HL Deb 29 February 1916 vol 21 cc237-46

THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY rose to ask His Majesty's Government whether they are in a position to make any statement as to the working of the Statutory Committee in respect of subsection (3) of section 3, and of paragraph (f), section 4 of the Naval and Military Pensions Act; and in particular—

  1. l. Pending any permanent scheme, what steps in the meantime have been taken to provide for the training of disabled soldiers and sailors.
  2. 2. What steps are being taken to retain and make use of the services of any person or voluntary organisation which is anxious to help.
  3. 3. Whether any list is being kept of disabled soldiers and sailors upon their discharge from hospital, and can be made available for the use of such person or organisation.

The noble Marquess said: My Lords, the Questions which I have put on the Paper are nearly allied to the discussion we have just held, but they differ in this respect, that they deal with another part of the Pensions Act—namely, that part which provides for the after care of disabled soldiers and sailors as distinct, from their pensions. That is to say, the provisions seek to secure that they shall be enabled to earn part of their own living in addition to, or in substitution for, their pension. Subsection (3) of section 3 is a provision which directs or enables the Statutory Committee to appoint a special sub-committee with a view to carrying out the training of disabled soldiers and sailors; and paragraph (f) of section 4 states, as a part of the functions of a local committee—your Lordships will remember that the Statutory Committee is the central Committee and the local committee is the county committee—that one of the duties of a local committee is to take into account this same obligation of providing training for disabled soldiers and sailors. I should like the Government to be good enough to tell us, in the first place, whether any progress has been made in respect of the carrying out of those two provisions of the law.

I go on to ask what is going to happen until these provisions of the Act become operative. There has been great delay; I dare say the delay was quite inevitable. The Act of Parliament was passed on November 10 last year. So far as I know, the Statutory Committee which was then established took no overt step in carrying out the formation of the local committees until quite recently—the 19th of this month. The new organisation is not to become operative until June 30, so that nothing effective is to be done so far as the Act passed by Parliament last year is concerned from November 10 until June 30. It becomes therefore very important to know what is going to happen in the meantime, because although it takes a long time for this great country to carry out alterations in the law, yet men go on being wounded every day in the week, and when they are disabled they are at once sent to hospital where the process of cure goes on and the necessity of providing after care for them is already Upon us. We are in the month of February; the new organisation does not come into operation until June 30; but in the meantime these soldiers have to be looked after and have to be trained, and it is very urgent that it should be done. Amongst other things, there is a great want of workers, and the more these disabled soldiers can be trained the better for the labour market, because there will be more people to do the work in this country.

I dare say I have not been quite correctly informed, but I believe there is a large body of convalescent soldiers now at Shoreham. If those men are able to get quite well and rejoin the ranks, so much the better; that is the best thing that could happen. But a great many of them, as I am informed, will never get wholly well, but they are kept on from week to week and month to month in some kind of hope that a miracle will happen and they will get fit to go to the Front again. It would be much better that these men should be discharged at once from military service and means provided to train them to earn their livelihood, better for them and better for the country. At any rate I venture to ask, pending any permanent scheme, what steps in the meantime have been taken to provide for the training of disabled soldiers and sailors.

There were great discussions in your Lordships' House and in the other House of Parliament at the time the Bill was passing as to what machinery should be used. I am deeply impressed with the great importance of using as far as possible the existing voluntary machinery, and I was very glad to see that in the Circular which was issued on February 19 by the Statutory Committee there is a paragraph which seems to contemplate the retention, so far as possible, of the services of these voluntary organisations, and the county councils are told that they will fulfil the law if they use existing voluntary organisations with the addition of such members as may be requisite in order to safeguard the public purse and provide the necessary representation of the working-class, and, perhaps, women, who are specifically insisted upon in the Act of Parliament. I should like to know whether the noble Marquess opposite can tell us what prospect there is of these great organisations—I mean, of course, principally the Soldiers' and Sailors' Help Society—being used in providing for the after care of these soldiers and sailors and their training to enable them to earn their own livelihood: I am quite sure that it would be madness to ignore these voluntary organisations. They already include among their number the best men and women in the locality, those who understand this sort of subject the best, and, moreover, who have probably —may I say?—more tact and delicacy than mere public functionaries would have in dealing with what must be a very delicate matter, because these unfortunate men who have been disabled in the service of their country are necessarily very sensitive about their condition and require to be approached with the greatest tact and judgment. Therefore I hope it may be possible to retain the services of these voluntary organisations.

