Local Authority Armed Forces Covenant Toolkit Update

Forces in Mind Trust has awarded £16,125 to Shared Intelligence to produce an updated Armed Forces Covenant Toolkit.

The Armed Forces Covenant is a promise by the nation that those who have served in the Armed Forces, and their families, are treated fairly. The Armed Forces Covenant Toolkit was developed during the first iteration of the Our Community, Our Covenant series back in 2016, and has been used by local government and other public services as a guide to implementing policies and practice that uphold the Armed Forces Covenant. The last iteration of this toolkit was published in 2022 alongside the Decade of the Covenant report.

Since then, several changes to the public services landscape have reshaped support for the Armed Forces community, such as the implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant Duty, which places a legal requirement on local government to pay due regard to the principles of the Armed Forces Covenant. The new toolkit will be informed by the ongoing Our Community Our Covenant and Beyond interviews with stakeholders, the full findings of which are due to report in autumn 2025. As part of the update, the team will convene an expert group, made up of local Armed Forces co-ordinators, to help define the scope and direction of the update to ensure that it as useful as possible for local authorities in helping them to deliver their commitments under the Covenant.

The aim is to update a resource that has proved highly valuable over the last near decade to local authority teams in convening support for their local Armed Forces Community.

Much of the updating can be carried out on the basis of insight collected from fieldworks for the current Our Community, Our Covenant and Beyond research, also funded by FiMT. This has involved visits and other engagement with ten areas around England, Scotland and Wales.
We are also convening a small virtual group of active local armed forces co-ordinators to help validate our updates. This is operating in two parts:

1. Confirm the scope of suggested updates.
2. Review the substance of the updates.

We are also gaining input from the MoD Covenant team to ensure there is no conflict or avoidable overlap with its own duty toolkit website: Covenant Legal Duty toolkit - Armed Forces Covenant.

Not strictly applicable.

However, interviews broadly ask local practitioners for their views, based on local practice, about where the toolkit should be updated.

We have conducted interviews with practitioners from six areas of England, Scotland and Wales building on fieldwork with a further eight.