Will Pike

Until the law was changed, British citizens caught up in terrorism overseas received little or no financial support upon their return to the UK.

The logic, well, if you could call it that, was simple and quite brutal.

The scheme covered crimes that happened on British soil.

What happened to you in Mumbai, maybe Bali, Istanbul, that was not the government's problem.

You chose to travel.

You're on your own.

It didn't matter that you were a British citizen.

It did not matter that the attack had been carried out by an internationally designated terrorist organisation.

It did not matter that you had come home in a wheelchair with a broken body, facing a lifetime of medical costs, care needs and lost earnings.

The border of the compensation scheme ended at the border of the country.

Step outside it and you stepped outside the safety net.

Will Pike had survived a terrorist attack, he had fallen five stories, he'd been pieced back together by surgeons in Mumbai, repatriated home, just, and was now facing the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

At 28 years old, with no government assistance, no financial support, and no legal framework that recognised what had happened to him as something the state or country had any responsibility to address, he was, in the eyes of the law, simply unlucky.

I wasn't the first person to sort of feel this sting.

It transpired that there were people who had been in terrorist attacks in Bali, Sharm El Sheikh, who had lost family members and had been injured.

And they'd been campaigning for years to sort of plug this kind of loophole, this negative loophole.

And I came along.

as a white male middle class, fundamentally wheelchair-using guy, with my dad as my lobbyist, and we changed the law.

This, by the way, this is not... I mean, that's a few years on.

But this became apparent very early in hospital, in the first hospital I was in, the general ward, that we weren't going to be on the receiving end of a bunch of financial aid, which was kind of scary, because...