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Defence in the UK

It would be a very good thing if relationships on the ground could be improved, but my point is that we need co-ordination at Government level. There has to be better integration between Departments in Whitehall, and they must have a better understanding of the problems that we are discussing today. This is not a party issue: rather, it is a structural problem inside Government that needs to be dealt with as a priority. The Minister talked about health care for our armed forces, and the question of why we do not have independent military hospitals arises regularly. It is worth pointing out to those who ask that question that a district general hospital treats about 120,000 patients every year, whereas the Army has fewer than 100,000 members in total. We must accept that the reality is that that makes it impossible for defence medicine to be carried out as it used to be. Having said that, however, I want to return to what the Minister said about military-managed units. The difference between those units and ones that are exclusively military is very important, as General Sir Richard Dannatt made very clear. On 13 March, he said:"““I have every confidence that in three years time we will not just have a military managed ward but effectively a dedicated military ward where our people will be exclusively attended to.?" That is what the Opposition want, but on the very next day—14 March—the Prime Minister told the House that,"““if, for example, there are spare beds within such a ward and the staff are required to look after a civilian patient, it would be wrong to say that such a bed could not be used for a civilian patient.?—[Official Report, 14 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 281.]" The two assertions are not compatible: the Prime Minister’s concept is fundamentally different from the one put forward by the Chief of the General Staff. The Government must decide whether or not they believe in exclusively military units. The Opposition strongly urge them to understand the importance of having units that are not just military managed but are exclusively military. I hope that the new Prime Minister—whoever that may be—will make that a priority. Another specific point that I want to make is that our defence medicine runs the risk of falling behind best practice in other parts of the world. In particular, I bring to the Minister’s attention the problem of traumatic brain injury as it affects our armed forces in theatre. He will know that improvements in the quality of body armour mean that more troops are likely to survive blast injuries, but also that they have increased the risk of concussion and other traumatic brain injury. In the US, protocols have been brought in already to test those who have suffered blast injuries both when they are in theatre and when they leave it. I am advised that the MOD has said that it will wait to see the results of the US programme before introducing similar protocols here, but there is already a large body of medical evidence that the US approach is the clever thing to do. If we wait to get the US results, we risk repeating what happened with post-traumatic stress, when we waited a long time after the end of the Vietnam war before recognising it as a disorder. The quicker we can bring the protocols into play, the better, and the smaller the number of injuries likely to escape detection. I hope that the Minister will reconsider his approach to this matter, and that he will return to the House and tell us that the US programme can be adopted by the UK in the near future. If we fail to do so, we run the risk that people will suffer long-term psychological or physical damage that could be prevented. It would be a failure of the Government’s duty of care if American troops were able to avoid such damage yet British troops were not. I turn now to the issue of overstretch.