A blind ex-servicewoman, Pauline Cole, has said she is ‘very angry and very bitter’ after her pension credit was slashed when she received war injury compensation
A blind ex-servicewoman has said she is “very angry and very bitter” after her pension credit was slashed when she received war injury compensation.
Pauline Cole, who joined the army at 18, has seen her weekly pension credit drop from £77 to £11 because her compensation counts as income. It means she is barely better off with the £80 weekly compensation award, which she receives for PTSD and damage to her skin during her army years.
The furious 78-year-old said she won’t be joining in next week’s celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day. She hit out at the ongoing crisis of homelessness among veterans and said she herself struggles to get by after her pension credit was cut.
READ MORE: After 70 years, MoD finally admits there ‘may have been’ radiation experiments on UK troops
“I don’t think the ‘Great’ in Great Britain should be there anymore, because Great Britain is not Great Britain anymore,” she said. “It’s just Britain over the way it treats its military personnel, its NHS staff, its teachers, its doctors and normal people… It makes me very angry and very bitter.”
Ms Cole suffers from two types of skin cancer due to time spent working in the sun when she was in the armed forces. She also suffers from the “mental scars” of seeing “horrific things” including eight men being blown up in a Land Rover in front of her eyes in the former Crown Colony of Aden, which is now part of Yemen.
She lost her sight in one eye due to a stroke in 2013 and has since also begun to lose her sight in her other eye, due to complications related to her diabetes.
READ MORE: JOHN HEALEY: ‘We’ll stop the rot in armed forces housing with new charter’
On Wednesday, Keir Starmer was confronted about her case during PMQs by her MP Josh Babarinde, the Lib Dem MP for Eastbourne. As Ms Cole watched on from the Commons’ public gallery, the Prime Minister thanked him for raising the “important issue”, adding: “I pay tribute to Pauline for her service, and I will make sure that she gets the appropriate meeting that she wants and needs to discuss her specific case.”
Speaking to The Mirror after PMQs, Ms Cole said she will now be pressing the PM’s team for a one-on-one meeting in No10 to “really thrash this out”.
“What I’m worried about and why I want something done before I die – I’m hoping it’ll happen before I die – are all the veterans that were in Afghanistan and Iraq who were obviously taken out of the armed forces because they’d been blown up or blinded or lost a leg or an arm,” she said.
“When they collect a state pension, they would get a pension credit, and if they… go to a tribunal (to get compensation for their injury), when they’re 65, they’re not going to get any money, because it’s classed as a pension.”
Mr Babarinde praised our “valiant” armed forces, adding: “I think it’s a disgrace that our veterans are being treated in this way.” He told the PM to “address this injustice and to ensure that no veteran is penalised for serving our country”.
READ MORE: Join our Mirror politics WhatsApp group to get the latest updates from Westminster
