Armed Forces: Historical Cases

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I congratulate the Democratic Unionist party on their motion. I particularly congratulate the right hon. and gallant Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson), not only on his eloquent words but on his gallant service—along with several of his parliamentary colleagues—as a part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, which was far the most dangerous regiment in the British Army in which to serve.

I am deeply conscious of the pressure of time and the fact that so many Members wish to speak, so I shall be very brief. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Sir Henry Bellingham) presented such a strong case in making points that I wished to make that I shall briefly echo two or three of his points before dealing with the other aspect of the motion.

Corporal Major Dennis Hutchings, when he served in the Life Guards, was by chance in the same squadron as a close friend of mine, an officer commanding one of the other troops. My friend says that Dennis Hutchings was one of the best senior NCOs with whom he had ever served, and he is absolutely astounded at the way in which this man has been treated. A constituent of mine, who has written to me in the last fortnight, is being investigated in connection with events that occurred in 1976, 41 years ago.

I listened carefully to what was said by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I have huge respect for him and I understand the considerations that he has to balance here, but I ask him to understand that while there is no Conservative Member who does not believe in the rule of law—we all believe in it—integral to the rule of law is confidence in the criminal justice system. The problem with trying to pursue soldiers in the same way as we pursue former terrorists is that, in most cases, there is no prospect of finding new evidence after all these years. Key witnesses have died.

The point about parity is not just the fact that it is morally repugnant to compare killings by the security forces, unless there is real evidence that they were criminal, to killings by terrorist organisations, but, as several other Members have pointed out, the practical fact that the other organisations we were up against—the paramilitaries on both sides—did not keep records, so there is not the same scope for pursuing them.

I firmly believe—my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk made this case so strongly that I shall not waste the House’s time by repeating it at length—that the only way to resolve this situation is to establish a transparent mechanism that will ensure that no case can be pursued to the point of charge without clear proof that new evidence has been uncovered. Unless that new evidence has been uncovered, it should not be possible to raise fresh cases after all these years.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

My hon. and gallant Friend is making a great speech, and I thank him for letting me intervene. I am increasingly worried, because 38 years ago I gave my word to two men under my command who had been involved in a fatal shooting that if they went to court having been charged with manslaughter and were found not guilty, they would never hear anything again. I gave my word, and it looks as though my word may not be worth a fig if this continues.

[Sir Julian Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend. Many Conservative Members share the view that a transparent procedure to show that fresh evidence has emerged should be required for any case of this kind to be pursued.

Let me now say something about the other aspect of the motion and about some of those other operations. The difference between the operation in Northern Ireland and the other three operations to which the motion refers is that we were in Northern Ireland as aid to the civil power. In Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, at many points there was very little civil power; in fact, at some points there was none at all.

My right hon. Friend the Northern Ireland Secretary stressed, just after mentioning IHAT, the importance of upholding the law. We have to be clear, however, what we mean by the law when dealing with these other operations. The fact is that when a force has just captured a city, as we had in Basra, there is no civil law, as was the case then. In conflicts throughout the 20th century, it was always accepted that only one law matters on the battlefield: humanitarian law, grounded in the Geneva convention. In the past 15 or 20 years, there has been a creeping process whereby a second form of law—human rights law—has started to be introduced into the picture. When I served on the Select Committee on Defence, a number of organisations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, deprecated that. They made it clear that humanitarian law, which is tried and tested for protecting the interests of the vulnerable, should be the law that applies.

On IHAT, I ask the House to think about two questions. First, why did no other country—all countries in the west claim to uphold the rule of law—choose to set up a body like IHAT? Secondly, what exactly did we expect our soldiers to do in the very dangerous circumstances that applied in a number of the cases, which are likely to survive the IHAT process and go forward, in those months after we captured Basra, when, effectively, there was no police force and no rule of law? We had large numbers of dangerous people around, and we were dealing with rioting, looting and so forth. Some colleagues might have read the recent account of how the Americans dealt with one looting problem: they shot two or three of the looters and a potential riot was supressed. There was never any question of any follow up for that.

We have to realise that in such circumstances, while we can have humanitarian law in the background and rules of engagement and so on, a young officer with a very small number of soldiers in a dangerous situation and seeing vulnerable people threatened might have to make split-second decisions that would not stand up in a court of law in any context anywhere within the United Kingdom. Trying to retrospectively establish such rules, with human rights law being substituted somehow or other into the picture for the old, very clear and simple principles of humanitarian law, has exposed members of our armed forces in a way that many of us find unacceptable.

