Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill (Second sitting)

Liz Twist Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th October 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Atherton]

Q Are you concerned about the interface between the service justice system and, perhaps, the service complaints ombudsman and what role they could play—if you feel that the Bill could be improved?

Emma Norton: Hilary Meredith mentioned this morning that the ombudsman could have a role here. I think she was looking at whether some sort of compensation or ex gratia payment scheme could be made or some form of redress could be given to the soldiers subjected to this cycle of investigation. That was a really interesting idea. I know that, separately, the ombudsman is very under-resourced, so that would need a whole separate discussion as well.

The interplay with the service justice system is something you should ask the Judge Advocate General about when you speak to him later, because—obviously—he has huge amounts of experience of issues arising where somebody is not convicted of the main charge but is perhaps convicted of a lesser charge under the court martial.

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

Q Mr Al-Nahhas, how aware are troops that they can privately claim for their injuries?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: Good afternoon. I think it is a feature of military claims that service personnel are largely unaware of their legal rights to bring a civil claim. I often find in my own practice—many of our members have also reported this—that they will, in fact, be misinformed of their legal rights. This may be because there is confusion in their chain of command. Indeed, we have heard of many cases in which the chain of command will misinform them and say that they should wait until the end of their service before bringing a civil claim, which usually means that they are out of time by the time they bring a claim. In other cases there is confusion between civil claims and the armed forces compensation scheme, which is a separate, no-fault scheme, which has a much longer period of time in which to apply—normally seven years. In answer to your direct question, I think they are very unaware and, in fact, a lot of the time they are misinformed.

[Liz Twist]

Q I see that you are nodding, Emma. Is there anything that you would like to add?

Emma Norton: Just that that is entirely my experience as well. I have not advised people about overseas claims, but I advise them about claims arising in other respects, and that is a very, very common observation, yes.

[Liz Twist]

Q Returning to Mr Al-Nahhas, after what period of time will troops usually be aware of the fact that they can claim for injuries? You said that there is often a delay.

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: There is often a delay. In fact, I have dealt with many hundreds of inquiries, or at least many of the lawyers who APIL and I work with have dealt with many hundreds of inquiries, that are many, many years out of time. You will have calls from service personnel who have just finished their 22 years in service, and they will call up and inquire about the opportunity to bring a civil claim, and you have to tell them that actually they are about a decade out. So, it does vary, but more often than not they are quite a few years out of time.

[Liz Twist]

Q Could the Ministry of Defence do more to make troops aware of that route to compensation, in your view?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: Absolutely—forgive me for interrupting you, but absolutely I think they could. In fact, at the moment I do not think that they do anything to inform service personnel of their rights to bring a civil claim. I am not suggesting that as an organisation they should be shouting from the rooftops and saying to service personnel, “You should really explore your opportunity to sue us”. However, I think that the Ministry of Defence has an obligation under the armed forces covenant to be fair to service personnel. They do provide them with information about the AFCS, but, as I said, there is a much longer period of time to claim under that scheme.

I think that we also need to bear it in mind that service personnel are quite unique legal creatures in a way. For example, they are not allowed, if we are comparing them to civilians, to join a trade union. So, if you were a civilian and you were injured, you might speak to your trade union and get some advice about what claims you might bring. They may even point you in the direction of a solicitor. That often does not happen with service personnel. So, yes, I think the MOD needs to address this and be fairer with service personnel about the information available to them.

[Liz Twist]

Q You mentioned the armed forces covenant. What do you think could be the impact of this Bill on the armed forces covenant?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: I think that the Bill, as drafted, is potentially in danger of breaching the armed forces covenant, and I will explain why. As I mentioned earlier, service personnel are quite unique legal creatures. They do not actually have the same legal rights as civilians. So, just to take an example, service personnel have very limited rights to bring a claim in the employment tribunal, save for issues such as discrimination. However, if this Bill were to be passed, they would not—beyond the six-year longstop—be able to rely on section 33 of the Limitation Act 1980 in respect of civil claims. They would not be able to bring those claims, which may be worthy but are actually brought very late in the day, whereas civilians might have the opportunity to use section 33 of the 1980 Act.

