Reserve Forces

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

We are committed to recruiting a reserve force of 35,000. I remind my hon. Friend that as recently as 1990, we had a trained reserve force of 72,500, so it is not as if we are trying to do something that has not been done before. All our English-speaking allies operate with far greater reserve forces as a proportion of their regular forces than we do.

I should tell my hon. Friend that the responsibility for delivering the strength required lies with the individual commands, and they understand and accept that they may have to flex resources if that is necessary to deliver the objective. We have no plan B: we will deliver these reserve numbers.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

One of the huge threats we face at the moment is a cyber-attack. The United Kingdom is the primary target of operatives in 25 countries. What specific training will be given to reservists in this important but specialist field?

[Mr Hammond]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me to refer to that matter in detail. Part of the structure change relates to a new focus on reservists’ contributions to cyber-defence. Alongside the traditional image of the reservist, we are looking for people who spend their week sitting in front of a screen, perhaps working for one of the big IT companies, but who relish being able to deploy their skills in a more operational environment. We will specifically recruit cyber-reservists, who will not necessarily have to have the same levels of fitness or deployability as reservists in general if they are willing to deploy to add to our cyber-defence capabilities at UK locations on a routine basis.