Armed Forces Recruitment

Baroness Goldie Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

Just for my noble friend: HMS “Glasgow”, a new Type 26 will officially enter the Royal Navy tomorrow.

On the specifics of his question, I will have to revert on some details but let me be very clear on how we are recruiting and ensuring that people can come through, especially engineers. We are looking at each pinch point individually, and for tri-service air engineers we have offered a £30,000 incentive.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, there is an urgent need not only to increase the number of people recruited into our Armed Forces but to ensure they are better allocated to roles appropriate to their skills. Serco will, I understand, lead a consortium of six delivery partners—TEAM Serco. How do the Government and Serco propose to monitor progress by the individual team members to ensure the aggregate objective of increased numbers of personnel and better alignment of skills is achieved?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness. At the heart of the contract is making sure there is one clear oversight to ensure of where we have missing skills. So, if a recruit says, “I want to be a chef in the Navy”, but we actually have too many vacancies for chefs in the RAF, we will actively encourage them to consider the RAF. Although this is candidate centred, we will for the first time be able to have an assessment of where our gaps are across the whole of the Armed Forces. If Serco fails, there are financial penalties.