Armed Forces Bill

Lord Swire Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and honour to follow the several noble Lords, including two noble and gallant Lords, who have already spoken; of course, they have tremendous expertise. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, because she made a point that is very important for the more general argument and not just about Scotland: the reserves are not a reserved matter. That says something about how it all operates and how local it is.

I have the honour, as a Sussex man, of being a member of the Sussex Club. We have an absolute rule that we have no speeches ever but, at our annual dinners twice a year, as well as the loyal toast, of course, we have two other toasts. One says, “Prosperity to the county of Sussex”. The other is to the forces of the Crown.

The link between those two toasts says it all. This is partly why we do not have speeches. This is what we are talking about here: this is why it matters, and why it is rooted. We must remember that the origins of all our armies, unlike the origins of the Royal Navy, are not as standing armies but as regiments raised. That is how the loyalty of the people has always been bound in. It is quite a serious historical, emotional and cultural matter.

However, we should not rest our argument only on that point, central though it is. It could be argued that for some reason, these arrangements are out of date. We would then need to think about whether they would be more efficiently done if they are centralised. The noble Earl, Lord Minto, said that centralised non-departmental bodies are a majorly difficult feature of modern British government. It is all to do with the problem of answerability. What comes into rhetoric a great deal in modern government is that we need “an independent body” to do something or other. That sounds lovely, because we all want independence, but what does that independence mean? It means a person with a bureaucratic background being appointed by bureaucrats. There is almost no answerability to the public more widely, or even to Parliament. Therefore, I would be suspicious of that.

Following on from what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, said, this is relevant now because the Government have inherited this measure from their officials, but it is not consonant with their own policies. The so-called “Manchesterism” from the Prime Minister is, in a way, a modern and more urban version of the thing we all are praising in relation to the reserves in the counties. It is the idea that local loyalty matters, that local people understand these questions better and that power should be devolved. This measure is going in absolutely the wrong direction.

This matters particularly because this Government are trying to shift all of that. Also, we must not forget the wider picture. We live in a dramatically more dangerous world than we have done for a very long time. The loyalty we are talking about needs to be constantly cultivated. People need to understand why their service matters. This will make it harder for them to understand, at a time when we want them to volunteer.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, thinks there is some intellectual coherence in the Government’s approach to regionalisation, given that in the last 24 hours, they have abandoned large swathes of it, including in my part of the world. However, I understand and take on board what he says.

I do not want to make a political point—having just made a political point. I strongly agree with the noble Lord in suspecting that this has the hands of officials all over it. Knowing the Minister as I do, I am not wholly convinced that this has his support. Of course, he will have to support it, as a government proposal, but I think he will get the arguments against it as well as anyone else would.

I am always nervous about any form of military reorganisation when it comes to recruitment. I bow to more distinguished military figures in this Chamber than I was, and it is very dangerous to speak about military experience, given how long ago, in my case, it was. However, I have witnessed over the years—and in the other place was a critic of—the move to change how we recruit our Armed Forces, not least through the use of Capita, which I always thought had disaster written all over it, in capitals. Indeed, that was a view shared at one point by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I am pleased that the Government are transitioning to the Armed Forces recruitment programme, which will come into force next year. We can only hope and pray that it will do us better service than did the Capita project.

But, of course, what we lost during all that was the whole issue of recruiting regiments from their localities, which has been enormously important over the years, not least because it engenders comradeship among those who join together from different parts of the world when they serve abroad. We have seen that throughout history. I agree that to try to centralise everything goes against the Government’s idea of localism. I can quite understand some officials sitting in the MoD on a quiet Friday afternoon thinking, “We must bring all this together. We cannot have all these independent organisations. It is much easier to have one”. But I think it would be a great mistake.

In an article in today’s Telegraph, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, Louise Sandher-Jones, talked about the mobilisation of some of the 95,000 retired people who have served in the Armed Forces for an exercise next year. I know they have raised the age at which veterans can be mobilised from 55 to 65—unfortunately, that excludes me by a year or two, although I hope I might have some use somewhere along the line if they are going to do that—but my point is that, if we are talking about a mass mobilisation, it goes back to the debate we had on an earlier clause about how to contact people. We are talking about contacting people who have not been in contact for decades. They live all over the country. What better way of connecting with those people and fostering some sense of purpose and community than by doing it through the existing structure?

The whole way that we do our military, to use rather bad English, is going through a transition, with much more concentration on our Reserve Forces and mobilising them in the case of an emergency. I therefore urge extreme caution to the Government, and to stop tinkering with this at the present time. Of course, the RFCAs are not above criticism—I understand a lot of improvements have already been made—but it is senseless, and the timing is wrong, to follow what the Government are proposing to place in their wake.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

I begin by apologising to my noble friend the Minister, for whom I have the highest regard. I fear that what I am about to say may not be the most welcome contribution to this debate. I do not know half as much about this as the many noble and gallant Lords and other Members in the Chamber, but I do want to say this.

