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Defence in the UK

Yes. We are thinking about how such a facility could best be delivered. It is definitely ruled in, not ruled out. Obviously there are staffing and other issues to be addressed, but any such facility, if it is established, is likely to form part of the Selly Oak centre. The train has left the station; we are simply trying to find the best solution. The Ministry of Defence’s Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court is the premier facility for the rehabilitation of injured service personnel. There is nothing quite like it in the national health service, and facilities and staff are second to none. Its main purpose is to provide rehabilitation for those with complex injuries, including amputees and brain-injured patients. It also houses a new complex rehabilitation and amputee unit, which provides high-quality appropriate prosthetics and adaptations, manufactured on site and tailored to individual patients, for service personnel who have suffered amputations. At the heart of our responsibility to the armed forces is ensuring that they are trained to meet every situation that they may face. The training that our forces receive must be tough to prepare them for the demands of operations. We are always looking for opportunities for improvement, and ensuring that training adapts to reflect the increasingly joint nature of military operations. The defence training review will transform the way in which we undertake specialist training for all three services. Earlier this year we announced the decision to centre the engineering and technical training currently carried out at various locations around the United Kingdom at St Athan in south Wales. That will reduce the number of sites for specialist training by a third. St Athan will become a centre of excellence, with modern facilities and modern living accommodation. The process will begin in 2008, and will last five years. Our ambition is that by 2013 the new training academy will be fully operational. The result of the changes will be continued world-class training for our personnel, but in world-class facilities. I must emphasise the importance of training, tactics and procedures—TTPs—for the protection of our forces on operations. Too often, discussion of force protection becomes a debate about equipment. There is no doubt that that is important, but TTPs are as important, if not more so. The theatre-specific training that our people receive at UK facilities before they deploy—on Salisbury plain, or at Stanford or Hythe—is crucial to minimising the risks they face in Basra or Helmand. An important part of our commitment to our people is making sure that new recruits are properly looked after. They find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, and often they are having their first experience of living away from home. The scale of this issue is significant. Last year, we recruited more than 13,000 to the Army alone, and 19,000 people across all three services. We have had to learn the tragic lessons of Deepcut—but learn them we have. I recognise and accept that there were deficiencies in resources and funding, but now we are doing a huge amount to ensure that those deficiencies are avoided in the future. The second report of the adult learning inspectorate—an independent body which we asked to look at what we did in training—was published on 6 March 2007. It identified areas of concern where further improvement was required, and I assure the House that we are focusing our efforts on finding answers to those concerns. However, the report also recognised the ““extraordinary strides? forward taken in the past two years in the welfare of recruits. Against a backdrop of fiercely competing priorities, not least operations, we have invested some £73 million of additional funds in trainee welfare alone to date, with a further £50 million planned in the coming four years. One important recommendation was that there should be an independent service complaints commissioner. We are now in the process of recruiting for that post.