Armed Forces Commissioner Bill: Motion to disagree with Lords Amendment 2

On 3 June 2025, the House of Commons voted by 319 to 180 to reject Lords Amendment 2 to the Armed Forces Commissioner Bill. The amendment, originally tabled by Conservative peer Baroness Goldie in the Lords, would have written an explicit whistleblowing function with statutory protections into the new Armed Forces Commissioner's remit. The government opposed it and offered a narrower amendment in lieu. The vote determines whether service personnel will have a formally defined, legally protected route to disclose wrongdoing to the Commissioner, or whether the Bill's protections will be limited to anonymity when the Commissioner publishes reports. Supporters of the Lords amendment argued that a complaints process and a whistleblowing function serve different purposes: complaints seek personal redress, while whistleblowing surfaces systemic wrongdoing, often at personal risk. The government's position is that the existing Raising a Concern policy and a separate amendment it proposed in lieu, covering anonymity in published reports, provide sufficient protection without the legal ambiguity it says the term "whistleblowing" would introduce. The vote divided almost entirely along party lines. All 320 Labour and Labour and Co-operative MPs who voted backed the government's motion to reject the Lords amendment, with no Labour defections recorded. Conservatives (91), Liberal Democrats (64), Reform UK (6), the SNP (4), the Greens (4), the DUP (4), and Plaid Cymru (2) all voted against. The Lords amendment had cross-party backing in the upper chamber, and opposition MPs pressed the argument that statutory precedent already exists, pointing to the use of the term "whistle-blowers" in section 340Q of the Armed Forces Act 2006, the very legislation this Bill amends. A further related division on Lords Amendment 3 the same day produced a similar result of 315 to 184.