Mr Lambie, 45, is claiming more than £400,000 in damages, but the MoD has offered him about £58,000 with its barristers claiming his hearing loss has not and will not have an impact on his future income.
He joined the Royal Marines in 1998 and was diagnosed with NIHL in 2002 but, in a witness statement, said “nothing was put in place to prevent me from being exposed to loud noise”.
Members of his unit were put through a hearing test before deployment to Afghanistan in 2011 and Mr Lambie said he was “very conscious” about as his “entire career was spent training for deployment”.
He initially failed but said he passed a retake by watching the medic testing him “press the button for the tone and then I pressed my clicker straight away”.
“We all knew that the emphasis on the staff was to ensure that Marines passed all the tests they needed to pass for deployment, as the MoD needed as many people as possible to deploy,” he said.
He said: “This is why the medics helped us pass our medicals,” adding the medic conducting the tests was “completely aware” of this,
Mr Lambie, who is now a defence and security consultant after being discharged in 2021, said members of the unit had joked about cheating the tests to ensure they passed regardless of whether they needed to.
The MoD has accepted “primary causation” in his case, but disputes how much he should receive.
David Platt KC, for the department, said in written submissions that Mr Lambie’s “instance of faking” the hearing test in 2011 was an “undoubtedly regrettable” but was “apparently isolated instance of cheating”.
He said the amount the former marine was claiming was “wholly unrealistic” as hearing loss had not impeded his career.