HL Deb 25 January 1949 vol 160 cc267-74

7.0 p.m.

Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.

Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Lord Chancellor.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly:

[The EARL OF DROGHEDA in the Chair.]

Clause 1:

Extension of Act to claims arising otherwise than out of war service

1.—(1) For the words "war service" wherever those words occur in Section one of the Pensions Appeal Tribunals Act, 1943, as in force at the date of the passing of this Act, there shall be substituted the words "any relevant service," and for the definition in Section twelve of that Act of the expression "war service" there shall be substituted the following definition— 'relevant service' in relation to any claim made under any such Royal Warrant, Order in Council or Order of His Majesty as is referred to in Section one of this Act means any service which, under that Royal Warrant, Order in Council or Order, is relevant for the purposes of that claim.

(2) No appeal shall lie under the said Section one from the rejection of a claim in connection with service before the third day of September, nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, and references in that Act to the claims referred to in the said Section one shall not be deemed to include references to any such claim.

LORD BELSTEAD moved to leave out subsection (2). The noble Lord said: I beg to move the Amendment which stands in my name. Subsection (2), which I wish to delete, deprives all men who came out of any of the three Services before September 3, 1939, of the right to appeal against rejection of a claim for pension. In case these matters may not be in the forefront of your Lordships' minds, may I say that before the 1914–18 war men had no right of appeal. In that war the administration of pensions was taken over by the Ministry of Pensions. After that war in 1921, the administration of pensions went back to the Service Departments, and was no longer the concern of the Ministry of Pensions. Very large numbers of men who came out of the Services between 1922 and 1939 have had no right of appeal, and, therefore, it is argued against me—with a certain amount of reasonableness, I admit—that this Bill does not deprive these men of anything they had before. That is true. But it is just because this uncontroversial Bill, as the Lord Chancellor called it during the debate on Second Reading, is such a good Bill, and is so beneficial, that it seems extraordinarily hard that these men should be deprived of their advantage.

The position with regard to men in the recent war is that, by the Act of 1943, they were given their Appeal Tribunals. That system has worked exceedingly well. As the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor, and the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Simon, said on Second Reading, these tribunals have done splendid work; and they are continuing to do it. The present Bill is designed to extend now, and perhaps for all time, to men coming out of the fighting Services in time of peace, a right to appeal to an independent tribunal, provided, of course, that the cause of their discharge from the Services is attributable to, or arising out of, their military service. It is said that men who came out in 1922–1939 were looked after—that is to say, they had their right to appeal to the heads of the three Services. That may be so technically, but it produces some very unfortunate results.

I have had brought to my notice, for example, the case of a man living in Ipswich, whom I have seen personally. This, shortly, is the man's record. He enlisted in 1933 in the Royal Air Force. He was a particularly fine, strong, healthy specimen of manhood. As proof of this, I may tell your Lordships that immediately on being enlisted he was trained to take part in the physical training display at Olympia that same summer. And he did take part in that display. He continued to serve, and in 1935 he had, not a routine but a very special extra board, as the result of which he was passed for foreign service and went to India. He was sent to the North-West Frontier, where he contracted sand-fly fever. He was very ill for months. Eventually, he was invalided home to England. He was boarded at Southampton and discharged from the Service after a few months. Here was a man who, as I say, was perfectly fit and healthy when he enlisted, but the only reply he has been able to obtain from his appropriate Service Department since his discharge was contained in one of many letters. It stated that "Any civilian in India might have contracted the complaint." That is true, in isolation, by itself. Any civilian might have contracted the complaint. But this particular man, if he had continued to live in Ipswich and to work there—or wherever he was at the time of his enlistment—would not have caught it. If he had not been taken to India on service, employed in India in the Service and there contracted a very serious disease which caused him to be discharged a few months afterwards, he would have had no complaint.

I do not want to labour the point. I want to make it clear, while we are on this clause, that men who were discharged between 1922 and 1939 without right of appeal to a Tribunal still have a lingering and an abiding grievance, and that grievance is very much increased by the fact that this excellent Bill will now give, let us say, the right of appeal to a young man who may have had only a few weeks or a few months of service—a man who may never have gone away from the depôt in his county, or may never have been away from Clapham Junction. If he is discharged from one of the Services he has a right of appeal. But these other men, who may have served five, ten or fifteen years between the two wars, and may even have been engaged in hostilities in Ireland, Palestine, or on the North-West Frontier, have no right of appeal at all. I feel that I am right in pressing this claim which has been pressed in another place (it was also mentioned on the Second Reading), but so far unsuccessfully. It seems to me a just claim and a fair claim. I feel that these men have a very reasonable grievance. I hope, also, that either as an alternative or in addition to this, I may have some assurance that, if these men are to remain dependent upon the Service Departments, they will have very serious consideration for some ex gratia payment or treatment. I beg to move.

Amendment moved— Page 1, line 17, leave out subsection (2).—(Lord Belstead.)

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

I really cannot see that the noble Lord can establish his proposition that these men are being deprived of their advantage.

LORD BELSTEAD

I hate to contradict the noble and learned Viscount, but I rather thought that that was exactly what I distinguished, against. I said that the Bill does not deprive them of anything they had before.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

We will see who is right to-morrow. I wrote down, at the time, the phrase: "deprived of their advantage." Whether the noble Lord said it or not, he clearly did not mean it. It is the fact that these men are not being deprived of any advantage at all.

