THE PENSIONS ACT AND ITS ADMINISTRATION. (To TEE EDITOR Or
THE " SPECTATOE."3
SIR,—It is doubtless true, as Lieut.-Colonel Fremantle said in the House, that many men get more out of the Pensions Act than they ought to. If imposition of this kind is to be resisted, there are sure to be a number of cases near the border lino which will be hard cases; until diagnosis is infallible, this cannot be avoided. Gross injustices, however, whether due to the Act itself or to administration of it, ought to be avoided, and the latter at least can be avoided by having some one competent official of standing in each area in a position to see that the broad principles of the Act are not overridden by minor regulations, and also to go and see the chief medical authority, and get obvious misapprehensions corrected at once. I was myself able on one occasion, though having no locus standi, to get a case reconsidered and resettled in ten minutes by going and putting it before the chief medical authority involved, although assured by the secretary of the committee that nothing could be done, and on another occasion by writing direct.
A more recent ease, however, of failure of justice induces me to write to you, as it is a good instance of the need of some sensible and accessible authority competent to interpret regulations in the spirit of the Act. In this case the man, a skilled tradesman, had a small pension for an injury due to service, but had received " treatment allowances," i.e., allow- ances at full disability rates for some time, as his injury quite prevented his working. Then the doctors advised a second severe and dangerous operation. The man, with the experience of the first failure in his mind, with the belief that he would not pull through tho second operation, and with the desire to see his son and daughter-in-law, who were shortly to return from Canada, would not consent. The committee then stopped his allowance on the ground that no treatment was available or possible, and said that he must wait till he could be "reboarded" as regards pension. This meant leaving the man and his family to be turned out of their house, and the furniture to be seized by the dealer, as the little money they still had coming in would barely suffice for food alone. Nothing but outside help staved this off.
The common-sense view of the case would clearly be that
rest would be the appropriate treatment until the reboarding for pension could take place. The Act does not intend that a man utterly unable to work by reason of his " attributable " disabilities should be left stranded pending a decision as to his permanent pension. Nor does it intend that a man should be forced to undergo a severe and dangerous operation by financial pressure. In fact, this latter is what eventually happened. The man just pulled through the operation, i.e., It was doubtful for two days whether he would. Whether ho will be able to earn his living remains to be seen. All the above aggravation of inevitable hardship and difficulty was quite unjustifiable from any reasonably large point of view. It was an additional hardship that the man was a victim of the super-subtle distinction the Act makes between disabili- ties judged by the medical authorities to be due to service, and those which, though they were incurred during service, and in no sense due to the fault of the man, are yet judged by the experts not to be due to service. This man very largely lost his eyesight during service, and accordingly his friendly society would not take him back, saying he was a damaged 'an, and he has never had a penny from his society for all
the years he contributed; the experts also would not give way. Can anyone say with approach to certainty that a disability clearly incurred during service is not due to service?
In the above case the lose of eyesight was at first the more serious disability of the two, but pension takes no account of it, and it blocked the road of approach to an alternative pension. I suggest that a very centralized administration can never be a success, however neat and uniform it looks from the centre; it always looks quite different from the edges where the goods aro delivered. There must be delegation of authority to some competent person in each area, subject to clear general principles, and that person must be accessible. Absolute uniformity in administration is not nearly so important as reasonably prompt justice. It is the practical working, not the theoretical perfection, that counts.—I nal. Sir, &c.,
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