Orders of the Day — War Pensions

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 20 July 1943.

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Mr. Stewart:

The hon. Member is stating fairly accurately the Legion's proposals in Scotland which no doubt he knows as well as I do. I accept Part i of the proposals but I am not at all certain about the wisdom of Part 2. I am putting them to the Committee so that we can see what the position is.

The Legion's proposal is that compensation under Part i shall be granted without any reference to earning capacity, the cost of living or the inability of the individual to maintain himself: and that the pension shall be irrespective of the man's rank in the Army, Navy or Air Force. If a man loses a leg, the assessment should be so much, and he should get that precise pension related to that assessment whether he is an Admiral, General, Air Marshal or private or Rating, the argument being that the loss of a leg to a man is the same to all men. He has lost a limb. As it is claimed that in the case of the physical disability pension, for fairness and justice all round, there should be a fixed scale of awards relating to the disability and that the award should be free of all income tax and free from a means test and examination by local committees. It should be a man's property until his death. The Legion then say that responsibility for his wife and his children, the demands of his social position, the fact that he has lost his earning capacity should form the basis of another claim. I confess I see great difficulty about that. I cannot see the answer to that suggestion until I know what the Government's social security proposals are going to be. If they are as good as I would wish them to be, I can foresee that part of the Legion's proposal already covered in a great national scheme.

But my friends in the North feel most strongly about it. They are faced and have been—I have seen it myself—with one anomaly and one extreme absurdity after another. There is the case of one man with a disability enjoying a considerable pension and his neighbour suffering an even greater disability without any pension; the case of the man on one side of the street working hard throughout his life though disabled and the other fellow perhaps rather a loafer getting a pension. It has caused much unrest and been a source of constant dissatisfaction at British Legion meetings throughout the country. We are trying to get at the back of these injustices. I beg of the right hon. Gentleman at least to undertake to consider with the greatest care these serious proposals and to consider particularly the desire for a Commission or Committee to examine this fundamental change proposed in the pension scheme.