Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord Walker of Aldringham Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proportion of service men and women being made redundant from the Armed Forces are expected to be between the ages of 18 and 24.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as a result of the strategic defence and security review and the comprehensive spending review, it has been necessary to plan for redundancies in both the Civil Service and the Armed Forces to restore public finances and to better equip and shape the forces for the future. I can advise that some 12 per cent of those selected for redundancy in tranche one of the Armed Forces redundancy programme were aged 24 or below—that is, some 350 people. Selections for tranche two have yet to take place.

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. I venture to suggest that the number will end up somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000, but we shall wait to see in due course. These young people will leave the services having been trained at taxpayers’ expense for war—a profession that does not read across easily to other professions. We may well find that they will have great difficulty in getting employment thereafter and merely add to the 1 million unemployed 18 to 24 year-olds. Last year, the Government added £1 billion to the programme. The absurdity is that those made redundant are going to be replaced by the Territorial Army.

[Noble Lords]

Question!

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

My question is coming. They are going to be replaced by the Territorial Army, which is composed of part-timers whereas those being made redundant are full-timers, whose members will have two jobs, two wages and two paymasters. Will the Government reconsider this issue? It would be perfectly possible to continue to employ those who do not wish to leave the Army, either by giving them some of the £1 billion that the Government are investing in the young or by underrecruiting the unrecruited TA.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think that I recognise a certain anti-TA bias in that comment, which neither I nor the Government share. The total reduction in the size of the Armed Forces over the next several years will amount to 17,000 and it is estimated that the total necessary redundancies from currently serving personnel will be 11,000. The proportion of those servicemen under the age of 25 will be much closer to 2,000 to 3,000 than the figures the noble and gallant Lord has suggested.