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Defence Reform Bill

I hope that the Secretary of State will respond to that point, because in an earlier intervention I asked the question to get to the heart of that aspect.

I am concerned about the message that would be sent to our allies, both NATO allies and the United States, if Parliament halted or interfered with the recruitment drive that the Bill is designed to enable. The redundancy notices for the Regulars have already gone out, so it is clear that there is no quid pro quo and that we cannot stop this plan and keep the Regular forces at the size we

would allow. The Bill allows a method of influencing, and indeed improving, recruitment, through the relationships with employers and so forth.

On the capability gap, an important question was asked: how will the wider world perceive that? Any pause in the recruitment of Reservists would be dangerous, because the TA is at a lower state of readiness. The idea is to replace 20,000 Regulars with 30,000 Reservists. Are they the same? No, of course they are not, but that raises the question of what world we are now working with.

I was interested in what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said. He touched on some of the concerns about how the conduct of war is changing. I asked those on the Opposition Front Bench to say exactly what it is, with our withdrawing from Afghanistan and reducing in size, to have a standing commitment, and what the armed forces, however they are comprised, will actually do, because the balance between war fighting, stabilisation and peacekeeping has changed. The idea that we have to win over local support is now more central than it ever has been. Infrastructure, development, local governance and the drive for agriculture have all been mentioned. All that is secondary to the war fighting that takes place, but in Afghanistan and Iraq the war fighting was conducted and completed relatively quickly. We lost in those cases in the peacekeeping and nation-building. That is where it is very interesting to see the TA provide value, because it has the linguistic skills and can come in when skills in banking, cyber-technology, civil service and governance are required.