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Reserve Armed Forces

My Lords, I also thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for securing this important debate. As other noble Lords have said, he has considerable experience of the Territorial Army and, much more importantly, he has been deployed with them on operations, as I know have a number of the speakers who follow. My experience of the Territorial Army is not as close as his, but I was fortunate enough to command a division that was two-thirds and one-third regular, although that was during the Cold War. But it did give me a considerable inside knowledge of the Territorial Army, and I developed a huge respect for their enthusiasm, commitment and ethos. It also made me realise even then how vital they were to the Army’s order of battle. Since then the Territorial Army has been reduced and reorganised on a number of occasions. As I understand it, the establishment at the moment is about 39,000; but equally at the moment, it is about 80 per cent manned—in other words, they are short of something like 7,000 all ranks. The problem has been compounded by the fact that since 1999 there has been an average haemorrhaging from the TA of around 1,600 a year, and of course many of those who went were those who were the most experienced. Having talked to a number of people, I am told that there is no single identifiable reason for that. It is attributable to a broad range of issues: demands of the family, employers, the Territorial Army’s conditions of service, inadequate training, the lack of availability of certain equipment, and to an extent too many operational commitments. The points which the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, portrayed so clearly will be a great help, if they are implemented and successful, in correcting that problem. There is no direct indication or evidence to suggest that Iraq is the main reason for people leaving. But it must be wrong to lose so many trained people on a regular basis. As other noble Lords said, significant remedial action is required, because we cannot afford to lose that number of trained, important TA soldiers. I am well aware that the manning of the Territorial Army is right at the top of Ministers’, CGSs’ and Commander Regional Forces’ agenda. The TA manning action plan introduces many wide-ranging initiatives, some of which have already been mentioned. It wants to tackle recruiting and, more importantly, retention. It talks about closer integration of the TA with the Regular Army, something that we have been trying to achieve for many years. I hope that it will be possible to achieve it, but we should not underestimate, given the pressures on the Regular Army, the difficulty in achieving it. It is very important, but let us not underestimate the challenges of doing it, simply because the Regular Army is so heavily involved on operations. The establishment of a One Army Regular and Territorial Army recruiting process is enormously important. I wish that we would stop talking about ““the Regular Army”” and ““the TA””; I wish that we would just talk about ““the Army””, because they both need each other. I am also told that the Government plan to introduce the Territorial Army’s conditions of service. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us a little more detail of what they have in mind. I am conscious that I have sounded rather negative, but I know that in the past year the TA feels that it may have turned a corner because it has gained more recruits than it has lost. But we should not underestimate the loss of those very important experienced people. It is also worth remembering that, since January 2003, the TA has deployed over 11,400 people on operations. With my simple mathematics, I make that the equivalent of about 19 to 20 battalions. It is an incredible achievement and they have obviously been very effective. Frankly, the Regular Army could not have operated without them. It was an invaluable and significant contribution and a great achievement. I understand that, to sustain its support on operations, in future the TA will be limited to a maximum of 1,200 annually to be deployed on operational service. That seems to be making operational assumptions before the operational situation on the ground is clear. As we all know, military operations tend not to pan out in such a tidy way. In addition a TA soldier, unless he is a volunteer, will be asked to deploy on operations only once every five years. I wonder whether that is realistic given the Army’s current operational tempo and with Afghanistan just around the corner. In conclusion, I pay a huge tribute to the Territorial Army for what it has done and achieved. As I said, the equivalent of 19 or 20 infantry battalions deployed on operations is a huge achievement and speaks volumes for their ability, commitment and dedication. I am not sure, however, that we will able to maintain that tempo. As I and other noble Lords have mentioned, something significant will need to be done if we are not to reproduce in the Territorial Army some of the problems that we have in the Regular Army—problems of size, over-commitment and under-funding. The provision of volunteers for operations and so on is being resource and not demand led. The first may not be enough and I just hope that the second will not break the camel’s back.