Armed Forces

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for providing this opportunity to discuss the role of our Armed Forces. I also thank the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, for his powerful and very clear maiden speech, which contained some important messages for us all.

This debate has been welcome and relevant. In a year of key and moving anniversaries of both the First World War and the Second World War, Armed Forces Day is nearly upon us. It is a day which provides us with an opportunity to remember and highlight the immense role that the members of our Armed Forces have played and continue to play in the life of our nation, defending us and protecting and furthering our national interests, all too often at great personal cost.

This debate is also relevant because of the major changes taking place, or about to take place, affecting our Armed Forces. They include the transition to Army 2020 with its reduction in the size of the Regular Forces and an increase in the Reserve Forces, the imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan, the implementation of the basing review, and the potential impact of the considerations that will determine the direction and content of the next strategic defence and security review—a pending review that should not, like the 2010 review, be driven almost exclusively by the amount of money available rather than by a determination of our strategic objectives and requirements, with the role, size and capability of our Armed Forces being geared to delivering those objectives.

We believe that Britain can play a positive role in the international community and that to withdraw from the world is not just undesirable but impossible. However, we also think that the United Kingdom should be realistic because there are no gains to be made from promising what cannot be delivered. Continued fiscal restraint at the Ministry of Defence requires a more enhanced understanding of what can and what cannot be achieved alone. We know that we must strengthen and deepen our partnerships with existing allies, and seek to cultivate new ones if we are to achieve our strategic objectives. We are also committed to the minimum credible nuclear deterrent which we believe is best delivered through a continuous at-sea deterrent and we will continue to look at ways in which that minimum credible deterrent can be delivered most efficiently.

One of the main priorities of the 2010 SDSR was to ensure that we emerge with a coherent defence capability in 2020. In their foreword to the review the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister said that they were determined to retain a significant well equipped Army in the context of a review that provided for a reduction in manpower over the following five years of 7,000, from 102,000 to 95,000, with a stated assumption that by 2020 we would require an Army of 94,000 personnel, a Royal Navy of 29,000 personnel and an RAF of 31,500 personnel. The reduction in the strength of the Army would enable savings to be made of £5.3 billion over the 10 years from 2011-12 to 2020-21. However, this was subsequently changed downwards to a Regular Army of 82,500, which is a reduction of a further 11,500 or some 160% of the reduction of 7,000 set out only a few months previously in the SDSR.

The 2010 SDSR set out the new defence planning assumptions that envisage that our Armed Forces in the future would be sized and shaped to conduct an enduring stablisation operation at around brigade level—up to 6,500 personnel—with maritime and air support as required while also conducting one non-enduring complex intervention, with up to 2,000 personnel, and one non-enduring simple intervention, with up to 1,000 personnel; or alternatively, three non-enduring operations if we were not already engaged in an enduring operation; or for a limited time, and with sufficient warning, committing all our effort to a one-off intervention of up to three brigades, with maritime and air support—around 30,000, two-thirds of the force deployed to Iraq in 2003.

That is what was in the 2010 SDSR when the reduction in the Army was stated as being from 102,000 to 95,000. The subsequent reduction a few months later was made on cost grounds alone, not because of any change in the defence planning assumptions. The deadline for completing redundancies was also brought forward. It was originally 2017-18, but was brought forward by the Ministry of Defence to 2015-16, because, according to the National Audit Office, of further demands on the budget requiring the department to make staffing savings earlier. The question is that with the further reduction in the size of our Armed Forces going considerably beyond that set out in the 2010 SDSR, can the capabilities set out in the defence planning assumptions at the time, which have never been changed, still be delivered now and in 2015, and can they still be delivered through to 2020 without any increase in the size of our Armed Forces, and in particular the Army?

The recent National Audit Office report on Army 2020 contains some interesting information and robust views. It makes it clear that it does not examine whether Army 2020 will provide enough military capability for the Army to meet its required defence outputs which presumably are those set out in the 2010 SDSR. That is why I am asking this question of the Minister in the light of what has happened since the 2010 SDSR and the critical report from the National Audit Office.

When told in 2011 to make further savings of £5.3 billion, the department produced a programme of change and restructuring which led to Army 2020. Eight options to achieve the required savings were produced by the department, and a panel of senior military personnel selected three of the eight options for further development. However, the panel subsequently decided that none of the shortlist of three options avoided unacceptable risk to the Armed Forces’ ability to deliver the defence outputs required by the 2010 strategic defence and security review. In other words, the department had managed to put forward eight options in a bid to secure the Treasury-demanded savings, none of which would have enabled the Armed Forces to deliver the capabilities required in the Government’s 2010 SDSR.

Instead, a hybrid option was settled on which included a Regular Army supplemented by Reserve Forces, as well as proposals for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. In the words of the National Audit Office report, the panel,

“decided that the option would give enough capability, compared with the three rejected options, to provide the required defence outputs and offered a tolerable level of military risk”.

