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Christmas Day (Trading) Bill
Armed Forces (Pensions and Compensation) Bill
Clause 1 [Pension and compensation schemes: armed and reserve forces]:
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 1, line 14, at end insert "and the Secretary of State shall report every two years to Parliament upon the operation of the compensation scheme"
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving the amendment, I shall make some comments about exchanges in your Lordships' House on 8 September. The Government have already promised to review the operation of the new compensation scheme after five years. I am seeking to persuade them to carry out that review every two years until it is clear that it is working as the Government hope. The Minister knows of the serious concerns of the Royal British Legion about the possible impact of putting the burden of proof on the claimant rather than, as now, on the Ministry of Defence. Only time will tell whether, and to what extent, those concerns are justified.
A review after two years would reveal that information earlier. That would be of assistance certainly to the Royal British Legion, to the Government and, more importantly, to those servicemen and women on whom we rely for our security and whose health is damaged or further impaired by their service. I hope that the Minister will be able respond sympathetically to my suggestion.
I shall raise briefly a matter of concern to me as a parliamentarian of 30 years' standing. It relates to a debate about an amendment tabled on Report to Clause 1 on 8 September. My concern is with an intervention by the Minister during my speech in that debate. I said:
"The Ministry of Defence rejects the arguments put forward by the Royal British Legion on the back of its analysis that 60 per cent of claimants who would have succeeded under the present rules are likely to fail under the new ones".
I then recalled seeing correspondence that disputed a government claim to have joined with the Royal British Legion to investigate the methodology used in their analysis, without their having done so. My noble friend replied that that had not been done,
"because the Royal British Legion cancelled the meeting at which it was due to be discussed. Since then, it has said in a letter that it has no intention of doing so. That is the reason it has not been done".—[Official Report, 8/9/04; col. 578.]
Those words had the effect of misleading the House—I am sure not deliberately—or were said because of a misunderstanding.
My noble friend's interruption of my speech related to the aftermath of a meeting between officials of his department and the Royal British Legion on 15 July. At that meeting, the MoD first revealed that £200 million was at stake if the Government's plan to shift the burden of proof to the claimant was rejected. The Royal British Legion's legal advisor, Mr Peter Knight, asked for the statistical basis for that figure and evidence for claiming that the present rules allow far too many claims to succeed.
The ministry's reply was that evidence could be provided to support this claim, but, in fact, none was provided. Nor was there any explanation of how the figure of £200 million had been arrived at. The only undertaking given was that the Ministry of Defence would,
and then write to let the Royal British Legion know the outcome.
Eight days later, on 23 July, Peter Knight wrote to the Ministry of Defence to recall that undertaking and to ask for the promised letter soon so that the Royal British Legion could,
Meanwhile, my noble friend the Minister had written to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, on 22 July and made it abundantly clear that,
by which he meant the cases received by the Veterans' Agency each year—
Anyone reading that letter would see that the Minister saw no useful purpose in looking at an analysis of individual cases.
The Minister wrote to my noble friend Lord Morris of Manchester on 18 August, dealing with the points raised by the legion's legal advisors, but he did not address the statistical analysis. In his letter of the same date to me, he then referred to the request made of the Royal British Legion, but he had not seen fit to copy the letters written to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, my noble friend Lord Morris and me to the Royal British Legion. The letter to the noble Lord, Lord Morris, was telling because my noble friend stated that the Ministry of Defence's position on this issue of the burden of proof was unchanged.
Unsurprisingly, the Royal British Legion concluded that there must be some doubt about my noble friend's new desire to inspect its analysis because he had previously told the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, that there was no purpose in doing that. The legion therefore considered that it was prudent to await the letter which the MoD had promised it would write to the legion following the meeting on 15 July.
There had been no reply so on 24 August Peter Knight wrote again to the Ministry of Defence referring to his still unanswered letter of six weeks earlier and stated,
"the Bill returns to the House of Lords on 8 September and I would therefore be grateful if I could receive a response as quickly as possible".
On 1 September, eight days later and seven weeks after the meeting of 15 July, and the pledge to,
and write to the legion, a letter from Lieutenant-General AMD Palmer of the MoD to Brigadier Ian Townsend, the legion's secretary-general, was received at the legion. The letter enclosed what it described as,
which repeated that the MoD stood by the terms of the Bill and set out its understanding of the legal meaning of the balance of probabilities and the obligations of the Ministry of Defence. This, the legion's adviser described, as having left,
When Lieutenant-General Palmer's letter arrived on 1 September, Brigadier Townsend was on leave, but he returned to duty on 6 September and responded to it in a letter which was delivered by hand to the Ministry of Defence on that day.
The response was that the restatement of the MoD's position had left its position completely unchanged and, since the MoD had previously said that it saw little purpose in considering the legion's statistical analysis, its change to requesting access to the Royal British Legion's statistics was unacceptable. Noting also Lieutenant-General Palmer's statement that the MoD had little scope to change and that it was within two days of the debate on the burden of proof in your Lordships' House, Brigadier Townsend said that matters would now have to take their course in Parliament.
Against that background, to imply that the legion was being unco-operative, as my noble friend did on 8 September, was grossly misleading. Neither did he acknowledge the legion's responsibility for liaising with other ex-service organisations and its duty, as the guardian of the interests, welfare and memory of ex-service people and their dependants, to do all in its power to protect the safeguard currently vouchsafed by a burden of proof based on reasonable doubt. Nor again did my noble friend at any time acknowledge the legion's offer to compromise on the basis suggested by the House of Commons Defence Select Committee and the MoD's rejection of that offer.
I understand that the legion will be responding in detail to my noble friend's allegations on Report and I am sure that it will do so with all its customary integrity as one of the country's most highly regarded institutions. I beg to move.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots: My Lords, I do not wish to get involved in whether the Minister misled the noble Lord, but I would like to support the purpose behind the amendment which has just been moved. It seems to me that this is a highly controversial piece of legislation on the compensation scheme and that an early report on it therefore would be worth while in less than the five years envisaged.
As we have noted during the passage of the Bill, this is a framework Bill and a great deal of the detail depends on the good will not just of the present ministerial team, which I do not doubt, but of future ministerial teams and future governments. Many of us have been seeking ways to buttress the position and to ensure that best practice in the private sector is read across into the public sector scheme. We have talked about the need for trustees and the possibility of statutory compliance with the new Pensions Regulator's codes, where appropriate. The Government, despite plenty of fine words, have not been prepared to put anything specific into statute. I have been particularly keen to make it a statutory requirement to comply with the Pensions Regulator's code. It was interesting in that rejecting it earlier the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, referred me to Mr Alan Pickering as an important source on the
15 Sept 2004 : Column 1184
matter. I refer to an article which appeared in the Financial Times on Monday in which Mr Pickering said that the trustees are,
should not be deterred "from becoming trustees".
I believe that there is an awful lot here that we are allowing to slide by. The noble Lord's amendment puts a brick in the wall, which I believe is well worth having in the sense that we shall have an early review of what is a highly contentious proposal which the Government are proposing to implement. I therefore support what he has in mind.
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