Of course, the other aspect of the Bill is the stripping away of reliance on the European convention of human rights. So, in many senses, if this Bill were to pass, service personnel would have less civil rights and less human rights. By analogy, they will have less rights than a prisoner, so I do not see how that squares with the armed forces covenant. I am very concerned about that.

[Liz Twist]

Q You mentioned the time limits. Can I ask you about the difference between the point of knowledge, as written in the Bill, and the point of diagnosis, which is when the Government have referred to the six-year longstop as starting? How clear cut are the questions about those dates of knowledge and diagnosis in your view?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: If I may, I will answer your question in two answers, because I think that there are two parts to it. The first is the difference between the date of knowledge and the date of diagnosis. The date of knowledge is the date when the courts will infer that a claimant realises that they have a significant injury and makes the connection between that injury and the person whose fault it was. The three-year time limit in civil claims starts from that date of knowledge. A date of diagnosis is a factor that may be taken into account when the court considers the date of knowledge. The court may assume that, if somebody is diagnosed with a condition and is told by a doctor what they have, that will move them a long way toward obtaining their date of knowledge. I think that there has been some confusion about that in some aspects of discussions.

Could I ask you to repeat the second part of your question, please?

[Liz Twist]

How clear cut are those questions about the date of knowledge and the date of diagnosis?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: They are not clear cut at all. In fact, they are incredibly complex, because it is about the date of knowledge relating to a particular claim by that particular service person in their circumstances. The facts will change from case to case. You cannot prepare arguments for this sort of thing. You have to assess their merits on a case-by-case basis. They are very complex arguments, and they may well lead to satellite litigation within civil claims.

I wish not to take up too much time on this question, but I will just explain that normally in civil claims you issue a claim and it will proceed on the way. It will take a certain amount of time, evidence will be exchanged and you will end up in trial. When you have date-of-knowledge arguments or limitation arguments, it may well encourage the courts to order a split trial, or indeed the parties to apply for one, so that this issue of the deadline is determined first. That invariably leads to increased costs, in my experience.

[Liz Twist]

Q Following on from that, in the experience of your members, does the MOD contest evidence given by service personnel about the nature and timeframe of their injuries?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: Invariably. The MOD has very robust lawyers who do a good job. Like any lawyer, they look to take advantage of the law and to act in their client’s best interests. I am certainly not suggesting that they are doing anything wrong by using these arguments. However, I have never had a case—never—in almost a decade of litigating exclusively against the Ministry of Defence in which limitation is an issue and the lawyers have not raised it or sought to take advantage of that argument in order to either strike out my client’s case or to negotiate a settlement downwards. My answer to your question is: invariably.

[Liz Twist]

Q In summary, how do you think the Bill will impact the number of personnel claiming privately for their injuries?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: That is a difficult question to answer. I think it will definitely have an impact. I do not think that the impact statement that has been released really explores it fully, because it ignores a large proportion of civil claims brought against the Ministry of Defence, which may include elements of overseas operations.

If I can give you just a quick example, the impact study does not take into account noise-induced hearing loss claims. These are complex claims that may involve exposure to harmful noise at any point of the serviceperson’s service, and at different points of overseas operations in different countries. The impact study that has been released ignores all of those claims. In the last year alone, I think the figures released by the Ministry of Defence suggested that 1,810 claims relating to noise-induced hearing loss were brought against the MOD.

My answer to your question is that I think there will be an impact, but we do not know the extent of that impact, and that needs to be explored further.

[Liz Twist]

Thank you. I want to ask Ms Norton a few more detailed questions. Are you okay? You look as if you are suffering.

Emma Norton: I am okay. I am muting myself, but I am okay.

[Liz Twist]

Q Further to the questions that my colleague Emma Lewell-Buck asked you, what is the evidence that courts cannot strike out baseless legal claims?

Emma Norton: We are talking about civil claims. I am not aware of any evidence that the courts cannot do that. They do it all the time; it is a fairly standard part of civil law procedure. Civil procedure rule 3.4—I think—says that if a claim discloses no reasonable prospect of success, the defendant can apply for strike-out, and the strike-out can be given. There are some really good examples of that happening where the MOD has been the beneficiary. A good example was the second batch of the Kenya litigants’ claims, which were thrown out a few years ago now. Something like 40,000 claims were dismissed on the basis that they were too old and it would be unfair on the defendant, which was the Ministry of Defence, to defend the claims because it no longer had the evidence available to have any reasonable prospect of defending them. The courts are perfectly capable of striking out stale claims and they do it all the time.

