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Mr. Brazier: Perhaps I can help my hon. Friend. I understand that it would cost £200 million to keep the arrangements as they were and £300 million to fund the amendment. The Minister still refuses to answer my hon. Friend's question on how much the compromise would cost. He keeps quoting the cost of the Lords amendment and criticises its drafting for extending the scope of the scheme. Instead, he should cost the compromise that the Royal British Legion proposed a long time ago.
Mr. Howarth: My hon. Friend's intervention is extremely helpful, because it demonstrates the bind that the Minister has got himself into. Instead of negotiating with the Royal British Legion by saying, "We will go away and cost what the all-party Defence Committee has come up with," the Government have tried to block the Royal British Legion's proposal, which is a great shame. Hon. Members cannot accept the £300 million figure, unless it is justified in a much more expansive way. I am not prepared to take the Minister's word for it—I mean no personal disrespect to him. Today, he said that figure is £300 million, but one week ago it was £200 million.
Mr. Caplin: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Howarth: No. I am sure that the Minister will have a chance to wind up the debate, if he can catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Will he catch your eye or should I give way to him now?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. It is entirely up to the hon. Gentleman whether he gives way to the Minister. Having attended to part of the debate, I merely observe that so many points have been dealt with in interventions that there may be very little scope for a winding-up speech.
Mr. Howarth: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The issue is important and the Ministry of Defence's resources should be made available to cost the double standard proposed by the Select Committee. The double standard offers the means of realising some savings while protecting those servicemen and women who are injured or who become ill as a result of their service.
We will vote for the amendment because the Government's blatant disregard for their duty of care should not go unchallenged, but their unwillingness to accept any form of compromise means that the amendment will be voted down. However, when the Bill returns to another place, we will encourage their lordships to pursue the compromise measure, and, even at this late stage, we urge the Government to do the same.
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As Lord Craig of Radley, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, said in the other place:
"This is a rare opportunity to get the arrangements for Armed Forces pensions and compensation dealt with. They should be dealt with against the concept of best practice and not just cost neutrality."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 September 2004; Vol. 664, c. 575.]
The Army has the recruiting slogan, "Be the best"; the people of Britain know that it is the best; it deserves the best; let us give it the best.
Rachel Squire (Dunfermline, West) (Lab): I rise to speak on behalf of the Select Committee on Defence. The Chairman sends his apologies as the Committee had a prior commitment to take evidence on another issue this afternoon.
I should declare that I am the honorary vice-president of the Dunfermline branch of the Royal British Legion, Scotland. That means that I take considerable personal interest in pension and compensation arrangements for veterans and for certain members of our armed forces. Personally, I am very disappointed by the Minister's speech and by the Government's refusal to compromise and I find the constant description of the Royal British Legion's concerns about compensation as "cherry-picking" insulting.
Lords amendment No. 1 deals with one of the main changes to the proposed compensation scheme—the method for deciding whether an injury has been caused by service. The Government believe that it is right that service personnel should have to prove for themselves, on the balance of probabilities, that a condition from which they suffer was caused by service. The Lords amendment would maintain the status quo, whereby it is for the Ministry of Defence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that an injury was not caused by service.
Under the Lords proposal, it is probably true that some people whose condition was not in fact caused by service would win the right to compensation. Under the Government's proposal, however, it is certainly true that some people whose condition was caused by service will not win the right to compensation. The question for the House is, which is the lesser of those two evils?
Sometimes it is not obvious why someone has become ill. As the Defence Committee noted in its report of December last year, armed forces personnel
"are likely to be involved in situations of great uncertainty, with uncertain effects on their health".
That is particularly true at the moment and will apparently be so in the near future. The fact is that we simply do not know how or why servicemen and women become ill, but does that mean that they should not be entitled to compensation?
The Government recognise that they have responsibilities to service personnel who make compensation claims—in particular, that they must keep proper medical records and make them available. That is welcome. However, we on the Defence Committee remain concerned that service people will find it more difficult to claim compensation under the proposed scheme and that, in some cases, personnel will
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be unable to prove that their condition has been caused by service because of a lack of information, not because their condition was not caused by service.
The armed forces are a special case. The essential difference between them and almost all other employees is that they can be asked to put themselves in harm's way or, indeed, to die for their country. In our December 2003 report, the Defence Committee argued that
"Because of the special risks that Armed Forces personnel are required to run, and because they are likely to be involved in situations of great uncertainty, with uncertain effects on their health, we continue to believe that the onus should remain on the Government to prove that service was not responsible for causing or worsening a condition for which a compensation claim is made."
