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Defence Policy

I agree completely, but the fact remains that nobody—including the Conservative and Labour Governments of the past 40 years—has ever asked our aircraft industry to produce a cheap, durable ground-attack aircraft. What we are getting for the second time round is an aircraft that is very expensive, highly specified and, in the case of Eurofighter, principally designed for air combat, at which it is arguably the best in the world. It is not designed for ground attack. One more example from the Air Force is the air tanker programme. I have been struggling to find the latest estimate of the private finance initiative cost. Two years ago, the figure was £11 billion, but I have since seen a forecast of £13 billion. Let us be clear what we are talking about: air tankering is a very important function that, in essence, involves converted airliners. A degree of skill is necessary, specifically in practising the tankering function, but the people involved have a skill base that is otherwise the same as that of an airline pilot. We are talking about expensively converting airliners that can be used to carry troops, but an awful lot of air tankering is needed at some times but not at others. There must be a cheaper way of arranging air tankering, so that we use, as the Americans do, reserve pilots—experienced airline pilots who fly for a living anyway—and consider a cheaper aircraft option, so that the aircraft do not sit about and are used either for air tankering or for air transport. We have overstretch in air transport at the moment, but that is not always the case. The Americans have the capability, which we do not have, to pull much more capacity on stream at relatively low cost. That brings me to the Territorial Army and the report prepared by our little all-party group. We had terrific support from the MOD, which agreed to provide us with all the information that we wanted. The Minister’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr. Ingram) came to speak to us. We subsequently received from the Minister for the Armed Forces, the right hon. Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth), whom I am glad to see in his place, a very courteous and detailed reply to our report. However, it was a little disappointing that very few of the ideas that we proposed found favour, and I should like to spend the last part of my speech on three of them: deployments, recruiting and retention, and resources. The Territorial Army has a remarkable record on deployments: out of an organisation that is barely 30,000 strong—including recruits and undeployable people, such as those in the Officer Training Corps—13,000 have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past five years. Let us remember that it was deployed to Iraq only a couple of years after a big deployment associated with the Kosovo operation. A growing feature of deployment, beside the pace of it, is causing considerable unhappiness in the Territorial Army: the Regular Army’s demands to cherry-pick lance corporals and privates to backfill regular units, with the officers and senior non-commissioned officers being offered buckshee posts away from command. To its credit, the MOD did not give this justification in the reply to our report, but the justification that regular officers sometimes give sotto voce is, ““Oh well, why should we use a TA officer as a platoon or company commander to command these soldiers, when we have got somebody who’s spent so many more years training in the shape of the regular officer. What we want is the rank and file to pad out the numbers in our regular units.”” The MOD gave a different reply:"““With approximately 600 members of the TA and Regular Reserve deployed at any one time, predominantly split between Iraq and Afghanistan, the infantry element is the only cap-badge where there are sufficient individuals available to deploy at sub-unit level.””" So deployment will take place by so-called cohorts—groups of mostly junior rank individuals, possibly with an officer going for a buckshee staff job. I am certain that the Minister did not mean to mislead us—a lot of trouble was taken over that reply, but it is factually wrong. For the bulk of next year, formed units of the TA Royal Army Medical Corps will provide most of the medical cover in Afghanistan. In fact, to give another example, a formed unit of 131 Commando Squadron Royal Engineers—a formed troop of 50 soldiers—has just come back from quite a distinguished tour in Afghanistan. Its tour in Iraq on the first day of the original invasion made the front page of The Times. So there are examples of those, apart from the infantry, who have been deployed as formed units. In fact, the kind of performance that I quoted from The Daily Telegraph—the welcome and fanfare in the City of London for the London-formed company—is a model for what can be done and for how the Territorials can keep the wider community interested in the whole business of defence. Full marks to the Londons for fielding that company, many of whom had been out to serve before, and for the excellent service that they did there. All