LORD LLEWELLIN

That is what the noble Lord said.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

I may be mistaken. I am venturing to suggest that we might look at Hansard tomorrow. At any rate, whether the noble Lord said it or not, we are agreed that these men are not being deprived of any advantage at all, the fact being that, of course, they had a wholly different code from the code which was administered during the war.

Let us take one illustration, which, I think, is right. Under the present code, of course, a man has a right of pension, either if his injury is "attributable to," or "aggravated by." Under the old code, which applied between the wars, there was no pension in respect of aggravation—none at all. Without dealing with a specific or particular case, I can imagine it being said: "This did hot really 'arise out of' or was not 'attributable to' the man's war service, except in the wide sense that the war service took him to India. The man might have been run down by a bus in London, but that, of course, could not be attributable to war service as such." Of course, there was no question of aggravation. I was pleased to see that in another place it was stated that the three Service Ministers, and the Services generally, had taken very great pains in administering that scheme as well as was humanly possible. I believe that they administered that scheme with complete fairness. I am sure that at any rate they tried to do so. That was the position. It does really seem to me that this is an absolutely impossible plan.

Let us consider the position of these men. The last man to be discharged under this scheme would have been discharged in September, 1939, a matter of ten years ago, and the first man would have been discharged in 1921, some twenty-eight years ago. To try and decide these cases by a judicial procedure—because that is what the Tribunals are carrying out; and carrying out with very great skill—in the case where a man was discharged fifteen years ago (to take an average period of time), seems to me to be an impossible proposition. This proposal calls upon the Tribunals to carry out something which, with the best will in the world, they cannot perform and which they have not been performing. The object of this Bill is something very different. I am not saying this Amendment is not within the scope of the Bill, which seeks to amend the Act, but the object of the Bill is to continue for the future that which has been in operation during the period of this war. That is all. There is this difference, that in those days a man who joined up knew perfectly well the terms of contract under which he joined. He was a volunteer and, although I do not want to press the idea, he did agree to join up for a penny a day.

A new situation has now arisen. We have had this new system with Tribunals during the war. We are now to have conscripts; people are bound to go, whether they like it or not, and we are now proposing to say that we shall continue into the future the same provisions as we had during the war. That being so, I am afraid I cannot say more than I said in answer to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Simon, the other day—that if a Service Minister discovers any injustice, I am sure he will find ways and means of putting it right. But in saying that, I must not be thought to mean that Service Ministers are going to embark upon a review of everything they have done, and which, on the whole, they have performed very well. We all agree that these people are not being deprived of their advantages. It is now proposed that they should have conferred upon them an advantage they have never had before. I believe the circumstances are such as to make it quite impossible for the Tribunals to carry out that task, in view of the lapse of time.

I sympathise with the noble Lord. I well understand the reasons which have caused him to put this Amendment forward, but I am bound to say—and I say it with some regret—that we cannot extend to these people this system with its new and different code. We must try to maintain the object of this Bill. It is merely a Bill to carry the scheme forward into the peace which will some day come. I hope that some day there will be an Order in Council fixing the end of the war; and when that happens we shall not go back to the system of 1921, but shall continue with the existing one. To include these people would completely alter the Bill. I am sorry to say that I cannot hold out any hope to the noble Lord about being able to do it.

VISCOUNT BRIDGEMAN

I am certain that what the noble and learned Viscount the Lord Chancellor has just said has a great deal of truth in it, and though the idea that we should adopt the noble Lord's Amendment is attractive I have a shrewd idea that the administrative arguments are all against it. I am told that the documentation is an insuperable problem, and for that reason alone I do not believe we can include these people under this Bill. That is not quite the whole story, however. In this Bill, we are among other things giving statutory force to what is sometimes called the Denning judgment—"Fit for service, fit for pension." Though it is perfectly true, as the noble and learned Viscount said, that these men contracted for a penny a day, and for certain pension terms—although they probably did not know what they were—it is not reasonable that the volunteer should be treated worse than directed men, when both are in at the same time.

It is a matter of the policy of the Service Departments. I am certain that it is not a good plan for the Service Departments to treat these disability cases more strictly than they have to, because of the effect on recruiting, particularly when we are asking every man to join the Forces voluntarily. It comes to this: that if we agree, as perhaps we shall in a moment, that Clause 1 (2) remains part of the Bill, it ought to be accompanied with a serious plea to the Service Departments not to be backward or "stingy" in dealing with any applications to review cases which may have been decided originally under what I might call pre-Denning conditions, and which could now perhaps be dealt with more generously under the principles which have been embodied in this Bill. I put that to the noble and learned Viscount. I do not think it is an unreasonable thing to ask the Service Departments.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

I certainly hope that the Service Departments, in administering the scheme, will do so in a generous manner, so far as they can without departing from the terms of the scheme. I think it to be the fact that that is what they have done. Certainly tributes were paid to them in another place, and it was said that they had done their best to administer the scheme in a generous way. I will gladly convey to the Departments the representations which have been made. It is my desire that, so far as they properly can, they should administer the scheme generously. But that is a different matter altogether from this Amendment. I am afraid I should not be honest if I were to pretend there was any chance of my getting authority to accept this Amendment. I am afraid I must resist it.

LORD BELSTEAD

In asking leave to withdraw my Amendment, I should like to thank the noble and learned Viscount for making his considered and explanatory reply instead of merely turning it down. On the point of conscripts, I think that since this new Army of peace time will consist of volunteers as well as conscripts, it is not merely conscripts alone who have to be considered.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Remaining clauses agreed to.

House resumed. Bill reported without amendment.