The Conservative party is returning to defence and security for another election pitch and has unveiled a series of measures to support armed forces veterans. The proposals include a Veterans’ Bill enshrining rights, cheaper railcards for former service personnel and tax allowances for those who employ them. Taken with a plan to introduce a form of national service and Labour’s performative commitment to renewing the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent, it is making the election campaign more defence focused than anything we have seen since the 1980s.
The challenges facing veterans as a result of their service are real and substantial
A few weeks after the general election, the Office for Veterans’ Affairs will celebrate its fifth anniversary. It was set up in the first days of Boris Johnson’s premiership as a unit in the Cabinet Office, staffed by officials there and from the Ministry of Defence, and entrusted to the ministerial leadership of former army officer Johnny Mercer. Although he was somewhat brutally dismissed from the role in 2021, he returned 14 months later, this time as a minister of state who attended cabinet. He was dropped but not replaced during Liz Truss’s fleeting stint as prime minister and returned under Rishi Sunak.
Britain has not always known quite how to deal with veterans. In the United States, there is a federal Department of Veterans Affairs with a budget of $300 billion which provides support, benefits and healthcare to veterans after their time in the armed forces. Here, however, responsibility for former service personnel was not even highlighted as a ministerial role until 1989, and was combined with various other policy areas until 2005, when Don Touhig became parliamentary under-secretary of state for veterans at the MoD.
The challenges facing veterans as a result of their service are real and substantial. A survey earlier this year by the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and the Royal College of General Practitioners found that 55 per cent of former service personnel experienced physical or mental health problems linked to their time in the armed forces, and 80 per cent reported that these problems had worsened since returning to civilian life. In the 1990s, as many as a fifth of single homeless people were veterans, though this has now been brought down well into single figures. Veterans have also been overrepresented in the prison population. All of this spoke of a combination of difficulty in making the transition from military to civilian life, and a lack of external support in doing so.
The idea of society’s obligations to those who had served their country was strongly promoted by General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009, as ‘the Military Covenant’. The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government went further, publishing the Armed Forces Covenantand including in the Armed Forces Act 2011 a requirement for the defence secretary to report annually to parliament on the operation of the covenant and the provision of support to veterans.
Progress has been slow, and the Conservatives’ new promises are welcome on their own terms. Relatively minor matters like a cheaper Veterans’ Railcard and visa fee waivers for Commonwealth veterans are small but contribute to an atmosphere of recognition and gratitude, while a National Insurance holiday for companies which employ veterans is a gentle but worthwhile encouragement.
There are more significant measures. A Veterans’ Bill (eventually a Veterans’ Act) is something of a catch-all but recognising military qualifications on the same basis as civilian ones, along with an entitlement to a full transcript on leaving the armed forces, would help veterans make a stable transition to civilian life and allow society to benefit more systematically from the skills they have acquired. The Conservatives also promise to put on a statutory footing the yet-to-be-appointed national veterans’ commissioner: this is particularly important because the post will not only be an advocate for veterans in England – there are already commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but will also be responsible ‘any veterans matters which are reserved to the UK Government and are not in the remit of the Devolved Administrations.’ Unfortunately this doesn’t cover health, where many of the issues are.
The government clearly sees electoral advantage in this area. Although the armed forces are dwindling in size, and the Army is soon to shrink to its smallest since the Napoleonic wars, there are more than two million veterans in the United Kingdom. More than that, supporting those who have served in the armed forces is part of an image the Conservatives are eager to project of patriotism and seriousness on defence and national security. They have pointed to the fact that the last Labour government did not have a cabinet-level minister for veterans. They have also drawn attention to the fact that the opposition would repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, a controversial measure which severely limits cases being brought against former members of the security forces for actions during Operation Banner, the 38-year deployment in Northern Ireland.
Improving support for veterans is something of which the current government can, up to a point, be proud. Operation Courage, Restore and Nova have helped veterans receive medical care, but have been restricted to NHS England, and the gaps between different schemes are still too wide. The new measures are not a panacea but would extend the good work which has already taken place. Inevitably, however, the government will be asked why these ideas have taken so long, and how they sit with a military which remains seriously over-committed, under-resourced and plagued by recruitment shortages. Any administration which has been in power for nearly 15 years will struggle to explain credibly why policies to redeem our debt to those who have served their country are only being proposed now.
Comments