Army: Divisional Manoeuvre and Deployment Training

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

With respect to the noble Lord, in effect it has done so. Exercise Saif Sareea in Oman, for example, which the noble Lord will be aware of, demonstrated very capably the Army’s ability to deploy in strength overseas with partners. I can reassure the noble Lord that the training the Army undertakes, both in the field and by way of simulation, is fully up to the standards he would expect and enables the Army to be confident of its ability to field a division.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, the essential prerequisite for putting an Army into the field is the capacity to recruit enough soldiers. Without that, you can do very little. We now have the smallest Army since the Napoleonic wars. We have a reduced target of 80,000, which we have failed to meet by several thousand, and we have just launched a campaign through newspapers and the media to recruit snowflakes. This must terrify the Russians. Who is responsible for this? Is it Ministers, civil servants or the outsourced company that has failed so miserably to produce our soldiers?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the responsibility for Army recruitment lies chiefly with the Army itself in conjunction with Capita, with which it has a partnership agreement. I completely accept that Army recruitment figures have fallen seriously short of target. A great deal of work is going on to remedy that. Encouragingly, the number of applications to join the Army over the last year is at a five-year high. The challenge now is to improve the conversion rate between those who apply and those who join, and there are signs of progress in that area as well.