My Lords, I have put my name to the amendment because I think it is extremely important. The covenant with the Armed Forces is an agreement putting obligations on our country in favour of people serving in the Armed Forces and those who have served in the Armed Forces. The covenant therefore contains specific obligations, which have been listed. It is true that in practical terms most of those will be local; if one wanted some health help, normally one would get that locally. It is therefore quite natural that the local authorities have a responsibility, but there seem to be quite serious possibilities that veterans and acting members of the Armed Forces will want government help.
One illustration that came to my mind when thinking about this before Second Reading was in relation to the first Iraq war. Noble Lords may remember that there was serious concern before and as the war started that our troops might be subject to a form of poison gas that would be very damaging to them. It was suspected that it was a gas of a particular kind. Exactly what the basis was for that I did not know, but it certainly resulted in protection being handed out to many of those in our services taking part in the first Iraq war.
When the war was over, it was discovered that some people who had served in the Armed Forces were beginning to suffer from a strange, rather neurological type of disease. There was a question about whether the disease had been caused by the protection that had been given to them against the gas. The gas, I may say, never emerged, so the protection turned out not to be necessary, but the protection had been given and could have had its own effect on those to whom it was administered.
That problem, of whether it was a consequence of the prescription, was a difficult and very deep question of medical research. It took quite a long time, as your Lordships may remember, and there was some dispute among the medics as to whether it was so. That is a special illustration of the necessity for the Secretary of State for Health, for example, to be involved because you could not expect the local authority or the local health trust to be responsible for looking into that national problem.
As one approaches this covenant, one also has to remember that it has obligations. That is not just a sort of wishful thinking; it has specific obligations. When the Bill says, as I hope the Act will, “have regard to the covenant”, it means looking to see what obligations in the covenant affect me. If I am a local authority, a local health authority or a local education authority, it will be the obligations in the covenant which have bearing on my responsibility. I therefore regard it as a close legal obligation that is created by the Bill to support those in the Armed Forces presently serving, and the veterans.
As the Minister has said, of course, the nature of the help that veterans require may be rather different from the help that service people require. For example, on moving between areas, if you have medical care in one area and have to move you may well have problems registering. There are quite a lot of problems nowadays in some places for somebody coming into a district in getting on to the medical register of a practice. That kind of thing can readily arise in relation to the local authority.
I have no doubt whatever that if the local authority has an obligation in a particular way, the finance for that is required under the local authority financial provision because this is one of the statutory provisions that are binding on the local authority. I regard the Bill as putting quite a fixed and rather balanced obligation on local authorities, but I see no reason whatever why it should not include central government. It will put obligations on them only in respect of an obligation in the covenant which applies to them at a particular time. In the example I have given, it would apply to the Government when a question was raised as to whether what they had done in the way of seeking to protect our people against a gas had in fact caused such a neurological condition. You would not expect the local health authority to be able to deal with that sort of problem; it would require the considerable resources of research that this country can command to see whether it was a cause and, if so, how it could be cured.
It is extremely important that the Government—the Secretary of State, as our amendment says—should be responsible. This provision would not put any responsibility on him or her that is not already in the covenant, so far as it affects him or her. I am not obliged to do anything under the covenant, except where an obligation encompasses me. The Secretary of State would not be put under any obligation which it was not a proper reading of the covenant to allot to him or her. I very much support this amendment. I mentioned it to my noble friend the Minister in general terms, based on my example of the first war in Iraq. I hope that the sensible effect of this amendment will be appreciated and that we can get it into the Bill.
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