Oral Answers to Questions
Heather Wheeler Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
Mrs Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
Leo Docherty
I am grateful for the work that my hon. Friend does in Hastings and Rye to represent the interests of veterans. It falls on us all to sing from the rooftops about this landmark Act. We will be communicating it through every channel available to us, and we will look at whether we can include it in pre-deployment training.
Mrs Wheeler [V]
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, which has provided huge relief to both veterans and serving personnel in my South Derbyshire constituency. Will he reassure me that, on top of improving the treatment of service personnel throughout the criminal and civil claims process, the Ministry of Defence is also improving its own internal investigations process?
Leo Docherty
My hon. Friend is right to raise investigations, which are a critically important component of the service justice system. It is in the interests of serving personnel that we have a rigorous and transparent system. That is why the Secretary of State has tasked Justice Richard Henriques to conduct a thorough review of our approach to investigations. We much look forward to him reporting in the autumn.
Oral Answers to Questions
Heather Wheeler Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Mark Lancaster
The hon. Lady will be aware that all local authorities in Great Britain have signed the community covenant. In my new role, I am very keen to ensure that best practice is spread across the United Kingdom. This is a partnership between the Ministry of Defence and, indeed, other Government Departments. If the hon. Lady feels that her own local authority has best practices that can be shared more widely, I shall be delighted to talk to her.
Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)
What steps is the Minister taking to implement our manifesto commitment to address hearing loss among veterans?
Mark Lancaster
The Royal British Legion was recently awarded £10 million LIBOR funding over five years to address long-term hearing issues. Work has already started with key stakeholders, and the Legion aims to launch the fund in early autumn. From summer 2015, the MOD will introduce new hearing protection measures for UK armed forces personnel, which will reduce the number of veterans with service-attributable hearing issues.
Defence Reform Bill
Heather Wheeler Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Brazier
I do not think the gathering of individual statistics should be a statutory matter, but the fact is that the Government have made a perfectly clear pledge that they are going to publish them. The crucial thing from the point of view of the ordinary reservist is that this body, which is elected by former reservists and respected by them as a body that effectively looked after their interests for nearly a century, is back with a really crucial position, able to make this report. When it visits the Army Recruiting Group, it will be heard with considerably more authority when it is known that it will be put on a permanent statutory basis and will be able to tell us what is really going on. I would like to say, however, that the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has taken a close interest in this matter, which I respect.
The plain fact is that when the Regular Army took over recruiting in 2006, the numbers collapsed. The collecting of statistics collapsed, too, and the structure made no serious effort to address the challenges it was taking on. It simply raided the budget and used it for Regulars. To provide just one example, from 2006 to this day—it is now seven years on—Army recruiting offices are open only from 9 to 5.30 Monday to Friday, so they are not even available for people with civilian jobs.
A number of other things happened at the same time. There was a steady reduction in the flow of equipment to the reserves. There was a huge cut in the training budget. In 2009, we almost lost the whole training budget for the Reserves for six months, and I pay tribute to a small number of colleagues on both sides of the House who supported us in that battle. Worst of all, from 2009, all deployments of formed bodies to Afghanistan stopped—echoing the argument that had taken place at the outset of the first world war—and units were effectively told, “You are just here to act as part-time personnel agencies for the Regular Army”. That really destroyed much of the Territorial Army’s officer corps.
I strongly support what the Government are trying to do with the reserves. The House will know how much I am in favour of a rebalancing. I also commend many things that have taken place: the equipment is improving; there has been a huge increase in the funds available for training, particularly for collective training; and there have been some interesting initiatives at Sandhurst, under the charismatic leadership of the recently appointed Commandant, General Tim Evans. He started a number of improvements in officer training, one of which was the personal brain child of the Chief of the General Staff—taking people through the training in a single eight-week package, timed to coincide with the summer vacation in universities. The pairing of units is another initiative.
The Army Recruiting Group, however, has not got its act together; it is every bit as disorganised as it has always been. I hope the House will forgive me if I give just one example in detail to show just how hopeless it is. When the RFCAs lost their recruiting brief, the requirement for medicals, which had been very efficiently organised, disappeared. Suddenly last year, as part of common selection, it was announced that the Territorials were to do medicals, too. A system was set up, using the NHS as the old one had done, but in a fashion that had not even been cleared by the lawyers in relation to the Data Protection Act 1998. It was completely unworkable. People were told to take a form to their GP and get him to sign it off and send it in. So inefficient was this system that GPs did not know what to do. If units rang up to see what was going on, they were breaching the Data Protection Act. The system was so hopeless that a unit I know well—for obvious reasons, I will not say which—that had had an average of 48 successful enlistees per quarter in the months up to that change, saw a rising trend in applicants turn into just eight enlistees per quarter in the subsequent quarters.
