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Mr. Brazier : It is a privilege to take part in a debate that has had such high quality contributions. As 11 November approaches, our minds go back to the parades that we have seen over the years. This year, we have also witnessed the D-day commemorations, when we saw the many fine old men and women with their medals. Some of them paid a horrible price, and of course we remember those who paid the ultimate price.
I hope that it is in order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for me to quote a little story that really put the whole business of war into perspective for me. A very good friend of mine was at the dinner that used to take place at the end of the rather gruelling selection procedure in my regiment. He was sitting next to an elderly, grizzled veteran. My friend, full of enthusiasm for the process that he had just been through, was telling the veteran how tough and demanding the selection had been. He went on at some length before realising that the other chap had hardly said a word. My friend turned to him and asked, "Was there a selection when you joined the regiment?" "Oh, no," said the old boy, "there was no selection. We just signed on." "I see," said my friend. "What is the most demanding thing that you can remember doing?" The old man paused for a moment, then said, "Well, Passchendaele was no picnic."
The truth is that we have a special duty of care to our armed forces. As the previous two speakers and my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) have said, it is wrong to draw a parallel with normal civilian practice, as such people are not normal civilians, given the risks that they take and the things that we ask them to do. I know that the Minister cares about the armed forces—I have no doubt about that—but we have an
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honest difference of opinion about what is in their best interests. As we think of our troops today in Iraq—not just the Black Watch but all the other units there—and as we think of the troops in Afghanistan and other uncomfortable and dangerous places where they are risking their lives, we owe it to them to get this right.
This is a bad Bill and I would be delighted if it failed in its entirety. It comes on top of a number of other extremely unwelcome measures that the armed forces have had to bear—I will not test your patience, Mr. Deputy Speaker, other than to mention in passing the cuts in numbers and the unprecedented risks of legal proceedings against them if they make a mistake in action.
Can we lay to rest what the Minister said about cost neutrality, as we have been round this buoy so often it is becoming tedious? It has been clear from the beginning, from the MOD's evidence to the Defence Committee, that the proposals are cost neutral in a distorted sense of the word. The overall double package—as the Minister rightly says, it is pensions and compensation—is cost neutral if we include in the calculation the fact that people will live longer. Individuals will be penalised for their prospects of living longer, if at the same time we exclude the fact that there will be more of them. The Government will save money overall, because the package will take account of the fact that people are living longer; obviously, the status quo does not do so. For that reason, I think that the Minister is bluffing when he says that he will drop the Bill—but I, for one, would be delighted, as would most members of the armed forces, were it to disappear after another gallant stand by their lordships.
It is a shame that the Minister has not been willing to listen to his gallant, honourable and noble Friend Lord Morris, whose father gave his life for this country in action, and who himself served in Palestine where, coincidentally, my father also had his first military service, with problems that are not very different from the ones being faced by our servicemen in Iraq today.
It might be helpful were we to discuss how the proposals will impinge on individual cases. I will quote three, the first two of which are actual, concrete cases, and the third of which is hypothetical. I am grateful to the Royal British Legion for providing the cases. The House will recall that the standard of proof for the war pension and the attributable pension is currently different, so we can see how the current test and the proposed test would work, because the proposed test is the current test for the attributable side. In the first two cases, there was a victory on one and a defeat on the other, but under the new arrangements there would have been a defeat on both because of the burden of proof.
The first case is that of Mrs. Rita Norman of York, the widow of Flight Lieutenant Roy Norman, RAF, who died of heart disease, which the war pensions scheme, under the old standard of proof, accepted was attributable to service. She got the war pension award, but she did not get the attributable pension on the balance of probabilities. Anyone who has followed the campaign by the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Mr. Smith) on deep vein thrombosis, for example, will know that heart problems are commonly associated with civilian air travel, so it does not take rocket science to know that one is far more likely to have a heart attack
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if one is a pilot. I can see why, on the balance of probabilities, that case would be lost. Anyone who marries a pilot in any of the three services knows that the likelihood of dying in service in peacetime is far higher than in most other professions. But proving that a particular death, unless it was in a crash, was attributable to military service can be extremely difficult.
In some ways, the second case is even more worrying. It involved Mrs. Cheryl-Ann Hulme of Anglesey, widow of Sergeant Geoff Hulme, RAF, who died in a climbing accident in 1996. Let us be clear: adventure training has always played an important part in the armed forces. Are we going to have arguments about whether someone who carries out activities involved in adventure training is involved in attributable service? We can argue that someone is on holiday on a particular occasion. A climbing instructor who takes people adventure training may from time to time want to take holidays in the same way, or may want to try out a slope on which he is thinking of taking personnel later. If someone engaged in climbing while in uniform—a recognised form of adventure training—will not be eligible for a war pension, that fills me with doubt.
That brings me to the third—hypothetical—case, which I want to put to the Minister. Previously, I have made it clear that the Bill offers a rotten deal for the reserve forces by reintroducing the abatement system, which was rightly abolished by the previous Government. That is in another part of the Bill. While the Minister was speaking, I realised to my concern that there is potentially a bad deal for the reserve forces in the Lords amendment. It is common practice in the reserve forces—I imagine it is even more common now, with the cuts in man training days under this Government—for officers in particular, but to some extent for all ranks, to carry out military activities without being paid for them. Indeed, Territorial Army units could not go on if from time to time officers and senior non-commissioned officers were not willing to do recces and carry out other activities outside paid training time, because there are not enough man training days within the annual budget.
Can the Minister give the House an unequivocal assurance that under the arrangements that he proposes, no one will try to argue in an MOD court that a person carrying out activities on behalf of their unit but not being paid, perhaps because the budget has run out, was not "in uniform" at the time? My God, that would be another blow to the reserve forces, on whom an incredible stress is falling at the moment. They are suffering from the same sort of problems of overstretch as the regular forces, and their civilian employers and families are becoming concerned about it.
Those three cases illustrate, I hope, why the Government's proposals are unsatisfactory. Over the years, we have all seen Ministers—it is a characteristic of Ministers in all Governments—faced with an amendment that has been lost in the other place, or in a tight corner with their Back Benchers, using a classic ministerial tactic, which is perfectly legitimate, of hiding behind the wording of the amendment to show how defective it is. The Minister has argued that this amendment would be more expensive than keeping the status quo on the burden of proof, if I have understood
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him correctly—£300 million against £200 million. That is not what he should be addressing, and he knows it. What he needs to tell the House is what the Government's attitude will be if, as we know is likely to happen, their lordships introduce a compromise amendment. Better still, why does he not tell the House that the Government are willing to introduce their own compromise amendment, which deals with any concerns he may have about enlarging the scope, but which still leaves those people who deserve compensation able to get it?
We owe a special debt to those who risk their lives for us. We owe it not only to those in the discomfort and danger of Iraq and Afghanistan but to future generations, such as people in cadet units—one of which I had the privilege to visit yesterday—who are thinking of joining the armed forces. Those people have received a number of unhappy messages over the past few years. Let us send a message from Parliament that we still recognise that when things go wrong, and when they get injured in military service, the House, Parliament and the system of compensation will continue to give them the benefit of the doubt, as has been the case ever since the first world war.
2.30 pm
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