I want to end by making two points. First, while I was delighted by the way my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stressed the importance of Mr Shiner being struck off as a lawyer, it seems to me to be extraordinary that there has been no criminal prosecution. When we look at what the Solicitors Regulation Authority—which I have hitherto regarded as the most toothless of all professional bodies, from my own constituency casework—has found against him and realise what that implies for our armed forces, it is extraordinary that he has not been charged, and I very much hope that he will be.

My final point is about the operations that our armed forces are involved in today. The Government made a pledge that if we were involved in further combat operations, we would derogate from the Human Rights Act, and we are now engaged in two operations. We are increasing the number of soldiers in Afghanistan, where the mission has turned from a purely support mission back towards increasingly being a combat one. At the same time, we are very heavily involved in the bitter fighting in Iraq and we have airmen regularly bombing areas. We have the most accurate bombs and the most failsafe systems—civilians sheltering in an area being bombed by the RAF are safer than those sheltering in areas where any other air force might be operating—but the RAF’s activities in the attacks on Mosul and so forth could nevertheless threaten civilians. We do not talk about it in this Chamber, but some members of the special forces are also involved. What protection is in place? Why have we not derogated from the Human Rights Act for those two theatres?

I want others to have the opportunity to speak, so I will end by saying that I wholly support my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk and those Members on the Opposition Benches who are calling for an end to the pursuit of veterans unless serious new evidence emerges in Northern Ireland, and I believe we owe more to the troops engaged in operations elsewhere today.

Defence Implementation Road Map

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 10th November 2015 General Committees

[Mr Brazier]

I think that the hon. Gentleman is over-egging his point. The EU offers some valuable opportunities for us to deal with other countries, and I mentioned the anti-piracy patrol as an example. The EDA has produced a number of joint projects on issues such as certification, airworthiness, helicopter training and so on, which have freed up money. There is also a small element of dual-use research, which is of real value. However, to suggest somehow or other that the EU is the cornerstone of our defence, when it is manifestly obvious that it is NATO, seems very strange.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I was under the impression that in the Gulf war, the Belgians did not supply us with 9 mm ammunition for submachine guns, not artillery shells—but whatever it was, they certainly did not provide one of those things. May I ask my friend the Minister whether this EDA strategy is going to end up with a possible attack on sovereign capability among SMEs, for instance?

[Mr Brazier]

I am most grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend—he is a good friend—for his question, to which the answer is no, it is not. All that is happening here is an attempt to get better value out of a defence industry that is completely out of scale with the amount of defence purchasing going on. We are helping by guaranteeing 2% and encouraging other people to meet NATO’s 2% target, and we have one or two countries such as Sweden that are not in NATO that are relatively large defence spenders for their size, but the fact is that British industry is offered more opportunities if people are willing to have a more open market in this field.

We are the one country that is really speaking up for SMEs—I say that having done it a couple of times in the European Council. I hesitate to go back to an earlier life and some of the things that I used to write about them before I was even elected to this place, but the fact is that SMEs have a huge role to play in defence. They often have very innovative ideas and different ways of doing things that can offer a great deal for our armed forces. It is no secret that sometimes—sadly—they are seen by prime contractors as a threat to their supply chain, which inevitably, they have a temptation to place cosily with their own subsidiaries. SMEs are extremely important. We as a Government are supporting them, and we are the country that is pushing them hardest in Europe.

[Bob Stewart]

I have a follow-up question. I do not quite get it. Hon. Friends have already raised the matter of the EDA versus us. Surely it is the Ministry of Defence that decides. We have been spending ages and ages looking at the way procurement is done in this country to our advantage. I am slightly concerned that suddenly we will have some EDA strategy that directs us in a different way that runs counter to the way the Minister and his fellow Ministers want to deal with it. That is a worry that I have had and continue to have.

