Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2021

Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Army Reserve and would like to focus my comments today by giving a taster of the soon-to-be published Reserve Forces 2030 review, of which I had the honour to be chairman. It is an enormous pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, and I can perhaps answer one of his questions and reassure him that in recent years the reserves have been growing in numbers.

While it may seem archaic that we debate this SI today, the requirement for your Lordships’ House to give approval for the continuance of our Armed Forces Act underpins the relationship between Parliament, society and service men and women, a relationship that many other nations view with envy. At its heart, in part at least, is the citizen soldier, the reservist. Indeed it is worth noting that the two oldest units in the British Army, the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers and Honourable Artillery Company, are reserve units tracing their history back to 1530s, predating even the Bill of Rights of 1688.

Like that of many fellow reservists, my service has been part of a fairly consistent juggling act between the competing demands of a hectic professional career, private life and soldiering. In reflecting on my own time as a reserve, so much has changed over the 32 years, going from an almost entirely contingent force that trained at weekends and annual camps, recruited locally and was encapsulated by names such as the Territorial Army and Royal Auxiliary Air Force to the Reserve Forces we have today, across all three services, delivering daily support and skills as part of a semi-integrated force, the true value of which we have seen in recent months during the current Covid crisis. To take just one example, the Nightingale hospitals were designed and delivered in part by the Engineer and Logistic Staff Corps, industry experts donating their skills unpaid to the nation via the volunteer reserve.

Since Haldane’s creation of the Territorial Force in 1908, which subsumed the militia and the Volunteer Force, reserves have always embraced change. It is perhaps because reservists are both drawn from and a part of society that one of their key strengths over many years has been their enduring capacity to adapt to the needs of the day. The relationship between the military and society, in which the Reserve Forces play a crucial role, is complex and changing, and the challenges the country has faced during Covid have underlined how important that relationship is.

The most recent reform was the Future Reserves 2020 review, which focused on growth and investment in the single service reserves. Until that point, the Reserve Forces were viewed by some as being in decline, having been used almost solely as a source of individuals to bolster Regular Forces exhausted after years of campaigning. Building on the undoubted success of the implementation of that review over the past 10 years which has seen the size of the reserve grow, the terms of reference for the latest review were rather different. Rather than looking down and in at the use of reserves by the single services, we were tasked with looking up and out. At its heart, the review is about people and skills and how defence, industry, government and wider society can share them. This means looking at how the Reserve Forces can provide capability across government departments, deliver networks into industry and academia and reinforce national resilience and homeland security as well as renewing and strengthening the link with society in general.

The national experience of the Covid pandemic has demonstrated in no uncertain terms how the nation needs to pull together in time of crisis and how government, Parliament, state institutions, industry and the general public rely on each other. In harnessing this latent appetite to volunteer, the latest review looked at how UK Reserve Forces can provide a nucleus for this activity as well as support the creation of non-military reserves, such as an NHS reserve. It became quickly apparent that the latest review could not just be another review focused on reserves. Rather, it needed to be a review on the provision of defence capability in the round. It is apt, therefore, that our work has been able to inform the integrated review, and we have drawn on the integrated operating concept published last year. The review will be published shortly, but suffice to say many of the recommendations go far beyond those that many have been expecting.

The vision the review describes is of empowered Reserve Forces that are further integrated with their regular counterparts and the wider defence enterprise, while at the same time providing greater utility and assurance across a broader range of military capabilities with access to civilian skills. We have sought to break obstacles for people to join the reserve and to promote a spectrum of service from full-time uniformed, to part-time, spare time and non-uniformed service that will enable individuals to contribute their skills. We have also looked carefully at ways to ensure those who have left the Armed Forces can continue to contribute. At the very core of the review though is the reservist and a recognition of the need to ensure that, just like it was to their predecessors, the offer of service in the Reserve Forces remains not only attractive to the individual reservist but is valued by their families, employers and wider society too.