A Better Defence Estate Strategy

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

What a great pleasure it is to see you in the Chair, Mr Rosindell. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) for leading the debate. I have found the Minister who is here today to be a listening Minister. He has engaged with me as much as I have engaged with him, and I am grateful for that.

I wish to speak about the situation in Chester, at Dale barracks. Some 2,000 years ago, a bunch of Romans came along and set up a camp—a castrum—in what was to become my city. The castrum gave its name to Chester, which has been a garrison town ever since Æthelfrith defeated the Welsh at the battle of Chester—apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), who is on the Opposition Front Bench. The first Earl of Chester built a chain of castles around Chester castle in 1071. We have a history that goes right through the second world war, when we had RAF Sealand—still in place today—and the headquarters of the Western Command. That history is very much part of the city’s DNA, and we are proud of it. We are proud to have those links to the military and to have an Army presence. We have the Westminster Centre for Research and Innovation in Veterans’ Wellbeing at the university, we have a recruitment office in the centre of the city and we have Dale barracks, which is now under threat.

The barracks was traditionally home to the 1st Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, and then the Cheshire merged with the Worcesters and Foresters and the Staffords to form the Mercian, so I understand that things do not stand still in the Army. Things move and things change—we also had the Royal Welsh based there for a while. Although we are not an Aldershot, a Catterick or a Colchester, we are a military city and proud of it. There are advantages to that. Chester is an attractive place to live, and so many of my constituents are former servicemen and women and their families who have made their home in the area. Schools in the Upton area are set up to cater for children facing the disruption of military life, for example when their parents are sent away on duty at short notice. Personnel retention rates in Chester are therefore much higher than elsewhere, because families are happier and there is less pressure on the servicemen and women themselves. Closing the barracks may well be a saving in the short term, but it would be a false economy.

The super-garrison structure in the south-west of England is part of the Ministry of Defence’s investment of more than £800 million in infrastructure in the Salisbury plain area, with a similar development proposed for the north-east, but super-garrisons do not cater for where troops are recruited from, and we have a high recruitment rate in the north-west. The net effect is that service personnel—in the Army in particular—find themselves bouncing around the country on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons trying to get home or back from work. I know of one former officer living in Chester who spent two years driving up and down to Sandhurst. He described being so far away from family as a reason why people might leave the Army. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald referred to that. The armed forces attempt to post service personnel close to their home town during their final years in the Army to help their and their families’ transition, and closing the Dale will further reduce that option for those from Chester and the north-west, which, again, will have a negative impact on retention rates.

I ask the Minister whether all options have been exhausted regarding the utility of Dale barracks. Could we provide other services and place other units there, perhaps a centre for combat stress and psychological therapy to link in with the work of the university? Can we beef up the presence with cadet forces? The facilities are modern; they were upgraded only in the past 20 years, so it will be a false economy for the Army and the MOD, as well as damaging to the local economy, if we close them simply, I believe, because of the high land values in Chester and move servicemen elsewhere. I am most grateful to the Minister for his time.