Armed Forces: Reserves

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Earl Attlee

Thursday 21st June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, like all contributors to this debate, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, for bringing this important issue this afternoon.

Much of this debate has focused on the issues of recruitment and training, and perhaps we have not spent as much time as might have been desirable focusing on the actual contribution that the reserves make. Obviously there were a few notable exceptions, particularly the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and my noble friend Lord Burnett talked about some practical examples where the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and the Royal Marines Reserve have made particular contributions.

Almost everyone speaking today has a particular interest to declare in terms of having served in the reserves or the regular military. I stand here slightly as an impostor because I may be the only speaker—although I suspect this may be true of the Minister also—who is not ex-military. I have some experience, not of going out to see the reserves on a Saturday morning, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, talked about, but of doing the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme for almost three years. So I have a bit of a sense of some of the issues, and that occasionally includes talking to reserves. I am also part of the committee on military education for the east of England, and here the fact that the noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, talked about the university royal naval units brings in a link between the university and OTC aspects and the reserve units. I thought I would mention that not quite as an interest but to express a point that I want to come back to.

We have heard about a lot of issues regarding recruitment, and the Urgent Question that was repeated immediately before this debate mentioned Capita. The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, mentioned the difficulties of recruitment and the fact that at some point last year a whole five months went by when there did not appear to be anyone coming through the pipeline. Can the Minister tell us what progress has been made in improving reserve recruitment, not just in ensuring that appropriate information is given to people who wish to join the reserves but, in particular, in how the medicals are dealt with?

There are particular problems about the medicals that are delivered for reserves—and this is where I bring in the universities as well. If you apply to be part of the OTC, your university royal naval unit or your university air squadron, you are faced with a medical where you are expected to meet the same standards as if you were going to join the Royal Marines as a regular. There may be some questions about whether that is appropriate, but even if those standards should be maintained, whether you are going to be in a university unit or a reserve or a full-time regular, there are a set of issues that are rather different for reserves and for university OTCs. Capita has been told, “These are the standards”, and that no flexibility or discretion is ever used. If you are joining the regulars, you will have a medical with an Army, Navy or Air Force medic. If you are trying to join the reserves, you may go to your own doctor but you may be sent to a Capita doctor. If you say, “Yes, I had a Ventolin inhaler when I was a child”, that automatically leads them to say, “You can’t join the services”. You may be able to put in for an appeal, but that can take months.

If you are joining as a reserve, are you going to keep coming back to do the medicals again? That is not efficient or conducive to ensuring that people who think they want to be reserves really feel that the military is taking them seriously. That is not the fault of the military; it is the fault of the recruitment process, and it may be an issue to do with the contract. I ask the Minister to tell the House whether the contract has recently been looked at, what questions Capita is told to ask and whether they could be reviewed.

That would also fit with the fact that reserves, in particular, may be doing specified jobs, as noble Lords have mentioned. That may mean not needing to be deployed in the field to Iraq or Afghanistan in the way that we would expect regulars to do. They may have particular activities for which they are responsible. Do they necessarily need to meet the same standards of health on attempting to join the reserves as an 18 year-old joining the military full-time for the first time?

If we have sought to increase the recruitment of reserves, it would be helpful if the Minister could tell the House, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, suggested, what percentage of new reserves are fully trained beyond phase 1. At the moment, there is a real danger that the Government will say, “We have recruited 90% of our 2019 target, so everything is fine”, but if many of them are only phase 1 trained, will they actually be deployable? The House of Lords Library briefing reminds us that the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, Nia Griffith, suggested that that was artificially inflating the recruitment figures, to which the response was that the,

“figures now more accurately represent the reality on the ground, following a decision to allow for phase 1 trained personnel to be more widely deployed, such as in response to natural disasters”.

