House of Commons Hansard Debates for 27 Mar 1996 (pt 49)

'For the purposes of this section works constitute a residential conversion'.

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No. 5, in page 17, leave out lines 32 to 35.--[Mr. Wells.]

Clause 29

Amendments made: No. 42, in page 18, line 19, leave out from '83(wa),' to 'in' in line 24 and insert
'the cases in which the tribunal shall allow the appeal shall include (in addition to the case where the conditions for the making of the direction were not fulfilled) the case where the tribunal are satisfied,'.
No. 43, in page 18, line 32, leave out from 'of' to end of line 34 and insert 'Schedule 9A.".'.--[Mr. Wells.]

Schedule 3

Value added tax: anti-avoidance provisions

Amendments made: No. 44, in page 172, line 55, leave out 'it appears to them'.
No. 45, in page 172, line 56, leave out 'that'.
No. 46, in page 173, line 1, leave out 'that'.
No. 47, in page 173, line 2, leave out first 'that'.
No. 48, in page 173, line 5, leave out from beginning to end of line 7 and insert
'the transaction in question is not a supply which is the only supply by reference to which the case falls within paragraphs (a) to (c) above.'.
No. 49, in page 175, line 47, leave out
'appears to the Commissioners to have'.--[Mr. Wells.]
Further consideration adjourned.--[Mr. Wells.]
Bill, as amended (in the Committee and in the Standing Committee), to be further considered tomorrow.

Mr. Ian Bruce (South Dorset): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I wonder if you can help the

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House. On Monday, a document was introduced into the House that purported to be a draft of an order that was supposed to have been introduced by the Labour party in 1978 on treating cattle food. The Labour Front Benchers said then that that document would be available to the House, but there has been nothing on the record to identify that document. I have tried to get a copy and I wonder whether you can help the House by explaining that such documents, when introduced, should be identified in Hansard.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: That has absolutely nothing to do with the Chair.

PETITION

Poverty (North-east England)

10.35 pm

Ms Joyce Quin (Gateshead, East): I wish to present a petition organised by the North East Child Poverty Action Group and signed by some 300 people, including many of my constituents and those of my hon. Friends who represent Newcastle-upon-Tyne and adjacent areas. The petition expresses great concern about the growing incidence of poverty, the great harm that it is causing in our society and the difficulties that confront people who are forced to live on low incomes and on inadequate benefits in north-east England.

The petition concludes:

Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your honourable House ensures that no further cuts in social security benefits are made.

And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray etc.

To lie upon the Table.

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Ex-service Men (Asbestos Exposure)

10.36 pm

Sir Peter Lloyd (Fareham): My purpose this evening is to raise with my hon. Friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces the situation of service men who have developed asbestosis-related conditions as a result of exposure to that material in course of their duties before 1987.

The significance of the year is that it is when the Government invited and backed the private Member's Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) to repeal section 10 of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. The Government deserve full praise for taking that initiative, which enabled service men for the first time to secure damages for injuries sustained in service which were the result not of hostilities, but of error or negligence on the part of the Ministry of Defence or its agents. The ensuing Crown Proceedings (Armed Forces) Act 1987 put service men on the same footing as civilians employed by the MOD, and was intended to remove for the future a potent source of unfairness.

Naturally, like other legislation, the Act had no retrospective effect, and no service man who had sustained injury before 1987 could benefit from it. It simply drew the line under everything that had gone before. I well understand why that principle is followed by successive Governments of every political complexion when they legislate, especially on employment conditions, rights and obligations. Any other approach would nearly always produce too many difficult time-consuming cases, in which the evidence was no longer available or which produced unfairness and anomalies.

