Air Cadet Organisation and Gliding

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Julian Brazier)]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) for giving me some of her thinking in advance of the debate and I congratulate her on securing it. I am also grateful to other colleagues who have spoken. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is coming to see me shortly about the situation in Northern Ireland, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Byron Davies) has just been to see me about the situation in Wales. I have been looking particularly closely at those two specific issues.

[Byron Davies (Gower) (Con)]

On the issue in Wales, the Government are expecting young people to travel at least three and a half hours from west Wales all the way to Gloucestershire to have the experience of flight. There is some talk about synthetic flight, but that in no way compensates for the thrill of flight when young people are being introduced to flying.

[Mr Brazier]

If I may, I will come back to my hon. Friend’s intervention towards the end of my speech.

In November, I had the privilege of watching the cadets from 1838 (Elm Park) Squadron—it is based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster—march proudly alongside the Royal British Legion at the Lords Mayor’s show. They are great ambassadors for the air cadet corps and for the future of the Royal Air Force. It is a sobering thought that some of the pilots who saved this country in the battle of Britain were the same age as some of the oldest cadets. Since I took over as Minister for cadets last autumn, I have been lucky enough to visit air cadet units from places as far apart as Perthshire and south London, and I have been consistently impressed by the cadets’ spirit of adventure, leadership and good citizenship skills and by the quality and dedication of their instructors.

Let us be clear that the recent restructuring of air cadet gliding is not a cost-cutting exercise. The Air Cadet Organisation remains hugely valued and the Royal Air Force is fully committed to offering flying training to all air cadets. My hon. Friend acknowledged that an in-depth audit of glider engineering in 2014 made it clear that the Vigilant and Viking fleets were not airworthy. The decline in numbers that she referred to reflects the fact that for nearly two years there has been no gliding in the air cadets. Indeed, almost half the air cadets I met recently at a 75th anniversary celebration event had not been in the air at all.

The blunt truth is that we were unable to find a sufficiently reliable contractor with the capacity to take on the bulk of the Vigilant fleet. Faced with no viable option but to draw it right down in the way that my hon. Friend described, we are increasing spending to get almost all the Viking gliders back into service, as well as offering an uplift of more than 50% in air experience flights. In addition, we can offer some excellent synthetic training through the generosity of the RAF Charitable Trust, to which I am most grateful. Let me reassure hon. Members that, following my recent announcement on the relaunch of air cadet gliding, we will get back to a position where all air cadets across the country have the opportunity to fly gliders and to participate in Grob Tutor air experience flights.