I want to pick up on a couple of Ahmed’s points, which were excellent. The point about the Limitation Act is really important. The Limitation Act contains a range of different criteria that, in my opinion, are duplicated by the new criteria that are set down in the Bill. Section 33 of the Limitation Act enables the court to consider whether allowing the claim out of time is going to prejudice the defendant, in particular, or anybody else. It requires the court to have regard to all the circumstances of the case, which would include the fact that the claim arose from overseas operations, and all the difficulties and complexities of that environment. I think the courts have more than enough powers.

[Liz Twist]

Q Do the courts have an unfettered legal route into matters of combat decision making?

Emma Norton: No, they do not, and I respectfully disagree with the previous witnesses on that issue.

In the Smith case, which Dr Morgan cited, the Supreme Court made it very clear that the principle of combat immunity is absolutely sound. In that case, the Ministry of Defence was trying to expand combat immunity to cover a range of factors that the court said were never intended to be covered by that. It was just heat of battle, in theatre. The families of the deceased—remember, they were young soldiers who got into those Land Rovers, or other vehicles that had been procured, and suffered dreadful injuries and death—wanted to challenge the decisions made by individuals back here in Whitehall, behind a desk, to procure that equipment for use in Iraq. That was the decision that they wanted to challenge. All the court said was that combat immunity did not go that far. It has not been chipped away or reduced. So no, I do not agree with that.

[Liz Twist]

Q That picks up on my next question, which was about the principle of combat immunity. That is all my questions. Thank you very much.

[Stuart Anderson]

Q When we have listened to evidence today we have heard from veterans and from legal representatives like yourself. There is a disparity between veterans, who really want this Bill and say how let down they will be if it does not go through, and legal representatives, who say, “Stop.” As legal representatives are there to defend or to represent our troops, as you have done, where is that breakdown happening and why, Mr Al-Nahhas?

Ahmed Al-Nahhas: I am not going to comment on the criminal aspect, but from my perspective there is a need to protect service personnel from spurious criminal claims, which we are looking into. That brings forward a lot of people who want this Act in place. I am not sure whether that is the incentive behind part 2 of the Bill, which is the civil aspect.

I can share with you, as a representative of APIL, that many of our members have many hundreds of clients who are service personnel. I have been doing this for a long time. The people we act for come to us seriously injured and needing compensation. The tools that are available to us as lawyers are the civil claim route and the Human Rights Act. If you start taking those rights away from veterans and service personnel then you will be, in my view, doing them an injustice.

I do not envy you. I can see that this a fierce debate and there are different sides to the argument. I would caution that that should be a sign to all of us that there should be a pause to the Bill and further exploration. I wonder to what extent the confusion is caused by the fact that the Bill tries to do two things. It tries to resolve the issues in respect of criminal law and it also addresses civil issues, which are incredibly different. That is a cautionary word that I would pass to you.

Emma Norton: We heard some compelling and moving testimony this morning. I was particularly struck by the gentleman from the British Armed Forces Federation—in fact, both witnesses spoke about the fear in the veteran community about being dragged off to court and having knocks on the door at 3 o’clock in the morning. Both of them indicated that they felt that that fear was ill founded and based on misunderstandings of what is actually happening.

Looking at the number of prosecutions that have actually been brought, let alone the number of convictions, it is quite stark. It is a very small number, and it is not reflected in the level of fear and anxiety in the veteran community. I do not underestimate that, but I think the question becomes: what do we do to meet that fear and anxiety? How do we reduce it? We reduce it by being honest with them about the real extent of the problem and by addressing the causes of the problem, which were the failures, early in the day, which the Minister acknowledged—the early failures to investigate these allegations. Had that happened, the unfairly accused would have been exonerated years ago and the victims would have had justice as well.

That is my concern about the Bill: veterans think that they want it, and I understand that, but I am not entirely sure. Indeed, the previous witnesses all agreed that it does not address the issue of investigations—the Attorney General for Northern Ireland has said it does not address the issues of investigations.