Future Reserves 2020

Joan Walley Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I have set the likely training requirement for the Army Reserve at 40 days a year once basic training has been completed. The experts—the professionals in the Army on whom I must rely when it comes to these matters—tell me that that will be sufficient for the tasks that we will ask reservists to perform. Clearly there will be some tasks that we will not ask them to perform; similarly, there will be some tasks for which we will rely on them entirely. However, I am confident that the training offer, and the funding to support it, will give us a reserve that is capable of deploying effectively with the regular Army, delivering the high-quality military output that we require.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

The key to all this will be recruitment: finding the 30,000 and, subsequently, the 35,000 reservists who will be needed. Can the Secretary of State tell us a little more about the role of the current Territorial Army centres? When I go down to Cobridge barracks, as I will on Remembrance Sunday, what assurances can I give all the people who are based there? Without the necessary recruitment—and given that the Secretary of State is also privatising recruitment—we shall not have the whole of the country and the local centres to produce the 35,000 whom we shall need by 2020.

[Mr Hammond]

Let me be clear about the numbers. The 30,000 figure represents the total trained strength of the Army Reserve in 2018. We currently have a trained strength of about 17,000. In the other two services, the current numbers are not far short of the targets. The big increase must be in the Army reserves. The challenge is to find about 13,000 more reservists over the next six years. I think that that is achievable, especially bearing in mind that in 1990—just 20-odd years ago—the Territorial Army was 72,500 strong, and that it was even stronger than that in earlier days.

However, the hon. Lady has identified what will constitute a tension. On the one hand, we want reservists to be close to regular Army units, because that facilitates training; on the other hand, we recognise that reserve units will need to be based in the recruiting areas within the centres of population, because the part-time training that reservists undertake requires them to be able to reach TA centres relatively easily. In the spring, we will set out a basing plan which I think will effectively manage that tension.