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Armed Forces Personnel

The manning requirement has been reduced to reflect what the Government can afford. Quite early on in my defence career, when the Government were something like 6,000 or 7,000 men short in the Army, I said at a meeting in the Ministry of Defence, ““If you could recruit 6,000 or 7,000 extra men, where would you get the money from?”” In our 2001 election manifesto, we said that recruitment should be carried out to allow the Army to reach its fully trained requirement. The Government immediately said that that was a £1.6 billion defence commitment—until we pointed out that it was their own target and they were publicly pledged to achieve it. That £1.6 billion never existed. The tragedy that we face now—perhaps tragedy is too strong a word. The challenge that we face now is that the situation is different. In the ’90s, a larger gap may have been passed off without comment. In 1990, one would have been hard-pressed to find one in 10 armed servicemen who had ever fired a shot in anger. We are now living in a different world and one would be hard put to find any armed serviceman or woman who has been in the armed forces for any length of time who has not served on operations. I put it to the Minister that the Government are not fulfilling their obligations to the people upon whom we depend for so much. That is reflected in the tour intervals. I attended Colchester military festival in Colchester, which my constituency circumnavigates, a few days ago. It was an impressive display.