[Mr Brazier]

May I just set my hon. and gallant Friend’s mind at rest? There are a number of risks from the Commission, as I have set out, and we are looking forward to seeing the new document that comes out of the Commission after Christmas, but the EDA is not a threat. It is a low-budget organisation, which, in the words of its last director, is basically a speed-dating agency. It enables European countries that are interested in a particular area to sit together, discuss things and find ways of saving money. I mentioned helicopter training as an example. It is not a threat in the way that he describes. There are some threats potentially coming out of the Commission, although I do not think they are as bad as they were a year or two ago, and I outlined some of them in my speech, but I assure my hon. and gallant Friend that that is not one of them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Brazier]

I do not think I can add a great deal to what I have already said. We support the internal market. This is not an industrial policy; it is about pushing back trade barriers. The Government support that and see it as an extremely positive thing for us and our fellow countries in Europe. We are quite clear that we have this exemption for defence, and we have deployed it a number of times. It covers roughly 10% of our defence procurement effort, and we have never once been challenged on it. Competitors are normally the ones who would make a challenge, and no one has ever tried to challenge Her Majesty’s Government’s exercising of their rights on that.

[Bob Stewart]

I am looking at the document, which states:

“The Council reiterates its call to retain and further develop military capabilities for sustaining and enhancing CSDP. They underpin the EU’s ability to act as a security provider”—

the EU’s ability to act as a security provider—

“in the context of a wider comprehensive approach”

and

“the need for a strong and less fragmented European defence industry to sustain and enhance Europe’s military capabilities and”—

this is key—

“the EU’s…autonomous action”,

presumably in this respect. I question whether this is yet another move towards an EU defence capacity.

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend, but I can only repeat what I said earlier. The EU provides collective defence capability in a small number of niche areas where NATO has chosen not to. I have mentioned several times, because it is of particular national interest to us as a country that still has a significant merchant fleet, the joint EU action off the horn of Africa, which has been a triumph—piracy there has virtually stopped. It is run from Northwood by the British, although, I am sorry to say, we have not had much in the way of naval vessels in it in the past year or two. The French-led operation in Mali is another such example. I thought that the willingness of EU countries to get together occasionally and tackle issues that NATO, for one reason or another, chooses not to was relatively uncontroversial.

The first half of my hon. and gallant Friend’s quote on Europe’s defence capability is true. The industries are in the individual countries and the policy remains a member state matter. We have made it absolutely clear—I do not think I could have made it clearer—that we have resisted successfully every attempt by the Commission to try to dictate to us in this area.

Reserve Recruitment

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

Will the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have the greatest respect, write to me so that I can look into that individual case? We have had a number of delays in the system. We are sorting those out, and the process is now working much faster for both regulars and reservists, but I would be grateful for a letter.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I have been waiting by my phone for the call to join the Army Reserve, but so far nothing has happened. What percentage of the 30,000 Army Reserve personnel will be available for not a great national emergency at any one time—assuming we get 30,000?

[Mr Brazier]

Over a decade or so, 25,000 reservists were called out of what was then a falling institution. I have given my hon. and gallant Friend some examples of the things we are calling reservists out for now—on intelligent mobilisation, not compulsorily, for Afghanistan, for Cyprus, and for interesting exercises all over the world, such as the British Army Training Unit Suffield in Canada and live firing in Kenya. I cannot give him a firm number, but we have seen that large numbers of reserves are available and willing to come. Compulsory call out, as the CGS has made clear, will happen in a national emergency.

Defence Reform Bill

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

If the sensitive areas were for UK eyes only, that is a protection normally for intellectual property rights. The problem for the defence industry is what is commercially in confidence—increasingly being called “soft IPR”—which is in no way covered by the provision my hon. Friend mentions, as he knows. The problem is that knowing how a particular contractor has structured a particular contract, which the management company must know—otherwise, there is no point in having it—means that that kind of information must be known to it, and it is extremely valuable material. He was quite right to say in his previous intervention that the danger already exists. However, the only way to produce an enforceable mechanism that deals with it cannot cover foreign employees who go back to America, or indeed anywhere else, although I think that we would be unlikely to take employees from another country.

My main point concerns reserve forces. I strongly support part 3 of the Bill and the Government’s measures on reserves, and I was delighted to hear the shadow Defence Secretary give a broad welcome from the Opposition Benches to those measures. I will not go into the provisions in the Bill except to say that one or two—special support for SMEs, for example—are especially welcome, as is greater protection for employees who are reservists. Instead, I suggest that the Bill could provide a vehicle for reforms in the governance of reserves. Such reforms were highlighted in the report by the independent commission to review the United Kingdom’s reserve forces, on which I was privileged to serve, as we are a long way out of line with arrangements in other English-speaking countries.

