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Defence Policy

I join others in paying tribute to all those who have lost their lives recently in Afghanistan, not least Guardsman Jamie Janes of 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, in which I served, who died tragically on 5 October in Nad Ali district in Helmand province while on foot patrol. Our thoughts are with their families and regiments. Nobody who wishes to do anything other than understand what is happening in Afghanistan could do any better than read the quite excellent speech that General McChrystal gave recently to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in which he attempts to give a comprehensive view of the situation and dispels many of what he calls the "bumper sticker" truths about Afghanistan. Those of us who were in Helmand province during Operation Panther's Claw will realise how important boots on the ground are and how welcome the announcement of 500 extra troops is, despite it being some way off the number for which the service chiefs asked. That pales into insignificance against the awaited decision from President Obama about whether he will have a further surge to provide far more manpower in Afghanistan. With the Canadians due to pull out and many of our coalition partners refusing to undertake what I would call active service, there is a concern that the burden of operational duties will continue to fall disproportionately on the UK, the Americans and some of our other allies. We need to watch that situation very closely. The Secretary of State's announcement that Merlins are shortly to be dispatched—finally—to Afghanistan is nothing other than welcome. The great enemy of our troops, the IEDs, continue to cause a real problem, and it would be interesting to know whether the amount of fatalities and wounded that we have had from IEDs is due to our troops going out to the forward operating bases, which they should most properly do by helicopter, or, as the Government would maintain, their going out from the FOBs on foot patrol. There has been some misunderstanding during the discussions about vehicles in Afghanistan. Of course we need new and different vehicles, but we need also a range of different vehicles to suit different terrain and operational duties. A heavily armoured American vehicle might be all very well for going down the road, and would offer better protection against an IED, but it most likely would not be able to go off that road if, as a result of an ambush, it needed to. The surge in growing the Afghan national army must be the right way forward, although the figures are ambitious and the training will take longer than we expect. We were lucky to see some of the Afghan national army training while we were out in Helmand, and I ask the Secretary of State whether there is any plan to bring some of the officers or the most promising potential officers to the UK to give them accelerated courses from which they might benefit. The Afghan police, as important in so many ways as an Afghan national army, present problems of their own. I said yesterday that we need to create a genuinely national Afghan police, but many refuse to serve outside their local communities, and when they become police in such communities it is tempting for them to become involved in corruption or extortion, or their extended families benefit. That is a real problem for a general, national Afghan police force. When I was in Camp Bastion, the first-class medical facilities that we saw at the hospital impressed me almost more than anything else. Unfortunately, we were there when several of our troops were "casevaced" back to camp. We were shown around by an excellent Royal Navy surgeon commander, who told us how many specialists one would have if one arrived at his hospital—far more, he said, than anywhere in the private sector or the NHS. I suggested that the reason why we might find so many specialists on duty there was that there were no golf courses nearby, which is where one finds most specialists in the United Kingdom when one needs one. However, they were all incredibly well trained, the hospital was immaculately clean and, I should point out, a good proportion of them were reservists. I say again to the Secretary of State and Ministers: please do not underestimate the importance of reservists in the Territorial Army. Of course, when invited to make cuts of one sort or another, the generals and those in the higher echelons of the regular armed forces will try to make cuts to the TA. That is only natural, but it is to be resisted. In my part of the world, in Lympstone, there is a commando training camp at which reservist Royal Marines are trained up to slot into positions vacated by the regulars. In the field, no distinction is made between a regular and a reservist, and that seems to be an increasing pattern in many of the other sectors of the armed forces. It is really short-sighted of us not to continue the TA training. That training is rotational; we cannot just stop and start the TA, or its soldiers will fade away and do something else. We have to keep it going. At the moment in this country we have the luxury of higher numbers of people entering our armed forces than has been the case for a long time; the same is happening, I think, in the United States. If people see on a piece of paper that Army recruitment is doing so well, I can understand why they might be tempted to run down the reservists. However, we are in the middle of a recession and that is why the figures are so high. One day we will get out of that recession and the figures will drop away. We will then rely once more on our reservists, but may very well find that they are just not there. I want to make a quick comment about those who are left behind and those who come back. The Secretary of State ended his speech by saying that we must give our armed forces the best support that we can give them on an enduring basis. Yesterday at Prime Minister's questions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) asked the Prime Minister about better facilities and monitoring for our armed forces. He said:""In the United States veterans are contacted regularly, even decades after they have served. Does the Prime Minister agree that that should happen here as well?"—[Official Report, 14 October 2009; Vol. 497, c. 290.]" Again, we are seeing reports of disproportionate numbers of people retired from the armed forces being homeless on the streets of London. York university research from 2008 has shown that on any given night there are 1,100 homeless ex-service personnel in London alone. The armed forces provide a structured environment—very often the only structured environment that many of these men and women have ever known. When that is suddenly taken away from them, they are on their own and cast into civvy street. Many of them find it extremely difficult to adjust. Additional to that is the whole issue of mental health. Between January 2003 and December 2006, 2,333 regulars and reservists who served in Iraq during Operation Telic were managed by the Defence Medical Services for mental illness attributed to their deployment. In 2007, 1,898 new referrals to the MOD's departments of community mental health were diagnosed with a mental health disorder and had served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both. The British Medical Journal reported that of those UK troops serving 13 or more months in the theatre of operations, 5.2 per cent. suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some 21.8 per cent. suffered from psychological distress and 23.9 per cent. suffered from severe alcohol problems. This month, the centre for suicide prevention at Manchester university looked at people leaving the armed forces and found that veterans were at increased risk of suicide. As part of the military covenant, the Government have made moves that I welcome. They have appointed a Minister for veterans and established Veterans day; I was proud to take part in Veterans day in my constituency. However, I still do not believe that we are doing enough to look after those men and women, who have given more than any of us in the Chamber, when they come home and have served their purpose. Underlying the military covenant should be an unspoken contract: people serving in the armed forces for whatever period will be supported during their training and service—and for the rest of their lives, if that is what they require. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, raised the question of homelessness and whether we should look to provide local authorities with a special housing allowance. I had one such case in my own constituency, where a serving soldier wanted to come to Exmouth but was registered in Bulford camp, where he had served, and it turned out that there was no extra money to get him to the top of any housing list. That is wrong: returning soldiers who want to go back to their original homes should be enabled to do that. That might mean giving some ring-fenced money to local authorities to accelerate the process. The situation in Afghanistan will continue for some time. We will no doubt be deploying more troops there, some of whom will be reservists. I again urge the Government to reconsider how we train and look after reservists and to redouble their efforts to look after those who are in need of our support when they can no longer support themselves.