The third Question which I have ventured to put to the noble Marquess is whether any list is being kept of disabled soldiers and sailors upon their discharge from hospital. That seems to me to be almost essential. How are the local organisations to know that there are disabled soldiers requiring their attention unless some such list is kept? Of course, if it were the case that soldiers of a particular county were always sent to the hospitals of that county, there would be very little difficulty. The local committees would see to it that they knew what disabled men were discharged from the hospitals. But that is not the case. Men belonging to all parts of England are in hospitals with which they have no local connection whatever, and from those hospitals they get their discharge; and unless there is some kind of official list to which the county committees and the voluntary bodies and individuals can have access to know what disabled soldiers there are in their neighbourhood who require attention, I am afraid a great many of these men will escape attention and a great deal of injustice be done. That is especially true of the great towns. In a little village, if a discharged soldier comes we know all about him; but in a great place like Manchester, or Liverpool, or London, who shall know what disabled soldiers have been sent back unless some list is kept? That is a thing which can be done at once, and I hope it is being done. If it is not, I venture to suggest to the noble Marquess that provision should be made for it without delay.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (THE MARQUESS OF CREWE)

My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Marquess for having kept this part of the pensions question separate from that which was discussed previously, because although, of course, they are closely allied, yet this must be treated as in a sense separate for the reasons which the noble Marquess explained. First as regards the work and meetings hitherto of the Statutory Committee. That Committee held its first meeting, as I understand, in the middle of January. It then appointed various subcommittees of its own, not the disablement sub-committee to which the noble Marquess's Question refers. Of that I will say a word in a moment. It appointed several sub-committees, which have been sitting weekly with regard to the preparation of model schemes. As regards what I may call the statutory sub-committee—the one mentioned in subsection (3) of Section 3—that committee has not yet been fully appointed, because I understand that all the replies to the invitations to serve have not yet been received, but it is expected that it will be fully constituted in the course of the next two or three days. However, before that has been done the model schemes under subsection (3) of Section 2 have been sent to all the local authorities who have to form the local committees, so that in that sense no time has been lost. The noble Marquess will, of course, be aware that the actual provision for the care and training as provided by paragraph (f) of Section 4 depends entirely on the constitution of the local committees, and that, I think, is the point on which the noble Marquess is most anxious to be informed—

THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY

Hear, hear.

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

I do not think that any unnecessary delay has taken place in the formation of these committees. In the meantime it is, of course, obvious that dependence has been still placed upon the admirable voluntary organisations which have carried on the work before. The noble Marquess was, I think, prevented by his duties from being present in the House during the discussion on the Bill itself, but he will not be unaware that there was a strong body of opinion in favour of leaving the whole business to these voluntary bodies without the intervention of a Statutory Committee such as was eventually founded. That goes to show that although there may be apparent delay in setting up this new body, yet the work is not thereby entirely neglected because those organisations have been maintained.

As the noble Marquess knows, there are separate institutions set apart for particular forms of disablement. There is what is known as Queen Mary's Hospital at Roe hampton, where cases of complete loss of different limbs are treated and where patients also undergo preliminary training for such work as in their position of serious disability they may be able to undertake. Then the noble Marquess, I am sure, knows of the work for the blind which is being carried on so admirably and with such marvellous success at St. Dunstan's, Regent's Park, where that particular form of affliction due to the war is being dealt with. But besides institutions of that kind there have been for some time past other enterprises on foot. The Labour Exchange Department of the Board of Trade started, so long ago as May of last year, making arrangements with the War Office and The Admiralty by which they were supplied by the record departments of those two Offices with full particulars of the state and capacities and previous experience of all disabled soldiers and sailors, with their names, addresses, and so on. They distributed forms founded on that information to the Labour Exchanges in the area in which the man stated he was about to live. Every attempt has been made to place these men in touch with employers in the different districts, and also, where possible, in other districts as well. As the noble Marquess truly remarked, there is a larger demand for men of this kind, partially disabled men, than there is a supply. The scheme was started in June of last year, and between that time and the middle of January, which is the latest date for which I have the figures, out of 23,000 men whose names were received by the Board of Trade nearly 13,000 applied to the Labour Exchanges for help in finding employment.

THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY

Was the 23,000 the total number?

