Queen’s Speech

Baroness Wilcox Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

My Lords, the gracious Speech includes a defence Bill and I speak to encourage the Minister of Defence to hold the Government’s position on recruitment and training of 16 to 18 year-olds to the Armed Forces, because siren voices are complaining that Army recruitment of under-18s is a waste of money. Other voices say that the Government should reconsider allowing 16 year-olds to enlist.

Here I should declare my interests. I am a member of the Defence Study Group of your Lordships’ House; I am from Plymouth, the home of the Navy and Marine Commandos, in which my family has served for generations; and I have employed many young people in fish processing units—not the most happy places to be, but useful—while they wait to go into the Army. It used to be a great tradition that they would go off and return within a year or so in uniform, for us all to gaze at them and glory at how much they had changed and improved.

In these difficult years of recession, many young people find it very difficult to find a job at all, and the social cost of the unemployed young is huge—youth on the loose, bored, losing confidence, depressed, prey to gangs in some places and obesity in others, in single-parenthood, dependent on government payouts, and open to temptations of all sorts. This is not the way to start a life and represents money wasted. The earlier that we can offer opportunities to these young people the better. We can give them greater confidence and pride by setting them on the road that perhaps their fathers or mothers took before them to apprenticeships, BTEC qualifications, training, and personal and team success. It may even be that they can learn to drive a tank.

The cost of recruiting these 16 to 18 year-olds is not wasted. In the year 2012-13, the Army identified that just 12% of under-18s leave before completion of their training, as against 14% of those over 18 who do so. It is the youngest entrant soldiers who stay as soldiers for the longest. It is they who become the best NCOs, and they are a great investment for us. This House is witness to the many years served here by our Staff Superintendent, Peter Horsfall. He was a member of the Coldstream Guards at the age of 16. Many of our Doorkeepers have backgrounds as boy soldiers and apprentices, and many of them became NCOs. They tell me that it is the NCOs who actually run the Army.

I turn to my second point, on allowing 16 year-olds to enlist. The Government believe that their policies on under-18s in service are robust and comply with national and international law. They have taken steps to bestow special safeguards on young people below the age of 18, under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. It continues to be the rule that they do not go to the front line to fight until they have reached the age of 18. Of course, a comprehensive welfare system is in place for all service personnel. I hope that the Minister—a soldier himself—will continue to support this Government’s route.

Finally, the voices “against” are against preparing the next generation for circumstances which are not abstract but real. Those same voices would, I suspect, leap to praise the youngster—the 16 year-old—who has performed well during a local crisis such as a flood, a fire or an accident. So often that youngster is a scout or a guide but is also an Army cadet, a Navy cadet, an Air Force cadet, or a boy or girl soldier.