Armed Forces Bill

Josh Babarinde Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I will use my time in this debate to highlight an injustice that strikes at the very heart of the armed forces covenant: the injustice suffered by a legendary Eastbournian, Staff Sergeant Pauline Cole.

Pauline served our country during the Aden emergency in 1967, and she wrote about her experiences in her book “Army Girl: The Untold Story”. She developed skin damage and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her military service. After tribunals rightfully awarded her compensation for those lifelong conditions, she should have been able to live with greater financial security in her retirement. Instead, the opposite happened. Military compensation is treated as income when calculating pension credit, so most of what Pauline won at tribunal was effectively taken away by the Department for Work and Pensions. Her pension credit fell from £77 a week to just £11 a week. Pauline was financially punished for being injured in the service of her country.

This is not just Pauline’s story; the Royal British Legion estimates that over 50,000 war disablement pensioners of retirement age face the same perverse outcome. What makes it worse and even more outrageous is that civil compensation is not treated as income for pension credit; only military compensation is penalised in this way. It is also outrageous in the light of the fact that LGBT+ veterans who received compensation following the Etherton review were explicitly, and rightly, told that their payments would not affect their benefits. We have to ask: why are injured veterans under the war pension scheme treated differently, and why does our system force our poorest veterans to use compensation awarded for pain, injury and lost quality of life to cover basic living costs?

I was proud to use my first ever question to the Prime Minister in this place to raise this injustice at the highest level, and I was proud to leverage a meeting with the Pensions Minister to discuss it further. There were many, many warm words but no action. I promised Pauline that I would do my very best to fight this injustice on her behalf. With huge sadness, Pauline died on 30 November last year, without seeing the justice that she was so determined to secure. At her funeral earlier this month, I restated to her sons Les and Simon Haffenden and to all her loved ones gathered there my promise to continue to fight tooth and nail for Pauline and veterans like her. To that end, this week marks my tabling of my armed forces compensation scheme and war pension scheme report Bill—Pauline’s law—as a step toward correcting the injustice permanently.

As this Government’s Armed Forces Bill progresses through Parliament, the Minister has an incredible opportunity—a duty, in my view—to act through his own legislation to correct this gross injustice. I urge the Government to amend the Bill to ensure that no veteran’s pension credit, or indeed any benefit, is reduced because they received compensation for serving their country.

I would love to work in a cross-party way on this issue. I know that the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) is passionate about this issue, as are the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) and many others. Indeed, it was mentioned by our spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (James MacCleary).

We owe our veterans nothing less than the dignity, security and fairness that they were promised when they signed up to serve. Pauline deserved better, our veterans deserve better, and this House must do better.