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Suez Canal Zone (Medals)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) on securing the debate and providing me with an opportunity to speak about this emotive issue. My hon. Friend is a strong supporter of veterans and he takes great interest in veterans’ issues. He has done so for a number of years. I hope to address the issues that he has covered today, but I may not be able to do so in the time that I have available, so I shall write to him about the issues that I do not cover during my response. It may be helpful if I explain the current position. In July 2002, following protracted representations from veterans who had served in the canal zone in the 1950s, who said that their service had not been recognised by the issue of a medal, the Government set up a sub-committee of the pan-departmental committee on the grant of honours, decorations and medals, known as the HD committee. Since the end of the second world war, the HD committee has maintained the policy that it will not consider the belated institution of awards and medals for service given many years earlier, because it cannot put itself in the place of the committee that made the original decision, which would have been able to take account of the views of the Government and other interested parties at the time of the decision. In response to requests for the institution of belated awards, the committee has made it clear on a number of occasions that it will not change that policy. If an exception were to be made for one case, it would be almost impossible to refuse to reconsider every other claim for the retrospective institution of an award or medal. The case for the Suez canal zone, however, was considered unique. Although there was some contemporary evidence to indicate that a request for a campaign medal had been submitted, there was no conclusive evidence to prove that the matter had been considered at the time. As a result, and in view of the exceptional circumstances, the HD committee established a special, independent sub-committee to look specifically at the case for a medal for service in the canal zone in the early 1950s. The sub-committee was chaired by General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former Chief of the General Staff and former Chief of the Defence Staff. Lord Guthrie’s sub-committee also included Field Marshal Sir John Chappie, also a former Chief of the General Staff, Air Vice Marshal Keith Filby, and Sir Max Hastings, the noted military historian. The sub-committee, in reporting its conclusions, recommended that those veterans who had served in the Suez canal zone between 1951 and 1954 for a period of at least 30 days should be eligible for the award of a canal zone clasp to the general service medal. With regard to Royal Navy personnel, the sub-committee indicated that the 30 days should have been spent ashore, not at sea. The sub-committee’s report did not contain, nor was it intended to contain, a detailed account of the eligibility criteria. The main focus of the report was on the justification for the institution of a new medal. The report merely indicated that the sub-committee recommended that service of at least 30 days would be required. It did not indicate whether eligible service must be continuous or aggregated. The report, however, drew a parallel between the circumstances surrounding the award of a medal for service in Palestine, which required 28 days’ continuous service, and the Suez medal question. Subsequently, the full HD committee discussed the question of eligibility for the Suez award. On the advice of the sub-committee, as confirmed by Lord Guthrie and agreed by the Ministry of Defence, the full HD committee took the decision to set the qualifying criteria at 30 days’ continuous service. The recommendations were duly submitted to Her Majesty the Queen, and in October 2003, the Government were pleased to announce that Her Majesty had graciously agreed to the institution of the canal zone clasp to the 1915 naval general service medal and the equivalent Army and RAF medal, the 1918 general service medal, to recognise service in the canal zone in Egypt between October 1951 and October 1954. There are no contemporary lists of naval ships that served in the canal zone between 1951 and 1954. The decision was therefore taken that the assessment of ““unit eligibility””—that is to say, ““Was a ship in the zone, and if so for how long?””—would have to rely in the first instance on naval veterans applying for the medal. Once veterans began to apply, a list of potentially eligible ships was established. Using the list, it was possible to investigate whether the ship had been present in the canal zone. Establishing whether individual naval personnel met the qualifying criteria was much more difficult. Neither naval records nor surviving ships’ records were found to be sufficiently precise. They had not been created to support applications for medals—certainly not some 50 years after the event—and available records did not specify whether ships’ personnel had served ashore in the canal zone. The decision was therefore taken that, providing it could be confirmed that a particular ship had been present in the canal zone for a period of 30 continuous days, and providing the applicant’s personal records confirmed that he was serving on the ship at the time, an assumption would be made that he had been subject to a similar degree of risk and rigour as personnel serving ashore. The qualifying area was Port Said and Port Faud in the north and Port Suez in the south, or in the lakes or waterways of the canal between the ports, although not for ships in transit through the canal. An assumption was made that many naval personnel, whose ships were in the area, would have gone ashore on duty or for other purposes, and that when ashore they would have been as vulnerable as their colleagues in the Army and RAF. It is probable—although it has not been possible to validate this—that some ships’ staff would also have been employed in an internal security role or on sentry duty, guarding their ships and other naval facilities and installations. Based on the applications received from naval veterans so far, the records of more than 140 naval units have been assessed. From that, it has been established that 30 or so ships meet the requirement of having spent 30 continuous days in the qualifying area. The individual eligibility of naval veterans for the canal zone award has been assessed by the Ministry of Defence medal offices, initially at the Royal Navy medal office in Gosport and latterly at the joint-service Ministry of Defence medal office at Innsworth. I fully acknowledge that some veterans have indicated their disquiet that, in so far as the Navy was concerned, the 30 continuous days’ service was overly restrictive. Concern has been expressed that the deployment pattern of Royal Navy ships at that time was not fully taken into account when the qualifying criteria were under consideration, and that in some cases ships had limited capability to remain on station in the canal zone. The point has also been made that had the qualifying criteria been 30 days’ accumulated service rather than 30 days’ continuous service, more naval veterans would have been eligible for the award, as my hon. Friend has made clear.