Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, as I said earlier, the National Security Council is meeting at this moment. It will obviously be considering world events as they evolve. We are confident that we have the members of Armed Forces to deal with any situation. As the noble Lord knows, we are reducing the numbers next year, coming back from Afghanistan. We have plenty of members of the Armed Forces to deal with these eventualities.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, the Government’s record in this area is not a good one. Within a few months of getting rid of our carrier strike capability, we found ourselves regretting the absence of a carrier in the Libyan operation and were forced to spend even more money hiring an Italian naval base and providing in-flight refuelling which we would not otherwise have needed. In the present state of affairs, is there not all too great a chance that we might soon regret this hasty decision to reduce our Army, which was taken in rather different circumstances a couple of years ago?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am sorry to hear that from the noble Lord. These redundancies are not new, and were part of the difficult decisions that had to be made to tackle the multi-million pound defence deficit which we inherited from the previous Government.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the challenge faced by the Ministry of Defence and the Army now is whether they can produce the number of reservists who are to take the place of those made redundant from the regular Army? That will need to be kept under review.

Is not the lesson of current events—not least in Mali and perhaps leaking over into Algeria—and of events in Afghanistan that there is definitely a time limit for the use of foreign troops in other people’s countries? The real challenge here is to make sure that we can train local military competence, whether in west Africa or elsewhere. Increasingly, they are the people who want a more ordered and stable world. The local people will increasingly have to be responsible for their own defence.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, on the first part of my noble friend’s question about reservists, we are confident that we can get up to the number of 30,000, which is our ambition. When my noble friend was Secretary of State, the numbers were about 72,000, of which 30,000 is less than half.

My noble friend makes a good point on training. Much more of the emphasis of our Armed Forces in future will be on training and mentoring our allies throughout the world.