Pensions Appeal Tribunals Act 1943 (Time Limit for Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2011

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Grand Committee

Although I recognise that the AFCS goes some way to compensate the injured and the families of those who have died, there are one or two discrepancies that can occur around the fringes of the scheme—often with regard to dates. Our Armed Forces have served in operations in Afghanistan since 2001, as well as in Iraq in 2003. Is the Minister content that those injured after 6 April 2005 receive awards under the AFCS scheme, whereas those who were injured merely one day before do not? Perhaps he can explain. A fair and respected compensation scheme must be a given for our Armed Forces, and I am content to endorse these provisions today.

[Lord Addington]

I am sorry to delay the Committee but I wish to say only a couple of things. This scheme—as the previous Government brought it in, I think we can pass on our congratulations to them—seems to be an improvement on what went before it, and it certainly seems to be much more fit for purpose than what it replaced. When you are dealing with the Armed Forces and anyone who has been injured, there is always a part of you that wants to say, “Give them more”. However, I appreciate that there are limits.

The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, has already touched on the specifics of the ongoing process of reviewing the scheme. Is there an inbuilt structure which means that we will constantly keep an eye on it as changes take place? If there is, I think that many people will be reassured. We will never get it right for all time with changes in medical technology, survival rates and so on, but if we were to have a look at the thinking here, that would help those of us who take an interest in this matter.

Perhaps we could also have a little more information on the body that has been set up. Knowing where it started from would be a help. As I said, the scheme may not be the most generous in the world but it seems to be a vast improvement on what preceded it and it provides a point from which to develop. An understanding of the logical basis and development of the process will help those outside and in the forces to have an idea of how they are viewed and how development will occur. That is something that we could usefully do today: we could put down a basis for future developments for as long as we will unfortunately need a scheme such as this.

[Lord Boyce]

I support the Motion to implement the two instruments, which very much fall within the recommendations from the AFCS review report. I think that some of the questions that noble Lords have asked were addressed in the report, and I am sure that the Minister will have adequate answers for them.

Armed Forces: Post-service Welfare

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I shall bear that in mind. This is one of those debates in which everyone will have said everything about the subject before, but we need to say it again and again to remind people of the problems. It is also a debate in which, fortunately, we are able to have a degree of political unity.

The problems facing our military existed before the two most recent conflicts, but they had not forced their way into our attention in the same way. When they did surface, the previous Government reacted with surprising speed, considering the political process. They took the matter seriously and started to address it, and for that I thank them. However, the fact that they had to do so indicates that we had not addressed the problems correctly beforehand. Smaller conflicts involving less immediately politically sensitive issues and smaller numbers of people meant that the problems relating to the armed services had been ignored for a very long time, as had the need to prepare our personnel for life after the armed services. We must all take a degree of blame for that.

Basically, we take very young people and put them into the military preferably for fairly long periods—the British Army likes long-service troops. They are told what to do and we do not prepare them for life outside. That is becoming increasingly apparent. I do not doubt that steps have been taken to improve that, but that was not done before. The fact that you are trained to be an excellent infantryman is apparently not the best preparation in a flexible job market, where IT skills are increasingly required and accuracy in handwriting is more valued in the workforce than ever before. The two are not compatible.

What can the military do? Its primary objective is to produce good service men and women and to make sure that they are ready to do that job. It is understandable that this issue has not been addressed properly. Taking on the idea of the military covenant, which has always been there, although I became aware of it only about a decade ago, we have to try to get involved in how we prepare people for life outside. Let us say that we have an 18 year-old young man, or possibly younger, almost fresh from school, who is placed in an environment where there is a structure. He is not expected to fill out forms or to decide things for himself and he is taken away from parents who could show him how to do that. He is trained for 12, 15 or whatever large number of years and we then we place him outside. Making sure that that transition is well managed will make everything else easier.

