Oral Answers to Questions

Jack Lopresti Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster]

The Royal British Legion was recently awarded £10 million LIBOR funding over five years to address long-term hearing issues. Work has already started with key stakeholders, and the Legion aims to launch the fund in early autumn. From summer 2015, the MOD will introduce new hearing protection measures for UK armed forces personnel, which will reduce the number of veterans with service-attributable hearing issues.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

11. What progress has been made on the creation of a NATO very high readiness joint task force.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Fallon)]

Significant progress has been made on the very high readiness joint task force. The interim force is established and the operational force will be ready by the Warsaw summit next year. We will contribute a battle group to the Spanish-led task force next year, and we will lead a fully operational task force brigade from January 2017. Our contribution that year will increase from 2,500 to 3,000 personnel.

[Jack Lopresti]

Given reports in recent days of attacks against Ukrainian forces by Russian forces and separatists backed by Russia, what is NATO doing to deter such aggression, and could a rapid task force play an important role in that?

[Michael Fallon]

We are continuing to press for sanctions to be upheld against Russia. We are helping Ukrainian armed forces with trainers at six different sites in western Ukraine, training and improving the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces. We have troops exercising in eastern Europe—in Romania and the Baltic—and our Typhoons are flying every day this summer to help to protect Baltic airspace.