LGBT Veterans Independent Review

Debate between Sarah Champion and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. Lord Etherton recommended £50 million, and we have accepted that recommendation. The details of the scheme will be worked out in the next few months, and I hope she will be pleased with what she sees.

We need to know what the cohort looks like. At the moment, we really do not know that, which is why the front door opens today. In a very short while, I hope, with the help of right hon. and hon. Members across the House encouraging their constituents, we will have a better handle on who needs to be marked with this financial reward, and what they suffered at the time and the degree of that. Once we have a handle on that, we will be better placed to design a quantum that will be appropriate to people who were maligned between 1967 and 2000.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I welcome the Government’s recognition of and apology for the persecution, dismissal or forced resignation of LGBT personnel, but the answers the Minister has given are raising more concerns. The first is the cap on reparations, the second is whether there is a deadline for those reparations, and the third is this: if people’s records did not actually state that their dismissal was because of LGBT persecution, how are they meant to prove that it was?

[Dr Murrison]

The answer is “with difficulty”, given what happened in 2010 for perfectly understandable and perfectly good reasons—it is the law of unintended consequences, is it not? I cannot give the hon. Lady that detail at the moment, because it is being worked out. It is so very difficult: if everybody had their records marked up, it would be quite straightforward, but they do not. We need to know who the folk are who are in scope, and then we need to look at what records exist. Many of those records had tags placed on them when papers were removed, which I think will help.

We also have to look at other schemes, such as the Canadian scheme. However, I suspect most right hon. and hon. Members in this House would be cautious about the Canadian scheme, because it drew the criteria very narrowly. Those who were nudged out, or inched out, through all sorts of means—innuendo, personal pressure, or being tipped the nod and the wink that somebody was on to them—would be disadvantaged under the Canadian scheme. I hope they will not be disadvantaged under ours.