General Sir Peter Wall has said there is an opportunity with the new prime minister for the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill to be amended.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “We don’t really know [if Burnham will side with lawyers against veterans] as we don’t know many of the new policies of the new prime minister. And I think to be fair, there’s a lot going on, and we’re patient to hear.

“Meanwhile, we know that, regardless of the arrival of the new prime minister, this Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which is the new legislation, is due to be heard at its committee stage, so-called, in the House of Commons soon after Parliament returns from its recess in the in the next few weeks, we imagine.

“It’s actually been delayed for over a year, really because I think people were apprehensive about how it would be received.

“And that was intentional on our part because we want to get people’s notice that whilst we don’t have any objections to the need for a Bill that clarifies some of the aspects of the Northern Ireland Legacy Act passed by the Tories in 2023, we absolutely need amendments to the Bill in its current form to afford protections to veteran soldiers.

“This affects two groups of people: veterans who are very much in the frame if this protection doesn’t get restored and by implication and by precedent, the situation of current soldiers on future operations will find themselves in because they don’t feel they can trust the government to support them through the rest of their lives without the lawfare clicking in and their protections being tampered with, which is exactly what’s going on here in the case of Northern Ireland veterans from the 1990s.

“It’s a good point that the personalities have changed and the mood may well have changed on this. The Northern Ireland Office, the Ministry of Defence, and Number 10 are all under new leadership, and it’s our plan to get in touch with all of those key players and put our point of view.

“And so far, to be fair, we’ve had a good listening. We’ve had assurances from the previous cohort that they would let us know what amendments they were going to put forward. That never actually happened. But we’ve got high hopes that we’ll get a better listening from the new crew.

“They need to realise the strength of feeling about this, the jeopardy in which it puts veterans, and the implications for for the operational effectiveness of forces in the future.

“And the point about the shoulder-to-shoulder site is it allows constituents, whether former service people or families or friends or other people who sympathise with this issue, to find out who their MP is, their own constituency MP, and alert them to the need for these amendments in the Troubles Bill in its current format.

“And so, anyone who’s listening needs to click onto that site, put in their postcode, and fire off the appropriate letter.”