Reserve Recruitment

Kevan Jones Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[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?

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

The Army Reserve has expanded by just 20 troops in the past year—20, not the 30,000 personnel promised by the Prime Minister. Capita is being paid £50 million a year to assist in recruitment, meaning that each new net recruit costs taxpayers £2.5 million. That does not include the millions spent on online and other advertising campaigns. The Minister is failing so badly, two years after the policy was announced, that the upper age limit for recruitment is now to be raised, even though, from his reply to the question, one would not think that anything had changed.

This is a shambles—yet more along the lines of the failed IT systems that wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and the repeatedly missed and repeatedly readjusted recruitment targets. Now we have the fiasco of the increase in the upper age limit for recruitment, changing the goalposts to meet the targets. Urgent clarity is needed on the level of integration between regular and reserve units following the recent statement by the new Chief of the General Staff. Will the Minister confirm whether it is now Government policy that reservists will not be called on routinely and will instead be used only in times of emergency? When was he consulted on that change in policy?

May I ask the Minister to be honest with the Army and the British people about what size he envisages not only the reserve but the British Army will be at the end of the process? He said that his policy is bold. Yes, it is bold, but it is fundamentally flawed, it has failed to be tested, and the tragic consequence will be that Britain's defence will be vulnerable for years to come.

[Mr Brazier]

I think that the hon. Gentleman had drafted his points before he heard my answer to my hon. and gallant Friend, so I will not repeat the same points about the changes in the system that are just coming through now and are evident in the latest quarter.

Let me deal with the hon. Gentleman’s more substantive questions. The message coming from the Chief of the General Staff has been cleared with the Secretary of State and me. We are all at one on this and I am grateful for the opportunity to make that clear. When we talk about integration, there is an important distinction to be made between compulsory call-out, which will occur only in times of public emergency—in the long term, because we suddenly hit an unexpected conflict, or in the short term, because of flooding and so on—and opportunities for intelligent mobilisation for formed bodies or individuals that will be there all the time. Most people join the reserves because they want an opportunity to deploy on operations. It may help the hon. Gentleman, whom I have known for a long time, if I give a few examples of that.

In February, under Operation Toral, the next phase in Afghanistan, a formed platoon from my local battalion, 3rd Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, will go to Afghanistan with its sister unit, the Royal Anglians. We have 24 people, 19 of whom are medics, going out on the Ebola operation. In 2012, the framework battalion for Cyprus was a reserve battalion. The opportunities are there, but call-out will be compulsory only when there is a real emergency. It is worth noting that 25,000 individuals went through Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them under a Labour Government. All of them went through the intelligent mobilisation process, except for a relatively small number involved in the original Iraq operation.

My understanding throughout this has been that Labour’s policy is to support our plan in principle, while doing what an Opposition always should do: hold the Government to account for delivery. I have heard nothing in what the hon. Gentleman has said to suggest that that has changed, and I am pleased about that.