Business of the House

Owen Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The provision of defence support to civil authorities in the UK is governed by a robust and well-defined set of principles, set out in a publicly available joint doctrine publication. Those principles ensure that defence assistance is the last rather than first resort when responding to operational challenges. That is essential in order to preserve defence capabilities for defence outputs wherever possible and to reduce the risk of legal challenge from commercial providers, which may otherwise have reasonably expected to tender for contracts from the requesting authority. Defence maintains a standing network of joint regional liaison officers across the country to maintain relationships with civil authorities, provide potential advice on defence assistance, and facilitate requests when they meet the required principles. Any request for defence assistance should be referred to the joint regional liaison office.

I fear that that is not an enormously helpful answer, because the issue is that defence assistance is a last resort. However, I hope that raising the issue in the House will put a little bit of extra pressure on Denbighshire County Council to get on with what it should be doing in relation to the bridge.

[Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)]

Last week I raised with the Leader of the House issues relating to war pensions and the armed forces compensation scheme, and I thank him for his actions in support of the points I made. Since then I have been contacted by dozens of other veterans who find themselves in similar situations. In the past week I have also received from the Ministry of Defence an answer to my written question asking how many veterans are giving up on the process because of the situation in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, the answer was:

“This information is not held in the format requested”,

so the MOD does not even know how many veterans are giving up on the process of trying to get compensation or uplifts to their war pensions as a result of injuries or traumatic experiences from their time serving in the forces. May we have a statement on that and on how we can make sure that the MOD does in fact have accurate records of the situation of all veterans?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. It is important that written answers are as helpful as possible. It is always possible to seek the advice of the Table Office—it is exceptionally good at this—to work out how to rephrase a question in order to get around an initially unhelpful answer so as to get the information requested. If the hon. Gentleman is not able to do that, or is not successful in doing so, my office will be more than happy to seek fuller answers than he has got so far.