Last week, I went to an RAF base for an event—I declare an interest because my son-in-law is the station commander—and I was very struck by the extent to which it celebrated the local connection between the base and the community. There were representatives of local organisations and schools and others there, in addition to the lord-lieutenant, with whom I had a friendly word, and I got a sense of what lies behind the debate we are having today.

All I would say to my noble friend is that it is possible that we might lose something valuable by proceeding with this clause. But I am very grateful and interested to hear what he says in reply to this debate. I have an open mind, but I think that some valid points have been made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, it is a new day in Committee, so I declare my interest as a serving officer in the Army Reserve once again. In moving Amendment 40, I shall also speak to Amendments 41, 45, 69 and 70. I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Penn and Lord De Mauley for adding their names in support of my amendments. Let me also preface my amendments by reiterating my intent behind all of them, as I did on the first day in Committee. They are all aimed at improving the lived experience of reservists in order to boost recruiting and retention and therefore to enhance the operational effectiveness of the Armed Forces.

I begin by welcoming the Government’s Amendment 38, which allows call-out notices to be served by email. It is sensible and I support it. But it also illustrates the point behind this group. We are getting steadily better at calling reservists up, but we have said almost nothing about the civilian conditions that determine whether they are still serving and able to be serving reservists when we call. I think that there is common ground across your Lordships’ House on that objective. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, has amendments for consideration later today that approach the same problem from a different direction.

The Select Committee on this Bill in the other place put the point plainly. It welcomed the changes to recall liability and then noted that the measures focus on the strategic reserve and do not in themselves achieve the strategic defence review’s ambition, which in my humble opinion is too modest anyway, of an increase of 20% to make a larger active reserve. That growth will be produced by the conditions in which people serve—and those conditions are set at the reservist’s desk on a Monday morning rather than in the drill hall.

Amendment 40 would therefore require employers with 50 or more employees to publish and maintain a policy of employment of reservists. There is no sanction. There is no civil liability. The Secretary of State supplies a model policy and, under Amendment 69, this would not commence for 12 months. This is already the required standard of silver and gold employers under the defence employer recognition scheme. The difficulty with a voluntary scheme is that it reaches the converted. The employers who need a policy have never heard of it. There are roughly 38,000 medium-sized businesses in this country and that is where a great many reservists work but where there is no human resources function to absorb the question when it arises.

A reservist in a firm with no policy negotiates from nothing. Every request for time away is a personal favour rather than an entitlement, granted or refused according to the temperament of whoever is in the chair—and when that person moves on, the answer changes. A written policy would end the line manager lottery. Subsection (2)(b) requires the policy to address what happens to pay, pension, seniority and continuity of employment during mobilisation. Most reservists have no idea what happens to any of those things, because nobody has ever written it down. That is a remarkable thing to discover at the point of deployment.

My main effort is Amendment 41, which is at the heart of this group. Most reservists fund their own training out of their annual leave. They spend their holiday entitlement on annual camp and have to spread the remainder among family commitments, personal holiday and the incidentals that real life throws in their path. That is the position we are in today and I do not think that it is defensible. This amendment would give 10 working days of unpaid leave a year for annual continuous training or for promotion courses. It would become applicable only after the employee had completed 26 weeks with the civilian employer. It requires 28 days’ written notice and a certificate from the commanding officer. It excludes employers with fewer than 10 employees, it confers no right to be paid and it counts against any contractual entitlement that the employer already offers.

Section 50 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 already gives unpaid time off for public duties to magistrates, to local councillors, to school governors and to members of health bodies. Parliament has decided that sitting on a planning committee merits protected time off, but it has not yet decided that training for the defence of the realm does. I think that that is a very difficult proposition to explain to a reserve soldier. Ten days is already the gold standard under the defence employer recognition scheme, and the Civil Service has offered paid leave of this kind for well over a decade. It is a fair question why what the Government expect of themselves as an employer is too much to expect of anybody else.

Let us look at our Five Eyes counterparts. Australia’s Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001 requires employers to release reservists for training—not just for mobilisation, but for training. Our own 1985 Act protects mobilisation only. The current gap is legislative, not cultural. Let me anticipate the objections, including those on my own Front Bench. The first is that this is a burden on employers. It is unpaid, it is capped at 10 days, it requires four weeks’ notice, it excludes the smallest firms and, under Amendment 70, it would not commence for a year. If that is an unacceptable burden, we should be honest and say that we are not really serious about the whole force.

The second objection is that an absolute right is too rigid and employers must be able to refuse. A refusable right is precisely the position that reservists have now and it is exactly why they use annual leave instead. The notice period and the annual cap are what protect the employer, and they are real protections. The third objection is that this is a day one right. It is not. It arises only after the reservist has completed 26 weeks of employment with the civilian employer—the same qualifying period that this House insisted on for unfair dismissal.

