---

Defence in the UK

I, too, congratulate the three new Ministers in the Ministry of Defence. I shall be brief, as I am conscious of the number of Members who wish to speak. I join all those who have said that in this dark time for the country and the world we should remember how much harder a time our armed forces and their families face than the rest of us. As the Member for Canterbury, I am conscious of the price that the 5th Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Scotland, has already paid in casualties, along with the 3rd Battalion, the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, our local Territorial Army battalion, which also has troops serving in Afghanistan. Lieutenant-Colonel David Richmond, the gallant commanding officer of the 5th Battalion—or the Argylls, as we still like to think of them—is currently recovering at Headley Court from serious wounds. I was saddened too by the deaths of three members of the sister regiment of my old unit, 23 Regiment Special Air Service. The figures given by the Minister in the interchanges between Front Benchers on improvements in recruitment and retention reflect some commendable changes in terms and conditions of service, but also the economic downturn. It is worrying that in certain key areas, especially the fighting elements of the Army and air crew, we are still extremely short of people. In that context, it is important to remember that the bare numbers conceal a large number of people who are temporarily physically downgraded because they are recovering from wounds or injuries—in some cases mental as well as physical injuries. It is also a blunt truth that the physical requirements for joining the Army have gradually lowered over the past generation; the present combat fitness test, for example, is of a much lower standard than a generation ago. I do not intend to get into the banter as to who is bidding higher on improving conditions of service, but I am glad that there have been some improvements. Let me isolate one small item that would not cost any money, and which was raised with me by the wife of an officer in the Argylls—the issue of allocation of school places. Currently, schools are allowed to ask for the address of a family who want to place a child in a school. An army family being posted into an area can put down the date that they will arrive, but under the normal system of quartering do not normally know exactly what their address will be. So we have seen the absurdity of a soldier's wife having to stay in a hostel for months before her husband's posting so that she could get her child into a heavily oversubscribed local primary school. That problem could be fixed at the stroke of a pen, and should cost nothing at all. I want, however, to go beyond the question of terms and conditions and touch on the issue of cultural isolation, about which the hon. Member for Telford (David Wright) had a certain amount to say, and the gradual erosion of the links between the service community and the wider community. I pay tribute to the study conducted by the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), and his team earlier in the year, although I think he would be the first to admit that recommendations of the kind that he produced can make only a modest difference to a situation that has been gradually deteriorating ever since the ending of national service. I certainly agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Select Committee, that 79 per cent. is not a good enough approval rating, but it is not just a case of whether the civilian community approves of the armed forces who are taking the risks in Afghanistan and Iraq; it is a much wider issue. People with very little exposure to the armed forces are much less likely to encourage a son or daughter to join, and, to put it bluntly, less likely to support necessary defence spending. The position has been worsened by the concentration of our armed forces, which is happening at a much faster rate than the rate at which they are becoming smaller numerically. The Royal Navy, apart from the submarine force, is now concentrated almost entirely on the western end of the south coast, and the Royal Air Force has lost all regular contact with large parts of the country, including the whole of north-west England. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire mentioned the move towards super-garrisons. Another of its effects is that, while we may talk of homecoming parades and the like, there will be progressively fewer small market cities and towns like Canterbury with a single regular and a single Territorial Army unit where such events can happen. Visiting my sister near Catterick, I was reminded that it already has a super-garrison with virtually no civilian community. That brings me naturally to the subject of our reserve forces, which form a much smaller part of the picture than the reserve forces in America, Australia and Canada—three countries which, like ourselves, do not have a conscription model, which face the same challenges, and which are engaged in the same theatres in much the same way. Part of the reason why I believe that the connection is so much better in all those countries is that, in ball-park terms, volunteer reserves in the other three countries constitute roughly half their land forces; in Britain, the proportion is only about a quarter. In America, more than a third of air squadrons are volunteer reservists, while the proportion of individual pilots is much higher. In Britain we have fewer than 30 pilots in the volunteer reserves, and only 800 trained Royal Auxiliary Air Force reservists. As for the naval side, in America an aircraft carrier has been set aside for the exclusive training of reservists, while in Britain we do