CIVIL DEFENCE AND FIRE SERVICES (KING'S BADGE) (Hansard, 10 February 1944)

§ Major Sir Jocelyn Lucas (Portsmouth, South)
I am glad to see the hon. Lady the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Home Security on the Front Bench, and to say how pleased we are about her recovery. In a way this is my maiden speech, not, of course, in the House but on the Adjournment. I want to raise the question of the King's Badge for wounded and discharged firemen of the National Fire Service and members of the Civil Defence Service who are invalided out on pension on the same terms as members of the so-called Fighting Services. Only yesterday we were told that the Prime Minister had said that the Home Guard were just as much part of the Army as the Brigade of Guards. Yet if a fireman or Home Guard is wounded in action and is invalided out he gets no silver badge, whereas the ordinary soldier will get one. People are apt to forget the blitz period in Britain when members of our Civil Defence Service, ambulance drivers, 2003 police, wardens and all the rest of them went into action night after night as soon as the bombs began to fall. Many were killed and many were injured. If there were troops in barracks in the area they were ordered to the shelters. If a soldier in the shelters was wounded and was invalided out he would get his badge, but a fireman who was wounded and perhaps crippled fighting the fires above him would receive nothing at all to show that he had served and suffered for his King and country.
I served for four years as a member of the A.F.S., as a part-timer, and I remember that I was once called to a military barracks, which had been hit in a raid, to help put out fires. A soldier injured and invalided out of the Army in such a raid would get his badge, but a fireman injured in similar circumstances would not. Even in hospital this differentiation continues. When I was wounded in 1941 I was sent to a hospital where the wards were full of wounded troops from Dunkirk. In the same wards were a number of firemen injured in the blitz. Every soldier used to receive a small bottle of beer a day, but the firemen merely got water, presumably because they used so much water on the fire and so were accustomed to it. Why should there be that difference between ex-members of the Civil Defence Service and ex-soldiers? If they have both been crippled doing the same sort of job I do not see why a wounded man who is not a member of the Armed Forces should not have something to wear in his lapel to show that he has suffered for his country. After all, a trade unionist wears his badge and is justly proud of it. A man who has bled for his country and will suffer for it for the rest of his life has every right to wear his badge and be as proud of it as a trade unionist.
I should like to ask the hon. Lady if the next-of-kin of a fireman killed in action gets a certificate which he can frame. I have a certificate for my brother, who was killed in action in the last war. It hangs in my hall. I do not know if the Civil Defence Services get anything like that. I hope that, if they do not, it will be looked into. I also want to protest against the way I have been pushed from pillar to post. When I first put a Question to the Home Secretary he referred me to an answer by 2004 the Prime Minister which had nothing to do with it. I put a Question to the Prime Minister and he referred me back to the Home Secretary. When I put it again the Under-Secretary gave me exactly the same answer. When I protested, he bad a second shot and referred me to another Question of my own on medals, which had nothing to do with it. I shall probably be told that I can raise the matter in another Debate, but it is a question of catching the Speaker's eye. I once tried to speak in an Army Debate and sat from 12 o'clock till half-past two, that is 14 hours, with only a sandwich to eat. I sat through the next day and did not get called on. I see no reason why I shall be called next time, and therefore I am trying to stake a claim.

