Army: Divisional Manoeuvre and Deployment Training

Debate between Lord Reid of Cardowan and Earl Howe

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.

Armed Forces: Investment

Debate between Lord Reid of Cardowan and Earl Howe

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as my noble friend knows, this House returns to the subject of defence at regular intervals, but I will of course convey his request to the usual channels. I, for one, would be more than happy to take part in such a debate. I am of course aware of the disquiet to which he refers; I have been made aware of it across your Lordships’ House over many weeks. However, the exercise that we are doing is very important: it is to make sure that we have Armed Forces that are fit for the future, not the past.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister declared that the central area in this is agility—those were his words. Agility runs through three essential elements: air mobility, marines and naval mobility, and cyber, which now permeates all defence. Can he therefore guarantee that there will be no cuts to the marines, no cutbacks to air mobility, and that cyber will be an integral part of the first major report rather than a separate issue dealt with by a department other than defence?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as I have made clear in this House, there is no question of this country abandoning its amphibious capability or cyber, quite the opposite: there is a £1.9 billion programme across government to boost our cyber capabilities. However, as I said last Thursday, the NSCR may result in our reprioritising how we allocate our resources to emphasise the most effective capabilities for the world in which we operate.

Counter-Daesh Update

Debate between Lord Reid of Cardowan and Earl Howe

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that on the sad and sensitive case that has been mentioned the Foreign Secretary would benefit from the Minister’s wisdom. The Foreign Secretary today admitted that, in his testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Mrs Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, his remarks “could have been clearer”. We may think that is rather a generous interpretation and description of his testimony. However, leaving that aside, can the Minister explain why the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, having said that today, refused either to apologise or, more importantly, to accept the invitation extended to him in the House by a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike Gapes, to write and correct his transcript if he had misspoken. We know that we can all misspeak in front of committees and elsewhere. However, the opportunity is there to change that record by correction. He was given the invitation today and I do not understand why he did not accept it. Can the Minister impress this upon him? If he leaves it uncorrected through his own free will, he will compound the initial problem. It may well be, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, said, that it cannot be changed now in consequence, but at least it can be changed on the record. The wisdom of the Minister would be useful in speaking to the Foreign Secretary on this matter.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I will ensure that the noble Lord’s remarks are conveyed to the appropriate quarter and I thank him for them. In my right honourable friend’s defence, he has been as keen as anybody to emphasise to the Iranians that there are obvious humanitarian grounds for the release of some of our dual nationals. He has pressed consistently for consular access and has done everything that he feels appropriate to reunite those detainees with their families. It is important that noble Lords understand that while he may indeed have misspoken—and I will put that to him; I am sure that it has been put to him—he has in the background been doing what I am sure all noble Lords would wish.