That was hardly an enthusiastic or ringing endorsement of the option.

Why the reference to the comparison with the “three rejected options”? If it is an acceptable option only when compared with three that have been rejected, it raises questions about exactly what capability the hybrid option actually does deliver. What exactly is a,

“tolerable level of military risk”,

as opposed to an acceptable level of military risk? They cannot mean the same.

The National Audit Office report goes on to tell us:

“The panel did not consider whether recruiting and training the increased number of reserves was feasible as part of its assessment, or whether the requirement for reserves to undertake a substantially different role in a smaller Army would have an impact on recruitment”.

Whether the panel or someone else should have undertaken the exercise is not the question, but rather the fact that according to the National Audit Office no one did it. Presumably that means that the Secretary of State did not ask for that assessment to be made before agreeing to proceed with the hybrid option.

The National Audit Office report says:

“We have not seen evidence that the feasibility of increasing the number of trained reserves within the planned timescale, needed to provide the required capability, was robustly tested”.

To say the least of it, that seems to be something of a mistake as the essence of the hybrid option was that there needed to be a significant increase in the number of reserves, particularly Army reserves, playing a substantially different and more important role. Indeed, the NAO report specifically asserts that the Ministry of Defence did not assess whether it was feasible to recruit and train the number of reserves within the necessary timescale. If that is the case, on what basis have the Government repeatedly asserted their confidence that the required number of Army reservists would be recruited to see the trained strength increase from 19,000 to 30,000?

According to the NAO report, the Secretary of State for Defence can have had no firm basis for the statement in paragraph 1.15 of his July 2013 White Paper on Reserves in the Future Force 2020 in which he said:

“We are confident that the targets can be met”.

That statement was a statement of hope and nothing more, yet the ability of our Armed Forces to deliver the 2010 defence planning assumptions is dependent on it being achieved.

The National Audit Office report also found that recruitment targets for reserves were not underpinned by robust data and that even the working model the department now has for reserves, which contains limited historical data, suggests that it could be 2025, as my noble friend Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde has already pointed out, before the trained strength of the reserves is increased to 30,000. That assessment, said the National Audit Office, assumed an increase in recruitment rates for new reserves as well as an unevidenced assumption that the percentage of reserve recruits that go on to become trained strength can be increased from the current level of 34% to 55% from 2015-16.

It seems that recruitment is falling behind. Just under 2,000 reserve soldiers were recruited in 2013-14 against a December 2012 Army demand plan requirement of 6,000, and just under 3,200 Regular Army training places were unfilled in 2013-14 from a planned allocation of 9,382 places.

It is not clear what the Government’s attitude is towards the reserves and the increase in the number of trained Army reserves to 30,000. The Government have repeatedly said that the rundown in the size of the Regular Army is not conditional on an increase in the size of the reserves being achieved, even though delivering Army 2020 involves recruiting, training and integrating an increased number of reserves into a single Army. Yet the hybrid option with its “tolerable”—not acceptable—level of military risk is dependent on that increase in the number of reserves being achieved.

I come back to the question that the NAO report did not address: namely, whether our Armed Forces, and the Army in particular, can currently meet now and in 2015, as well as in the future under Army 2020, the defence output set out in the defence planning assumptions in the 2010 strategic defence and security review. The reality is that since those defence planning assumptions appeared in the cost-reduction driven 2010 SDSR, the intended size of the Regular Army has been reduced by a further 11,500, from 94,000 to 82,500. A deliberately untested and unassessed objective of a projected increase in the size of our Reserve Army has fallen well behind schedule and a senior military panel has described the present hybrid option, even if achieved through the increase in trained reserves, as offering not an acceptable level of military risk but only a tolerable one. The conclusion must be that, at the very best, the Government, through their own actions, have placed the ability of our Armed Forces to deliver the defence outputs the Government set out in the SDSR in 2010 in jeopardy, both now and under Army 2020. Frankly, to try to maintain otherwise in the light of the further reductions in the strength of our regular forces, and the continuing failure to achieve the required recruitment levels to our Army Reserve Forces without making any changes to the defence planning assumptions lacks real credibility.

Of course it is possible, although contrary to everything the Government have been saying, that in the 2010 SDSR the Ministry of Defence made provision at a time of austerity for the size and cost of our Armed Forces to be considerably larger than was actually needed to deliver the defence outputs provided for in the SDSR. If that is the case, can the Minister confirm that such an overprovision at a time of austerity was an intended part of the 2010 SDSR? The National Audit Office has done a useful job in throwing some light on what was actually going on at the time of the SDSR and what has been going on since. It indicates that the Secretary of State is somewhat removed from his image as a safe pair of hands. The significance of the next SDSR, and the need to ensure that the demands we place on our Armed Forces, who do not let us down, are matched by the resources we provide for them to meet those demands, cannot be overstated.