Our report looked at three areas of governance, one of which was for transition. The other two areas were senior appointments, and the role of the reserve forces and cadets associations and, when considering those two matters, it is important to ask what is happening abroad. I have focused on English-speaking countries because there is little point in looking at countries that have recently given up conscription. The most obvious example of a country that gave up conscription a long time ago—France—has gone down a route that Britain will never follow in having an armed gendarmerie trained effectively as an army reserve, including a big reserve component of its own. Therefore, the US, Canada and Australia seemed to the commission, and seem to me today, to be the best comparators.

In truth, those countries—I say this with no pride at all as somebody who has extensively visited their armed forces—have consistently had, year after year, much lower personnel turnover than our reserve forces, and they often get better turnouts for periodic training. The National Guard units that I visited in Afghanistan had a staggering 98% turnout for that operation, and the officer recruiting level of all those other countries is much higher than in the UK. Reserve forces in those countries have a larger place in society than our Army Reserve, and I fully endorse and totally support everything the Government are doing to expand that role in society. Above all, reserves in other countries have much more experience than us of deploying formed capability rather than simply being used as a part-time personnel service, as has been forced on the reserves over the past few years.

[Bob Stewart]

I totally understand and accept the majority of what my hon. Friend is saying, but to compare us with the National Guard is somewhat misleading. National Guard units are often mobilised and deployed for long periods of time, whereas our system will bring someone in for six months’ operations, presumably with three months of training before and three months afterwards. That is not as long as National Guard units serve, which obviously makes them almost regular, at least in spirit.

[Mr Brazier]

My hon. Friend has been misinformed about that. An impressive airborne cavalry unit that I visited in Kabul was one of a small number of units that had had the misfortune a few years ago of being part of the only experiment by the Americans in recent memory of trying to call people out for more than 12 months. The US has the same limit as us in the UK and has agreed never to repeat that experiment because of the painful experience. Such units operate on the same 12-month cycle as we do.

I do not say this to run down our reserve forces in any way, but when those forces were used as formed bodies, they served extremely well despite the handicaps they faced. One thinks of a company of reservists from the London Regiment, who in their time in Afghanistan were reputed to have killed 45 members of the Taliban. They got an incredible endorsement, which I quoted in the House, from their Brigade Commander, Brigadier—now General—Lorimer. I also think of my own former unit, which deployed a squadron that got three military crosses. However, I want to make the point that, in terms of yardsticks, we are behind the curve. I welcome all the Government’s efforts to move us up the curve, but we have to recognise that governance is an important part of this.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Thursday 26th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I will not respond to the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), because I am confident that one or two of my hon. Friends will do so. Instead, I will talk for a few minutes about defence procurement.

Twenty-five years ago, I was responsible for carrying out a survey with three colleagues as a management consultant to compare the procurement systems in seven western powers. It is depressing, a quarter of a century on, how little things have moved on from the issues at that time. I remain convinced, as I was at the end of that process, that Britain is about average or a little above average, and not as inefficient as it is presented to be by some commentators.

I share the view of the Chairman of the Defence Committee that Bernard Gray is exactly the right man in the right job and that his report is excellent. I am deeply concerned that much of Lord Levene’s report will undermine some of Bernard Gray’s best and most important ideas, much as I respect the noble Lord and the work that he did in procurement at about the time I was a consultant.

There is time to touch briefly on only four points, of which two relate to the procurement function and two to the Ministry of Defence. My first point is that Bernard Gray is absolutely right to point to weaknesses in the contract staff, who are grossly underqualified for the job of stacking up against the highly competent lawyers employed by the other side. In project after project, we have found ourselves badly damaged by the small print.

My second point is about project managers. Gray, Levene and everybody else who has looked at this matter have concluded that we need more continuity in project managers and that they need to be professionally trained. Nevertheless, we are out of line with most other countries in concluding that project managers should be civilians. The most efficient procurers in the world remain, in my view, the Swedes. Their project managers are overwhelmingly military. They are in post typically for four to five years and they are properly trained before they become project managers. The problem, particularly on the army side where there are large numbers of comparatively cheap interlocking projects, is that if civilians are in charge of the projects, as in France, one ends up with lots of detailed user-problems that would have become obvious earlier if they had been before a military project manager. That is why France, despite spending far more on research and development than any other continental country, does not have a particularly good record on land vehicles.

My third point goes more to the heart of the distinction—in my mind, anyway—between Levene and Gray. The heart of Gray’s report—perhaps his single most important recommendation—is at point 4 in his summary, where he says that we must

“Clarify roles and create a real customer-supplier relationship between the capability sponsor (MoD centre)”—

—this is a distinction that we, alone in the whole world, developed before the second world war—

“and project delivery (DE&S)”.

