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Defence Reform Bill

I am grateful for that intervention. I hope that it would not be a career-damaging move if I called the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) my hon. Friend, because I have had the pleasure of serving with him on the Defence Committee for the past

three years. That is a perfectly reasonable suggestion and I am sorry that the Secretary of State has not offered that option.

There is genuine good will on both sides of the House. The armed forces and the defence of the realm are not issues that should be party political. This has been a good debate so far because we have managed, on the whole, to keep party politics out of it.

I agree with the Chairman of the Defence Committee about the growing value of cyber-warfare. When the Defence Committee visited the United States earlier this year, we went to cyber command and saw at first hand the key role that is being played by Reservists. I think that Members on both sides of the House would agree that we need more Reservist like those coming through.

The problem is that the bald facts show that we are not recruiting sufficient reservists. When the generals appeared before the Defence Committee earlier this year, they said that we needed to recruit 6,000 Reservists annually. I am sure that the Secretary of State has the most up-to-date figures, but I doubt whether a huge number of Reservists have been recruited in the past few days. We are clearly falling short and we have been falling short for years. This is not just a teething problem; it is an ongoing problem.

As the Chief of the General Staff has said, there is no plan B on this project. It is therefore crucial that we get it right. At the moment—I say this in a genuinely bipartisan manner—the Government are not on track to meet these important targets. It is entirely sensible for the House to ask for a pause so that the Government can get back on track. The excellent observation was made earlier that that would help to focus minds. Having robust targets and the threat of a pause hanging over the Ministry of Defence might get it to pull the finger out.

The point on which I disagree gently with the hon. Member for Canterbury is that the problem until now has been that the Regular generals have been siphoning off the money. They have not made enough progress.