That might be fine if it did not also seem to be the case that the reserves are supposed to be filling a gap when full-time regulars are being reduced. Are the Government trying to square a circle that is not squarable? Are they trying to say, on the one hand, that reserves will maintain the numbers of our Armed Forces but, at the same time, they do not need to be trained to the same level? Is that not a real danger to the security of our country? What are the Government expecting from the reserves, how far do they really believe in a whole force understanding of the military and how are they delivering it?

There has been a lot of talk of training and retention and the two things going together. If you are in the reserves, you may want to be deployed, but you also want meaningful training. Can the Minister say whether the provisions in place for the reserves are adequate and whether they have been reviewed recently? We have heard the slightly different things from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, about the expectations. The noble Viscount suggested that the requirements for Air Force Auxiliary training were essentially too long and related to requirements for 100 years ago. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, seemed to suggest that the Army Reserve needs rather more training. Has any of this been looked at?

[Earl Attlee]

My noble friend Lord Trenchard is actually quite right. I am talking about initial training. When you start your military career, your reservist career, you need to do a longer period of training, but when you are more experienced and doing different roles, you might not need to do the continuous training.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

I am most grateful to the noble Earl for that clarification.

I conclude, following the call by my noble friend Lord Burnett and various other noble Lords, with the hope that there is no truth in the Financial Times article this morning that somehow the Prime Minister is asking the Secretary of State to think again about whether the United Kingdom should be a tier 1 country. I hope that the Minister can reassert that the Government understand that their primary duty is the security of the realm.

Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Earl Attlee

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments, particularly to Amendment 8 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Jolly. My comments will be very much in line with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig. In Committee, the Minister said:

“I am not in a position today to give any undertakings on the substance of this issue, but I undertake to reflect further on the matter in a constructive way ahead of Report”.—[Official Report, 12/9/17; col. GC 85]


If constructive reflection has occurred, it has not been visible in the form of any government amendment. Could the Minister explain to the House why no government amendment has been forthcoming and, in the absence of that, why noble Lords should not accept either the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, or that of my noble friend Lady Jolly?

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, to answer the noble Baroness, I suspect we are going to find out very shortly.

An essential characteristic of any good parliamentarian is curiosity, so I can understand why many noble Lords would like to debate the first relevant new Defence Council Instructions before they are implemented. However, in the future it may become apparent that it would be appropriate to make a slight amendment to the regulations concerning flexible working in order to make them work better, be fairer to service personnel or for some other desirable reason. Unfortunately, no such amendment is likely to be made unless it is absolutely essential. The reason is that, thanks to these amendments, an affirmative order will be needed and the MoD will simply not bother with it—it is just too much trouble, unless it is absolutely essential.

Why, then, is my noble friend likely to acquiesce to these amendments? The answer is that he will have told his officials that they have only one shot and they must get the regulations right first time. In short, my noble friend probably thinks that no amendments to the regulations will be needed for a long time, so it does not really matter. Unfortunately, these amendments would make the parliamentary scrutiny of Section 329 of the Armed Forces Act entirely inconsistent, as recognised by your Lordships’ DPRRC’s first report. The fact that a power is novel—in other words, innovative and broad—does not necessarily mean that it should attract the affirmative procedure; what really matters is if there was likely to be any difficulty with it.

The Bill and the subsequent regulations under Section 329 provide flexibility for service personnel, and that can only be positive for them as it will enable certain of them to continue to serve when otherwise they would have to consider leaving the services. However, any of these regulations under the Bill will attract the affirmative procedure.

Contrast the flexible working provisions that we are talking about with, for instance, Section 329(2)(d), which I suspect enables Defence Council regulations to impose golden handcuffs on a service person in exchange for attending a desirable course. For instance, if a soldier has completed his minimum term of service, he or she might want to be considered for training as a helicopter pilot. Quite understandably, the MoD would want to prevent that new pilot from leaving for civvy street immediately after qualification—hence the need for the golden handcuffs. But what if the MoD is experiencing a shortage of helicopter pilots? As far as I can see, the Defence Council could retrospectively increase the period for the golden handcuffs. However, these regulations, which could be very tough, are made under the negative procedure.

