Let's make 2025 the year Armed Forces nuclear test veterans get justice, suggests Burnham

The Mayor of Greater Manchester has pleaded for 2025 to be the year nuclear test veterans receive justice.

Andy Burnham made the comments on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show.

As the show was ending, he called the way those who had been subject to the UK's nuclear tests had been treated an "outstanding injustice".

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"Please in 2025, justice for those nuclear test veterans," he said.

More than 22,000 British servicemen are believed to have taken part in the British and US nuclear tests and clean-ups, along with scientists from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.

Many have suffered health problems they believe may be related to exposure to radiation from the tests.

Mr Burnham has previously called for a public inquiry into the tests that took place on Christmas Island, with some claiming it caused the early death of hundreds of veterans.

In a Notice of Motion from Manchester Council earlier this year, Mr Burnham's council outlined that while other countries who conducted nuclear testing, including France, the US and Russia, had compensated nuclear veterans financially, the UK had not.

The UK government has awarded nuclear test veterans a medal for their service in the testing of nuclear weapons.

In October last year, Labour's Angela Rayner said she would do "everything within my power" to help nuclear test veterans access their medical records.

Campaigners say they have been denied results of blood tests carried out when they served at British nuclear testing sites in Australia and Christmas Island in the mid-20th century.

In March of this year, veterans who took part in nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and '60s offered to settle their legal claims with the Ministry of Defence through a "special tribunal".

While in October, nuclear test veterans gave a guarded response to the suggestion that criminal sanctions could be brought against the people who exposed them to radiation during the Cold War bomb trials.