Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Sarah Atherton and Lord BeamishThursday 8th October 2020
(4 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21 View all Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 8 October 2020 - (8 Oct 2020)
The Chair
Okay. Just one. There might be time for further questions, because only Sarah is indicating that she would like to ask one at the moment.
Mr Jones
Q
Lieutenant Colonel Parker: I would say a strong yes, because in all the incidents I have seen where it has gone wrong, if the individual concerned knew that there was some way that an independent person would be able to investigate them, they may have been less likely to think that they could get away with it; it is often individuals acting fully in the knowledge of what they are doing because they can get away with it. Personally, based on my experience, I would say yes to that.
Sarah Atherton
Q
Lieutenant Colonel Parker: I will, and if it helps you, I would prefer to answer that in the broadest terms, rather than focusing on individual cases, to avoid causing them any further distress. Obviously, a lot of the things we talk about are very confidential, and a lot of them are very tearful.
With that incident and the aftermath, once it started to break out that there was going to be some sort of investigations, and the manner of those investigations, there was certainly a feeling of horror and almost terror that swept through people, because they realised, “When will this stop?” It was a particularly brutal engagement, and it was cited, as the Committee probably knows, as being along the lines of second world war bayonet fighting-type engagement—incredible bravery but also incredible stress. One of the individuals I know—a large, strong, tough individual—was in tears in my arms, explaining that he had enough to deal with coping with having had to kill several people, and now he would have to deal with the fact that he might be court martialled for it. He just could not understand it.
We have to remember, again, that the individuals concerned are not people who are able to sit and pick through legal documents, nor understand them. Whether we ask the most vulnerable or tough people in our society to go forward and do these extremely tough and brave point-of-the-spear jobs, such as combat roles, we must remember that we have a duty of care to protect them from anything—intellectual or otherwise—that might affect them later in their distress.
In answer to your question about the families, that whole inquiry, and certainly that incident, were the largest single point of family distress that I have witnessed in my entire military service or veteran chairmanship of five years. That amount of distress was not only for those who were being prosecuted, but for their spouses, partners, mothers, fathers, others, and children in some cases—those who knew that the veteran had been involved not only in that incident but in others—because there was immediate presumption that there would soon be a knock on the door or a letter popping through the door for some sort of summons, so the stress levels, the distress and the impact snowballed to quite a large level. It was very hard to put a lid on that stress because that is what happened: letters did start to arrive and people did get knocks on the door, so it became a very distressing time.
Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Sarah Atherton and Lord Beamish(4 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
Okay. Just one. There might be time for further questions, because only Sarah is indicating that she would like to ask one at the moment.
Mr Jones
Q The ombudsman can look backwards. We heard Major Campbell the other day; even though he had been completely exonerated, there was no ability to investigate why he was treated the way he was. Do you think it would help those individuals who have gone through very poor service—in his case, it was 17 years of hell, by the sound of it—to have recourse to the ombudsman to have that investigated, to at least get some answers as to why things were actually happening?
Lieutenant Colonel Parker: I would say a strong yes, because in all the incidents I have seen where it has gone wrong, if the individual concerned knew that there was some way that an independent person would be able to investigate them, they may have been less likely to think that they could get away with it; it is often individuals acting fully in the knowledge of what they are doing because they can get away with it. Personally, based on my experience, I would say yes to that.
Sarah Atherton
Q Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the Tigers, was caught up in the battle of Danny Boy. As an association representative, can you give the Committee a sense of what the soldiers and families went through during those vexatious claims? There have been high-profile cases of Brian Wood and Scott Hoolin, whom I assume you know all about. Can you give us a sense of what they went through during these vexatious investigations?
Lieutenant Colonel Parker: I will, and if it helps you, I would prefer to answer that in the broadest terms, rather than focusing on individual cases, to avoid causing them any further distress. Obviously, a lot of the things we talk about are very confidential, and a lot of them are very tearful.
With that incident and the aftermath, once it started to break out that there was going to be some sort of investigations, and the manner of those investigations, there was certainly a feeling of horror and almost terror that swept through people, because they realised, “When will this stop?” It was a particularly brutal engagement, and it was cited, as the Committee probably knows, as being along the lines of second world war bayonet fighting-type engagement—incredible bravery but also incredible stress. One of the individuals I know—a large, strong, tough individual—was in tears in my arms, explaining that he had enough to deal with coping with having had to kill several people, and now he would have to deal with the fact that he might be court martialled for it. He just could not understand it.
We have to remember, again, that the individuals concerned are not people who are able to sit and pick through legal documents, nor understand them. Whether we ask the most vulnerable or tough people in our society to go forward and do these extremely tough and brave point-of-the-spear jobs, such as combat roles, we must remember that we have a duty of care to protect them from anything—intellectual or otherwise—that might affect them later in their distress.
In answer to your question about the families, that whole inquiry, and certainly that incident, were the largest single point of family distress that I have witnessed in my entire military service or veteran chairmanship of five years. That amount of distress was not only for those who were being prosecuted, but for their spouses, partners, mothers, fathers, others, and children in some cases—those who knew that the veteran had been involved not only in that incident but in others—because there was immediate presumption that there would soon be a knock on the door or a letter popping through the door for some sort of summons, so the stress levels, the distress and the impact snowballed to quite a large level. It was very hard to put a lid on that stress because that is what happened: letters did start to arrive and people did get knocks on the door, so it became a very distressing time.
Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill (Second sitting)
Debate between Sarah Atherton and Lord BeamishTuesday 6th October 2020
(4 years, 1 month ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21 View all Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 6 October - (6 Oct 2020)
Mr Jones
Q
Ahmed Al-Nahhas: They do split them. I do not have them to hand, unfortunately, but they separate them out, so maybe you will glean more from that. I am sorry that I cannot assist further. My understanding is that the Bill will affect the vast majority of the civil claims that are brought against the Ministry of Defence, which are the employer’s liability claims. The main provisions that the MOD break them down into are non-freezing cold injury claims, which are a mainstay of civil claims that are brought, and are in relation to negligent cold exposures, and noise-induced hearing loss, in relation to negligent exposure to loud noises. The others relate to industrial disease—things like asbestos—and then they have a quota that is defined as “other”. With a freedom of information request, we may be able to dive a bit more into those statistics. I hope that helps.
Sarah Atherton
Q
Ahmed Al-Nahhas: That is a very good question. It depends on what they agree with their lawyer. In the industry, the norm is to provide something called a conditional fee agreement. Where you can establish that a claim has good prospects of success, you may, as a lawyer, offer a service person’s family, in relation to your example, a CFA, where you do not charge them unless you win. It is conditional on certain terms. These days, there are a lot of rules that regulate how much lawyers can charge. Normally, for example, and taking a rule of thumb, they cannot exceed the damages that you recover for the individual. In the past, there were fewer constraints on the extent of lawyers’ fees.
There are lots of lawyers out there who are specialists and who offer no win, no fee agreements to service personnel and their families. The only way that service personnel or their families may be required to pay legal costs normally is that they sometimes have to pay a chunk of their costs, related to what lawyers would define as unrecovered costs, which are things that they cannot recover from the Ministry of Defence, but as long as the claim is successful, in this context, it would be the Ministry of Defence that pays the lawyer’s bill. I hope that answers your question.