Armed Forces Bill

Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and I start by congratulating the Government on bringing forward this Armed Forces Bill in this particular form. My noble friend the Minister has set out how the Bill strengthens the nation’s enduring covenant with armed services personnel. I thank the men and women who serve, who defend our nation and who protect our interests.

Every Armed Forces Bill is of course more than just an administrative requirement: it says something important about what the country stands for. This current Bill is an opportunity to modernise, strengthen and improve. As has inevitably been noted, the Bill arrives alongside the defence investment plan. Whatever the level of noise around that plan, there is no denying that this Government have already shown that they are prepared to make hard choices to invest in defence and that there must be even more, even harder choices to come. Meanwhile, against a background of growing global instability, the Government are acting decisively, with money attached, to begin to shore up our defence capabilities to meet present and future external threats.

Fundamentally, the Bill is about the people who defend us and I hope that one of its effects will be to help with recruitment, retention and morale. The Bill builds on the big pay increases, better housing, expanded childcare and the more flexible offer of service that the Government have already brought in. As my noble friend the Minister detailed in his introduction, the Bill deepens the legal force of the covenant, stretches obligations across government, improves the service justice system with better protection for victims and, as several noble Lords referred to, establishes the new defence housing service, backed by £9 billion over the next decade. We cannot honourably carry on expecting people to go off to risk their lives if they do not have a decent home.

Like many other noble Lords, I take every opportunity to encourage young people to consider joining the armed services. To a young person considering service, the Bill says that your country values you. It tells a parent that a service career for their son or daughter offers dignity, respect and opportunity. On recruitment, the defence investment plan promises investment in the first four years, then an expansion of the regular workforce, including increasing the size of the Army. I ask my noble friend the Minister: how will progress on this be tracked and reported?

The investment plan also signals a £4.2 billion spend on the reserves to the end of the decade. Like other noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, I want to focus on the reserves. There is a reason that around 12,000 employers across the United Kingdom have now signed the covenant. They will tell you that they recognise both their duty to support those who serve and the real benefits reservists bring into civilian employment. The British Chambers of Commerce, for example, signed the covenant five years ago and it uses its voice to encourage chambers and the broader business community to do the same. Over half of UK accredited chambers of commerce are signed up and all these signatories actively support the Armed Forces, including encouraging member employers to take on reservists and to give them the support they need.

The BCC and other employers regard this as an active and mutually beneficial partnership, particularly as businesses are up against skills shortages. The benefits of this flow in both directions. Employing reservists gives employers access to skilled staff and to skills training that they would otherwise have to pay for themselves. Organisations gain crisis-capable staff with leadership skills and sound judgment. For the Armed Forces, civilian employers provide the flexibility and support that makes reserve service viable.

There are also advantages for the wider economy. Employing reservists sustains a two-way flow of skills between the military and civilian sectors in, for example, engineering, logistics, cyber and healthcare. For example, a reservist cyber specialist may bring cutting-edge commercial knowledge into a defence company; a reservist military engineer may return to industry with world-class leadership experience; and a reservist medic strengthens both military readiness and civilian resilience.

It is not just private sector employers who testify to this. For example, NHS Employers reports that reservists in NHS trusts bring emergency decision-making, leadership confidence, problem-solving and resilience under operational pressure. One NHS trust recently described reservists as improving workforce capability daily, particularly in acute and emergency settings. That matters because healthcare is one of the clearest civilian environments where crisis management skills transfer directly. Reservists themselves report using the skills they get from military service in civilian jobs, as we saw in the 2024 tri-service reserves continuous attitude survey. I invite the Minister to consider what more the Government can do to encourage more employers to take on reservists.

It is, of course, the strategic reserve, as has already been said this afternoon, that is the Bill’s main target, and rightly so; it makes absolute sense to keep ex-servicepeople on the books longer and make call-up easier. But I ask Ministers not to underplay the Active Reserve. I anticipate a positive response to this from my noble friend the Minister after what he has told us about his close family member, who is a member of the Active Reserve.

I acknowledge a persistent low conversion rate among applicants to the reserves. It takes a constant effort to recruit, and it depends very much on employer support being sustained. But there is a positive pay-off from investment in the Active Reserve. It creates a continually renewing source of capability. It gives the military access to live civilian skills, and it is a source of larger long-term mobilisation and deeper long-term resilience.

The Defence Minister recently said in the other place that the MoD had taken urgent and targeted action to streamline and speed up volunteer reserves recruitment processes, and, from next year, reserve recruiting will pass to the new Armed Forces recruiting system. In conclusion, I join other noble Lords, notably the noble Earl, Lord Minto, in asking, in light of all of this, when will it be possible to make progress on the SDR’s ambition to increase the Active Reserve by 20% over time?