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Future of the Territorial Army

I declare that I was a Territorial Army soldier. I was commissioned in 1980 and left in 1992 as a rifle commander. I was part of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and was incredibly proud of my time in the Territorial Army. I did not do it for money or because I wanted to become a major in the Army. I did not do it because I saw it as a grandiose way of furthering myself. I did it because I felt that it mattered. I had another life, and at the weekends I dropped my family and did my job. Two weeks of the year I went off and trained. I went to Germany, Gibraltar, America and Canada. What was I doing in these places? I was not on jollies; I was helping out the Regular Army. That is what the TA is. When I joined, there was an A4 poster showing two soldiers in the old tin-pot helmets and with the old self-loading rifles and bayonets, and the slogan was, "If you were the Russians, could you tell which was the TA?" The answer is no, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you could not, any more than you can today. When those soldiers go out anywhere in the world, unless you know from the shoulder flash that they are from a Territorial unit, or unless you ask them, you cannot tell the difference, and the difference certainly does not bother the enemy, as has been proven time and time again. However, the problem is that we have seen change being made to the TA, which has never been good. I remember my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), when he was a special adviser to the then Secretary of State, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), changing the rules for employers so that people could be deployed. We have come an enormous way in getting the TA out, but the most crucial part of being in the TA was not being there for the weekends; rather, it was that people could train with those men. What will disappear faster than anything else is the coherence of the formed unit. The Rifles have just been out in Afghanistan. What made their tour successful was training together. The people in the Rifles joined together, commissioned together and went through the battle camps together. They were there together. I was interested to hear the Secretary of State say that the programme would be put back as quickly as possible, but we have troops training all the time to go. Even specialists in the Territorial Army train as formed units, and they go as formed units. If we send a trooper out—I will give the Minister an example in a second—without knowing that unit or the blokes behind it, we will have problems. I have experience of that from 1990, when my regiment was in Germany, mech training—in other words, in armoured cars. The Gulf war came along, and the 3rd Battalion the Fusiliers was told that it was being deployed, but it did not have the men. We were in Aachen, where we were rung up and asked, "Could you supply a company of troops immediately?" The colonel came and said, "I need roughly 150 men to go to Iraq." We were only on a two-week camp. The blokes put their hands up almost to a man to go with the battalion—and the Minister will remember that that battalion had a friendly fire incident in the Gulf war. Those men did not shirk; they went out. The reason why the colonel could do that was that the men in that unit knew each other. They could join the battalion because they knew what they would have to do. The company commanders who were there at the time said that they were superb. In fact, Lord Bramall recently quoted an officer who said at the time, "Thank goodness for the Territorial Army." We make the difference when the difference is required. However, it goes beyond that. When we go to remembrance parades and see the lords lieutenant doing their thing, or when we see events in our constituencies—we all have the same thing—who is augmenting the regulars? It is the Territorials on parade, because we do not have the resources. Not only are the Territorials the public face of the military a lot of the time, because the troops are away doing other things, but they are the face of recruiting. Let us be honest: the reason why we are recruiting at the moment is the recession. That happened in the '90s, too, when recruiting went up. People will join because they cannot get jobs elsewhere, but that will not last.