credit, too, to the Brigade of Guards, which had no previous experience of working with Territorials, and which said, ““We’re going to treat these people seriously.”” It even detached a platoon of regulars to serve under its wing, because it was a three-platoon company with four tasks, so it clearly needed a spare platoon. That is the way forward that the Territorials want, rather than the cherry-picking of individuals. I do not mean to suggest—please do not misunderstand me—that there is no scope for individuals who want to volunteer to fill gaps in the Regular Army, but the same point that has been made many times about the Regular Army applies to the TA. Just as the Regular Army needs to train for general war so that it can be used for peacekeeping—a point that we used to hear many times in debates a few years ago, before Afghanistan hotted up—Territorials must have opportunities for formed-unit deployments, in which officers get the chance to command and soldiers to serve under TA officers, if they are also to be useful as a supplier of spare parts. That brings me to recruitment and retention in the TA. We are desperately short—5,000 or 6,000 under-strength on paper—and I am sure that the gap would be even larger if those who are held on strength but have really ceased to attend were taken off. The decision to hand recruiting from the reserve forces and cadets associations to the regional brigades is potentially very dangerous. The original brigades, however well they are commanded—some of them have more expertise than others in the TA—do not have the same links in the local community with business, the local media and so on as a regional organisation. It is an accident of geography that, apart from London, none of our regional brigades coincides with, for example, a television area; they all cut across boundaries, thus making things still more complicated. If we want to recruit good quality officers and soldiers for the TA, it is essential that regional brigades are persuaded to continue to work with the RFCAs and to find best practice among individual TA units, some of which have been very adventurous in getting into groups that are of no interest to Regular Army recruiting teams. For example, 4 Para, which we visited as an all-party group, has gone into gym clubs and rugby clubs to speak to young men in their early 20s who are too old to be interested in joining the Regular Army but who are extremely fit, would make excellent TA soldiers and would like the opportunity to go off to Afghanistan. That brings me finally to resourcing. In the announcement on the future Army strategy’s TA section, a number of promises were made to the TA, which has suffered a long series of cuts. I shall quote two or three of those promises:"““We have, therefore, made allowance in our unit structures for both a training and a mobilisation margin…will also increase joint TA and regular training, thereby delivering more enjoyable, relevant and challenging training to the Territorial Army…about 240 permanent staff recruited to provide administration””.—[Official Report, 23 March 2006; Vol. 444, c. 427.]" The sad decision to cut £5 million from the TA’s budget—a terribly small sum for the Department, but a huge sum for the TA, at nearly 3 per cent. of its budget—has meant that those promises have gone out of the window. I draw the House’s attention to early-day motion 1761, which was signed by 91 Members of all parties, including most of those present at the moment. It states that the cut"““will stop all recruiting in TA units that are not making a significant contribution to current operations””." That includes the Royal Yeomanry, which made a huge contribution to the first wave in Iraq. It also states that the cut will"““cancel Cambrian Patrol, cancel all TA involvement in the Nijmegen marches,””—" two of the most exciting things in the TA, which help it to recruit and retain good quality people—"““cancel divisional skill at arms meetings and freeze the recruitment of 244 non-regular permanent staff””." Those staff were, of course, promised in the original statement. The TA, which is just coming up to its centenary, has made a huge contribution. It made up almost half the units deployed in the first world war, when Territorials won nearly 80 Victoria Crosses. One thinks of the defence of Calais during the second world war, where the London Rifle Brigade was praised for its gallantry by the German high command. One also thinks of the contribution made by those 13,000 Territorials in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, there is a limit, in the recent words of one TA officer, to how many times one can twist the Rubik cube without breaking it. The TA must be given the resources it needs—we are talking about terribly small sums—and it must be given opportunities for command on operational service because of those three things that I mentioned at the beginning: we need reserve forces because they are an affordable way of providing extra capacity, because they bring civilian expertise into the defence sector and because they are a key factor in preventing regular forces from slipping into cultural isolation.