Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, I express our sincere condolences to the families and friends of the two brave members of our Armed Forces who have lost their lives as a result of action in Afghanistan in the service of our country.

I thank the Minister for repeating as a Statement the Answer given in response to the Urgent Question asked in the other place on Armed Forces redundancies. With these further redundancies, how will the Government ensure that the specialist skills that will be required more than ever in future in, for example, North Africa, in intelligence capability and foreign languages, as well as in our Special Forces, are retained, not lost in the continuing reduction in the size of our Armed Forces?

Secondly, the reduction in the size of our Regular Army also assumes an increase in the size of our Reserve Forces. That will require incentives for employers to employ and retain reservists and cast-iron guarantees for reservists that they will not be discriminated against in their employment. What assurances can the Minister give on these two points, without which achieving the required strength of our Reserve Forces is likely to prove very difficult?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments at the beginning of his speech. He asked how we ensure that we retain the skills that we need. There are certain pinch-point skills that will be excluded from the redundancies. Off the top of my head, they are the intelligence corps, a certain number of Royal Engineers, particularly IEDs, language skills, which the noble Lord mentioned, and, of course, the Special Forces, which we do not talk about. They will be excluded.

Turning to reservists, as the noble Lord knows—we had a debate on this subject the other day—we expect to have a White Paper on this issue in the spring. We spent a lot of time debating this issue. This is a subject in which I personally take a great deal of interest. I have been involved with the reserves for a number of years, and I am confident that we can do everything possible to get up to the number we want, which is 20,000 by 2018.