An apology and thousands of pounds in compensation are to be offered to hundreds of former Service personnel who acted as guinea-pigs in chemical and biological research tests at Porton Down in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lawyers for the Ministry of Defence are in the final stages of negotiations for an out-of-court settlement, which is expected to award £8,300 to each of the 360 Porton Down volunteers who have put in claims – a total bill for the MoD of nearly £3 million.

Although the details of the deal were still being worked on yesterday, some Porton Down servicemen said that they were dissatisfied with the compensation being offered.

However Ken Earl, from Maidstone, Kent, who runs the 536-member Porton Down Veterans’ Support Group, told The Times: “The most important thing is that we are going to get an apology. That’s what we want, an apology for what they did to us.”

A campaign for compensation began 15 years ago after some of those who took part in the experiments into finding ways of countering chemical and biological warfare attacks accused the MoD of risking their health and covering up the reasons for the tests. They claimed that they had been told the experiments were concerned with finding an antidote for the common cold.

Derek Shenton, one of the servicemen, although not a member of Mr Earl’s group, claimed that there was “very high pressure” for all the claimants to sign up to the settlement. About 10 per cent of the claimants have reportedly refused the offer.

Mr Shenton, from Medstead, Hampshire, told BBC Today: “The whole thing is disgraceful. Once the Ministry of Defence got my signature they came back and said, ‘Because there’s various people who have decided to go missing [not accepting the money], we are not going to pay you until we have got their signatures’.”

Mr Shenton, 60, a retired plumber, said: “The compensation is miserly and I didn’t want to accept it, but I felt bullied into it by the MoD. I’ve spent 40 years trying to get them to recognise what happened to people like me and I just got sick of trying and gave in.”

The MoD denied that it was trying to coerce the Porton Down claimants and insisted that negotiations were still under way. “There is no question of the MoD putting pressure on the veterans to accept any settlement,” a spokeswoman said. “The issue of whether any mediated settlement would be acceptable to the veterans is entirely a matter between them and their solicitors.”

In 1999 police in Wiltshire began a four-year investigation into the experiments at Porton Down after a complaint was made by one of the guinea-pigs about the death of 20-year-old Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison, who collapsed and died in 1953 within an hour of having liquid sarin, a deadly nerve agent, dripped on his arm.

The claimants’ battle with the MoD came to a head in 2004 when a second inquest was ordered into Mr Maddison’s death, following the police investigation. The inquest recorded a verdict of unlawful killing. The first inquest, held in 1953, was conducted in secret on the ground of national security. Despite the 2004 verdict the Crown Prosecution Service decided against pressing charges against any of the surviving scientists who had overseen the experiments. The MoD paid £100,000 in compensation to the Maddison family.

In 2006, Sir Ian Kennedy, an independent expert in ethics, published a report, commissioned by the MoD, in which he concluded that some of the trials of chemical agents had been “unethical”. He acknowledged that tests were carried out in a “thorough” careful and often ingenious manner and were “obviously of great importance in assessing military effectiveness”.

Mr Earl said that he had been subjected to the same sarin nerve agent test, and on the same day, as Mr Maddison. “I didn’t find out the significance of it until 1999 when I read in the newspapers that the Wiltshire police had begun an investigation,” he said. Mr Earl said that he was bound by an agreement with the MoD not to reveal details of the settlement until a formal announcement was made.

Top brass: battles lost

— Gulf War syndrome
The MoD refused to acknowledge that it existed but a war pensions appeal tribunal in 2005 ruled that it did. The MoD has acknowledged that thousands of troops from the 1991 Gulf War suffered from a variety of illnesses that forced many of them to give up their military careers, and has awarded them war pensions as a result

— Nuclear test veterans
The MoD has always denied any evidence linking health problems with participation in the atomic bomb tests in the 1950s when servicemen were forced to stand unprotected in the open to watch the explosions at Maralinga in south Australia. But one veteran with cancer proved his case in an appeals tribunal in 1995 and the MoD had to pay him a war pension.

Next year other veterans’ claims will be heard in court

— Pregnant servicewomen
The practice of sacking women in the Services who became pregnant was banned in the early 1990s after an EU directive that said it was discriminatory. The MoD had to pay tens of millions of pounds in compensation to more than 5,000 women.

— Homosexuals in the forces
The MoD had to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the Armed Forces in 2000 after four Service personnel who had been sacked won their case at the European Court of Human Rights

— Gurkhas
The MoD gave in last year and announced that the Gurkhas would be given equal rights to pension and holiday entitlement after years of campaigning for the same pension as the rest of the British Army

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