Reserve Recruitment

Debate between Julian Brazier and Richard Drax

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

I will have to write to the hon. Gentleman to give him a total figure. I do not recognise the figure he quotes, but I will write to him. Most of the Capita programme is directed towards the regular forces. It has had some difficulties, some around software, which has been a feature of Governments of all complexions. It is in the process of a considerable set of improvements, most of which are now in place.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend on all the efforts he is making in this regard, but may I make one small point? According to the sources I speak to, the smaller the Army gets, the more professional it needs to be in order to be more flexible in dealing with a greatly changing world, so the proportion should stay at 80:20 and not move to 70:30. Can we therefore go back the other way and have a smaller Army, yes, but one that is more professional, not less so? I am not saying that the part timers are not professional—they are—but a smaller full-time Army has the necessary flexibility.

[Mr Brazier]

I hear my hon. and gallant Friend with respect. However, if he visits, as I am sure he does from time to time, the Royal Wessex Yeomanry in his own constituency, he will see just how good that unit is and how much it can achieve. The size of the Regular Army came out of the very difficult decisions that we had to make in the strategic defence and security review. We have to be clear that if we want to have a framework to expand a small professional Army, and if we want to keep connections between that small professional Army and the wider civilian community, we need a substantial reserve.

Defence Reform Bill

Debate between Julian Brazier and Richard Drax

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Drax]

I hear my hon. Friend, and I respect him hugely for his opinion, but it is slightly dangerous to look at other countries and think that we can meet their expectations. I remember when an American general came to speak to a few of us upstairs about reserves. He had served under President Clinton and then President Obama. He was an interesting and very decorated man who had fought in Vietnam. We asked him about the reserves that America has. He made a rather salutary comment: “In America, having a high proportion of reserves works, because we have the money to fund them. We have airstrips with Hercules aircraft lined up on them, just waiting for commercial pilots to step out of their 747s into them, and to go off to trouble spots or wars around the world.” We cannot begin to meet that level of expenditure; that is what really worries me. We are pushed to fund the regulars.

We have two aircraft carriers, but I bet my bottom dollar that we will not have enough men and resources to man and protect one, with frigates and destroyers around, submarines underneath, and aircraft above. It is a hugely expensive commitment that I do not think has really been considered.

[Mr Brazier]

I am so pleased that my hon. Friend enjoyed the presentation by Dave McGinnis, one of my oldest friends, but his point was that because in America reserve manpower is less than a quarter of the cost, America is able to afford, whatever size its budget—it is obviously larger than ours—a much larger range of capabilities, and more boots on the ground, albeit that some of them are at lower readiness, by having such a high proportion of reservists.

Reservists

Debate between Julian Brazier and Richard Drax

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), including on the fact that he has the second-last ever Distinguished Service Order awarded for gallantry. I am conscious that many hon. Members—including the Minister, whom I am pleased to see in his place, and the Whip, the Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty’s Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster)—have been on active service, and that I have not.

Let me be absolutely clear that I firmly believe that the Government’s direction is right. I have one or two reservations on details, but we should be clear that the tiny proportion of the work force that we need to recruit to make it work is much smaller, and the balance with which we will be left is a much smaller proportion of reservists, than in any other English-speaking country.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Brazier]

I am sorry, but I am conscious that I must leave time for other Members.

The national guard and the US army reserve make up more than half of the American army, and two thirds of Australian infantry battalions are in the Australian army reserve. The fact is that other countries have delivered such a change and have been able to do so. When I visited units from the national guard in Afghanistan, I was told that its brigade, commanded by a civilian soldier—he is a banker in civilian life—had achieved a 98% turnout for its deployment for three months’ work-up and nine months’ active service there. I was intrigued by the roles that it had been given. The infantry battalion that I visited had detached platoons along the Pakistani border defending provincial reconstruction teams, a role in which older soldiers with civilian skills could produce double value, given the skills that they bring as well as their being infanteers.

I am a great believer in maintaining political control over the call-up of volunteers, but the one area we must delegate is disaster and emergency relief. The Americans, Australians and Canadians all say that that is their No. 1 recruitment factor with employers and local communities, although it is a tiny proportion of their activity.

I want to suggest a couple of things that need sorting out. We must be clear that we are talking about the integration of two forces, each of which has a very different ethos. There is a danger of sliding back into the old days of assimilation. The absolute shambles in recruitment for the nine months from April to December, which will leave a permanent gap in the numbers, was because of the Regular Army’s imposition of a completely unworkable system on the reserves. My hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) gave good examples of that. It has now been sorted out, but it has left a nine-month gap in recruiting numbers.

If we are to maintain the distinction of ethos, we must also be clear that the vast majority of volunteer reserve units abroad are commanded by reservists. Unbelievably, 24 out of 30 commands went to regular officers on a 2011 list; the last was a little better, but not a lot. If we are to produce the volunteer ethos, soldiers need to be commanded by people who are used to dealing with employers, understand how to market training to soldiers with competing demands and, above all, have the moral plus that comes from being able to look a soldier in the eye, when he is under serious pressure from his employer, and say, “I’ve been there too”, not someone who can take Mondays off. To do that, we must provide more support for Territorial Army commanding officers, so that people with busy civilian jobs can fulfil their role on a genuinely part-time basis, as they do everywhere else in the English-speaking world.

We need to see off the attempt by the Defence Infrastructure Organisation to take over the control of the reserve forces and cadets estate from the reserve forces and cadets associations, which have much lower overheads and are far more efficient. We must also sort out the muddle in cyber, where a centre of excellence—the Specialist Group Royal Signals—has been broken up, with its squadrons sent off to different parts of what some of us think is a rather expensive and wrongly oriented set-up.

Those are points of detail, however. The fact is that the Government have set the right course. They are tackling a profound imbalance in the system. Everyone here wants defence to have a higher priority, but the balance was wrong and the Government are doing everything they can to restore it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.