Conor McGinn
Main Page: Conor McGinn (Independent - St Helens North)Department Debates - View all Conor McGinn's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(7 years ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) should not keep hollering from a sedentary position in evident disapproval of the stance taken by the Minister. Apart from anything else—he is chuckling about it—it is marginally discourteous to his hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), who had requested an intervention and had it granted, before it was ripped away from him by the hon. Gentleman’s unseemly behaviour.
Conor McGinn
Talking about the figures, I was very concerned to read in the London Times this morning that the Government are considering scrapping the £29 deployment allowance that applies to soldiers on the frontline in Iraq. The Minister is an agreeable chap, and I would like to give him an opportunity to deny that categorically at the Dispatch Box.
Mark Lancaster
I am a very agreeable chap, but this is yet more speculation from The Times. No decision at all has been made to scrap the operational allowance. Every year since the operational allowance was introduced 12 years ago, there has been a review of where it should and should not apply. Soldiers have not been told that they will not receive it when they go to Iraq. I am deeply proud that this Government have doubled the operational allowance from £14 to £29. Finally—to get the last word, for the time being at least, with the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones)—none of those figures takes into account the substantial rise in the personal tax allowance introduced while this Government have been in power.
Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)
Let me start by joining other right hon. and hon. Members in acknowledging the work our armed forces do in protecting Britain, both at home and overseas, in difficult circumstances. I wish to specify two people in the armed forces in particular. The first is the erstwhile Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland or, as he is known after passing out at the weekend, Private Tom Blenkinsop of 243 Provost Company, Norton Detachment, 1st Regiment, Royal Military Police. Tom may no longer be an hon. Member in the parlance of this place, but we can all agree that he is certainly an honourable man and still a good friend to many of us.
The second person I wish to mention is Corporal Andy Reid, from Rainford in my constituency. Andy lost both legs and his right arm to an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, yet this year he and Warrant Officer Glen Hughes cycled 400 miles, kayaked 175 miles and ascended 17,500 feet to raise funds for veterans. I was very honoured, along with the Veterans Minister, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), to host a reception here for Andy.
I use those two cases to illustrate that, as hon. Members have said, money is not the motivation for people to join the armed forces—no one is suggesting it is for a minute—but we do have a duty not to exploit that sense of duty or service, and to treat people and pay people properly. I am sorry to say that I do not think the Government are doing that, and this is causing difficulties for serving personnel and a crisis in recruitment. The Government must address and get to terms with the chronic under-recruitment affecting the Army, but they have been in denial for the past seven years about this. In 2013, when I was the adviser to the then shadow Defence Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), and to the then shadow Defence Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), we opposed the Government plan to cut the Regular Army and expressed deep concerns about a lack of reserve recruitment. The then Defence Secretary, now the Chancellor, said:
“to halt that or to seek to reverse it at this stage would simply create confusion in the ranks.”
If the Government continue on their current path, there will not be any ranks left to confuse.
Lady Hermon
Earlier, the Minister gave the impression that the armed forces covenant was working well throughout the country. I am absolutely clear that I am a huge supporter of the implementation of the armed forces covenant, but if it is going swimmingly everywhere, why on earth did it have to be specifically written into the deal between the Conservative party and the Democratic Unionist party?
Conor McGinn
The hon. Lady makes an important and interesting point. We have certainly tried hard in my constituency and the Metropolitan Borough of St Helens more widely to implement the armed forces covenant, but there have been issues with its implementation in Northern Ireland. I am sure we would all wish to see those issues resolved and its full implementation in Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the UK.
Despite the Government’s target in the strategic defence and security review to have 82,000 full-time fully trained troops, as of April this year there were just 78,000 soldiers in the Army. By any measure, that is an abject failure on the Government’s watch, and it was rightly identified as a key problem by the former commander of Joint Forces Command, General Sir Richard Barrons. The recent report by the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) confirmed that the Regular Army needs to recruit 10,000 people a year to maintain its strength, but managed to attract only 7,000 entrants last year.
Worryingly, alongside all that, the figures show that the numbers leaving the part-time Army Reserve, which we were told would be increased to meet the decline in numbers in the Regular Army, increased by 20% between 1 June 2016 and 1 June 2017. At about the same time, in the most recent financial year the reserve intake fell by 18%. The Government do not seem to have a strategy to turn these falling numbers around. In fact, their only solution so far has been to sack another 120 members of the armed forces personnel who serve as recruiters and replace them with civilians from Capita. I say gently to the Minister—as I said earlier, he is an agreeable chap—that he has a bit of a cheek on him to criticise our plans for recruitment and what we would do with the budget when he is taking money out of the pockets of armed forces personnel and giving it to a private company.
Mark Lancaster
Of course people join the armed forces and people leave—that is the nature of any job and the nature of the armed forces—but to be absolutely clear, over the past three years the numbers in the reserves has increased, not decreased.
Conor McGinn
I do not wish to contravene the rules of the House by getting into a debate with the Minister, but I am not sure that he can express particular confidence that the target of 30,000 reserve recruits will be met. The Government started to publish the figures only after pressure from the Opposition several years ago. We will continue to monitor progress on that in particular, because although, like the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) said earlier, I am not a mathematician, I know that if we need to recruit 10,000 and we are attracting only 7,000 to the Regular Army, and we have not met the quota that we defined to meet national security needs through recruitment to the reserves, it is not going to add up. It is not going to add up for the armed forces, and it is not going to add for the British public.
Mr Francois
In my speech, I gave figures about recruiting targets for the reserves and explained where we currently stand, and I pointed out that we are ahead of target.
Conor McGinn
There is a huge issue with respect to the figures, but there is also a problem in thinking that we can replace regular soldiers with reserves. The truth is that this Government have cut the Army, and they have cut it to below their own target, which was 20,000 below how things stood when Labour left office. There is worry about recruitment and there is worry about capability. With the proposed further cuts, there is a real danger that, in a very dangerous and uncertain global context, Britain’s defence and security could be undermined and, indeed, compromised.
On this Government’s watch, the armed forces have been cut, their pay is down, key capabilities are being hollowed out and our world-leading defence industry is being left behind—the latter is perhaps something we can debate on another occasion. The armed forces and the British public deserve far, far better.
Mr Ellwood
If I may, I will ask my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces to write to the hon. Gentleman with the details, but I do not shy away from the challenges that we face. I have just made that clear. It is difficult to recruit and retain in the manner that we would wish because of a number of circumstances, which have been highlighted by the report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois). I shall come to that shortly.
Conor McGinn
The Minister for the Armed Forces was quick to his feet earlier to dispute figures that I gave that show that numbers leaving the Army Reserve increased by 20% between June last year and this year. Furthermore, the intake decreased by 18%. Those are not my figures; they are the Government’s figures. Would the Minister care to acknowledge that?
Mr Ellwood
I think that, overall, reserve numbers are up, but, again, I will ask my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces to write to the hon. Gentleman with more detail.
To move on—