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Armed Forces Personnel

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that we have been asking a lot of our armed forces—that they have been operating above the planning assumptions for some time now, and no matter how people try to mitigate them, those stresses come out somewhere. They come out in breaches of harmony guidelines, and therefore create additional pressures on service life. There are plenty of support mechanisms. People in post are constantly monitored to try to assist, both at local unit level—regimental level—and more widely, at Army level or Royal Marine level or Navy level, to try to mitigate those effects. For instance, we brought in the decompression facility for people coming home from theatre to try to get them in a better place and give them advice on their way home after, in some cases, some very hard fighting and some intense operations. So we are constantly looking at how we can relieve that pressure, and as I shall explain later in my speech, we hope to improve our performance against harmony guidelines, because that in itself is so important.