HC Deb 07 May 1970 vol 801 cc715-26

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Armstrong.]

10.30 p.m.

Mr. Julian Ridsdale (Harwich)

I have been pressing the Ministry of Defence for some time about the pay of British forces in the United Nations Force in Cyprus. My attention to this problem was alerted last November by a constituent who has a son serving with that Force. He told me that everyone except the British gets a considerable extra allowance. According to him, British troops serving with the United Nations unit even had to pay for their shirt badges. This may or may not be true, but there is no smoke without fire.

This is why I have been most disturbed to read in the Sunday Mirror recently an article by Ellis Place headed: The Scandal of Britain's Poverty-stricken Tommies ". If this debate does nothing else, I am glad that it will give the Minister an opportunity to reply to that article, which he indicated in a reply to me had been read by the Ministry. It makes severe criticism of the way in which the United Nations Force in Cyprus is being run, although I am glad that it praises the work and efficiency of the British Army.

According to the article, one young soldier who signed for a six-years' engagement said that he made arrangements to buy himself out. I was happy enough in the British Army ", he said, but I curse the day when I ever saw the Blue Beret. This substantiates information I have had from other sources.

The article indicates that conditions in the United Nations camp are spartan, but whereas those in the United Nations Force who are well paid can get away and buy their relaxation, British troops on their pay are unable to do so. This is well illustrated by what the article says about pay. Is it true that a British captain earning the regulation £5 a day for his rank and experience finds that his Swedish driver is earning twice as much? Is it true that a 22-year-old second lieutenant who joined the Danish Force to save money was receiving £38 a week with another £25 added for United Nations allowance? Is it a fact that he collects at those rates as much as a British lieutenant-colonel with eight years' service?

I will not quote everything in the article, but it was obvious that such differences in pay, which are evidently translated right through the unit from officers to other ranks, prove that all is not well with this Force. The hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg), who noticed that I had this Adjournment, mentioned to me that when he visited Cyprus it appeared that some British other ranks were not getting the same rations as Canadians and Americans. He asked me if it was possible to draw the attention of the Minister to this point. The Secretary of State has said that the new pay scales will help. I hope that they will, but I fear for soldiers serving abroad. The increases will go only some way to counteract the 14 per cent, devaluation of the £ since 1967 and the recent cuts in the purchasing power of the £ after revaluation of the German mark.

When our Armed Forces are serving with international units or in countries where, for exchange reasons or otherwise, our rates of pay are not in line with the armed forces with which they are serving, more should be done to minimise differences in pay. This was always my experience when I was a soldier, and I am disturbed about what appears to be happening now, but more particularly with British forces attached to United Nations units, especially the United Nations unit in Cyprus.

In reply to a Question which I asked on 25th February the Secretary of State said that he raised this anomaly with the Conservative Administration, but he did not think that we would be justified in paying British Servicemen different rates of pay according to where they were serving. When I raised this matter again on 8th April I was told that the Minister had nothing to add to the Secretary of State's reply.

British soldiers serving in different sectors receive pay calculated on the same basis, but to me it is clear that this policy is meeting with difficulties and, I hope the Minister realises, with resentment. Can one really have an efficient international unit in which the pay differences are so marked? If soldiers are under the command of the United Nations, surely there should be United Nations rates of pay. This is what happens with United Nations officials in New York. Why should there be a different rate for the officials there from that for the men who form a United Nations unit to keep the peace? I ask the Minister to reply to the question which I have put to him and not to run away from it, because this is really the crux of my argument. I ask the Minister not to quibble about different rates of pay in different sectors, but to deal with the pay of soldiers in Cyprus.

United Nations officials are not paid as British, French, Guyanese, Japanese, or Chinese civil servants. They are paid as United Nations officials. I ask the Minister to ensure that the men who are serving the United Nations in a much more difficult role than sitting in New York are paid the United Nations rate of pay and not the pay of their respective national units.

I can understand that in Cyprus there may be certain local difficulties, but am I to understand that if a similar situation arises elsewhere there are no common rates of pay for United Nations forces? Do some countries pay special rates, or are the rates of pay of the various units which comprise a United Nations force those which are applicable to the armed forces of their respective countries?

The Government support the principle of equal pay for women. Why should there not be equal pay for the various nations which make up a United Nations force? If there is not a change in the method of payment these forces will lose their efficiency and their morale will deteriorate. Indeed, from the reports which have reached me this appears to have happened, especially if the stories that we have heard of late are true.

