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Defence in the World

I am mindful of the needs of others, and of your request for shorter speeches, Mr. Deputy Speaker, so I shall jettison half my speech. Unfortunately, not every hon. Member plays the team game. The subject matter of the debate is defence in the world, and I shall concentrate all my remarks on that issue, rather than on some of the subjects about which we have heard in the past few hours. Some 3,500 soldiers from 16 Air Assault Brigade, based in Colchester garrison, are in Helmand province, Afghanistan. I know that the whole House will wish them well, and a safe return. I visited Afghanistan earlier this year, and I passed the medical test. I suspect that if I can pass it, many others can too. The serious point is that we owe a great debt of gratitude to our brave men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to those who have served in other theatres in the past, for what they have done. I want to return to a point that I have put to both the present Prime Minister and the previous Prime Minister, and that has also been made today, about the lack of support from other NATO countries for our troops in Afghanistan. We should thank those on the roll of honour—Holland, Denmark, Latvia and Estonia, alongside the US and Canada—for their contribution. The question is: where are the troops, air frames and logistical support from Spain, Poland and Italy, and Germany and France in particular? To my mind, our army is under-strength and over-stretched. If it was not for the fact that 10 per cent. of the British Army is drawn from overseas, that situation would be even more dire. Clearly, something has to be done to improve recruitment and, more particularly, retention. Let me briefly bring together the aspects of retention that the Government need to address. The new single-person accommodation provided at Merville barracks at the Colchester garrison is first-class. We should seek to repeat that success wherever we can. The married quarters, however, are not as good as they could be. I find it unacceptable that in the past 10 years or so the MOD has paid more in rent to Annington Homes than the Government received in 1995-96 when the MOD housing stock was privatised. If that same amount of money had been invested in modernising and improving our housing stock, every married quarters in this country would be the best they could be. I put it to the Minister that the Government should consider ways of converting rental payments as a hire-purchase means of regaining a capital asset that was sold in a ridiculous privatisation—a rip off, giving Annington Homes a licence to print money. For example, more than 200 MOD houses are standing empty in my constituency, for which Addington Homes receive about £750,000 a year for doing nothing. The public purse will pump billions of pounds over the next few years into upgrading and modernising housing stock that the public will not own. I pay tribute to the garrison welfare services and the community in Colchester for all the support that they give families in Colchester. I pay particular tribute to the Colchester Gazette, which produces a ““Support our troops”” news item almost daily. That is the sort of thing that the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff are urging communities to do. So that our soldiers in Afghanistan can be relieved of their worries at home, I ask defence Ministers to discuss the proposals to shut the secondary school in Colchester with their colleagues in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, in the spirit of joined-up government. Approximately a quarter of the schoolchildren at the Alderman Blaxill school have a father—sometimes, a mother, but usually a father—serving in the Army, and most of those dads are in Afghanistan, knowing that the school that their children attend is under threat of closure. I believe that that threat could and should be lifted, and I urge the Ministry of Defence to discuss that with their colleagues, in a spirit of joined-up government, to get that closure stopped.