Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I and these Benches wish to join in the sincere condolences to the families and friends of Private Martin Bell, Ranger David Dalzell, Warrant Officer Class 2 Colin Beckett, Private Lewis Hendry and Private Conrad Lewis. Like, I am sure, everyone in the House, I share the sentiments of the Minister about the grave impact that these operations are having not just on those who die but on those who are seriously injured. They put themselves in harm's way on our behalf.

Yesterday, the Opposition chose not to take a Statement on Afghanistan because we are working in a largely bipartisan way with the Government on Afghanistan. I commend the Minister for the efforts that he makes to keep interested Ministers so well informed of what is happening and I decided that it was inappropriate to take the time of the House on that issue. I can assure noble Lords that we will continue to work with the Government on a bipartisan basis in this important area.

The same does not apply to the events of the past couple of days. I note the Statement that has been repeated in the House. I welcome the fulsome apology about the 38 warrant officers, but I note that we only deprecate the article in the Daily Telegraph. I think the Government should go further. Short of this article being a figment of the Daily Telegraph's imagination—I doubt it can be, given its usual care—the Ministry of Defence is responsible, one way or another, for a leak which will have been profoundly hurtful to the people involved. I hope that the Minister will be able to make a rather more fulsome statement in his response to this event.

What assurances can the Minister give us that this will not happen again? It is important in this difficult period that Ministers take personal responsibility for this difficult area of managing personnel, ensuring that statements are made in an orderly way, that proper discipline of information is maintained, that there is proper support and that people hear bad news from those who should be giving them bad news; for example, those in their chain of command. I hope that the Minister can go further in his assurances about how these events will be prevented from happening in the future.

However, I feel that these events are not just in themselves sad and wrong but that they are actually symptoms of the SDR. It was done too quickly. The document turned out to be a simple Treasury-forced cuts exercise. It was ragged and, if we are to believe newspaper reports, not fully worked through. It is not the job of the Opposition to lay out how we would run the country, but it is our job to comment and to hold to account. We believe that the deficit is being reduced too deeply and too fast. We fear that what we have seen over the past couple of days are symptoms of chaos occurring in the Ministry of Defence. The redundancies of which we have heard seem to have been crudely worked out, inefficient in their long-term effects and, of course, executed in a grossly insensitive way. What assurances can the Minister give us that we are not creating holes in our medium and long-term capability? What assurances can he give us that these redundancies have been thought out with the care that should have been applied to the cutting of resources in the incredibly complicated world of defence? Will he be able in future to make those cuts in a way which assures us of that all round capability?

I hope that the Minister, perhaps repeating a Statement made by the Secretary of State, will be able to come to the House in the not-too-distant future to make a Statement on that very big task: 17,000 service personnel are to go; 25,000 civil servants are to go—that is 29 per cent. Knowing, as I do from my previous experience, the sheer complexity of the Ministry of Defence, I fear for our military capability if that is not done in a thoughtful, careful way. I hope that the Minister can give us some assurance on that and some promise of a future more detailed Statement about how redundancies will occur, how they have been thought through and where they will occur.

Finally, I turn to the issue of morale. From this Government, our brave men and women have seen cuts in pensions, cuts in allowances, pay freezes, a most amazing U-turn by the Prime Minister on his commitment to put the military covenant into law and, finally, this fiasco. What is the Ministry of Defence going to do to arrest the inevitable erosion of morale that these events will have brought about?