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Armed Forces Personnel

It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to the debate today. I should start by reminding the House of my interest, in that I am a serving officer in the Territorial Army. It is especially a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Derek Conway). Between us, we represent how the TA has changed. He spoke of serving in the TA some years ago and going on exercise on the north German plain, hoping to defend the United Kingdom against the Russian hordes. Of course, that is not the TA of today. Before I speak further about the Territorial Army, I would like to thank the Minister. I want to acknowledge that the welfare package for servicemen on operational service has improved in recent months, and certainly since the time I served in Kosovo in 1999, when I used to have to queue for 20 minutes for my weekly two-minute phone call to my wife. The situation is much better now. I want to ask him a question that he will not be able to answer now. Will he confirm that a problem that existed in Afghanistan last year has been addressed? Under the Paradigm phone system, the soldiers who were out in remote units and having to use the mobile Paradigm system were being charged three times the amount that those using the landline system were paying to top up their units. Those people were being discriminated against, and I would be grateful if the Minister wrote to me to confirm that that practice has now ceased. Since I first joined the Army on 11 November 1988—yes, I was a very young man at the time—I have seen rapid changes taking place. It is clear that the Territorial Army has never been under as much strain as it is at the moment. Its numbers are at an all-time low, at just over 32,000. That does not include the officer training corps, but the OTC cannot be deployed. Among the 32,000, there is also a significant number who cannot be deployed on operations, either because they have already been so deployed, have come back and are within the time bar, or because they are going through recruit training. In those circumstances, they are not fit for role and cannot be deployed. Perhaps it says much that, in recent years, I was deployed as a Territorial Army soldier to Kosovo in 1999, to Bosnia in 2002 and to Afghanistan last summer, as the Minister knows. I fear that he might want to deploy me again after he has heard some of my comments this afternoon, but that is a different matter. Only last year, General John McColl said that the equivalent of 21 infantry battalions had been deployed by the Territorial Army in the past three years. That is why I want to say a few words about today’s official announcement that there will be a £5 million cut in the Territorial Army budget over the next two years. I said in my intervention on the Minister of State that that would probably be the equivalent of a £50 million cut for the regular Army, and I was not exaggerating. All too often in the House, we tend to talk in generalities, but I intend to go into specific detail to explain exactly why I said that. Fortunately—unfortunately, perhaps, for the Minister—I have a copy of the paper that has been prepared by General John McColl on the exact arrangements being proposed to implement a £2.5 million cut this year and a cut of the same amount next year. I want to take this opportunity to describe to the House the impact that the proposed cuts will have. The first relates to capability. The Territorial Army future army structure was designed to rebalance the TA. It was a recognition of the overstretch that the Minister of State described in his opening speech. Some units—Royal Engineers, Army Air Corps and Medical Corps—were suffering such overstretch that their harmony guidelines were not being met, and they were having to go on repeat tour after repeat tour after repeat tour. The FAS was designed to give uplift to some units so that they could better support units in the regular Army that were being directly affected by the overstretch, and other units that were not affected could be downsized. The Minister of State recognised that in March 2006, when he said in a statement to the House:"““The organisational changes of TA rebalancing will include strengthening the Royal Engineer element of the TA””." Can the Under-Secretary of State explain why, as a direct result of the cuts announced today, 124 Squadron 71 Engineer Regiment and 139 Squadron 73 Engineer Regiment will now not be established until 1 April 2009, two years after they were originally to be established? Indeed, there is no guarantee that they will be established then. That will rely entirely on the reinstatement in future years of the funding that has been cut for the next two years. We have talked at length about the pressure on helicopters in theatre—lack of helicopters and lack of crews. The Minister of State recognised that problem as well when he said, in the same statement in March last year,"““The following new TA units will be formed: an Army Air Corps regiment to support the Apache attack helicopter regiments in the Regular Army””." If it is so important to create those units, why is it that, as a result of today’s announcement, 2 Squadron 6 Regiment Army Air Corps will also not be formed until 1 April 2009? That, alas, is not the end of it. We shall also have to wait for the formation of 280 Squadron 162 Regiment The Royal Logistics Corps; 155 Transport Regiment The Royal Logistics Corps will not expand any further; and crucially, the squadron to support our medics who are under such pressure in Afghanistan and Iraq will not be established until 1 April 2009. It is not only capability that will be hit so badly in the TA. Personnel will be affected as well. In his statement last year, the Minister of State acknowledged that the Territorial Army was not the same as the regular Army. TA soldiers like me train perhaps on one evening a week and over the occasional weekend. We all have busy jobs. Although they are not necessarily Members of Parliament, by definition most TA soldiers are busy professionals—successful, can-do people with busy day jobs. We are entirely reliant on a very small number of permanent staff in TA units who act as the backbone or skeleton to keep the organisation on the road. But as a result of recent mobilisations many TA soldiers have gone off to Afghanistan and Iraq, and enormous pressure has been put on those permanent staff. We have had major problems with both pay and mobilisation. In his statement, the Minister of State said:"““we will strengthen the support we give TA units, with about 240 permanent staff recruited to provide administration, welfare, training and employer support.””