He goes on to stress that the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Capability) is the man who has to drive this. In contrast, Peter Levene suggests that DCDS (Capability) should be merged with one, or possibly two, other functions out of a long list—that it should be downgraded—instead of having, as Gray recommends, one board whose secretariat and day-to-day policing should be provided by DCDS (Capability) to oversee the process. In Levene’s structure we would end up with a complete muddle, with, in effect, four different bodies considering these matters—the new Defence Board, which is all-civilian except for the Chief of the Defence Staff, and the three armed forces themselves. That would take us halfway back to pre-1936.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

If the move is to make the CDS the commander-in-chief, and therefore in charge of the Army, with the same going for the other two services, surely it is proper that such people are represented on the Defence Board, if not particularly within the Ministry of Defence?

[Mr Brazier]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. Friend. I was about to come to that as my fourth and final point, but let me first finish my remarks on capabilities.

There is a very important reason, which Bernard Gray fingers exactly in his original report, for having a proper supplier-customer relationship. In the second world war, the Luftwaffe had a much more powerful research and development and industrial base, but the RAF, because it had a separate capabilities group, was able to make sure that all the pieces interacted so that we did not have problems with fighters that could not talk to bombers, and so on.

The A300M is a modern example of where that structure has broken down because—Gray criticises this—the capabilities staff have got weaker, and they will get a lot weaker still if the Levene recommendations are adopted. This aircraft is being bought for the Air Force—I have huge respect for Air Transport Command because of the brilliant work it has done in Afghanistan—but the user is the Army. Bizarrely, we have managed to arrive at a point where we are choosing to buy an aeroplane that is much more expensive than its tried and tested competitor, the Hercules, on the grounds that it can carry one armoured vehicle per aircraft whereas the Hercules cannot. If asked, the Army would say that armoured vehicles usually go by sea—it has C17s if it has to move them by air—and that it could not afford most of the armoured vehicles it wanted anyway. A strong central capabilities directorate would probably have been able to get a grip on that. Furthermore, the problem is as much in the detail as in the big picture.

That brings me to my fourth and last point, which was anticipated by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). Some countries, particularly on the continent, do not allow executives on to their company boards; we would say that their company boards are all non-executive. Putting those countries to one side, in all my years as a consultant—I worked on all six continents—I never came across a successful company anywhere in which the heads of the main operating divisions were not on the main board. Peter Levene’s recommendation that the individual chiefs of staff should not sit on the Defence Board is bizarre. If one puts that alongside my third point about capabilities, with the greater powers that the individual services are going to take back from the centre to monitor projects, one can see that it is a recipe for increased in-fighting and for a reduction in interoperability. That is a big step away from joined-up defence.

I should like to end on a more positive note. With Bernard Gray, who is probably the best informed and best equipped man in the country, being put in charge of procurement, there is a fair chance that he will manage to overcome many of these problems. Certainly, under his leadership the performance of the procurement function itself will move from being a little above average internationally to being among the best. However, if we simply implement at the centre the Levene reforms as they are constituted—I have mentioned two of the weaknesses, and I could go into some of the others in detail—there is a risk that, in this area and in several others, we may undermine long-term defence planning.

Armed Forces Personnel

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Thursday 10th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my friend and Select Committee colleague, the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard), and indeed our excellent Committee Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot).

As we remember those who gave their lives in earlier generations, we honour those who serve today. To visit them, whether on operations or on exercise, is to be humbled by the sheer quality of the men and women who serve in our forces, but over the generations since the cold war the structures that planned and organised them lost direction.

On the day after another young Territorial has died in Afghanistan, I want to talk about reserve personnel, but first I shall give the House some context—when tension between operational pressures and funding is especially tight. The Ministry of Defence has become distorted by the shape of most conflicts during the 20 years between the Gulf war and the Libyan operation. For most of that period, the main effort has been a single, medium-scale expeditionary force, led by the Army with air support. Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan mostly followed that pattern.

The intensity of the conflicts varied enormously, but each saw a brigade-sized expeditionary force supporting air elements in six-monthly rotations and in line with defence-planning assumptions, hence a strong temptation for the planners to configure our forces around that model. Resurgent problems in Northern Ireland and the 7/7 bombings figured very little in pre-strategic defence and security review planning, and two important overseas outliers were widely overlooked.

