Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many claims for hearing loss have there been in the (a) British Army and Army Reserve, (b) Royal Air Force and Air Force Volunteer Reserve (c) Royal Navy and Royal Navy Reserve, excluding the Royal Marines and (d) Royal Marines and Royal Marine Reserve for injuries sustained between March 2003 and the implementation of the Tactical Hearing Protection System program.

The implementation of the Tactical Hearing Protection System programme took place between April 2015 and Sep 2016.

Between 1 April 2003 and 31 March 2015 there were approximately 16,000 common law compensation claims for Noise-induced hearing loss from Defence personnel.

As this is based on historic data on legacy systems it is not possible to be more specific or break down the figure between Service and Civilian personnel. This does not include claims made via the Armed Forces Compensation and War Pension schemes as providing breakdowns would require information from three different data systems to be combined and individual files to be manually reviewed which would incur disproportionate cost.