—[Official Report, 23 March 2006; Vol. 444, c. 427.]" The document, however, is very revealing. Not only is further recruitment of non-regular permanent staff to be stopped entirely, but of the 244 who were originally promised, only 31 have been recruited to date. That figure will not increase, despite what the Minister of State said in his statement about what a genuine requirement this was. I should be grateful if the Under-Secretary of State explained why that is. My hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup mentioned competitions. It might be thought that they would be easy to cut because they are not particularly important, but so much of the spirit and ethos of the TA is about doing things not only for the right reasons—my colleagues and I want to serve our country and do the right thing—but because they are great fun. I assure the Minister that if he removed the fun element from the TA, we would very soon see a reduction in the numbers turning up on drill nights and at weekends. The proposed cuts in competitions are severe. The Cambrian patrol is a traditional competition that takes place in Wales every year. It is designed not for officers or senior non-commissioned officers, but for the smallest blocks—sections. It offers a lance corporal or corporal on the first rung of the command ladder their first opportunity to take their small unit away to do genuine training. That is being cut next year, and I understand that it is being cut for the foreseeable future; no TA unit will be able to participate. The Nijmegen march in Holland has been running for about 94 years. It provides an opportunity for junior TA commanders and their colleagues to do something fun; they go overseas and do a 100 km march. That is also being cut for the foreseeable future. One of the key skills that we must give our TA soldiers is basic skill at arms, especially if they are going to be sent on operational service in Afghanistan or Iraq. However, as a direct result of the £5 million of cuts, all divisional skill-at-arms meetings have been cut and will not be re-instigated for the foreseeable future. Employer support of the TA is often taken for granted. I would not have been able to take part in my first two mobilisations, to Kosovo and Bosnia, without the support of my employer. I recognise that it might be easy to sell to employers the idea that if they send their TA soldier employee away for six months he will return a far better employee; he might be employed as a storeman in the TA, but he will come back capable of being a stores manager, such was the benefit of his experience. The Reserve Forces Act 1996 rightly protects TA soldiers and reservists by ensuring that they get their job back, but it does not guarantee them a promotion when they return. That must be looked into. Because so many TA soldiers have been deployed time and again, employer support is beginning to be lost. We had one measure in place to repay employers: exercise executive stretch. It was run regionally, and every year there was an opportunity for employers who had supported the TA to send their non-TA employees to take part in a team-building exercise over a weekend. The employees would participate in a series of military activities, such as assault courses and command tasks. It was an ideal way to thank employers and to offer them a service by putting their non-TA employees through a team-building exercise. It was greatly valued by employers across the country. Yet as a direct result of the proposed £5 million of cuts, it will not happen next year. The biggest impact of the cuts will be on recruiting. I understand that the recruiting element of the cuts will be about £2.5 million. The directive has been handed down that all recruiting for units that are not directly supplying soldiers on mobilised service in Afghanistan and Iraq is to stop next year. That is incredibly short-sighted. I speak as a former squadron commander who had 120 soldiers in my unit. The average length of service for a TA soldier is only 3 years. Therefore once every three years, a third of the unit will leave. To turn off the tap and not recruit in one year might create a saving in that year, but it will have an incredibly dramatic impact in years two, three and four. TA units simply will not recover. A TA unit by its nature can only do one thing at a time. It may have 124 soldiers, but some of them—probably at least 20 at present—will be away on operations, and at least 30 will be recruits who can do nothing other than their recruit training. That leaves a possible total of about 60 who could turn up on any given Tuesday; and of those 60, perhaps only 20 will come in. It might therefore be possible to achieve only one project on a Tuesday or a weekend. When I was a squadron commander, I was fortunate in inheriting a squadron that was 90 per cent. recruited because it had done a lot of recruitment activities in the two previous years to increase its numbers. The mistake I made was that as soon as I inherited that squadron I focused on genuine training—the Minister will appreciate that bomb disposal experts need a lot of training—and we did not focus on recruiting for six months. The impact was felt the next year and the year after, when my numbers went down by 20 per cent. That was a tough lesson to learn. The decision to turn off the tap for recruiting for all non-TA units not directly delivering to Afghanistan or Iraq is, therefore, possibly the most damaging measure in the proposals. I urge the Minister of State to look again—