First, there was the planned invasion of Kosovo in 1999, when 1 million desperate refugees fled the Serb army. Almost all our allies demurred from sending ground forces and the MOD initiated a confused blizzard of call-out notices, summoning many reservists at a few days’ notice, even from units that it was in the process of disbanding. Britain was spared humiliation, of course, when the Serbs backed down under Russian pressure at the very last moment.

Secondly, in 2003-04 we were stretched well beyond expectations, as the continuing operation in Iraq overlapped with the incursion in Afghanistan.

The national security strategy rightly dismisses the assumption that our forces should be optimised almost entirely for medium-scale, Army-led expeditionary operations. It includes other roles, including, crucially, homeland security and upstream intervention, and there is even a faint hint of the scenario that dare not speak its name—general mobilisation for an unexpected crisis. Libya was Royal Air Force and Royal Navy-led—and led brilliantly, a point that I note in the week when we mourn the loss of Flight Lieutenant Cunningham of the Red Arrows.

How can we address so many scenarios, therefore, when the money available is so tight? The key surely is to reverse the slide towards an impossibly expensive manning model in which most units are full time, with costly payrolls, pensions, housing and so on. Of course they are worth it, but we cannot afford enough of them. Between two fifths and half the armies of our English-speaking sister countries are made up of volunteer reserves. On paper, ours make up less than one fifth, and in reality estimates suggest that the true figure is nearer 10%.

The US deploys National Guard armoured infantry brigades and fast-jet fighter squadrons to Afghanistan; Canada had a reservist company with every infantry rotation; and Australia has deployed formed companies and handed over its main commitments in Timor and Bougainville to reserve-led forces.

[Bob Stewart]

When we talk about National Guard pilots, I worry, because I wonder how much training they have to do, and whether it is different from what a regular has to do to be up to speed and to fly in combat.

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Three quarters of the US National Guard’s fast-jet pilots are ex-regulars, so they are not wasting several million dollars in training when they leave, and the remaining quarter have to be very experienced pilots to be allowed to join.

As we stand in silence at war memorials up and down the country, let us remember that the vast majority of those who served and fell were not professionals, and that the volunteer reserves were the key link between our brave but small professional forces and the wider community. They also provided back-up that was immediately available and, crucially, a framework for expansion into a national effort.

In the great war, the Territorial Army provided almost half the combat units, winning 71 Victoria Crosses. The Royal Naval Reserve won 12. In the battle of Britain, the Auxiliary Air Force squadrons comfortably out-shot their regular RAF counterparts. Although those forces were trained in peacetime at a fraction of the cost of their regular counterparts, they were available when they were needed to fight—and fight they did.

When overstretch peaked in 2004, our small volunteer reserves provided a fifth of our forces in Iraq and one-eighth of the number in Afghanistan. Yet over the next two years, they were rewarded with a cack-handed reorganisation, recruitment ceilings and a demoralising freeze on collective training. Despite all that, they continued to achieve some remarkable successes. In 2007, when commenting on a company from the London Regiment, its commander Brigadier Lorimer—now General Lorimer —said:

“Somme Company was an outstanding body of men: well trained, highly motivated and exceptionally well led.”

More than 25,000 reservists have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and 28 have given their lives, including the young man yesterday. Yet, in 2009, all formed deployments to Afghanistan apart from field hospitals were stopped, and the use of reservists has degenerated into the backfilling of regular units, unlike what happens in the countries of our English-speaking counterparts.

Not surprisingly, the strength of the reserves rapidly dwindled, with the greatest deficiency among young officers. As the House knows, I was recently privileged to serve under General Sir Nicholas Houghton on his review of reserves. Two or three units I visited had no young officers left at all. While we were carrying out our study, the unhappiness among TA officers was compounded by the truly disgraceful announcement by the Military Secretary’s branch in July that an unprecedented four-fifths of TA commands were to go to regular officers, despite there being 25 Territorials in the frame who had all the necessary qualifications.

Our study recommended that we should move towards a better balance between regulars and volunteer reservists in the Army, with 30,000 trained reservists by 2015, and that they should

“no longer simply be used as individual specialists and augmentees, but as formed units and sub-units”.

The Royal Naval Reserve has plans to expand several areas, including its highly cost-effective air branch, which took over the training pipeline for some months in the overstretch crisis of 2004. It also has imaginative plans for the Royal Marines Reserve. The commission was disappointed with progress on the RAF, which has a pool of flying volunteer reservists that is only about a quarter of the size of that of the Royal Navy. Although there were some more imaginative ideas in the background, the recommendations it actually put forward were all rather expensive and seemed to be very modest in their actual value. That is why we recommended an independently led follow-up study on the RAF.

