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Armed Forces: Future Defence Policy

My Lords, as a former commanding officer of a Territorial Army regiment, and a member of its executive council, I will focus on the recently announced and then reversed TA training cuts, which were mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, and other noble Lords. TA soldiers have recently seen more active service than most regular servicemen during the Cold War. They have had the added pressure of removal from their civilian employment for up to a year at a time—often, as my noble friend Lady Seccombe said, with destabilising personal consequences. I ask noble Lords to consider the feelings that rebounded around TA centres across the country when the recent cuts were announced. No briefing of any sort had been given to senior officers to enable them to manage the inevitable outcry. The feelings were of anger, frustration, betrayal and deep disappointment. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Sheikh for his words on this today. More damaging in the long term is the fact that, even now, there is a complete lack of guidance on what funding will be available beyond April next year. In view of the serious damage to confidence, which has by no means been repaired by the reversal of the latest cuts, a confirmation on that point from the Minister, for whom I have the highest admiration, is urgently needed. It does not seem to be widely understood but, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, said, those £20 million of cuts, which have since been reversed, came on top of TA cuts of £23 million, announced in the summer, which have not been reversed. Those cuts had already resulted in training being reduced to a weekend every other month instead of the necessary weekend every month. I understand that the cuts that have been reversed arose because the Regular Army, for which I have unbounded admiration, ran out of funding, having recruited more regular recruits than expected. Yet everyone knew that we were going into a recession and that, therefore, recruiting would increase. This should have been seen a year ago and budgeted for then, so what were the Government doing? On 19 October, Bob Ainsworth said in another place: ""Nobody in the TA will lose out on the training that is necessary for deployments to Afghanistan".—[Official Report, Commons, 19/10/09; col. 656.]" The Government were suggesting that, in stopping TA training, they could still arrange that those TA soldiers to be deployed would get the necessary training with the regular units that they would accompany to Afghanistan. That suggestion is completely disingenuous. Someone to be mobilised in mid-January would receive no more TA training for nearly three months. This gap would be so much longer for those selected for mobilisation in July 2010. The reality is that pre-deployment training with a regular unit vitally assumes that there has been continuous ongoing training prior to mobilisation, so that only trained TA soldiers with a high degree of readiness enter upon it. You cannot just put on a uniform, pick up your rifle and expect to start pre-deployment training, because you will be training alongside fully trained regular soldiers. It might be argued that a TA soldier can get himself fit, but he would not have access to a modern TA gym, the competitive benefits of doing it alongside his comrades or the advice of the physical training instructors that he ought to expect. As for shooting, a skill that the Government might be surprised to hear is somewhat important in war, it is inconceivable that one could expect him not to have handled a weapon recently, let alone done some fairly challenging shooting to ensure that his skills were absolutely at the top level before he joined his regular unit. The exact same must of course be said of first aid and the myriad other vital military skills. These things simply cannot be dropped for several months before being picked up again shortly before deployment into one of the most dangerous places in the world. Cutting TA training is a breach of the Government’s duty of care to their TA soldiers. This is a time bomb that is now ticking. Of course it will affect operations; to pretend otherwise is complete folly. Furthermore, the TA is not just an amorphous group of people who appear when needed on their own as if by osmosis. It is an organisation; it needs management, leadership, training and administration. New TA soldiers need to be recruited and senior TA soldiers are needed to train them. The TA does not just stop when it stops training, yet that was what the cuts demanded. Putting this damage right will cost so much more than the saving, at the very moment when the TA is as good as it has been since the Second World War. There seems to be a complete lack of perspective in the Government. It is worth considering the paltriness of a saving of £23 million in the wake of the release of Bernard Gray’s report—the Minister and others have mentioned it—which says that the Government are wasting hundreds of millions of pounds a year in defence procurement. The TA cuts were a drop in the bucket. If as a country we are convinced of the philosophy of the citizen soldier forming an integral part of our fighting force, as has been shown to be so successful, then we must never again see its funding raided to stop a short-term gap in Regular Forces funding. We must ensure that this sorry episode is not repeated and, like my noble friend Lord Sheikh, I look to the Minister for urgent assurance on this. There has been much talk in recent years of the military covenant—something that I think is extremely important. The nub of my contribution today is that the TA covenant has not just been broken, it has been smashed. So I am speaking for the whole of the Territorial Army when I say of the Government: we have fought their wars, we have taken our share of casualties, we have done everything they asked of us; we have not challenged the wisdom of their actions or questioned their morals or judgment, we have not overspent our budgets, yet they thank us like this. They do not know what leadership is.