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Defence Reform Bill

The right hon. Gentleman is flying another kite. I am not making that commitment at all. We support the thrust of the reforms to the Regular

Army and the uplift in Reserves, but new clause 3 seeks to obtain a proper understanding of whether the reform is working, whether it is saving money, whether it is offering value for money and what is happening with the recruitment targets. We need much more clarity and openness about all those things. The Defence Secretary can say that these are spending pledges or things we do not know. He can attack the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay for not properly understanding the reform. However, he needs to address what is being said rather than what he thinks we are saying, and that is the whole point.

We talk about allowing adequate uplift in the Reserves to meet the shortfall, and we heard from the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox). He remarked only last month:

“When I was secretary of state, I said we would only decrease the numbers of regulars when we had guarantees that we would be able to get the numbers—training and equipping up of the reserves—to match.”

Members of the armed forces and of this House deserve to know from the Defence Secretary when that policy changed and why.

We support new clause 3 because we want the Defence Secretary to take more responsibility for these reforms. We consider it better to pause until the MOD has managed to get recruitment back on track as a plan accepted by Parliament than to be forced to ditch the entire reform a few years down the line when it is clear that it is not working. A pause before progressing the reforms would give him time to fix the problems, to provide us with the figures, to prove his plan is cost-effective and to show that he can meet the time frame he has set.