CLAUSE 6.—(Amendment of Section 76.) (Hansard, 5 April 1922)

§ Mr. HOGGE
I wish to know precisely what this Clause means. The Note 2320 states that its object is to enable boys under 18 to be enlisted for special technical branches of the Service in such a way that service before the age of 18 will be in the nature of apprenticeship, and that their 12 years' enlistment will only count as from the age of 18. If there is one question which is constantly coming before Members of this House it is the question of the entitlement of men to pensions for length of service. Frequently one is told of some old army man in one's constituency who is not entitled to the long service pension because he happened to join at a certain age, and until he had attained the proper age the years which he spent in the Army counted nothing for the purpose of a service pension. I take the view that where the Army agrees to the enlistment of a boy under the age of 18, either for the purposes of the Army pure and simple or for the purpose of any training connected with the Army, service for pension ought to start straight away, and ought to count. I would like to know from my hon. and gallant Friend how we stand in this matter? Supposing a boy under the age of 18 joins as a mechanician. If he stays in the Army will the years up to the time he is 18 count for service, or will we still find, as we often do now, men who have served long periods of years and who cannot draw pensions because a few years at the beginning of the service do not count at all.

Lieut.-Colonel WARD
My hon. Friend has raised a very important point. I have studied these oases for a number of years, and I imagine that, allowing two years for technical training—that is, enlisting a boy at 16, and allowing him a period of training up to 18—is a very good thing, and enables the boy to become of real service to the community by the time he reaches 18 years. I do not think, how-over, the two years should count for pension if the man leaves at the end of the first 12 years for which he was enlisted. If he remains for a further period and arrives at anywhere near the pension age before, for some reason, he leaves the Service—because he is invalided, or is no longer of any use, or is unfitted for the Service—then I really think that for the purposes of pension the two years of technical instruction should be added on to the second term. I make the suggestion that that should be done. I do not suppose for a moment that it will be 2321 attended to at the proper time, but while I do not imagine this proposal would be of any use to the soldier who only does the first term of service, it might be of immense advantage to those completing the second term of service, enabling them to receive some assistance from the State for services rendered.

§ Major Sir B. FALLE
The question of counting boys' service for pensions is a very serious one, not only for the Army, but it may also affect the Navy. Men's service in both Army>and Navy counts from the age of 18. The suggestion that in the Army boys' service should count as half-time might be brought forward, but at the present moment I am very much afraid you cannot go to either the Admiralty or the War Office and ask them to take all the years of a boy's service, from the age of 12 to the age of 18, as full men's service.

Lieut.-Colonel WARD
I understood that we are dealing with the Army. The position of the Navy is quite different. The boy is taken at 12 years of age. It is not suggested that boys should be taken, even as artificers, until the age of 16—a time at which they would be excluded from the Navy. Why the hon. and gallant Gentleman should use that quite different question of boys in the Navy—I know because I tried to join at the age of 11—to frighten the representatives of the Army Council from dealing with the boy who starts in the Army on technical instruction at the age of 16, I cannot understand. The two cases are not analagous, and this has nothing to do with the Navy.

§ Sir B. FALLE
We are dealing with the question of whether a youth under the age of 18 should count his service before that date.

Lieut.-Colonel WARD
In the Army.

§ Sir B. FALLE
In the Army, and if it applies to the Army it will have to apply to the Navy.

Lieut.-Colonel WARD
Why should it not apply to the Navy?

§ Sir B. FALLE
There is no question of my intimidating anybody at all. I am rather amused at the idea that I should be intimidating my hon. and gallant 2322 Friend (Sir R. Sanders) in any matter. It is undoubtedly a very large question. If you are going to take a boy at 16, at 14, at 12, or at any age before he is a man, it is a very big question indeed, especially when money is so tight, because it becomes a matter of taking him at a time when he is of very little use indeed to the country as he is learning his job. I do not think we should press the War Office with any such idea.

§ Sir R. SANDERS
I am not going in any way into a discussion of the Navy. I think the question of pension is wholly irrelevant to this Section. I cannot lay down exactly what the provision is at the present moment as to pensions in such cases, but I do not think this alters it in any way whatever. I think it has nothing to do with pensions. All this applies to is the maximum period of original enlistment. You are not allowed to have an original enlistment for more than 12 years. We want to get boys in at less than 18, and to teach them a technical Army trade in their first years of service. All that this does is to say that the period during which they are being taught before 18 shall not count as part of the 12 years which is the maximum for their original enlistment. I think the policy of taking boys young and teaching them Army trades is one that commends itself to Members generally. The proposal here is simply to amend the Act so as to provide that in the case of boys so enlisted the boys' 12 years of maximum period for original enlistment shall only begin to run from the date of their reaching the age of 18. It really has nothing to do with pensions whatever.

§ Mr. HOGGE
I am afraid I cannot agree for a single moment with the hon. and gallant Gentleman's argument. I think the House agrees that it is quite a wise policy to take boys into the Army as young as they are prepared to go, or are admitted, and presumably that age is 16. But if the boy did not go into the Army he would go into a trade, and would be learning his trade and completing his apprenticeship. It is true that the hon. and gallant Gentleman says what he wants is that the first completed period of Army service shall be 12 years, and that it shall not count until the boy has attained the age of 18, when he will have had two years' training in the trade he chose when he joined the 2323 Army, but when the hon. and gallant Gentleman says that has nothing to do with pensions, is he right? I suppose the policy of the Army is to get the trained soldier with a trade to remain in the Army for a second period of service. Surely, a man who has been taught a trade in the Army, and has been taught for 12 years how to serve as a soldier with all our modern equipment, is a much better assets to the country than ever he was, and the Army authorities try to induce that man to rejoin for another period, the maximum period—the hon. and gallant Gentleman will correct me if I am wrong—being 21 years. I do not know whether the subsequent nine years is broken up into any period of service or not, but I do know that the complete service is 21 years.
Suppose you have a boy joining the Army at 16. Suppose he serves for 12 years. During that time he has been 14 years in the Army. Presume that at the end of 12 years he takes on a second period of service at the request of the authorities and does not complete that period for some reason or other. We all know there are many reasons that arise. Illness overtakes a man, or some domestic convenience makes it impossible for him to remain in the Army, and he goes out at the end of seven years. He has done 12 years and seven years, which make 19 years, but he has also done two years prior to the time he was 18 during which he was being trained as an asset for the Army. That makes 21 years. The hon. and gallant Gentleman knows perfectly well that if that man applied for the long service pension he would be turned down because he has not completed the 21 years' service. One of my hon. and gallant Friends suggests the long service medal, but I am not so much concerned with that as with the economic position of the man we are asking to serve at the end of this service. We ask that where you have cases where the 21 years' service pension depends on a few days or months, as is so often the case, as hon. Members know from the many individual instances they receive, the two years the boy has served prior to reaching the age of 18 shall be included to bring the term up to 21 years' service. It is not a costly request. The hon and gallant Gentleman is himself a soldier, and has had experience in the Army, and 2324 he knows there are not multitudes of these cases, although those that do occur are very hard cases, cases of men who have served 18 and 19 years in the Army who might be able to jog along in the later years of their lives, but who are unable to do so because they have not these completed years. Could not the hon. and gallant Gentleman take into consideration that point in cases of that kind and arrange that a man should be allowed to count those years?

§ Sir R. SANDERS
I will most certainly give that subject consideration, but I am practically certain it makes no alteration at all in his pension. I am practically certain it makes no difference to the existing law which governs the pension. This alteration of the old Clause will not affect any matter of pension at all. It is a point of law, but I am practically certain of it.