I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this matter. It has served to draw attention to the practice which I think bears the examination of this House. I am also grateful to him because he has been very courteous in not suggesting of the Department which I represent that we have, in any way, unfairly administered the regulations which at present exist to meet this case. The substance of his contention is that where compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Act is being paid to a widow in the form of weekly sums making up a total lump sum, it should be regarded as capital and not as income.

The position about dependants' allowances in the Forces is that it is not in any sense part of the ex-Serviceman's emoluments. It is an allowance which is paid by the State to meet immediate needs which are brought on by the fact that the State has taken into the National Service the breadwinner of the family, and the justification for the regulation which I have hitherto had to administer in this connection is that since that money is coming in, whatever be its source, there is at that moment not a degree of immediate need which would otherwise justify the payment of this allowance. Circumstances must necessarily be taken account of and the allowance should not be paid. I have given very careful consideration to this matter following a series of letters which my hon. Friend has written to me, and I have come to the tentative conclusion that there is substance in his argument.

The reason, I think, is that there is a distinction which we should not lose sight of between capital and income in this connection. The distinction is simply this, that in the case of ordinary income at the end of any given period you are still left with the capital. In the case of lump sum compensation of this kind, which is paid in periodical packets at the end of the same period, your capital has disappeared and I think that there is some substance in what my hon. Friend has said that it does constitute an entirely different case.

I would not like to give the impression to the House that I or my predecessors are sheltering in this matter behind the Treasury. It is of course perfectly true that in the administering of warrants of this kind one draws up for ordinary day to day practice, a series of regulations which, if they work well over a period of time, are usually held to have almost statutory force. I cannot at this late stage of dependants' allowances, which is, after all, a purely wartime measure, undertake to reverse the practice of the last seven years without very careful thought. There are objections to doing so. We must be very careful in these matters not to remove one anomaly, and in doing so, create a whole series of other anomalies. These matters of dependents' allowances and the various operations of the Assistance Board, to say nothing of the other two Services which are also concerned in this, hang together in a complex way, and I shall have to consider with the greatest care whether it is reasonable for the Government at this late stage to make some sort of alteration to meet my hon. Friend's point.

However, this is the argument which really sways me. When the court, in the original workmen's compensation case, made its award, it made it having regard to family circumstances and having regard to the fact that there was a young person at home who was earning money and contributing to the upkeep of the family. The effect subsequently, when the State had called that young man up, of not allowing the weekly compensation to be excluded from the assessment of income is that we are, in effect, compelling the widow to spend that lump sum of compensation at a faster rate than the court originally intended her to do, and to that extent it appears to me that these regulations tend, as they stand at the present time, to frustrate the intention of the court which originally gave the compensation.

That is a frank argument, which I think largely concedes my hon. Friend's case, and if he will allow me to say so, it is the most forceful argument which can be adduced in this matter. I cannot give a categorical reply one way or the other this evening, but I will say that my hon. Friend will observe, from the way I have argued this case, that I am considerably sympathetic to the concession which he is seeking to get, and I will undertake in the immediate future to look into it and to see if it is reasonable at this late stage of an allowance which is rapidly disappearing, to make such a change. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I wish to make it quite clear that I am giving no binding undertaking, but I will look at the whole question with the utmost sympathy and with a desire to help my hon. Friend. Having said that, I think he will be well advised not to press me further this evening.