There are three keys to rebuilding our reserves: first, we must get out and recruit officers from the thousands of young men and women passing through our university officer training corps and restore the proposition. If we reintroduce demanding collective training for units and sub-units, it will restore the capability of the TA to deploy formed bodies and provide those leadership opportunities that are so vital for the commitment of young officers.

On a recent visit to 7 Rifles, I was told that four regular officers had just applied to join. I was astonished to hear, however, that some of them were stuck waiting to receive security clearance. Why on earth do we have security clearance for regular officers transferring to the TA?

That brings me to my second point. We need fit-for-purpose administrative systems, so that people can enlist, have their medicals and be fed into training without the endless delays that characterise the current dysfunctional system. My local unit, 3 PWRR, has had more than 100 recruits in a few months. Yet, the sheer incompetence of the MOD personnel administrative systems has already put off a large number of them.

Some regular officers are claiming that the TA cannot reach a trained strength of 30,000 by 2015. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces, who made an excellent speech earlier, not to listen to them. It is the dysfunctional system and the blockages in the regular-dominated training pipeline that is holding our reserve numbers back.

Hence, my third and final item on the shopping list is this. Let us reintroduce regionally based phase 1 training, so that Territorials are not scrabbling for a place at the back of the queue in the regular establishments. In July, the former Secretary of State announced a £1.5 billion investment in the reserves over a decade. I am certain that my right hon. Friend the new Secretary of State is still committed to that. May I advise that it must be spent on rebuilding viable and usable structures to meet the 2015 deadline, not siphoned off to meet shortfalls elsewhere while that crucial date is allowed to slip?

Rebalancing our armed forces will enable Britain to afford more capacity within tight budgets—to expand the pool of talent available for defence, to increase the footprint for national resilience and, above all, to reconnect our excellent but increasingly remote regular forces with the nation they serve so well.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Julian Brazier and Bob Stewart

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Let me start by paying tribute to 5th Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland, better known as the Argylls, whom we are proud to host in Canterbury—they were given the freedom of the city last year, the first Scottish unit ever to do so—and to 3rd Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, our local Territorial Army battalion. They have both had many deployments to Afghanistan and both have taken casualties.

Before I make some rather controversial remarks, let me say that I am deeply conscious of the fact that I have never participated in active service. I was a witness to quite a serious battle once, but I have never been on active service, unlike a small number of Members of the House. Every time I meet people who have been, and especially when I meet those who have been desperately wounded—people who have lost limbs, who have been blinded and so on—I feel deeply humbled.

[Bob Stewart]

When people are wounded, it has an impact on morale. As I am in poetic mood, may I just say what Padre Woodbine Willie said in 1918? He put it perfectly:

“There are many kinds of sorrow

In this world of Love and Hate,

But there is no sterner sorrow

Than a soldier’s for his mate.”

The wounded not being dealt with properly has an impact on morale.

[Mr Brazier]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. Over the years, on a number of occasions—including at Prime Minister’s questions—I have raised that issue and been glad to do so. However, my speech today is on quite another subject.

I am emboldened by a pamphlet by two very fine fighting soldiers, General Sir Graeme Lamb and Colonel Richard Williams, both former commanding officers of the regular SAS—it will be published by Policy Exchange and was trailed in The Times today—to say that I have a very specific concern that I have never raised in the House before: I do not think that, for some years now, the quality of military advice in the upper echelons of the MOD has been anything like as good as that deserved by our gallant, brave and highly professional armed forces.

I was sorry to miss the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) and I must apologise to the House for being late, but I had a pressing constituency engagement with the Secretary of State for Health. However, I know that my right hon. Friend set out wider concerns—he is too polite a person to concentrate on particular areas—about the SDSR. I want to cite a couple of examples from the past for which politicians and the previous Labour Government must take the blame, but in which it seems that military advice must have played quite an important role.

The first is the second Iraq war, which is the largest conflict in the past 15 years. Let us put the intelligence, the dodgy dossier and all the rest of it to one side, although there was a military element in that, and ask how that conflict, in which we started so professionally and so well, could have led to such mistakes in operations, equipment and so on that it ended with a substantial British force sheltering on Basra airbase—I am saying no more than the American media have said again and again—subject to mortar fire, with men being killed and wounded, and unable to locate the mortars that were shooting at them until the US marines arrived to rescue them and effectively to clear the area.

