Stop investigating 'vexatious claims' against troops, says Burnham MP James Heappey

James Heappey has shared an insightful first hand account of his experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan to highlight why he believes civilian human rights cannot be applied to the battlefield.

Mr Heappey has written about why he believes it is time to stop spending taxpayers' money on the Ministry of Defence's historic investigations team.

In pre-deployment training before operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we went through a very great deal of judgemental training.

The aim was to make sure the rules of engagement were second nature. It was supposed to empower us to defend ourselves and achieve our mission rather than to constrain us and make us worry about the ambulance chasing lawyers at Leigh Day.

And for good reason too. On patrol in those places, things happened quickly.

Often we needed to use our intuition to pre-empt what might be unfolding around us so that we were able to act more quickly than our enemies.

It was those split second decisions that made the difference between living or dying.

Yet even after that preparation, some of the decisions made in the most extraordinary circumstances, under intense pressure and never with all the information you’d want available, will later prove to have been incorrect. Civilians might have been detained, injured or killed because a threat was perceived that on investigation months later might not actually have been there.

Putting on a uniform and standing up for our country in dangerous parts of the world does not make you above the law.

But it does require you to make decisions that the vast majority of people could not and would not make.

That the Ministry of Defence has spent nearly £30 million investigating our own troops over the mostly vexatious claims cooked up by Iraqis incentivised by the self-righteous (and ever richer) lawyers at a UK law firm is just plain wrong.

It’s also a monstrous waste of MoD money – by my calculation it’s roughly the annual wage bill for two infantry battalions.

Already every combat incident is analysed and reported on immediately afterwards. It means a huge amount of paperwork needs to be done by junior commanders on the battlefield but it allows the military lawyers to satisfy themselves that each incident was dealt with legitimately and, in theory, because it logs the threats as they were perceived in the heat of battle, it protects us from those who would seek to make a less sympathetic analysis years later.

Yet soldiers deploying on future operations cannot help but know the way our own MoD has encouraged the encroachment of litigation onto the battlefield.

No matter how much judgemental training is done and no matter how much commanders encourage their troops to trust their instincts; it will not be long before an 18 year old soldier hesitates over pulling the trigger because a future run in with Leigh Day crosses his mind at that instant. His enemy will not hesitate and the outcome could be fatal.

About eleven years ago, my soldiers opened fire on a car that came speeding towards our position. They had already sped past the line of Kabul City Police and Afghan National Army and we were in the process of securing the area after two vehicle-borne suicide bombs had been crashed into separate German and Greek NATO convoys.

There had been fatalities in both convoys and there were a large number of civilian dead and injured too. But for the brilliance of a sniffer dog and his handler, I’d have been dead as well because the Taliban were in the crowd placing secondary devices exactly the distance from the original explosions that they knew we’d clear back to. Our perception of the threat was sky high – this was already a well co-ordinated complex attack.

Yet it turned out that the people in that car weren’t bombers at all. They were high on drugs, they panicked when they saw all the police and military, but they were not the Taliban.

In the cold light of day, we killed some innocent civilians that afternoon in Kabul.

But in the context of the training exercises we’d done when vehicle borne IEDs were driven at cordon positions; in the context of the ignored calls for them to stop the car; in the context of the two suicide bombings that had gone immediately before; the threat was perceived to be real, immediate and lethal.

My soldiers reacted as they were trained to do and I’m proud of them for doing so.

There will be countless incidents like that from across the time British forces were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those days live forever with everyone that was involved. I cannot imagine how it must feel to have done what you thought right in the circumstances at the time but to then have your own side turn on

you and question the judgements you made.

It is time for the historic investigation teams to be wound up and for our troops to be reminded that whether we’ve previously served in the military or not, the UK’s politicians are all on their side.