Pensioners were comparatively few in 1916, and the central committee was still mainly occupied with the work of supple menting the separation allowances of the families of the men still in service, when it was superseded (May 1917).
The new minister (the Rt. Hon. G. N. Barnes, M.P.) had to meet two primary sources of grievance—the chief was the prac tice, already mentioned, of determining the amount of the pen sion by reference to the man's earnings: the other, hardly less important, was the apparently arbitrary refusal of pension on the ground that a disability had no connection with service. The former grievance was taken up at once by a departmental corn mittee, which included the minister and parliamentary secretary (Sir Leo Chiozza Money, succeeded after a short period by Sir Arthur Griffith Boscawen) and which undertook the task of revising the principles of assessment. They discarded altogether the criterion of the individual wages or earning capacity of the man, and substituted for it, as the only method of securing uni formity of compensation for like or similar disabilities, "the degree of disablement" sustained, on a judgment of "the man's physical capacity as compared with that of the ordinary healthy man of the same age" or, as the principle was more precisely defined by the later Select Committee on Pensions (1919), "the general disability in comparison with and by reference to indus trial conditions as a whole and not in reference to the loss suffered by the individual disabled soldier." Further, to enable a more precise adjustment to be made of the extent or the "degree of disablement" sustained by the man, the former scale of assess ment in quarters of disablement was discarded in favour of assess ment by tenths, from i00% representing total disablement to 20%, compensation below the latter figure being awarded in the form of a gratuity or temporary allowance for a limited period. A schedule of fixed assessments for certain specific injuries was attached to the warrant both as a guarantee and an illustration of the principles of assessment. At the same time to meet the
case of the man whose civil earnings or profits of business had been so much above the average wage earner's that war dis ablement might represent a greater loss than would be fairly compensated by the ordinary rate of disability pension, the new ministry devised a new form of pension—the "alternative pen sion" by which on an estimate of the actual earning capacity left to the man the ordinary flat rate pension could be increased, within certain over-riding limits, so as to compensate more nearly the actual loss of earning power. The alternative pension was made available to widows also. New regulations were issued (March 1917) carrying out these principles, together with a slight increase in the scales of pensions, for all ranks and both services.
On the second of the ex-service men's grievances, the frequent and apparently arbitrary refusal of all title to compensation on the ground of want of any connection between the man's invalid ing disability and the conditions of his service, the Government were hard pressed in parliament. The difficulty was met by giving an appeal to a tribunal under a county court judge, to be ap pointed by the minister. There was also a new doctrine that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the claimant where a doubt existed as to connection between disability and service. Finally, cases ineligible for pension were granted gratuities of varying amounts up to Liao.