I ask the Minister to look into this problem. It is obvious that all is not well. Surely some gesture is needed to give encouragement to our troops serving under United Nations command. The Government's policy appears to be to make a mockery of such forces and not to give them the standing which they should have if they are to be as effective as the House, the country, and many parts of the world would like them to be.

I hope that the Minister will not give me the Ministry's reply, but will tell me whether he considers it right that there should be different rates of pay for the armed forces of the different nationalities which comprise this force. If we are to have an efficient United Nations force, there must be proper rates of pay for everyone. There is something wrong in the way that British Army personnel attached to the United Nations force in Cyprus have been treated, and I hope that we shall have an explanation from the Minister about the present position.

10.40 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army (Mr. Ivor Richard)

I am obliged to the hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Ridsdale) for raising this issue tonight, though I rather regret some of the language he has used. This is not an easy matter. It is not a new matter. It is a question which, as the hon. Gentleman knows, was considered at a time when he himself was a Defence Minister. If my memory serves me right, the hon. Gentleman was Under-Secretary of State for Air at the very time that this matter was considered by Mr. Thorneycroft—now Lord Thorneycroft— when he was Minister of Defence. Therefore, I should have thought that with the hon. Gentleman's past experience he would have appreciated some of the difficulties.

The hon. Gentleman raised a point on rations, which I will answer immediately before going on to deal with the main issue he has raised. It is true that Canadian rations in the U.N. Force differ from British rations. They also differ from Irish rations. The point the hon. Gentleman did not make, however, is that all those rations are supplied by the British Forces on Cyprus. Much of the logistic backing for the U.N. Force on Cyprus is provided by the British contingent on the island. Indeed, when I visited Cyprus about two months ago one of the things I was shown with a great deal of pride by the Army there were the foods and rations of different national contingents, which we were supplying.

Therefore, if the rations are different, it is not because we could not supply British troops with precisely the same rations as everybody else. It is because national contingents like their own national foods.

On the main issue, I reject almost in toto what the hon. Gentleman said about the efficiency and morale of the United Nations Force in Cyprus, and particularly of the British contingent. I have had the opportunity of visiting this force in the relatively recent past. The article to which the hon. Gentleman referred appeared some time ago and was, indeed, written some time before that. The hon. Gentleman's criticisms could not by any stretch of the imagination be said to apply in the areas I visited or to the British troops to whom I talked and who were actually part of the U.N. Force in Cyprus.

I went, for example, to one of the most difficult posts occupied by part of the British U.N.F.I.CYP. contingent; namely, that at Kophinou. This is a difficult area where there had been fighting between the Greeks and the Turks. I talked there with a large number of British soldiers. They all appreciated the reasons for their being there. They did not think that it was the nicest job they had ever done. Of course it was not. In some respects it is a very dull and difficult job, but it is a very necessary one. Their morale was extraordinarily high.

It is worth while recording that the United Kingdom contribution to U.N.F.I.CYP. is extremely valuable and extremely important. Other nationalities which are part of the U.N. Force in Cyprus will generally concede that without the British backing and without the British contingent the force could not function at anything like its present efficiency or level.

Cyprus is not the only theatre outside the United Kingdom in which British forces have to serve abroad. In some ways it is not even the most difficult theatre in which British forces have to serve abroad. It would be a bold man indeed who said that the British part of the U.N. Force in Cyprus was performing a more difficult task than is at present being performed by some of our troops in Ulster. It would be a bold man indeed who said that perhaps the Emergency Battalion in Gibraltar was not performing as difficult and as arduous and perhaps in some ways as dull and as boring, a task as that being performed by U.N.F.I.C.Y.P. Perhaps some of our troops employed in Sharjah or in the Trucial States, or elsewhere in the Middle East, or in some parts of the Far East are discharging an equally arduous and equally unpleasant task.

The real question which the hon. Gentleman has not faced up to is whether the fact that this is a British contribution to an international force in Cyprus, as opposed to a task being performed by a national force on its own, is sufficient in itself to take it out of the normal principle of payment for United Kingdom troops. Like the hon. Gentleman in his previous incarnation, and like his then Minister of Defence, Lord Thorneycroft, I found this subject not without difficulty. But I have come down firmly on the side of the argument that it would be much worse to have a situation in which British troops were being paid two different rates for doing precisely the same job, the only difference being whether their job was done as part of an international contingent or part of a national one.

