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Service Personnel

I welcome the hon. Gentleman's warm welcome for the announcements, although he did get to the ““but”” eventually. I thank him for his tribute to the armed forces and recognise the special contribution that his constituent, Scott Paterson, made. I know of his circumstances, but as Secretary of State, I cannot single him out. He is one of many who have suffered injuries and borne them with great stoicism and courage. The hon. Gentleman suggests that the implication of the proposals is that service people will move up lists. That may be the case, but the intention and the principle, which we have stated at the outset, are that members of the armed forces and their families should not be disadvantaged by their circumstances. No member of the armed forces came to me and said that they wanted to be able to jump up lists for treatment or for their children to be treated better than any other children. They said that they did not want their lifestyle, which they accept, to operate to their disadvantage. We are trying to find ways to ensure that that principle is observed. We are not asking for people to jump up lists and, indeed, members of the armed forces and their families would be the last people who would want to queue-jump. They are much more likely to stand back and let others go first, but they do not want to be disadvantaged. That is the point, with respect to the hon. Gentleman. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned a failure to deal with the issue of accommodation. When he gets an opportunity to read the paper in detail—the devil is always in the detail—he will see that paragraph 3.5 and the following paragraphs are devoted to accommodation. In part, they point out what has been achieved, and that is something that I think that he does not appreciate. We have invested £1.4 billion in delivering single-living accommodation, and to date that has produced 26,000 new bed spaces. A further 30,000 are planned, as part of a planned investment in accommodation in excess of £8 billion over the next decade. So it is not correct to say that we are not giving accommodation the priority that it deserves. Finally, the hon. Gentleman identified what he considers the real issue, and I shall say two things in response. First, I regularly meet our forces doing their jobs in the operational environment. They never complain to me about their morale when they are doing their jobs, because that is when they are at their happiest, most content and most professional. There is no morale problem when we ask people to do what we have trained them to do. Secondly, I recognise that our armed forces are operating at a tempo that is beyond what we planned for. I have said time and time again at this Dispatch Box that it is our intention to deal with that. In my term as Secretary of State for Defence, we have already drawn down significantly in Iraq. We are in transition, and we intend to do more in the way of draw-down to resolve the tempo problem.