not even have a mine warfare vessel for the purpose. That is why I welcome the MOD's review of reserves. I must pay tribute to the work of General Nick Cottam and his team: I think that the MOD has chosen an extremely good project manager. I am also extremely grateful to the Minister of State, who I know has had to leave us early for a good reason, for the way in which he has fostered a relationship between that team and our all-party group. I am pleased to see present the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), who is an active member of it, as well as serving on the Select Committee. The Minister of State rightly drew attention to the huge role—quite disproportionate to their size—that the reserve forces have played in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I urge the House to bear in mind that, vital as that role is, it is not the first purpose of reserve forces. Their first purpose, when money is tight and the regular forces are overstretched in the here and now, is to provide a capability for the unexpected. Let us consider some recent events in which we have been involved. No one expected the Falklands war a week before it began, and no one expected that we would send armoured brigades to the desert of Saudi Arabia six months before we did so. We had no warning at all of 9/11, of course, but we would not now be in Afghanistan—or, arguably, Iraq—if it had not happened. Reserves are a cheap way of keeping capabilities in place that might unexpectedly be needed. They are much cheaper than regular forces, but unfortunately, the one drawback is that they take much longer to build up than regular forces. It is possible to train an officer for the Regular Army in a year, but for the Territorial Army that typically takes three or four years. We cannot create them when we need them; if they are not in being, we have not got them. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the central theme of the two reports that our all-party group prepared has been the necessity of structuring reserve forces in a way that attracts good quality men and women to act as officers and non-commissioned officers in them, so that we really have something usable there. One of the most common remarks in debates before Afghanistan became a high intensity war was that the Army could be structured so as to work in high intensity operations and then go out and do an excellent job of peacekeeping, but if we ever designed an Army based around peacekeeping, it would ultimately fail in all its roles. A similar point needs to be made about volunteer reserves. If we design volunteer reserves to operate as formed units to provide a framework in which people have interesting and challenging work to do, with opportunities to take at least sub-units from time to time abroad on operations, we will produce an organisation that is also extremely good at producing quality augmentees for regular units, but if we allow some at least of the senior regular hierarchy to persuade us that we should just structure volunteer reserves to produce augmentees— spare lance-corporals and privates—to top up regular units, we will produce an organisation that not only cannot do the strategic job if the balloon truly goes up, but also in the long run, because it will have lost all its best officers and senior NCOs, is not training any quality augmentees either. That brings me to a short list of a few of the things we pointed out in our reports. If the infantry and the Special Air Service and units such as 131 Commando Squadron Royal Engineers can provide formed sub-units that operate successfully, other parts of the TA should also be able to do so. However, in order for any part of the volunteer reserves to operate, they must have opportunities for interesting unit level exercises, but there are very few of those at present. We must make more use of officer training corps and other university units for officer training. They are excellent organisations, but they are underutilised in a string of ways. Let me give one example: why cannot we have special-to-arm courses tacked on to the back of the Sandhurst courses in the summer so that a student who wants to can do what happens in America or Australia and undertake their whole officer training in one go? I wish to mention two last points. One is a point made earlier about aviation. It is unforgivable that a country that has such a big, successful and dynamic aviation industry simply writes off the whole investment it makes in people who leave the RAF having trained as pilots. If the Americans can have reservists operating a whole range of aircraft, it is ridiculous that we cannot make more use of reservists on operations, at least for helicopters. The other point is about mine warfare. Mine warfare is either not needed at all—we do not use it in Afghanistan for obvious reasons, although we have naval pilots and Royal Marines heavily engaged there—or it is needed, in which case a hell of a lot of it is needed. The current arrangement whereby we have one expensive regular crew for each mine warfare vessel is ridiculous. It is both expensive and, by definition, has no surge capability; a mine warfare crew cannot be worked around the clock as their work is very exhausting. If we handed a couple of those over to the volunteer reserves and trained a large number of volunteer crews on them, for the same money we would be able to deliver a much greater capability. At a time when our armed forces are increasingly isolated as well as overstretched, I am pleased that the Government are reviewing their reserve forces. I look forward to that review, and I urge the House as a whole and the Government to realise that volunteer reserves could play a much larger role in the defence of this country.