Ill-Health Benefits - Non-attributable ill-health benefits
Armed Forces (Pensions and Compensation) Bill
10:45 am
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury, Conservative)
The Minister says from a sedentary position that it is nonsense; why then is he making these changes? Nobody can pretend that any of them will make it easier for members of the armed forces to go through the process: there is a two-tier tribunal, which we shall discuss another time; the burden of proof has been placed on the individual; the standard of proof has been raised; and the whole process, apart from the appeals process, is now under the main employer, the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps the Minister wants to respond on that point. He has changed his mind, and I am not surprised.
On Second Reading, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) quoted George Washington, who said that the test of the moral worth of a society is the way it treats its war veterans. Funnily enough, my hon. Friend did not give the context for the quotation. The context was interesting, because Washington was talking principally about the huge number of Frenchmen who had gone over to fight for the Americans, so he was not even appealing to a constituency in his own country. He was saying that there was a debt of honour to the people of France, who lived on the other side of the Atlantic—a month's travel away—because they had been wounded fighting for the revolutionary cause.
We are discussing our own people, who live in our communities. Every single member of the Committee has constituents who are war pensioners. I hope that there will not be another huge crop of them, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot said, small conflicts occur all the time. Many people are deployed in operational theatres, and who knows when there will be another major conflict? However, even if there were only one case, we owe people who have served this country in uniform and suffered as a result of it a better arrangement than that in the Bill.