§ Mr. Reakes (Wallasey)
I rise to support the hon. and gallant Gentleman's claim. I am very familiar as, no doubt, are other Members, with the wonderful work that has been achieved by members of the National Fire Service, and there is in my opinion no reason whatever why that gallant service should not be recognised along the lines that have been indicated. There may be difficulties attached to it but, after all, the Civil Defence Forces have rendered yeoman service in all parts of the country. I can speak from personal observation of the services they rendered on Merseyside during the dock raids, when many of them were injured and some were unable to continue their service owing to their injuries. It is only a matter of justice that they should be recognised, and I strongly support the hon. and gallant Gentleman's claim.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Home Security (Miss Wilkinson)
I am sorry that the hon. and gallant Gentleman is suffering under a sense of grievance. If he has only put the Motion down in order to catch the Speaker's eye, I can only say that I am willing warmly to back his claim, if that is of any use, when the appropriate Debate comes on; but the fact is, as we have said already in reply to Questions, that it really is not possible to consider badges or decorations, or the whole question of recognition, separately for each Force. The Prime Minister has promised a Debate on the whole subject of war decorations and medals. Therefore, I can only say to the hon. and gallant Member that it is not 2005 possible for me to-day to give him any definite answer on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. I can only say that the whole subject is being fully considered and that a reply will be given to him, or to anyone else who raises this matter, and a full statement will be made when it is debated.
I do not want to be discourteous to the hon. and gallant Member, particularly as we at the Ministry of Home Security have a very warm recollection of his own gallant conduct when he was a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service and suffered as a consequence. I will, therefore, just give him the line on which our thoughts are working, while making it clear that no final decision has yet been reached. The real difficulty is to delimit the field and decide who is to have these decorations. The Home Office and the country generally are fully aware of the gallant conduct of our Civil Defence and National Fire Service and the police during the blitz, which is not by any means ended, as some hon. Members occasionally think. We have recently had raids, small, I admit, but raids which have called forth gallant conduct. We wish in every way to make it clear that these Services are fully appreciated by the Government. In considering whether to grant badges, however, we must work on a definite procedure. While it is fairly simple in connection with the Armed Forces, because the whole procedure of enlistment and discharge is on a formal basis, the difficulty is that in the Civil Defence Service there is no fixed minimum medical standard for discharge, and the discharge procedure does not provide for certification to the Ministry of Pensions, except in a limited number of cases where a disability pension is awarded.
It would be quite easy if the badge were limited only to those who were discharged because of disability, but many men may have been discharged from the Civil Defence Forces because we are having to cut down and to release men as the need for their services becomes limited. Therefore, it would not be fair to say that only those who actually came under a disability pension—and it would be a very small number—should get the badge and that others should not. If the suggestion of the hon. and gallant Member were adopted, it would mean that the Ministry of Pensions would have to examine all past cases and consult the local authorities to see whether 2006 discharge had followed the award of an injury allowance. I want to remind the hon. and gallant Member that the Civil Defence Forces are not national forces, and are not under our national control. They are employed by individual local authorities. This would involve a considerable amount of work, not only for us, but for the very over-burdened staffs of the local authorities.
We also have the difficulty that the recipients of the badge might rejoin the Services in a different rank, and the withdrawal of the badge would be quite impracticable. There is the further difficulty that awards could not be confined to the whole-timers. The hon. and gallant Member indicated the gallant rôle that the part-timers have played. If we admitted the part-timers in Civil Defence and N.F.S., we would also have to bring in the Fire Guard, and there are several millions of those. If we included the local authority Fire Guard we could not then exclude the Fire Guard and the A.R.P. squads at business premises. That would begin to involve the Ministry of Pensions in an appalling amount of work, in correspondence with hundreds of firms, whose evidence might be unobtainable or unreliable. Moreover, if we accepted award on this basis it would lead to a demand to admit people who had been discharged from ordinary industrial employment because they were injured in doing very gallant work during the raids, as many of them have been. The hon. and gallant Member may ask: "Why not?" But if we followed those lines, although we realise how fine our Civil Defence Service has been during blitz and in times of danger, we should get to the stage when it would he difficult to exclude any members of the community from the proposed badge, and when the badge itself would become meaningless.
I do not want to seem to be presenting merely a reductio ad absurdum answer. We have really gone into this matter carefully, but the position, so far as Civil Defence is concerned, is very difficult indeed because it is a local authority service. With the police and the N.F.S., and particularly the N.F.S., these practical difficulties do not apply with the same force. It would be quite easy to apply the proposed badge to the N.F.S. and police forces or no more difficult than it is to the Armed Forces, because all of them are on a national basis. The 2007 difficulty that arises is whether you could grant a badge to the N.F.S. and not to the Civil Defence wardens who work side by side with the N.F.S., or to the Fire Guard, who, in recent raids, have done magnificent service in putting out incendiary bombs and thus have made it unnecessary for the N.F.S. to be called to fires which otherwise would have needed them.
I have given this general idea of our difficulties, so that the hon. and gallant Member can see that it is not just carelessness or lack of sympathy on our part. The sympathy is fully there. It is only that we see practical difficulties before us. I think I have at least done this for the hon. and gallant Gentleman, I have provided him more or less with the Department's case on what he is anxious to have done. Therefore, if he is able to catch either your eye, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, or that of Mr. Speaker, he will be able to answer the case point by point. I, for one, will be very glad indeed if he will do so, because we have an open mind on the matter and have not come yet to a final conclusion.
The hon. and gallant Gentleman raised another point. It is a question of the next-of-kin. I think he has raised a real point there. If a man or woman has died in a raid their loved ones have been bereft just as much as if they had died in Libya, or Italy, or where you will. I give him my personal undertaking that I will have a word with the Home Secretary about 2008 this, and see what can be done in the matter. The difficulties which I have raised do not apply in these very definite cases, although of course we should have to deal with the matter through the local authorities. That is the general line, and I hope very much that, when the matter is fully debated, we shall be able, perhaps not to give the hon. and gallant Gentleman all he wants, but to meet him on one or two of the points.

§ Mr. Tom Brown (Ince)
Might I ask the hon. Lady if it is correct that she said in her reply that the Home Office have no jurisdiction over the N.F.S.?

§ Miss Wilkinson
No, I said quite the opposite. What I said was that the Civil Defence services are local authority services and the N.F.S. is a national service. We have a direct control over the N.F.S., exactly the same as the War Office has over the Army, but the Civil Defence services are different because they are local authority services.

§ Mr. Brown
Civil Defence is totally different from the N.F.S. I understood that in her reply the hon. Lady said that the Home Office had no jurisdiction over the N.F.S. I want that making clear.

§ Miss Wilkinson
I think my hon. Friend has quite misunderstood me. The Home Office and the Ministry of Home Security have complete control over the N.F.S. because it is a national service.