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Armed Forces Personnel

I understand the hon. Gentleman's point. The instinctive reaction of the British people is to support our armed forces. The point that I was trying to make is that there is a growing disconnect, because ever more people do not have knowledge or experience of people who serve in the armed forces, and that is not healthy. To return to the issue of combined cadet forces, the pilot scheme that has been rolled out moves us in the right direction. I hope that the scheme will be rolled out across Britain. That would allow us to enhance the education and training of young people in skills and trades that are often in short supply, while giving a head start to those who want to make a career in the armed forces. I should like more to be done; I would like a trust fund to be created specifically to support the development of the cadets services, to which private firms would be asked to contribute. The cadets do a wonderful job, creating all sorts of interesting and exciting developments in young people's lives. It is no bad thing to raise funds by helping to fill shopping bags in supermarkets at Christmas, but that is not a certain funding stream, and we should not encourage it to be viewed as such. We need to do more, and as the private sector has a strong interest in developing a skilled work force for the future, I expect that quite a number of companies would be willing to support such a trust fund. There is more that we can do to engage private companies in co-operation that would benefit both them and service personnel. We could set up partnerships with firms to ensure that when someone is coming to the end of their forces career they can contact a company that will guarantee them an interview, provided that they meet the basic requirements. After all, those with military experience bring a wide range of skills and abilities to civilian life that no one else can contribute to a business or organisation. Civil society and the armed forces have many shared interests that are often overlooked, and the Government must do more to strengthen co-operation in respect of those interests, for the benefit of all. A major factor in the recruitment and retention of our service personnel is housing. Measures such as the £700 million invested in forces accommodation last year, and the commitment to spend at least £5 billion on housing in the next decade, are certainly encouraging developments. However, our servicemen and women are no different from anyone else in society when it comes to wanting to get a foot on the housing ladder. Given the sacrifices that we expect from them, and the demands that we make of them, we should do all that we can to support servicemen and women in that ambition. We should look at ways of working with financial institutions, with a view to offering discounted mortgages, perhaps at a rate that is fixed at the time when the mortgage is taken out, and which applies for the duration of servicemen and women's time in the forces. Alternatively, as I have suggested in the past, we could offer service families a lump sum of, say, about £30,000 as a contribution towards a deposit on a mortgage. We could look at ways of developing a savings scheme in which someone could earn above commercial interest rates throughout their time in the forces, and the amount saved could be matched by a lump sum from the MOD when they leave. The money could then be used as a deposit on a house. We could engage financial institutions in exploring that.