I come to the more obvious questions about those who have been severely injured and the more process-driven points, which I hope my noble friend will be able to answer fully, such as making sure that medical records are transferred more frequently and that doctors are more aware of mental health problems. I believe that doctors are now much more aware that there are different types of stress, but it is important to make sure that they can get to the expertise. We cannot expect the GP to do it all himself. If greater emphasis needs to be placed on different types of treatment, we must make sure that patients can be transferred quickly. Somebody who is not used to dealing with the outside world and whose treatment is delayed can be lost. It happens. If the transition is swifter and smoother, without form-filling or dozens of interviews, people will get to the right help quickly. I could carry on for a great deal of time on the transition phase, but I will just say that preparation for that transition will allow us to get the best out of what we are doing. That is surely the first step.

I ask my noble friend whether we have been able to identify the major bumps in the process. Where does the process break down when people do not get the best health and support? Have ways to avoid those problems been identified? Greater awareness is one and greater intervention would be another. Have we found out where they are most needed? We talked about pinch-points in defence recruitment and retention. Where are the pinch-points for services afterwards?

I shall curtail my remarks. I could have talked at considerable length about those who have lost limbs and the ongoing processes. Possibly, they will get a slightly better deal as they are more visible, because of their injuries, than those who have minor problems that manifest themselves later on. Can we have an assurance that we will keep this under review and that the Government will encourage all those who are involved in the political class to ensure regular reviews? This will go on beyond the life of this Parliament, and possibly the next two or three.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, when I put my name down to speak in this debate, I felt that I would probably be entering into a debate where there was a great deal more knowledge among the speakers than I have. I am afraid that has been confirmed to me on several occasions.

Having considered what should be the focal point of my contribution, I decided to talk about the problems of procurement. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, has just jumped all over what I was going to say with far bigger and heavier shoes than I have brought with me today, so all I will say is that everything that I have learnt about this subject boils down to the fact that the procurement process is definitely not fit for purpose, as he describes. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, was the person who talked me through that.

When are we going to develop the courage to say, “Scrap this process, dump it and buy off the shelf?”. At the moment we do not do that, and things taper on. We say, “Oh, let the project bubble on and see if it catches up”, but that does not happen. That is the black hole in the procurement process. All Governments and anyone who has been involved in them share some of the blame here for saying, “We can’t have the most wonderful bit of kit going. Let’s see if we can get the bit of kit that is good enough to do the job and gives our troops in the field a decent chance of achieving that with minimal casualties”. Until we have enough courage to stop thinking like this, we are going to have problems.

The ability to buy off the shelf will mean that we have to have a balancing act between our own strategic industrial capacity and the problems in the field. If we have to structure that and admit to it, we may take some steps towards dealing with it. We cannot have a situation where we are running around and chasing our tails, keeping projects running and then saying, “This isn’t going to be ready—we need to buy something else”, thus incurring maintenance costs that are far in excess of what they would be if we said, “We’re going to do it ourselves or we will buy off the shelf”. When are we going to have something in place that says that we will do one or the other? Until we do, the great background costs—they are the great problem, rather than the upfront costs—will mean that we will never really address the black hole.

One of my noble friends asked before when we are going to develop a coherent attitude towards wars of choice—when do we fight and why? The previous Government got themselves drawn into situations where we sent the troops in. That is understandable. This is not a party political point; it is about the illusions of power—“Let’s just send something in to deal with this situation”. On several occasions the previous Government got away with it. On certain occasions before Iraq and Afghanistan, the consequences were not too bad for us and our troops, but then they suddenly got real. Unless the Government, the whole of Government, learn to say, “We cannot do things”, “We cannot intervene here”, “We cannot do it by ourselves” or “We will not go in just simply because an ally is going in”—once again, I am referring to Iraq; I forget how many undeployed American divisions there were—and build this into the structure of our decision-making process, we are going to continue to push ourselves into places where our structure for supply, troop numbers and planning will not be fit for purpose.

I will leave my comments there. Unless we are prepared to limit our posturing, given our limited defence capacity, we are going to get into serious trouble again and again.

