Injured Veterans Wait More Than Nine Months as the Nation Remembers

On the morning the King leads the silence at the Cenotaph, the Sunday Express reports that veterans injured in service are waiting many months, and in some cases years, for compensation. The paper says people with mental injuries faced an average clearance time of more than nine months under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme. Campaigners want Prime Minister Andy Burnham to treat that wait as urgent. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said the department was working at pace to pay those who are eligible as quickly as possible, using overtime and weekend working, and putting the terminally ill first.

The Express figure for 2025-26 is 186 working days, about 37 weeks, for a mental injury claim. That is close to double the 20 weeks recorded in 2020-21 under the same scheme. For the older War Pension Scheme, the paper puts the median clearance time for a physical or mental injury claim at 361 working days, about 72 weeks. It also says that fast-track cases, meant for the terminally ill and for claimants over 90, are now taking weeks, after attempts to speed the system ran into a shortage of money and staff. The paper calls it a battle with bureaucracy. A former defence minister is quoted describing the same fight.

What the schemes are supposed to do

The Armed Forces Compensation Scheme pays for injury or illness caused by service on or after 6 April 2005. The War Pension Scheme covers service before that date. Both sit inside the Ministry of Defence, which means the queue is a government queue, and the Prime Minister is the person campaigners are addressing on a Sunday when the country is looking at veterans in the most public way it has. About 10,000 of them will march past the Cenotaph after the silence. The claim forms are not in that column. They are in a backlog the department says it is trying to clear.

Burnham's government has spent the last fortnight on a different argument about the past: the Caribbean tour, the Commonwealth text on slavery, and a dialogue that stops short of reparations. Remembrance is closer to home, and the numbers are smaller and more specific. A claim that took 20 weeks five years ago and now takes 37 is a measurable change. So is a median of more than a year under the older scheme. The MoD answer does not dispute the direction of those figures. It says the work to bring them down is already under way, including at weekends, and that terminal illness goes to the front.

The politics around the poppy

The opposition has its own Sunday story. A poll by Lord Ashcroft, published in the Mail on Sunday, puts Labour on 31 per cent, the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch on 26, and Reform UK on 18. That is an eight-point Conservative lead over Reform, and it is the sort of figure Nigel Farage's party will be asked about after naming a serving-style RAF voice to speak on defence. It does not pay a delayed claim. It does tell you where the argument about who speaks for veterans is likely to go once the wreaths are lifted.

For Burnham, the morning is simpler than the poll. The nation is at the Cenotaph. The paper on the step says the compensation system has slowed. The department says it is using overtime to catch up. Between those two sentences is the practical test of a Remembrance Sunday that is supposed to be about the living as well as the dead.