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Armed Forces Personnel

May I begin by adding my and my colleagues’ condolences to the sympathy that the Minister extended to all the families of personnel killed recently in Iraq and Afghanistan? The thoughts and prayers of the whole House are with them in their suffering. Like the Minister and some other parliamentary colleagues, I spent the past week or so in the Falklands. The visit was a poignant and moving reminder of the courage, resourcefulness and commitment of all our armed forces—and of the members of the Merchant Navy, whose contribution to the conflict is often overlooked. It was a reminder to us all that freedom does not come for free and may require substantial sacrifices. The men and women who serve in our armed forces are unique. They are expected to be separated from their families for long periods, increasingly on a repeated basis. They are asked to risk life and limb for the security of their country and its people, and they are asked to make literally life-or-death decisions on the spur of the moment. No other group in our society is asked to do all those things and, sadly, that is something that our current society seems to forget all too often. What do our armed forces expect in return for their sacrifices? They expect to be properly trained and equipped for the tasks that they undertake, and that the Government will not ask them to do more than they are willing to pay for. They expect that their families will be properly looked after, especially in their absence. They expect that the Government will always maximise the chance of success of any mission, and minimise the risk to those on the front line. In addition, they expect that they will be properly treated if they are injured. That is not too much to ask in return for the risks that they take, but all too often their expectations remain unfulfilled. The backdrop to this debate and to the others that we have had in recent times is that our armed forces are overstretched and undermanned. When the Government came to office, they published the excellent strategic defence review, which still holds good today. From that came the defence planning assumptions, and from that the Treasury’s budget for the MOD. Yet the defence planning assumptions have been exceeded for the past five years, so much so that they are largely fantasy now. That is the root of the problem. In April this year, the armed forces were undermanned by 5,850 personnel, according to Government requirements—the Army by 2,520, the Navy by 1,860, and the RAF by 1,460. The recent National Audit Office report also identified especially alarming manning shortfalls in pinch-point trades, with intensives therapy nurses being 70 per cent. undermanned, and accident and emergency nurses 68 per cent. undermanned. The Armed Forces Pay Review Body stated that there are more than 80 operational pinch-point trades—18 in the Royal Navy, 24 in the Army and 41 in the RAF. The harmony guidelines, which determine the frequency of deployment and separation from families, are broken so regularly as to render them meaningless.