Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the Armed Forces Covenant Annual Report 2013, page 25, when his Department plans to publish the initial findings of its study of the causes of death of veterans of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence hopes to publish the first report on deaths amongst veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in 2015-16. The work to link the cohort of over 500,000 personnel records with the deaths register held by the Health and Social Care Information Service (HSCIC) is in the early stages and a release schedule for the results is still being finalised but we hope that the information will be available for publication in the next financial year.