Mr. Ridsdale

I can see the force of the Minister's arguments, but does he think it right and fair that various units composing a United Nations force should have different rates of pay for doing the job? I cannot see the principle for their being paid differently for the same job, and I do not believe that it is fair.

Mr. Richard

Like many other matters aired on the Floor of the House, it is not a clash between two situations one of which is wholly right and one of which is wholly wrong. There is some substance at first glance in what the hon. Gentleman says, but on analysis I think that he has come down on the wrong side of the argument.

Three issues emerge. First, does the fact that this is a United Nations force in Cyprus mean that all United Nations troops in Cyprus should be paid the same rate? I think that that is the point to which the hon. Gentleman was really addressing himself. It is a logical approach to ask what the United Nations position is on this, as opposed to what the hon. Gentleman says the British position should be.

Second, could we justify a situation in which British soldiers stationed next to each other on the same island, perhaps doing almost the same jobs, though not precisely the same, are paid two different rates? Does the hon. Gentleman think that that would be good for the efficiency and morale of the British Armed Forces?

Third, in any event—and perhaps this is the important point to which the hon. Gentleman did not address himself—is the soldier in Cyprus being paid a reasonable rate for the job he is doing, whatever the other national contingencies may be getting?

It has always been the practice in establishing international forces that men in them are paid according to the overseas rates of pay and allowances set by their own internal authorities. In the case of the U.N. peace-keeping forces, these are accepted between the contracting Governments and the U.N. Secretary-General, and are the basis for reimbursement by the U.N. to those Governments which do not meet their own costs. It is hard to see how any other arrangement could be satisfactory to all.

The U.N. Secretariat, which has given a great deal of thought to this problem, takes the perfectly understandable view that the possible establishment of uniform rates of pay and allowances for national contingencies is not practical. In particular, it feels that any rationalisation of the kind the hon. Gentleman proposes would inevitably lead to a levelling up of pay and allowances to those of the highest-paid contingent, and that would inflate the cost of the operation to the United Nations.

Second, there is evidence that other countries apart from Great Britain contributing men to the U.N. Force have to offer special financial inducements to their troops to obtain enough volunteers, because some of those nations do not normally send troops overseas. In some nations which have conscription, for example, there is an aversion to military service and no tradition of serving overseas as there is in some other forces, and therefore some have decided that it is necessary to pay more in order to attract people to serve outside their frontiers.

What really is established is that comparisons which have been made in the past between pay and allowances of British forces in Cyprus and those of other national contingents of the U.N. force raise such severe qualifications as to make such comparisons almost meaningless. It is necessary, in order to make accurate and sensible comparisons, to take account of conditions of service as well—the terms and nature of the engagement, the costs of living and the standards of living, which inevitably differ from country to country. One has to consider not only basic pay but other allowances and what they are meant to cover, what is the net pay in each case, what provision there is for pensions and insurance, what are the normal obligations for military service to which these sums, conditions and amenities in the home country relate, particularly if these obligations normally exclude service overseas.

For these reasons, I believe that, apart from the question of establishing rates of pay and allowances based on all these considerations, the U.N. rightly has ruled that emoluments have to be determined by the national Governments of the contingents, bearing every consideration in mind. There is no case I know of in which the U.N. Force has been established on anything other than that principle.

I turn now to the second point. To pay British Servicemen with the U.N. Force specially enhanced rates of pay in order to remove the anomaly that they receive somewhat lower pay than the men of contingents from some other countries would be to put another anomaly in its place, for there would then be different rates of pay for British Servicemen according to where they were serving and what task they were employed on. This, as the hon. Gentleman will know from his experience at the Ministry of Defence, would be a novel proposition for this country.

Mr. Ridsdale

But surely the same principle applies to the officials of the U.N. in New York. They are all British or Canadian or American or other nations' civil servants but they receive U.N. rates of pay. Why should there be one rule for U.N. officials and another for U.N. forces in the field?

Mr. Richard

The first and obvious answer is that the British troops in Cyprus, who are part of the U.N. Force are still part of the British Army. They are not part of a UN. army. It may well be that an individual Briton serving the U.N. Secretariat comes under the control of the U.N. itself. This is not the principle so far as British Servicemen in Cyprus are concerned. They are still part of the British Army and are subject to the disciplinary provisions of the Army Act. They can still be posted wherever their nation decides to post them. That is the distinction and I would have thought that it would have been obvious to the hon. Gentleman.

