Veterans Advisory and Pensions Committees Bill

James Daly Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

It is a genuine honour to be here to support a Bill from my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar), who is genuinely one of the most thoughtful and great men of this Parliament, so I am delighted to be here.

I do not want to be a merchant of doom or negativity about this, and I defer on just about all matters to my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland), but when I looked at the Bill after it was first published I had a question. We talk about the importance of providing statutory services and the vehicles for that—our Government should certainly be proud of everything they have done to support veterans—and the point of the Bill, as far as I understand it, is to make sure that the statutory functions of veterans advisory and pensions committees reflect and serve the needs of veterans as they are now, not as they were when the initial legislation was put in place. However, I struggled to find evidence that these bodies are effective at doing what they are doing now. As my hon. Friend says, I am sure they are great people, but they have to be effective, and if they are not effective, this is just all words, although I fully agree with the ideas behind what we are requiring them to do.

We all have our own individual veterans groups in our areas, and I am very lucky with those in Bury. Clause 1 makes provisions about the membership of VAPCs, and perhaps those memberships can be widened to people who are doing good work on the ground. In Bury, that could be Owen Dykes of the Borough of Bury Veterans Association, Baz and Sam Phillips and Shirley Simmons of the Bury Veterans Hub, Steve Butterworth of another veterans group and Stewart Spensley, the fantastic landlord of the Two Tubs. Let us not keep these services to a certain group of people, but broaden them out and make sure the membership reflects the good work that is done on every street in every town in this country.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the shadow Minister.