I could go on and on. The software is unworkable; Ministers have already acknowledged that. Unfortunately, that compounds the problems at the recruiting centres. Because it is de facto impossible for somebody to do the form online on their own—if they make one mistake, their application is lost in cyberspace—it has to be done either at recruiting centres or in the units. The recruiting centres, of course, are not available.
Mr Speaker
It was good of the hon. Gentleman to remind the hon. Lady of her own name.
Heather Wheeler
I forget many things, Mr Speaker.
Having sat in Committee week in, week out, with my hon. Friend, it is fascinating to note that it has taken this Bill, proposing this reform to bring all the discrepancies of the past out into the open, and indeed to bring things together with a new form of Territorial Army and a new form of reservists. I give great credit to my hon. Friend for his perseverance throughout the Committee stage; he attended as much as he possibly could and provided helpful background to our understanding of the Bill. My question to him is this: does he find it as interesting as I do that it has taken this Bill to show what a mess all the previous discrepancies were?
Mr Brazier
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her kind words. My essential point is that Parliament recognised, when the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 was put through, that reservist recruitment would never work if it were simply run by the Regular Army. It does not work. There is no reserve army anywhere in the world that is effectively run by its regular counterpart. We need a strong independent body. This new clause, which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has generously said he will accept, will put the body that used to do this job very effectively into a powerful position as inspectors.
Nuclear Test Veterans
Heather Wheeler Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
We are very proud of and grateful to the Royal Navy and to our Vanguard-class submariners, who are on patrol as we speak, for their service to our country. It is right to recognise that service, but there is a legacy from the dawn of our nuclear deterrent that has yet to be fully recognised and a debt of gratitude that has yet to be fully acknowledged—that is to our British nuclear test veterans.
The deterrent that this country now has would not have been possible without the efforts of 20,000 servicemen during the 1950s and 1960s at nuclear tests in the south Pacific and Australia. The science at the time was not well understood. Precautions, therefore, were primitive and inadequate, and they often failed to protect individuals from the effects of blast, heat and ionising radiation. Many test veterans believe that their health was adversely affected by their service. That view has been substantiated by scientific research undertaken relatively recently by Professor Rowland in New Zealand. That work was peer-reviewed and accepted by the then New Zealand Government.
Some years ago, I was contacted by a constituent about those issues. That initial contact spawned an association with the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which is the largest organisation by far that represents both veterans and their descendents. I am pleased to say that I am its patron, and I take this opportunity to commend all those who work for the BNTVA, its membership and especially the chairman, Nige Heaps, and the vice-chairman, Jeff Liddiatt.
After a long campaign, the BNTVA, I and others in the House persuaded the Ministry of Defence, with the help of the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), to undertake a health needs analysis of surviving veterans. Many helpful and practical measures are being introduced as a result, particularly in relation to a veterans pathway through the NHS. Our first priority was to focus on health, given the age profile of the veterans.
Following the success of the health needs analysis, over the summer, the BNTVA, I and others in this place launched the second and final part of our campaign, which essentially involves two main objectives. The first is official recognition from the Prime Minister—preferably orally, but in writing, if not—for the veterans’ unique service. The second part of that campaign, which we are presently in, involves the establishment of a £25 million benevolent fund administered by a board of trustees that would be distributed on the basis of need, not entitlement.
Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter—I apologise, but I will be leaving before the end of the debate, as I have other duties. I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I have at least five survivors and families of survivors from that time in my constituency, and I would be very interested to hear him flesh out more details about the potential funding pot. We have had numerous letters in and out of the MOD since I became an MP in 2010, and I am looking for a glimmer of hope that there will be practical measures as well as support, verbal apologies and congratulations to the servicemen involved at the time.
Mr Baron
The benevolent fund that we are discussing would be distributed on the basis of need and not entitlement, which is terribly important to understand. That is what differentiates this fund from other recognition or compensation elsewhere. There is often an automatic entitlement to compensation in other nuclear test countries if veterans can prove that they were there at the tests and have suffered ill health. The US is an example, as is Canada, and even the Isle of Man. I shall come on to the point in a minute that we are near the bottom of what I would call the international table of decency, in terms of how we treat veterans, compared with other countries.