Armed Forces Redundancies
Jim Cunningham Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Mr Robathan
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, because he is absolutely right. The National Security Council came up with various scenarios, including operations such as the one in which we are currently partaking in Libya.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Will the Minister say how many people in the armed forces will be made compulsorily redundant?
Mr Robathan
All 11,000 redundancies are termed compulsory. We are hoping that we will receive volunteers for as many posts as possible, but we are not just going to accept volunteers because some of them will be people we wish to keep, so we will not want them to enter the redundancy programme.
Military Covenant
Jim Cunningham Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Murphy
No, I have already given way to the hon. Gentleman so I shall make some progress.
On the military covenant, the amendment to the Armed Forces Bill that the Secretary of State and his friends were intent on rejecting said:
“The Secretary of State must by Order through Statutory Instrument establish a written Military Covenant (henceforth referred to as “the Covenant”) which sets out the definition of the word “covenant”, used in Clause 2, line 6 of the Armed Forces Bill. The definition would set out the principles against which the annual armed forces covenant report would be judged.”
That is the amendment that the Government have found so dangerous and refused to accept in Committee. That is the amendment that they claim would create a whole set of new justiciable rights when it would do no such thing.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend recall that the deficit that the Government now blame us for was accumulated over nearly 30 years, so they are as responsible for it as anyone? Does he agree that they should not have signed up to a covenant that they never intended to carry out?
Mr Murphy
The fact is that prior to the financial collapse across the world and the banking crisis, we had pared down the debt. [Hon. Members: “Oh.”] There is no point in that crowd on the Government Front Bench moaning about this: throughout that period they demanded ever more spending on our armed forces. They cannot deny that.
Returning to the military covenant—