Reserve Recruitment

John Baron Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence to make a statement on Army Reserve recruitment.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Julian Brazier)]

I am most grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend for the opportunity to make this statement. Future Force 2020 represents one of the fundamental steps this Government have taken to ensure that our defence is delivered on a sustainable financial basis. The Government have ensured that the armed forces, both regular and reserve, are structured and resourced to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This is a far cry from the position we inherited, where our armed forces were run on a fundamentally unaffordable basis by the previous Government. After years of neglect, this Government are reforming and revitalising our reserve forces. We are investing £1.8 billion in better training and equipment, and reversing the decline and years of underinvestment in our reserves. We have always said that increasing the trained strength of the reserves to about 35,000 would not happen overnight; it is a five-year programme, but one year in we are making steady progress, and during the latest quarter we enlisted about twice as many people as we did in the equivalent period last year.

The expansion of the reserves is about doing defence differently. It is not about swapping regular personnel for reserves or doing defence on the cheap; it is about changing the way we deliver defence to make the best use of our resources and to harness the talents of the wider UK society. The contribution of our reserve forces will deliver, in a cost-effective way, the capable and usable armed forces that the nation needs. It will better harness the talents of the wider community and help restore the links and understanding between the armed forces and that community.

There have been a number of technical challenges affecting Army Reserve recruitment, which have been widely discussed in this House before, and we continue to introduce measures to improve recruitment. So far, those have included: improved financial incentives—much greater incentives with employers; removing delays, sometimes of many months, caused by medical documentation and security checks; increasing capacity at selection centres; and giving a key role for mentoring back to units.

The programme to grow the reserves is on track. We have reversed 18 years of decline. The Army’s latest projections indicate that the Army Reserve can reach its 30,000 trained strength target by April 2019. The Chief of the General Staff, the Secretary of State and I are all committed to achieving that target.

The future reserves programme is a bold change programme. It will make defence more flexible and able to deal with the changing demands placed upon it. I say this to the House: the plan is working.

[Mr Baron]

I thank the Minister for responding. No matter how he dresses up the figures, the latest recruitment figures for the Army Reserve show that the trained strength has fallen between April 2013 and October of this year. If one was being charitable, one would say that Government plans to replace 20,000 regulars with 30,000 reservists are struggling to say the least. Those of us who have opposed those plans have questioned the resulting capability gap as 20,000 regulars have been shown the door and the false economies that will loom as the Government are forced to throw more money at failing plans.

Let us be absolutely honest about this: these plans have been in a state of flux from the beginning. The 2010 strategic defence and security review showed haste and little strategic overlay. In 2011, the then Defence Secretary stated that he would keep the regulars in order to check that the reservist plan was working and to recruit those reservists. In 2012, that plan was changed, and the regulars were allowed to leave before we had recruited any reservists. Meanwhile, the start line keeps getting changed. We talk about “one year in”, but we are actually 18 months into this plan and there has been no acknowledgement from the Government. We now have this sorry state of affairs where 20,000 experienced troops have left, including some from my own battalion the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, and we are now recruiting—even if one puts the most optimistic spin on these figures—at a rate of seven reservists a month. If we are to meet our deadline and targets, we need to be recruiting nearer 250 a month. Let us not forget that we are 18 months into the plan.

The Public Accounts Committee has condemned the plan. It said that the plan has put anticipated savings at risk

“and is not delivering value for money.”

The National Audit office was critical, saying:

“There are significant risks to value for money which are currently not well understood by the Department or the Army.”

It has even been said that these plans have been put on the Treasury’s watch list.

I have a series of questions for the Minister. There have been extra costs: £10,000 given to ex-regulars to join the reserves,£300 to the civvies, £500 to the employee reservist per calendar month, pension liabilities, and the IT fiasco. How much extra are these plans now costing over and above the original estimate?

Secondly, how big are our capability gaps? Can the Minister guarantee that there will be no operational fall-out from these plans and tell us what assessment has been made? Finally, in this increasingly uncertain world, surely the time has come for a fundamental reappraisal of the need for stronger defence. Trying to get our defence on the cheap is not the right approach. We should now start recruiting regulars to the Army to bring up the trained strength of the Regular Army to at least 100,000. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend for his thoughts. Let us be clear on the numbers. The Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the Army, said to the Defence Committee on 5 November:

“Already, at the six-month point, we have got to 2,100”—

he was talking about new recruits to the reserves—

“and it is my sense that we will increase the numbers beyond the target in this year…It is not something that will be solved overnight, because we have had the last 10 or 15 years when we have not invested in the Reserve in the way that we are now investing in the Reserve.”

The point—I have tried to explain this to my hon. and gallant Friend a number of times—is that we had a very long period of decline and neglect. In setting up a new system that for the first time for a decade re-established proper medical checks and proper fitness checks, started to collate the numbers properly and so on, we had some glitches, which have been widely discussed. Most of the improvements we made have happened only in the past few months. In the last quarter, we recruited almost twice as many people as in the equivalent quarter last year. I am grateful to him for his continuing interest in the subject, but may I recommend that he does what almost every single unit I have visited recommends and visits some reserve units to discover the exciting things that are going on?