CEO and Chair Newsletter Update – January 2025
CEO Update
A warm welcome to our first update of 2025. The year certainly set off at a rapid pace for FWP and the team has been working hard to support individuals and organisations across the UK, and some overseas, particularly with enquiries in regard to the Financial Reparations Scheme, including various issues signing up to the Defence Gateway. We have updated our Guidelines to capture these issues and we thank you for your questions and feedback to help identify them. Our FRS Guidelines v2 will be added to our website over the weekend, but we’ll advertise that widely as soon as it is done.
Over the past month, FWP has been working with several legal expert partner organisations including Bolt Burdon and Kemp (BBK), Irwin Mitchell (IM), Latham and Watkins LLP (LW) and RBL, who are offering a wide range of legal advice and support that will be outlined in more detail following publication of the legal guide. It is important to note that the FRS is a discretionary payment scheme and not a compensatory one, which has significant implications in law, and this is why expert legal advice has been so much more important. The guide we promised has now developed into a separate leaflet thanks to the support of BBK, who have thoughtfully created it as A Short Guide to the LGBT Financial Recognition Scheme and Your Legal Rights. This has taken slightly longer than we estimated because it was in everyone’s interest that BBK fully understood the foundations of the scheme first, as well as its rules, to explore and enable the best possible advice. The guide is currently being formatted into a pdf online resource and will be available on the FWP and BBK websites next week, no later than 7th February. We will also promulgate it’s availability through our bulletins and social media channels, and BBK will join us for our next Town Hall to help answer your questions.
Earlier this month, we were delighted to catch up with many of you in London and Manchester for the 25th Anniversary Weekend events. We appreciate it was a weekend restricted by geography, time and cost for many others who would have liked to attend, but we hope with the diversity of events being arranged throughout the year and across the country there will be events and occasions accessible to as many as possible. The anniversary weekend began with the selection and announcement of the winning design for the LGBT+ Armed Forces Community Memorial, 2 events in the Imperial War Museums in London and mirrored in Manchester, ‘Voices of the LGBT+ Ban’ and ‘Come and Sing’, as well as some informal social gatherings, a deeply emotive Service of Commemoration in the historic St Clement Danes Church, and a MOD supported tri-service serving personnel and veterans Reception at Westminster Palace.
As we enter LGBT History Month, celebrating its own 20th Anniversary, we are looking forward to this weekend’s 25th Anniversary RAF LGBT Network dinner in the RAF Museum Midlands, and a mid-month RN LGBT Network Dinner on HMS Belfast. More events will follow so please keep an eye on our bulletins, and more information on the Memorial design can be found on our website. Please do also take a look at our mid-month regional newsletter, you will find a lot of information of events, activities and news at a regional and local level as well as national, including details of what the team are doing regionally, and the online opportunities to meet with them. I’ll hand you over to Ed now for a message from the Chair.
Chair’s Message
We start 2025 as a group of veterans in a stronger position than we have ever been before. Our founders’ work in creating FWP and persuading the government to launch the Etherton Review was an act of genius that has changed lives, and put us in the heart of LGBT+ history.
It isn’t all perfect, and some of you have shared with me your deep disappointment about the final stages of the process. I realise how hard that must be, and for those whose settlements won’t be what they hoped for, I feel very deeply. I wish it was our scheme, and I wish we could make it perfect. We are having conversations about what might be improved, but the truth is, that what we have is something that nobody dreamed would exist 5 years ago, and I’m very proud to be part of the charity that made it happen. Over the next few days and weeks, we will try to help where we can, and the charity is building up its capacity to assist applicants.
For many veterans of my generation, the 25th Anniversary was bitter sweet. It was a celebration of something that we never got to experience, being able to serve openly. Despite that, at the various events I have attended, I sensed a renewed desire amongst our serving colleagues to embrace our history, and to make sure we hold our just place in the wider veterans’ community. I am going to work harder than ever this year to make sure that we, and they, feel comradeship as we approach the unveiling of the incredible Memorial that Roly, Kevin, Caroline and the team are making real.
That brings me on to Caroline, our amazing CEO and a key founder of the charity. Without Caroline and the other founders, we wouldn’t be here at all. I will make sure we recognise her amazing contribution during the course of the year, but as many of you will only have recently discovered that she is retiring, I wanted to say here, on behalf of all the Trustees, what an amazing job she has done, and what an amazing debt we owe her. I’d like to add that we aren’t parting ways in some ghastly way, I know we’ll continue to see Caroline as a vital part of our family for a long time to come.
With best wishes,
Ed and Caroline
January 2025 Regional and National Upate Newsletter here.