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Defence in the World

I fully understand the objectives of the Government’s policy and realise that there may be a time lag between setting out those objectives and achieving them. However, the discrepancies are worrying, and I hope that the Minister can offer the House some reassurance about what is going on when he winds up. The peacekeeping or peace-enforcement tasks that the Army is increasingly required to undertake are manpower-intensive and will surely prove increasingly difficult to carry out without sufficient troops. Fewer troops are being asked to do more and, as a result, some battalions have had only months at home between demanding operational tours—far less than the two-year interval target. That has substantially restricted essential rest and recuperation time, time spent with families, and training time. If that continues in the medium term, it will inevitably undermine the Army’s effectiveness. As has already been pointed out, in the Navy there is an equally serious shortage of more than 1,700 personnel. At the moment, it does not appear that recruitment will be the answer to some of these problems. In each year since 2002, there has been a significant fall in the number of civilian applications to join the United Kingdom regular forces—in each service, whether for officer or other ranks. Civilian applications to join the Army outside the officer ranks fell from nearly 37,000 in 2002 to just over 28,000 in 2004–05. Non-officer civilian applications in the same period in the RAF and the Navy fell by more than 4,000 and 2,000 respectively. That is a picture of dramatic decline in interest in joining the services, which is reflected in similar problems in attracting reservists. If we add to the mix the difficulties with fitness, regimental restructuring and changes in terms for redundancy, it makes for a serious list of problems that need urgent attention in the Ministry of Defence. The future replacement of the nuclear deterrent is reappearing on the national agenda, as the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) highlighted. Given the long lead times in any decision-making process, that is understandable. However, we must not lose sight of the overwhelming responsibility on all the nuclear powers to seek ways of achieving multilateral disarmament. The Secretary of State rightly drew attention to the Government’s significant reductions in nuclear weapons since 1997. We applaud that, but internationally, there is still a long way to go. In the aftermath of the failure of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference in New York a few weeks ago, we are in a worrying position. We know that some countries such as India and Pakistan have obtained nuclear weapons and that others, for example, North Korea, are trying to acquire them. There is therefore a pressing need to create the international political climate in which multilateral disarmament can take place. We must also not lose sight of the danger of proliferation through the passing of expertise and materials from the former Soviet Union. Those should be our first priorities. Although we must not lose our focus on those issues, we will in due course have to consider any future replacement of Trident. On Monday, the Secretary of State said:"““Decisions on any replacement of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent are likely to be necessary in the lifetime of the current Parliament””.—[Official Report, 4 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 5.]" That echoes the wording of the White Paper in the previous Parliament. He repeated those sentiments today. He went on to give an assurance that the Government had not started considering, far less making decisions, on the details. We accept that assurance but it is vital that, in due course, the Government set out their intentions in a new White Paper so that we can hold a proper public debate about those matters. As the Secretary of State made clear, there is a range of challenging matters to consider, not least the future strategic security context, the deterrence capability of any new system and the cost of the replacement. Those issues must all be properly thought through. Today, the events elsewhere in London rightly dominate our thoughts. We cannot know yet whose evil plan it was, although we will all have our suspicious. However, we know that the emergency services, assisted by the armed forces as necessary, are dealing with the situation to the highest professional standards. Our ability to rely on those men and women should never be taken for granted and support for them must unite us all.