Armed Forces: Territorial Army

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for his support. We are making the offer more attractive to both reservists and employers and encouraging ex-regular personnel to join. This is supported by significant additional investment—£1.8 billion over 10 years across training, equipment, paid leave, pensions, and welfare and occupational health support. The Army has already run one Army Reserve recruiting campaign, which resulted in a great many expressions of interest, and is currently running another with up to 900 soldiers conducting outreach activity at local and regional level.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise first to associate these Benches with the condolences expressed by the Minister and, particularly, to share his thoughts about the wounded. The Minister has refused on three successive occasions over the past few months to give an undertaking that the decline in the size of the Regular Army will not proceed until the increase in the trained Army Reserve is secured. Now we have figures—incomplete figures—about how this is going, but it does not seem to be going well. The data should be available and open. This should not be a clandestine experiment. Will the Minister commit to publishing all the figures? Does he share my concern that the Government are not meeting their targets and that the untrained strength of the reserves has gone down year on year? This does not bode well for his 2018 target or the future of the British Army.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I do not share the views of the noble Lord. The recruit partnering programme is not failing. We are getting the most capability for the taxpayer from the resources available. At the same time as growing and transforming the reserves, we are changing the way that we recruit for both regulars and reserves, along with our commercial partner Capita. These are two large-scale change programmes, which are yet to reach full maturity. We are working with the relevant contractors, namely Capita and ATLAS, and all MoD stakeholders to identify any problems, iron them out, mature the programmes, and deliver as committed.