However, such common-sense rough justice, which ensures that everyone knows exactly where he stands, may be right for the generality of cases, but it does not serve for the very special circumstances of service men suffering from asbestos-induced disease and disability. The great difference when asbestos is involved is that the effects of exposure do not become apparent until many years later. So it is only recently, well after 1987, that service men are being disabled as a result of exposure in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, with asbestos, no final line can really have been drawn in 1987. In fact, it is drawn again and again in practice, whenever the symptoms develop and an asbestos-related disability takes hold, and another service man or former service man finds his health, his job and eventually his life taken painfully away.

The unfairness to the former service man newly afflicted with the symptoms of asbestosis is not just in being told that he cannot apply for compensation because his condition is not really new, as it was the result of exposure before 1987; the unfairness lies also in the knowledge that a civilian MOD employee who has just developed the same symptoms, possibly from exposure while working in the same job at the same time all those years ago, can seek and get substantial compensation.

Mr. David Martin (Portsmouth, South): I congratulate my right hon. Friend on bringing this growing injustice before the House. As he can see from the number of our hon. Friends who are attending the debate, it is a matter that takes up the time of, and causes anxiety to, quite a few of us. I hope that his debate will lead to early action by the Government.

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Sir Peter Lloyd: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He is quite right.

For the service man developing an asbestos-related condition in 1996, there is still only a war pension, while for the civilian MOD employee with exactly the same condition, there is industrial disability benefit and compensation. In a number of respects, the war pension is considerably more generous than IDB, although they both produce fairly similar sums weekly. Where disability is 100 per cent., that is about £90 to £100 a week.

It is in the availability of compensation, where the civilian victim can be awarded £150,000 to £200,000 in the severest cases, that the inequality lies. Compensation means a lump sum which can make the last months or years of a sufferer's life more comfortable, and can take away a great deal of worry about how his dependants will fare after his premature death.

The injustice is compounded by the cruelty of the condition. It can take many forms: from the deadly tumour of mesothelioma, to asbestos-induced lung cancer, to cancer of the larynx, asbestosis, pleural thickening and pleural plaques, in rough descending order of malignancy. Most are disabling and life shortening; all are a source of worry, discomfort and reduced activity.

This well-founded sense of injustice is further exacerbated by the knowledge that the MOD, like many other public and private employers, was culpably slow to act on the evidence, plentifully available in the 1960s and 1970s, that asbestos is a killer.

There is no doubt that the MOD failed to show the foresight and to exercise the proper care that it should have done. The fact that it has awarded compensation to almost 1,500 civilian employees since 1985 proves that point. I do not know how many service men have also developed one of these conditions. No doubt the information is present in the details of war pensions awarded. I was told in answer to a parliamentary question, however, that it would cost too much to sift out this information.

So what proportion of the 297,000 war pensions granted since 1985 are for asbestosis-related conditions is not known. It would not, I suppose, be unreasonable to assume that they are running at a level similar to that for civilian cases.

I know that I do not have to persuade the Minister of the pain and distress that these conditions bring to service men and their families. I know that he is aware of that. I know I do not have to win his sympathy for their plight. Nor do I have to convince him of the inequity of their treatment compared with their civilian colleagues, who were exposed at the same time and with the same horrific, though long-delayed, consequences. But I do realise that, as a Minister, he comes here tonight bound by the law and practice as they stand, and that he cannot offer the House a remedy off the cuff. I am not asking him for one.

I am, however, asking my hon. Friend to accept that this is a problem which simply will not go away. As the number of victims grows as a result of the after-effects of the intensive use of asbestos in the 1960s and 1970s, so will public disquiet and the sense of injustice, which cannot permanently be ignored. For it will not be until well into the next century that the number of new cases each year will begin to reduce.

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The fact that, unlike most Adjournment debates, I am not speaking to an empty House, but that my hon. Friends the Members for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Martin), for Portsmouth, North (Mr. Griffiths), for Isle of Wight (Mr. Field), and for Wyre Forest (Mr. Coombs), and the hon. Members for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle) and for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) on the Opposition Benches have stayed to express their interest and support is an early sign of the strong and determined feeling that this subject will increasingly evoke.