The anomaly which I suggest would be put in place of what the hon. Gentleman wants to remove would be one where there would be different rates of pay for British Servicemen according to where they were serving and on what task they were employed. I cannot imagine where such an anomaly would be felt more keenly than in Cyprus, where we would have British Servicemen with the U.N. Force at higher pay than other British troops serving in the sovereign base areas.

It is far more equitable that British Servicemen should receive the same rates of basic pay appropriate to rank and length of service. Extra expenditure incurred while serving in various parts of the world is recognised by the payment of local overseas allowances designed to bring the purchasing power of the troops up to the level generally prevailing in the United Kingdom. There is nothing particularly original in these principles. They were annunciated when the hon. Gentleman was at the Ministry of Defence. The facts were then virtually the same. British troops were serving then in the U.N. Force in Cyprus.

I turn to the third point; namely: are they in any event receiving the rate for the job? The hon. Member has not taken account of the military salary. It is now much more profitable to consider what the Government have done for the individual Serviceman. For the first time he has been given the rate for the job. For the first time there is the same rate for a single and a married man. He has been given the X factor to compensate for turbulence and other exceptional conditions of Service life.

Taking the ranks mentioned in the Daily Mirror article which the hon. Gentleman quoted in extenso, the effects of our measures have been to increase the single Army captain's rate of pay by 40 per cent, with the prospect of another 13 per cent, increase next year. The pay of the single private soldier has been increased by as much as 70 per cent. Both have local overseas allowance added to their rates to compensate them for the additional cost of living over and above the United Kingdom. Even more, the new arrangements for pay are flexible enough to meet the particular field conditions in which these men are serving, by rebating the normal contributions towards food and accommodation under the military salary. The weekly rate of pay for the captain referred to in the article is now more than £44 and the rate of pay for the private soldier over £18 a week.

When the hon. Member recognises, as I am sure he will, that those are excluding charges for food and accommodation since the men will be serving under field conditions, I am bound to say that such a rate of pay plus free food is not unreasonable.

In addition, British Service personnel serving overseas receive a local overseas allowance. The L.O.As. at present payable in Cyprus for British Service personnel would be as follows. A single accommodated captain gets an additional payment of 5s. 3d. a day and a single accommodated corporal an addition of 3s. a day. The rate is increased to all personnel if they happen to be permanently stationed at Troodos.

These rates of L.O.A. in Cyprus were last reviewed and revised in May 1969. Small adjustments were made to them, as to all L.O.A. rates world-wide, with effect from 1st April, 1970, to take account of certain changes resulting from the introduction of the military salary. These rates in Cyprus apply to all British Service personnel in Cyprus, and there is no evidence to show, and no case has ever been made, that the cost of living of the British forces serving with the United Nations is higher than is that of other British Service personnel in Cyprus; for example those serving in the sovereign base areas.

Therefore, a separate and higher rate of L.O.A. for British Service personnel serving with the U.N. Force could not be justified on cost of living grounds, and if granted would occasion justifiable criticism from the other British forces serving in Cyprus.

Mr. Ridsdale

While I welcome the increases in pay, as everyone who has had any connection with the Services welcomes them, will the hon. Gentleman not agree that he is exaggerating the cost because he is not taking into account in the present increases that a lot of the allowances which the soldiers had before which were tax-free are not now tax-free but are bound up in one lump sum?

Mr. Richard

I have taken account of the fact that if a person has an increase in salary he is liable to pay tax. This is almost an act of God rather than an act of Government. Taking the two examples the hon. Gentleman quoted, that of the captain and the private soldier, the weekly rate of the captain serving under operational conditions with the UN. Forces in Cyprus is more than £44, and that is after his food and accommodation have been taken care of. He is not charged for that. The equivalent weekly pay for the private soldier is now over £18 a week. Having regard to current price levels in force in Cyprus, I do not think that this is a bad rate of pay for the job.

Therefore on the first of the three counts I make—" Does the fact that this is a U.N. force mean that British troops serving with the U.N. should be paid more than other troops?"—we would conclude that they should not because the merits of the argument lead to that conclusion and in any event be cause the United Nations accept that position. Secondly, we do not believe that we can justify a situation in which British soldiers stationed next to each other are being paid two different current rates—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at Eleven o'clock.