Select Committee · Defence Committee

The Armed Forces Covenant

Status: Closed Opened: 13 Dec 2024 Closed: 3 Sep 2025 5 recommendations 8 conclusions 1 report

This inquiry will examine the Armed Forces Covenant, the UK’s commitment to ensuring that members of the Armed Forces community are supported and treated fairly. The inquiry will explore whether the Covenant is working, examine areas where serving or former personnel and their families continue to face difficulties, and consider how the Covenant might be …

Reports

1 report

Title	HC No.	Published	Items	Response
4th Report – The Armed Forces Covenant	HC 572	8 Apr 2025	13	Responded

Recommendations & Conclusions

2 items

10 Conclusion 4th Report – The Armed Forces Covenant Acknowledged

Fragmented evidence hinders understanding of Armed Forces Covenant effectiveness and accountability.

The evidence available to help us understand how well the Covenant is working is currently very fragmented. This makes recognising success, learning lessons and holding organisations to account difficult. The Minister told us there were ‘plans afoot’ to create structures that can improve Government’s understanding of how well the Covenant …

Government response. The MOD acknowledges fragmented data and the importance of improving data collection and governance, describing ongoing stakeholder engagement, roundtables, and a planned annual conference in July 2025 to facilitate knowledge sharing.

Ministry of Defence

12 Conclusion 4th Report – The Armed Forces Covenant Acknowledged

Require Whitehall departments to provide annual updates on Covenant implementation and outcomes.

To enable proper scrutiny of cross-government efforts to implement the Covenant, Whitehall departments should provide an annual update on actions they have taken to uphold the Covenant as part of the Covenant Annual Report, along with outcomes. Departments should–when requested to do so by the Committee–make themselves available to give …

Government response. The government will engage with other departments to consider how they can best report on their Covenant obligations and the MOD will commit to providing evidence, while the Minister will continue to encourage other departments to do the same.

Ministry of Defence

Oral evidence sessions

3 sessions

Date	Witnesses
11 Mar 2025	Alistair Carns DSO OBE MC MP · Ministry of Defence, James Greenrod · Ministry of Defence, Sarah Houghton · Ministry of Defence, Vice Admiral Phillip Hally CB MBE · Ministry of Defence	View ↗
25 Feb 2025	Cllr Gillian Ford · Local Government Association (LGA), Col. James Phillips · Office of the Veterans Commissioner for Wales, Councillor Lis Burnett · Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA), David Johnstone · Office of the Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioner, Kate Davies · Ofcom, Lt Cdr (Retd) Susie Hamilton · Office of the Scottish Veterans Commissioner, Mike Callaghan · Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA)	View ↗
4 Feb 2025	Collette Musgrave · Army Families Federation, Lieutenant General Sir Nick Pope KCB CBE · Cobseo, Mark Atkinson · The Royal British Legion, Rebecca Lovell · Naval Families Federation, Vanessa Plumley · RAF Families Federation	View ↗

Correspondence

2 letters

Date	Direction	Title
8 Jul 2025	—	Letter dated 30th June from MinVP to the Chair regarding the Covenant Legal Dut…
9 Jan 2025	—	Letter dated 23rd December from Secretary of State to Chair regarding dispensat…