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

Yes, the total number referred to the Board of Trade by the two Departments. Nearly 13,000 applied; close on 6,000–5,900 odd—subsequently cancelled their application; 5,400 were found places through the Exchanges, and 1,439 were still on the register as waiting employment in the middle of January. That is not very recent information, but those are the only figures that we have. The number of cancelled applications seems in itself singular—nearly 6,000. That is accounted for, as I understand, in two ways—partly that some of the men found that they were really not fit to take up any kind of serious employment, their health being less good than they had hoped, and that the remainder—which is a more satisfactory conclusion—no doubt found places independently of the Labour Exchanges.

In addition to that, there have been one or two special schemes. The Board of Agriculture combined with the Board of Trade in instituting a system in the county in which I myself live. They give a free course of training at an Agricultural College. That particular college will be found willing to take in from fifty to sixty soldiers and sailors discharged as disabled, and they will be provided with board and lodging and given a free training in agriculture or horticulture for a term of twelve weeks. At the end of that time it will be seen whether they are particularly suited or desire to continue their course of training, and, if so, it might be extended up to two terms further. That, I think, is a helpful kind of scheme, and I should hope that it will find imitation elsewhere.

Then there is another case, that of the Cordwainers Company. They have undertaken, working through the Soldiers' and Sailors' Help Society, who have promised provisionally to bear the cost of the subsistence of these men during the period of training, to train about fifty or sixty discharged soldiers and sailors to become bootmakers. They have a technical college at Bethnal Green where the training will take place, and the experts say that at the end of that period of training these men ought to be able to set up in small boot-shops or as cobblers in various parts of the country where they may like to settle. Again, there is a scheme, which I understand is greatly favoured in many parts of the country, that golf clubs should take on a selected number of men as caddies. I understand that this is likely to meet with no inconsiderable success. Then again the Automobile Association and other trading associations are in communication with the Board of Trade in order to provide employment for ex-soldiers and sailors. I think I can venture to reassure the noble Marquess completely as to the anxiety of the Statutory Committee, not merely to call in now in this transition period, but to maintain in permanent relation the great voluntary organisations of which he spoke. I understand they are fully convinced of the importance of that, and indeed during the progress of the Act through the House we endeavoured to reassure noble Lords who trembled for the fate of those organisations that such would be the case, and I believe that this is absolutely so.

I spoke of the list of disabled soldiers which is supplied by the Army and Navy record offices, and these lists will, of course, be at the disposal of the Statutory Committee. How far it may be possible for them to devise and to keep going a current list of the kind, which I understand the noble Marquess had in his mind, I am not aware, but I will see that this is brought to the notice of the Statutory Committee. But one thing I think will be clear to the noble Marquess from what I have just said —that there are various agencies at work, including various Government agencies; and I feel sure that we ought to do our utmost to impress upon all the Government Departments concerned and also upon all the voluntary organisations the absolute necessity of working in concert and not trusting to the particular activity or effort of any one Department however capable and however energetic it may be. What is important in this case is that all these agencies should work together, thereby avoiding overlapping of all kinds and bringing into play all the forces of the country which are available for this object. I believe it is hardly possible to over-rate the strength of those forces. I am quite convinced that next to the gaining of a complete victory there is nothing so near the heart of the nation as the care of these disabled men.

We have heard from more than one speaker how the case of this war differs from that of all previous wars in this respect, that the conscience of the nation is infinitely more deeply stirred on this subject than it has ever been before. That is, of course, due to the fact that whereas in previous wars large numbers of citizens joined the Services, now the Services and the nation are in effect one; and therefore the feeling is practically universal that these men who have fought and suffered for the country are the care of everybody, that they do not belong to any particular profession or class but are all a band of brothers in the strictest sense, and that the responsibility for their care rests upon all of us. But most of all and best of all and apart from and above the care which any kind-hearted person would desire to devote to the wounded, infinitely more, is the training which can enable those, even some of those who have suffered the very worst deprivations, such as the deprivation of sight, to acquire new interests in new work, and, what is more valuable still, the feeling of independence and self-support. The importance of that, I am sure we all feel, cannot, be over-estimated; and it is to the hard work of these committees and various organisations that we look to carry out the different, enterprises to the fullest possible extent, and thereby relieve the country from that burden on its conscience which I am certain it would feel if the lot of these soldiers and sailors was in any way neglected.

House adjourned at Seven o'clock, till To-morrow, half-past Ten o'clock.