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Defence Reform Bill

I will make some progress, because I have very little time, and I want to respond to some of the points made during the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) made an extremely important point that I fear was nearly missed. One could be forgiven for thinking that the recruitment of Reserves as part of Army 2020 is simply a question of backfilling or substituting for Regulars, but he pointed out that as the nature of warfare changes and we need more specialist skills, we will find increasingly that specialists have to be recruited through the Reserves from the civilian sector. With the creation of our cyber-reserve force, we are already seeing the truth of that statement, as people in highly skilled technical jobs in the private sector queue to join the cyber-reserve and offer their skills and expertise to the defence of our nation.

I am the first to acknowledge—I have done so before, and I want to do so again today—that increasing the size of our Reserve Army forces to 30,000 and sustaining them at that level is a challenging agenda. We are doing it in the face of ending combat operations in Afghanistan, and however strange some people may find this, the prospect of going into a combat zone is a huge recruiting sergeant for the armed forces, Regular and Reserve alike. We are also doing it against the backdrop, about which I have been completely frank, of challenges with the existing IT system.

We have to get the balance right between our central recruiting system and the vital role played by Reserve units in mentoring new recruits. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) was absolutely right that the key to converting applicants into recruits and getting them through the training process is to get hold of them early at unit level and mentor them through that process. That is what we are doing.

5.45 pm

Across this agenda, there are dozens of work strands. The top echelon of the Army is completely engaged in this agenda. The top civil servants in the Department are completely focused on delivering this agenda. Countless pilots are under way to trial different approaches in different parts of the country to determine what is the most effective way not just to recruit Reservists, but to convert them to trained strength as rapidly as possible.