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Armed Forces Personnel

The real core strengths lie in those groups with more than 10 years of experience, in all the theatres in which we have engaged, whether Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Iraq or Afghanistan. Yes, there may be issues, and we must attend to those. In relation to the similar point made by the hon. Member for Woodspring, a hard logic must be applied—if people are leaving because we are busy, we must be less busy, which means that we should not be in certain theatres—[Interruption.] There may be other answers, and I would be interested to hear what they were. Given that warrant officers or sergeants cannot be recruited—they have to grow—we must do our best to encourage them to stay. We have applied various solutions at other pinch points over the years, such as golden handshakes or handcuffs, depending on our approach. That might become an issue in future. Such people are very dedicated, but we understand that there are family problems, to which I shall refer later. We have had to address the pinch points, because it is not just a question of that cohort of sergeant majors or warrant officers but of the enabling trades. Part of our approach to the Army’s future structure was to reconfigure, to examine where the pinch points were and to reinvest what came out of one end of that structure in those pinch points. We said that we would reinvest about 3,000 posts, and we are making progress—we have cut the shortfall by 600. We are still some way short, but that is not because of lack of effort or determination. There are other problems that we need to address. We must address the harmony and pinch point issues and the specifics of certain groups of voluntary leavers. There are no easy solutions, but we must address the issues before we can find solutions.