Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, for obtaining this important debate. I am sure that those thanks will be reflected by members of the Armed Forces because, like him, I deplore the stories I am hearing about people being discharged and made redundant before they achieve their pensionable age, sometimes by ridiculously small amounts of time.

I was the Adjutant-General, the director of personnel in the Army, at the time of the Options for Change exercise after the Cold War, when we were required to reduce the size and shape of the Army by a third over three years. Therefore, what I am about to say is inevitably coloured by that experience because that kind of reduction could not have been achieved without the redundancies that accompanied the number of people who left voluntarily.

At the time I was extremely fortunate that in the Treasury I was faced with a deputy secretary who was extremely tough but very fair—Mrs Jack Straw. I was always grateful to her, not only for her toughness and thoroughness, which meant that we had to do our sums in presenting cases, but for the humanity she showed when we suggested to her that among the casualties of this reduction were the children of people being declared redundant who were at school on boarding school allowance. She allowed boarding school allowance to be continued through until the next stage of a child’s schooling so that they could complete the examination on which they were currently embarked. The reason I mention that is because that good sense and humanity is in stark contrast to the way in which this current exercise is being conducted.

Inevitably, when you are looking at reductions in size—particularly of personnel—in the services, one word always dominates your thinking, and that is “sustainability”. Whatever you are going to do, you are bound to have to do it over a period of time and therefore the size and shape of the Armed Force—it does not matter whether it is Army, Navy or Air Force—must allow you to maintain whatever you have been required to do operationally for a period of time.

At the time we were conducting Options for Change, the aim was to make certain that people did not go on unaccompanied operational tours at an interval of less than once every two years so that they would have a chance to remain with their families and be trained to develop their service careers. At the time, because of the pressures, we were faced with the problem that some specialists had only 11 months between tours, which was ravaging their family lives, quite apart from their other development.

What worries me about what has been going on in the strategic defence review, followed by other reviews, followed by Army 2020, is that overall it is said that the proposals in the strategic defence review would be realisable only if the money was available in 2015. We know from looking at the books that the extra money to provide that will not be available in 2015, so there is more to come. The fact that there is more to come is obviously worrying to those who have done their sums to produce what they think is the sustainable Armed Force the country requires, but particularly worrying for the people in it.

It is here that I come to the word “trust”. The mutual trust between the top and the bottom of an organisation is absolutely crucial. The regiment that I joined, the Rifle Brigade, had the motto given to it by my ancestor, Sir John Moore, which was based on a mutual bond of trust and affection which the officers had to earn. I thought that they were wise words because there is no doubt that the trust of the Armed Forces in their political and military masters has to be earned; it is not automatic. What worries me about the impact was clearly put by the Chief of the General Staff last December and repeated by General Sir Nick Houghton: the trust has been damaged by the way this has been handled.

It is not only about the damage that has been done to the internal workings of the Armed Forces and their members, but to the families and on down to potential recruits. Armed Forces are living organisations, so that even while you are reducing in size you have to recruit to be certain that you will have that sustainability tomorrow. In 1990, I remember having great difficulty persuading civil servants that it was not like shutting a garage door. You could not just chop something off because you had to think about the future. Looking back on those years, I was hugely impressed by the care that was taken over every single redundancy. Each one was planned with care and pension issues were taken into account. That is why some people were put into tranches 2 and 3 as opposed to tranche 1. If it was possible then with the much larger numbers involved, I fail to see why it is not possible today.

If I was a member of the Government, I would be seriously worried about the damage that is being done to trust in the system which is responsible for committing our Armed Forces to war. I know that this may go beyond the immediate issue of redundancy, but redundancy is the cause of the distrust. The way in which a redundancy round is conducted is hugely important and I hope that more attention will be paid to the effects of not getting it right, as well as to the experience of doing it differently in the past.