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Armed Forces Personnel

I think all Members agree with that. Certainly it is the principal focus of the Ministry of Defence. We work hard to recruit and retain sufficient capable and motivated armed forces, in the context of a strong economy that provides increasing opportunities and more and more young people taking up the chance of further education. I can see the jobcentre from my constituency offices. I realise that I must apologise for the amount of time that I spend in my constituency, although I must say that being castigated for being in his constituency is not the worst thing that ever happens to a constituency Member—but I have dealt with that issue already, and I genuinely regret that I was not here on Monday. The point is that the number of people recruited through my local jobcentre reflects the state of the economy in my part of the world much more than anything else. Our forces require some 18,000 new recruits annually. Over the last two years we have met 96 per cent. of that target. We have taken steps to sustain and improve recruitment in specific shortage areas through, for example, recruiting bounties in the infantry and the Royal Artillery. Retention, too, is generally satisfactory. Each year some 19,000 people leave our forces, around 10 per cent. of the total number. People leave, of course, for a variety of unavoidable reasons, such as retirement, injury and, regrettably, illness. We focus our retention efforts on those who choose to leave, and there have been no significant trends in that direction in any of the three services over the past three years. Although we should never be complacent about our ability to recruit and retain the people who constitute our greatest asset, I do not believe that accusations of a manning crisis are justified by the facts; nor has anything that I have heard or seen given me any reason to doubt that the quality of our people is every bit as good as it ever was.