If we accept these amendments—as I expect we will—not only will we make the parliamentary scrutiny of Section 329 of the Armed Forces Act entirely inconsistent but we will be getting ourselves deep into the weeds. Apparently, the MoD is considering whether two landing platform docks should be taken out of service, while your Lordships want to look at the minutiae of flexible working for a few service personnel. If we can trust Ministers and the Defence Council to make really difficult strategic or operational decisions, sometimes on a very short timescale, I think that we can safely allow them to amend the original flexible working regulations on their own.

Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Earl Attlee

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 12th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord’s forbearance with my amendment. I have some slightly difficult personal circumstances which mean that I have not been able to prepare quite as well as I would like, and therefore I shall not speak to my Amendment 18.

If these two proposed new subsections to affect the main clauses in the Bill were part of the wider quinquennial Armed Forces Bill, would we look at them in such great detail? I think that if we are honest, we would say probably not. I can understand the thinking of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in recommending the affirmative procedure. The committee rightly recognises that your Lordships will want to look closely at the detail. However, as drafted I believe that even the most minor amendment in the future would have to be debated by both Houses, and I am not convinced that that would be a good use of parliamentary time. Worse still, a situation may arise where some minor change is desirable but the change is delayed, or even worse not made at all, because of the effort required. Noble Lords should be aware that putting an affirmative order through Parliament is not an exercise in rubber stamping; it is a complicated process. Would it not be better to use the affirmative procedure for the first set of regulations and then revert to the negative procedure for subsequent amendments? I wonder whether the noble Lord would like to consider that.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 18 tabled in my name and to Amendment 6 which is tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig. The amendments are similar. In contrast to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, we believe that it is important that Parliament should play its full role in legislation. If the Defence Council is to have new powers conferred on it, it would be appropriate to make an affirmative decision rather than use a negative instrument. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, took the words out of my mouth. I was in this Room last week taking part in a debate about reporting on the process of Brexit. The issues being discussed included questions about the role that Parliament plays in that. The Henry VIII clauses which are in the EU withdrawal Bill cover a bigger set of issues, but the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has asked, “If these clauses were part of a bigger Bill, would we be bothered about them?”. Perhaps not, but that is not the point. At the moment there seems to be a tendency on the part of Her Majesty’s Government to say, “If the Government have an idea, it should be accepted without any amendment or scrutiny”. It is important that your Lordships’ House and Parliament as a whole play their part in scrutinising legislation, and it is right that this should be done through the affirmative procedure.

On reports, the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, reminded us that there now is information; I am grateful to the Minister for ensuring over the summer that further information was provided regarding the sort of questions we were looking for. As my noble friend Lady Jolly said, Amendment 4 was a probing amendment, but obviously, the more information that can be given and made available to people and the more detail we have, the greater the opportunity for this to be successful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, in those halcyon days when I was an Opposition Front Bench spokesman, I would have been proud to have tabled any of these amendments, something I did many times. I leave it to the Minister to say whether they are a good idea, but I draw the Committee’s attention to Amendment 15, which has not yet been spoken to, although it is in the grouping.

We need to know how many servicemen are taking advantage of these provisions, because otherwise the stats on the strength of the Armed Forces are to an extent meaningless. Perhaps the frequency of the report is too great but I would like some reassurance from the Minister that we will know, from time to time, how many members of the Armed Forces take up flexible working.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, I will also speak briefly to Amendment 15. Picking up on the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, it is hugely important that we have clarity on what percentage of our Armed Forces are working full-time and what percentage part-time. At Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, frequently asked whether this was a cost-saving measure. While we listened respectfully to the Minister and understand that it is not a cost-saving exercise, the question is whether, if a significant number of our Armed Forces are working on a part-time basis, there may be a cost saving, but equally a loss in capability. Having this basic information will be important in giving us a sense of whether we are up to full strength. If there were significant numbers of people working part-time, would there be a necessity to create new part-time or full-time posts equivalent to the time that they are not working—up to 40%?