Armed Forces: Refusal of Goods and Services

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, we encourage servicemen and women to wear uniform as much as possible. I am aware of the small number of incidences that were reported in the media, including the two mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord. All of us will remember the scenes and demonstrations in Luton during the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment. Behaviour of this kind is unacceptable, but, in truth, it is rare, and the vast majority of the public support our Armed Forces enthusiastically. With regard to the noble and gallant Lord’s question on the covenant, we are looking carefully at the best way of ensuring that the covenant makes a real difference and that the Armed Forces community gets the respect and services it deserves. That means looking at all options, including legislation.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that if we are going to support people who are putting their lives on the line for our country, we should give them all the support we possibly can? Will he clarify to the House exactly what the legal status is if somebody is refused a service just because they are wearing the uniform of one of Her Majesty’s services?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, legislation would not necessarily address the problem, but we encourage commanding officers to engage as much as possible with the local community to prevent the sort of incident that my noble friend mentioned.

Rural Communities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, as someone who was brought up in East Anglia—indeed, in Norfolk, which, as a talented playwright said, is very flat—it is with some trepidation that I join a debate on the uplands. However, the main problem for rural areas and the uplands is the same: small communities are losing their heart because of the better transport facilities that are made available to people by the car. When enough people take their economic activity to other places, the small local community tends to wither and, as has been said by many people, local shops disappear, which leads to a loss of local casual employment. If you have not got access to transport—usually a car—you cannot get a job; this in turn means that you have to leave, which leads to a contraction of the community. The further up and the more difficult the hills, the worse the problem gets. It is an underlying social problem.

I do not know how many noble Lords have a holiday cottage, but those who do are adding to the problem because they have an economic reason for ensuring that that house is not available to the local community for people to rent or buy at an economic level.

There is a series of problems that are not effectively addressed by the way in which modern society is organised. It all comes down to the way we use transport. What we can do to counter the current trend is the only real question. We have talked about information technology and broadband and whether it will encourage people to work in the knowledge-based economy at home. Potentially it will—many do—but do people want to be isolated and spend all their time working at home? Many people want to spend some time at home and some time being interactive with people face to face. Are we providing enough incentives and encouragement to enable people to be by themselves or to spend virtually all their time within the family unit? We have not got there yet. There is still the problem that, if you are by yourself, you will still be dependent on your car and may have to travel slightly further and so on. Unless public transport is easily available at a mass level, we are always going to have these problems; people will become isolated in a modern community.

We do not know how affordable car transportation will be in the future. In the debate yesterday on the low-carbon economy, the question was posed whether the electrical car would prevent us from being priced off the road in private small boxes. We do not know yet. The Government should encourage the private sector —or do it themselves—to take on the role of ensuring that there is some kind of accessible public transport available to rural areas. This is a fundamental problem for rural communities in any part of the country.

The uplands of our society have become a recreational resource for much of the rest of the country—I thought that I might be the first person to touch on this after my noble friend Lord Greaves, but the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, has just done so. That recreation takes the form of country sports, such as shooting, walking, mountain-biking, which is on the increase, and other forms of outdoor activity. Here, the uplands seem to have a real role. The problem, as has been pointed out to me, is that people may go there, have their sport and leave, but the economic spread is not as high as it could have been. Do we encourage people instead to go for several days’ walking or mountain-biking—those activities have slightly greater potential for this—to seek accommodation locally and to have at-leisure spend, for the pub or restaurant, after the main activity of the day? Are we doing enough to encourage this? Are we doing enough to encourage people to want go out there?

My noble friend Lord Greaves said that if we leave our hills spare, many of them will be covered in scrub woodland. Scrub woodland may look pretty, but just try walking or riding a bike through it. It is very easy to get lost in a wood. Will we have to invest in mountain rescue and more complicated forms of support if we do not maintain the type of landscape that has encouraged rural recreation? Walking over a comparatively open stretch of land with great views is a pleasant experience that has obvious health benefits. It is also a form of activity that is non-competitive, although one can often be very competitive with oneself, saying, “I’m going to try to get over that hill, see that view and get back again”. If we can encourage that type of activity, linking into the idea of making public transport more readily available, we would serve those communities. Local businesses, as my noble friend said, used to rely on a great pool of agricultural workers, who are simply not there now—modern agriculture seems to rely far more on mechanics than on people who have any great knowledge of the land. If we are going to encourage this type of activity, we have to make sure that we help rural people to be able to take on the business.

I will leave it there, because other noble Lords have dealt with this matter with considerably greater skill than I shall ever be able to manage. However, unless we start to look at this in the round and realise that recreation is also important to the survival of local communities, we will be missing a trick.