Let me give a second example. There is probably no Labour politician for whom I have more respect than John Reid, who is an exceptional man. When he made that—in retrospect profoundly silly—remark about it being quite possible that we could go into Afghanistan without a single shot being fired, and when we deployed a force without even such basic equipment as adequate amounts of body armour, I cannot believe that he did so without first having conversed with his senior military advisers. I say that only because a number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), have already said that the MOD will need some shaking up. I believe passionately that the defence of the realm is the first priority of a Government. I stepped down as a Parliamentary Private Secretary—I quietly retired rather than resigning—during the “Options for Change” programme. I believe that we have to be a lot cleverer and that we cannot continue as we are now.

Let me address two of the themes from the pamphlet I mentioned. First, we have to move on from the industrial age to the information age, just as we moved from the horse-drawn age to the age of the tank. The pamphlet points out that, in practical terms, although we have lots of drones and other information-gathering systems in Afghanistan, our troops do not have the technology with the bandwidth to make much use of it. We are losing more than twice as many people per thousand in each engagement as the Americans, because although we have some of the information-gathering machines, we do not have the means by which to get the information to where it is needed in a timely fashion. On a more strategic level, the pamphlet makes the strong point that, in extremis and out-and-out war, a force that has the edge over the other side in information terms will ensure that the other side is never able to deliver a single shot. We are already that far behind the Americans in some areas. The really terrifying point is that, by working with little bits of civilian technology from the mobile phone and several other areas, the Taliban have in some areas got inside our information loop.

A second point that the pamphlet makes concerns a subject on which the House has heard from me many times. It discusses the reserve forces and the regular forces and makes the point, absolutely convincingly, that we must keep a full range of capabilities, but it is absolutely impossible for us to do so and at the same time afford to modernise our armed forces given the current costs of manpower. We could achieve it by doing what the Americans and the Israelis have done—by transferring most of the heavy stuff such as armour and heavy artillery not into storage in so-called reserves but into proper, trained volunteer reserve units.

We have just had the anniversary of the battle of Britain. My great-uncle served in that battle merely by driving a desk, but as an under-age enlistment in the first world war, he was one of the founding members of the Royal Flying Corps and served gallantly in the air. I am intensely proud to represent a Kentish constituency in which much of that battle took place. As the pamphlet that was published this morning reminds us, a quarter of those units were volunteer reserve units from the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and a third of the pilots in the regular squadrons were from the RAF Volunteer Reserve and were also volunteer reservists with civilian jobs who trained to fly for the Air Force in their spare time. The pamphlet asks something that we should all be asking about why the continental air defence of the United States is carried out almost entirely by the air national guard, with F-16s manned by people who fly for a living in their civilian jobs—the same applies in Israel—while in Britain we have the absurdity of paying the huge cost of training and retaining regular pilots to fly for just 12.5 hours a month. It must be possible to move some of those pilots across to volunteer units, as the pamphlet suggests.

I want to end by spending a couple of minutes on what makes volunteer reserves tick. If the outcome of the review is that the Government say that we have run out of money and that they intend to put various things on to the reserves, and that means pools of tanks and artillery equipment, aircraft in hangars and lists of people who very occasionally turn out to train, or worse still paper lists like those for the regular reserves of all three forces, the review will have failed and the volunteer reserves will wither and disappear.

We have to think about how we make the offer and the job sufficiently attractive that a high-calibre man or woman with a busy civilian job who is tired at the end of the week will be willing to climb into a car and drive to their training centre, aerodrome or vessel and undergo challenging and interesting training. There are three ways to do that. First, units must be led by volunteer reservists with real civilian jobs, not commanded by full-time people. Secondly, there must be a range of training and opportunities for command on operations that make commanders at the junior and middle-ranking officer level and the senior and junior NCO level feel that they are valued and have a real job to do. The Americans do it. When we sent a squadron of 21 SAS —my old regiment—last year, three out of fewer than 70 were awarded MCs in six months, so it can be done. Thirdly, we talk about barracks and accommodation, but the volunteer reservists must have decent centres. As Field Marshall Montgomery said, “They must be the best clubs in town.” These things cost money, but it is about a fifth of the price of their regular counterparts.

We face a difficult and dangerous world; we face an intensely difficult financial crisis. We must be more imaginative in finding a way forward.