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Territorial Army

I, too, did not necessarily intend to take part in this debate, but I am delighted to have the opportunity to do so and to follow the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), who did such an outstanding job as a Minister in the Ministry of Defence for a long time. I served against him at one stage as a shadow Minister. If I were to say that the Ministry of Defence was a poorer place as a result of his retirement, it would be a discourtesy to his successors, so I would not go that far, but he graced his office for a long time, and we are grateful for his doing so. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) on having the initiative to call for this debate. It comes as not the conclusion—that will be in many years’ time—but the climax of 20 or 30 years of his speaking up for the Territorial Army and the reserve forces in Parliament. He does an outstanding job of that, and if there were a debate on the armed services in which he did not participate, we would be very surprised. I should declare a minor, non-pecuniary interest: I have the honour to wear the tie of the Honourable Artillery Company, which is the oldest regiment in the British Army. That makes it the oldest regiment in the world, with the possible exception of the Swiss Guard in Rome. However, a strange quirk of history makes it the second most senior regiment in the Territorial Army, because the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers registered first when the TA was set up in 1906. Incidentally, the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers is interesting for another reason: it is the only regiment in the British Army whose name includes the word ““Royal”” twice. I challenge anyone to come up with an alternative to that. We in the Honourable Artillery Company are proud of our record in serving the nation for about 400 to 500 years—from the time that King Henry VIII set us up. We served with huge distinction in the London contingent in the Boer war and suffered among the heaviest casualties of any regiment in the first world war, in which we served as a regiment. As a result, we were deployed in the second world war as an officer-producing unit. We produced tens of thousands of officers, many of whom were casualties. I am glad to say that we have served as a formed unit—I believe this was as a result of the Reserve Forces Act 1996, which was one of the last Acts of the previous Conservative Government—on two separate occasions in Iraq. We currently have soldiers deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere, carrying out a variety of highly specialist and dangerous tasks. We are proud of our regiment’s service to the nation and believe that our regiment has an enormous amount to offer. I do not just raise the matter of the Honourable Artillery Company because I am a sensibly proud member of it. I should mention that my service—seven years of serving the Queen—was probably the least distinguished military career in the history of the British Army: I was seven years a private soldier. I claim no greater military distinction than that I was particularly good news in the bar. None the less, my regimental colleagues have done fantastic work. I am proud of the HAC not simply because of regimental pride. Should there be the triple postings that were described earlier, we would risk losing the regimental pride that the HAC and so many other TA regiments have. If the boys are deployed as a regiment, or at least as a formed unit from the regiment, they serve with their mates and as a regiment, they have that 500 years of history behind them, they are proud to wear the cap badge of the HAC and they serve better than they would as an individual soldier posted elsewhere. I raised the issue of my pride in the HAC not only because of understandable personal pride in my own regiment, but because even in debates such as this, and in other discussions that we have had in recent months and years about the deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, we give occasional compliments to the Territorial Army but do not pay sufficient respect to the real contribution that it makes to our overall war effort. I do not have the figures to hand, but my memory of them is that about 25 per cent. of all soldiers deployed in Iraq came from either the TA or the reserve forces—those two are different, but similar in some respects. I stand to be corrected on that figure, but the number is of that order. Significant numbers of TA and reservists have been deployed in Iraq and, more recently, in Afghanistan. In other words, it would not have been possible to have done what we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan—I leave aside the question of whether one believes the former action to be a good or bad thing—without the support of the TA. That stands in sharp distinction to what happened in the Falklands, where I believe that few TA soldiers were deployed. In the Falklands, the Regular Army did it, whereas in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the TA did it. That is fantastic. I congratulate the TA on the outstanding commitment and the contribution that it has made to British successes across the world. I know that it will continue to make such a contribution. I have set out the background, but we face a particularly worrying future. I recall that the strategic defence review cut the number of TA soldiers to 44,000. Recently, the number was as high as 100,000, and I would not be in the least bit surprised to discover that the TA numbered 200,000 to 300,000 in the 1950s and 1960s, so the current number is very small. The strategic defence review concluded that the right thing to do was to cut it to 44,000. Discoveries about the way in which the TA has been deployed since the SDR have confirmed my opinion, in retrospect, that that was a mistake. However, I shall leave that to one side; I am not certain that even my own party was that forward in pointing it out then—we rather welcomed the SDR and its change of emphasis. Nevertheless, there are big problems with regard to numbers, some of which we have already touched on. First, we know about the problems with recruitment, and particularly the problem of officer recruitment that was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury. That is a real difficulty, and if some of the situations that he described continue, there is a strong likelihood that officer recruitment will fall further, which would be a real worry. There is also some hidden loss in the Territorial Army, for one very good