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See you in court, Gulf veterans are told by Whitehall
By David Wastell and Tom Baldwin

2 March 1997

GULF war veterans seeking compensation for illnesses they developed after their service have been told by Ministry of Defence officials: "We'll see you in court".

The hard-line stance reflects a growing belief in the Ministry that most of those in Operation Desert Storm will not be able to prove negligence against the Armed Forces.

It comes as pressure increases for someone at the MoD to take responsibility for allowing Parliament to be misled for more than two years over the use of organo-phosphate pesticides by British troops during the war.

The Telegraph has learnt that about 10 MoD and Services employees, all past or present members of the Surgeon-General's Department, face possible disciplinary measures for failing to provide ministers with accurate and up-to-date information. But the Surgeon-General at the time of the first inquiry into the use of the pesticides, Vice-Adml Anthony Revell, retired last week aged 61 and is beyond the reach of any new inquiry.

Senior MoD officials are convinced that only a tiny proportion of the 1,228 Gulf veterans who have notified their intention to claim compensation will have come into contact with the chemicals in an improper way.

At most 50 Service personnel specialising in environmental health, and a further 50 attached to particular Army units, could have been exposed to excessive quantities of the chemicals, the MoD believes.

Sir Richard Mottram, the MoD's permanent secretary - whose own internal report last week found "fundamental failure of working practices" among those responsible for supplying information to ministers - is understood to be sympathetic to claims.

A senior official said: "It is open to people to come to us and say, not only that they are ill and want to claim the war pension to which they are entitled, but also that they want compensation. If Gulf war veterans serve writs upon us and can show negligence, then they can claim compensation. It may not be necessary to go through the courts if they present us with a properly formulated claim."

But some of Sir Richard's officials take a tougher view, arguing that environmental health personnel could only have been improperly exposed to OPs if they failed to follow the drills for their use, or if they used supplies obtained locally without adequate instructions.

One such official said: "It is quite likely that these people have been constructively negligent to themselves. It was against their instructions to use pesticides for which they did not have safety data sheets."

The Ministry made clear yesterday that it would not even consider a more general system of compensation until there is hard evidence, from medical studies now under way, that the veterans are suffering any greater degree of illness than the rest of the population. David Clark, the shadow defence secretary, said last night: "The way our troops have been treated is abominable. This Government seems to put our ex-soldiers on the scrap heap."

Last week Nicholas Soames, the Armed Forces minister, faced calls for his resignation after a grilling from the cross-party Commons Defence Committee over how Parliament was misled on the use of the OP pesticides during the war.

This week the MoD will come under attack again from the committee which plans to publish two more reports. The first will criticise the privatisation of married quarters to a Japanese bank and the second will say that the heavy-lifting capacity of the Armed Forces by both sea and air has been seriously undermined.

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