Investigation of Veterans

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and John Penrose

Thursday 16th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Penrose]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I certainly did not want to imply that we are countenancing being leisurely about this. This situation has been wrong for many years. The only reason for not announcing something tomorrow—or, indeed, today or yesterday—is simply that we need to ensure that we have put all the answers from the consultation out and in front of the House, so people have a chance to work through the details and ask, “All right, what does this mean in practice then?” We need to move as fast as we can, but it has to be as fast as we can in a way that is consistent with forging a consensus in Northern Ireland. We have to ensure that whatever answer we come up with sticks, survives and works for both sides of the community, otherwise it will come unravelled in the fullness of time and we will have failed to protect our veterans from the kind of problems that we have all heard about and that I think everyone here agrees are absolutely unacceptable.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

The right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) is quite right when he says that this question really ought to be answered by the Secretary of State for Defence, because it is her intervention that has left the Government with a policy that is totally lacking in any coherence.

Quite apart from the inconsistencies that others have highlighted, we are now, we understand from the Secretary of State for Defence, to disapply the European convention on human rights in this area. Is that Government policy that she speaks of, and if so, where does the Minister, as a Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office, think that leaves the Good Friday agreement?

[John Penrose]

Let me first address the right hon. Gentleman’s point about whether this is a matter for the Ministry of Defence or the Northern Ireland Office. He is of course right that the Ministry of Defence has a major, major stake in getting this right. As he would expect—as everybody would expect—the Secretary of State for Defence wants to make sure that this issue is dealt with as promptly as possible. The Ministry of Defence is not the only Department to have a stake, because clearly there are former police officers in Northern Ireland—members of the PSNI—who could also be vulnerable to such predatory legal attack, or whatever, and we need to make sure that they are properly dealt with too. He is right that the MOD is a vital part, but it is not all of it, and that is why the issue goes broader than just veterans of Her Majesty’s armed forces.

On human rights, as I said earlier, all we have to go on at the moment are the press reports and the outlines of the Secretary of State for Defence’s proposals. I did not see those as having—and I do not think she meant them to have—anything to do with contradicting human rights. It is clear that anything we come up with, if it is to be legally robust, has to be compliant with article 2 in human rights terms, because if we do not have a process that is compliant with article 2, we will have failed to protect our veterans, whether they are former members of the armed forces or former members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. If we fail to protect them from proper legal challenge because we have designed a process that is not compliant with article 2, we will have failed in our duty and failed to deliver what everybody here, of all parties, wishes to achieve.