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Defence Reform Bill

On new clause 6, we have all heard, in the Defence Committee and elsewhere, that the biggest disincentive to joining the Reserves, of whichever service, is getting time off work. These are the words of the Secretary of State’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt):

“a lot of reservists find it difficult to get time off for deployment or training courses”.—[Official Report, 23 April 2013; Vol. 561, c. 273WH.]

I am sorry that she is not in her place today. Perhaps she is training. [Interruption.] She is away on a course and we wish her all the best. Even the Secretary of State’s PPS has acknowledged that this is a huge challenge.

The White Paper sets out an ambitious goal of increasing the annual training requirement to 40 days, and I think Members on all sides of the House recognise the importance of that. I hope the Secretary of State will support new clause 6—his Liberal Democrat colleagues will, for reasons I will explain in a moment—because it seeks to provide a simple way to address that goal: Reservists

would receive an additional two weeks unpaid leave from their employer, provided that their firms had more than 50 employees. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) made the point that we have to careful about the impact on small and medium-sized enterprises, and it is right that we provide protection to smaller companies. The proposal is sensible and measured, because Reservists will receive their military pay at no cost to their employer. In the rare cases of resistance from an employer, we propose that complaints are referred to an employment tribunal for arbitration.

I must confess that I am confident that the Liberal Democrats will vote for new clause 6 because the idea was originally developed by them and was passed at their party conference only seven weeks ago. I suspect that the former Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), has had a large hand in writing their defence policy, and that, in the regrettable and unforeseen event of there being a Division, he will vote for the new clause.