reason, which is that TA members are paid their tax-free bounty at a certain stage in the year. On the spur of the moment I have forgotten the amount of the bounty, although one of my hon. Friends might enlighten me. It is several thousand pounds that is paid, tax free, if one completes a year in the Territorial Army and carries out one’s basic weapons test, fitness test and a couple of other tests, such as a first aid test. That means that there is a very good reason for not leaving; if one is ready to leave one might as well stay on for six months or even a year in order to collect the bounty. I hesitate to say so, but it might even be that one or two people carry on and do the minimum necessary to obtain the bounty. I do not remember the exact figures, but there are minimum requirements for days served per year and for the tests, and if those are fulfilled one collects one’s bounty relatively easily without being fully committed to life with the regiment, and certainly without being ready for deployment. I suspect that the Territorial Army numbers are therefore significantly misleading, because in any TA regiment there are a number of such people—slackers would be too strong a word to describe them, but they are definitely not as committed to the nation as perhaps they ought to be. The true figures are therefore lower than they appear. Let me explain why there are worries also with regard to whether the numbers will fall further. Had I been called up when I joined the Territorial Army, I would have served. It would have been difficult, because at the time I had a job in the City of London running a shipping company. Most of the people in my own regiment are also employed in the City of London, and most TA soldiers elsewhere have good jobs in civilian life. Under some conditions one might give up six months to serve the Crown, in which case most employers, leaving aside a few, would be happy to give their support. However, when one is asked to go back and serve a second six months, things become significantly more difficult—both for oneself and for one’s employers, and also for one’s wife and family. They ask why it is that one is going off to spend a second six months in Iraq as a private soldier or as someone’s driver, or doing something else of the kind in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it becomes much harder to explain. It is particularly difficult for people who are self-employed and who work on their own, for whom giving up their jobs for six months is a real problem. People might do it, but giving up a job for two periods of six months is almost impossible, and nine months or a year are virtually out of the question. There are certain regiments—one thinks of the Port and Maritime Regiment, which has one TA and one Regular unit—that are on virtually full-time deployment. Some of its soldiers are having great difficulties in maintaining their civilian jobs under those circumstances. Until recently, there was a further difficulty with regard to pay and conditions, whereby one’s pay on deployment as a Territorial Army soldier might have been significantly lower than one’s pay in civilian life. That applied particularly in the case of medics. Some of the very specialist surgeons who were paid enormously high salaries in civilian life were often paid rather less as a major in, say, the Royal Army Medical Corps. I believe that I am right in saying that that has now been corrected, and that there is now a system in which one’s civilian pay is reflected in one’s TA pay when under compulsory mobilisation. That is fine, but it means that there might then be two people of identical rank doing identical jobs but being paid very different sums. I shall not boast, but I was paid a reasonable salary in the City. Had I been deployed as a private soldier in the TA, which was perfectly possible, I would probably have been the highest-paid such soldier in the British Army, which might have caused some difficulties. There are problems with pay and conditions, therefore. Some of them have been addressed in recent years, but others might need further attention in years to come. If we are to be able to deploy people in the way that we have asked them, and if we are to rely so heavily on the TA—as we have for the past four or five years—it is vital to find a way to ensure that their pay and conditions and their terms of employment are as good during deployment as when they are at home. There are other aspects of the Territorial Army’s life that might need consideration. One matter that faces us currently is the huge problem of homeland defence. The very name ““Territorial Army”” exists because the TA was originally set up to defend the homeland; that was its purpose. That original purpose is entirely outdated and I certainly would not advance the argument that we should return to it; if we said to today’s TA members that their job was to defend the UK in the event of an invasion, I fear that people would leave. They do not want to do that job; they want to be involved in war fighting or at least to be ready for such fighting. They want to be deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and they are proud when that happens. There is none the less a significant need for some form of force to look after the homeland, to deal with all sorts of homeland defence issues, and to be ready for deployment to pick up the aftermath of any significant incidents on the mainland—let us hope that none happen. Some time ago, the Government set up a group of 500 TA people per region who, it was said, would be deployed in the event of some national onshore emergency. A significant number of those people have been deployed overseas, however, so that they are not available for deployment in the UK. In any event, the patchwork for deployment around the UK is unequal; some parts of the country do not have anyone available, and the likelihood of deployment at short notice in the event of a major national catastrophe—again, let us hope that that does not happen—is frankly small. It seems to me that the Government should therefore reconsider whether something could be done by way of some form of adjunct to the TA, such as existed until recently in the form of the Home Service Force, whose job it was to look after the homeland rather than to be deployed overseas. The Government should look at some way of reorganising some parts of the TA so that there is a body that is ready both to defend the nation against the unlikely event of overseas aggression and, more particularly, to be deployed to help the civilian powers in the event of a national catastrophe.