Let me turn to something that has happened since these amendments were tabled. Last Friday, the BBC and the Times reported that the Army has been instructed to halt non-essential training exercises and that collective training for United Kingdom-based units has been suspended for most of this year on budgetary grounds. The Army has not denied it. It says that it is prioritising the activity that contributes most directly to readiness. I understand why it would say that, but this bears directly on the amendments before your Lordships.

A reservist books their annual continuous training months ahead, clears it with their employer and, very often, pays for it out of their own annual leave. If the exercise is then cancelled, they do not get that leave back, and the employer who has released them draws their own conclusions about how seriously the department takes its own training. Every cancellation of that kind spends employer good will that took years to accumulate.

I therefore ask the Minister three things. First, will reserve collective training and the annual continuous training period fall within the scope of the current pause? Secondly, what has been cancelled or curtailed for the reserves so far this financial year? Thirdly, £4.7 billion of the £15 billion in the defence investment plan remains to be confirmed at the Budget on 28 October. I would be grateful if the Minister could say whether reserve pay and training will be protected within that settlement, as well as undertaking to write to members of the Committee once the position is known. I put that in support of these amendments, rather than against the Government. If money is tight, the measures that cost the Exchequer nothing become more, not less, important; everything in this group is of that kind.

Amendment 45 is the mechanism that makes Amendment 40 matter. It would require the national procurement policy statement to address how contracting authorities take account of a supplier’s arrangements for employing reservists. These authorities must already have regard to that statement under the Procurement Act 2023, so this would create no new machinery and no new liability. There is one fact here that the Committee ought to have: the current statement disapplies the social value priority for the Ministry of Defence in relation to defence and security contracts. So the one department whose suppliers most obviously employ reservists is the department least required to weight it; I would be grateful if the Minister could explain how that came about.

Amendments 69 and 70 are consequential. They would provide the 12-month commencement period for the two duties.

The Bill asks reservists to be available later in life, at shorter notice and on lower thresholds. Attendance at annual continuous training is the single biggest determinant of a reserve unit’s readiness. Promotion courses generate the non-commissioned officers, without whom mobilisation at scale is not possible, whatever powers the Bill confers. These are modest amendments and would cost the Exchequer nothing. I beg to move.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, before we move on—because I suspect that this is not going to detain us too long—I would like to tease out from the Government Front Bench a couple of things.

As I said in my earlier remarks, we are going through something of a sea-change, rather too late in the day, in how we look at our reserves, our responsiveness and our state of alert in this country. In that respect, we understand that it is easier for larger companies to let people go for training because they have more people, but it is the smaller companies on which we should spend a little bit more time in thinking how we can better assist them. With that in mind, in both cases—those of larger and smaller companies—what are we doing to promote the idea that it is a good thing for them to release their employees to take part in some activities involving the military? Are we actively doing that?

Secondly, on people being released from other duties, it suddenly struck me that it seems rather ridiculous that people in the reserves are not exempt from jury service; I think I am right in that. This means that, particularly if you are a small employer, you might have to let somebody go for not only their reserve training but jury service. That takes a huge whack out of somebody’s time. However we monitor these things, it is almost impossible to ensure that, ultimately, people are not being penalised in their careers for taking time off. I would like to know what the Government are doing to monitor this on an ongoing basis in order to make sure that people who are actively involved in the reserves are not being penalised further down the line.

There seems to be something of a disconnect in our thinking here. On the one hand, as I said earlier, there is talk of mobilising many more veterans—something like 69,000—in an exercise next year, just at the same time as we are telling our Reserve Forces that they cannot have money for training and equipment. What is the Government’s thinking on that? If we are going to mobilise these people, is it going to be a paper exercise or are we actually going to invite them to turn up? Are they going to be given equipment? What is the current thinking here—or is it just a catchy headline?

We have debated the whole issue of preparedness in this country and will continue to do so going forward, for obvious reasons—of that I am absolutely sure. The noble Lord, Lord Harlech, mentioned a number of issues, with which I concur. I am broadly supportive of many of the amendments that he has tabled and which we are debating this afternoon, some of which are probably probing. He talked about Australia and the difference in its approach to these matters, as compared to ours. We have lessons to learn from Australia, but why do we not also take into account what they have been doing so successfully in Switzerland for decades now, whereby almost anyone of working age and beyond is required to do service in the reserves at weekends? It is a very bonding exercise. You can be somebody’s boss in the week and that person can be your radio operator at the weekend. It engenders in a country a sense of purpose, unity and preparedness, which is what this must all be about.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I will make just a brief point. The noble Lord, Lord Harlech, mentioned the training issues. I have raised these with the Minister and will come back to them.

In dealing with the employment issues, we have discussed people being released, but, having had the responsibility for fair employment matters, what about somebody being employed if an employer happens to know that that person is a reservist? The employer could say, “I don’t want to employ that man or woman because they will be a nuisance to me and I will have to let them go on release”; that would be one step before you get to the point of being an actual employee. The question is: is a person to be discriminated against on the basis of being a reservist by a future employer who happens to know that that person is a reservist, whether their picture appears in the local paper, through word of mouth or whatever? There is an issue there to be addressed.