The Government have explained that they oppose the Lords amendment for several reasons and those deserve proper examination by the House. The first reason is cost. The Government claim that it would be too expensive to maintain the status quo because of the cost of improvements that they have made elsewhere in the schemes. Lord Bach told the Lords:
"Frankly, we cannot afford to improve benefits for the more severely disabled and maintain the current, generous burden of proof."
The Government have always insisted that the new schemes should cost the same overall as the existing schemes. In 2002, the Committee said that the pension review had been
"hamstrung almost from the outset by the decision that the new proposals should be cost-neutral".
Mr. Brazier: The hon. Lady is making a powerful and convincing speech. In fact, the problem goes even further than that, because the Government's definition of cost-neutrality involves taking money out of the scheme to allow for the fact that people are likely to live longer, but adding nothing back in to allow for the fact that there will be fewer of them.
Rachel Squire: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Indeed, we need further detailed consideration of where money is being taken from to benefit other developments.
In the Lords, it was suggested that to maintain the status quo would cost an additional £200 million. According to the Government, as we have just heard, it is more likely that it would cost £300 million over a 10-year period. All these figures can only be estimates based on a best guess of the number of claimants who would qualify for a war pension under the current criteria but who would not be entitled to compensation under a balance of probabilities test. Maintaining the current test would undoubtedly be expensive, although whether as expensive as the Government claim is open to conjecture. But this is a matter of principle—a question of ensuring that when service personnel put their lives on the line for their country, we look after them properly. We should do that even if it is unclear whether their injury was caused by service or not.
The Minister and the Government have claimed that the Lords amendment would upset a balanced package and that Parliament should not cherry-pick. Many of us would question whether that is a democratic approach. After all, what is Parliament here for if not to legislate? And legislation means looking at the detail, not just
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accepting or rejecting the Government's proposals as a package. In the Defence Committee, many hon. Members have expressed concern that several parts of the Bill remain very vague and general with insufficient detail.
The Defence Committee recommended that some of that detail—the basic principles of the schemes—should be set out in the Bill, including
"the standard and burden of proof for claims under the compensation scheme".
We need to be aware of the effects of what we propose and to decide whether the extra expense of maintaining the current burden of proof would be justified, but that is a judgment that Parliament is fully entitled to make. If the Lords amendment remains in the Bill, the Government may need to break out of their cost-neutral straitjacket to pay for it. Many of us think that that would be the right thing to do.
Finally, the Government argue that the status quo is wrong in principle and encourages a compensation culture. Lord Bach told the Lords that
"under the present arrangements it frankly is too easy for people to claim that they have received an injury or an illness during service, whereas everyone knows that they almost certainly did not. But, because of the burden, and particularly the standard of proof, that person succeeds in their claim. That is what we are trying to stop".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 September 2004; Vol. 664, c. 585, 587.]
That is the real debate that we should be having and the only one of the Government's arguments that is worth exploring in depth. If it is indeed true that, under the current scheme, many claims are unfounded yet claimants receive a war pension, a remedy should indeed be sought. However, the Government need to provide hard evidence, in the form of statistics or examples, that people are succeeding in spurious claims for war pensions. Even if they can make a convincing case that the net should be tightened, it is important that that should not penalise those whose claims may be just but who lack the information to prove it.
2 pm
The Government may also claim that the amendment is poorly drafted and would make claims for compensation even easier than under the current war pensions scheme. However, the amendment's aim is clearly to maintain the status quo and it could be redrafted to achieve some compromise. The Royal British Legion wrote to me on Monday. The letter stated:
"The Legion has carried out research which indicates that, under the proposed scheme, using the amended burden and standard of proof, coupled with its new limitation of only 5 years during which a claim might be submitted, up to 60 per cent. of those claims currently succeeding, would fail. Although the MoD challenged our figures, they have carried out no research of their own and offered no credible alternative, whilst admitting successful claims would reduce. However, the MoD has recently conceded that their proposals, if accepted, would result in savings of £200 million"—
we now hear the figure of £300 million—
"although they do not specify over what period of time. It has additionally confirmed that the burden of proof relating to the claim will transfer from the MoD to the individual claimant."
The Government have threatened to withdraw the Bill if the Lords amendments, especially Lords amendment No. 1, are accepted. The Minister has reiterated that this afternoon. There is particular concern about that, especially in the Forces Pensions Society. Both the Minister and Lord Bach said that, if the Lords insisted on their amendment, we would have no choice but to re-examine the overall package and that there was no guarantee that the schemes could be delivered in such circumstances.
None of us wants the Bill to fail but elements of it need improving. Some of those improvements may cost money. Rather than threatening to throw it all out, the Government would do better to consider calmly how best they could effect Parliament's decisions, seek some acceptable compromise and be seen at such a crucial and dangerous time, which is likely to continue for at least the next five years, to be prepared to reward those who serve and seek to maintain freedom in our country.
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