Reserve Forces

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

My right hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right. The success of this strategy is vital in the national interest, and I very much welcome the fact that the Opposition have approached the matter in a bipartisan fashion, challenging and questioning us where appropriate, but supporting the basic principle of expanding the reserve forces. I would be very happy to suggest to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that he make a joint approach to employers with the Leader of the Opposition. I am sure both of them share the view that the support of the employer community is critical to the success of this project.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

As we withdraw from Afghanistan it will be increasingly important to have community buy-in and community awareness of our ongoing defence needs, so the building up of reserve forces within communities will be vital. It is disappointing that hon. Members, who will take a lead often in their communities to encourage people to focus on the reserve forces, do not have a copy of the statement and have belatedly had copies of the details of the areas that have been closed. I find that two are being closed in Wales, which is worrying for me because Wales’s defence footprint is already particularly small compared with that of the rest of the UK. Will the Secretary of State assure me that he will look at the impact on recruitment in Wales and the opportunity for reservists in Wales to continue to serve following the closure of these bases?

[Mr Hammond]

I can tell the hon. Lady that I have already done that. For example, the Territorial Army centre at Caernarfon is to close and I have looked at the distribution of the home addresses of TA members serving at that base. The nearest alternative base where they would be expected to go is at Colwyn Bay and, in fact, the majority of them live closer to Colwyn Bay than they do to Caernarfon. So we would expect the majority of them to continue to serve at the Colwyn Bay TA centre.

I have to explain to the House that when I said in my statement that some of these small units are significantly under-recruited, I was not overstating my case. We have TA centres with six or seven people enlisted at them, and we have one where the average attendance on training nights has been one over the past year. This is not just a question of the careful husbandry of resources; it is also a question of delivering the kind of training that we have promised members of the Army Reserve. We cannot deliver effective training unless we have a critical mass at the sub-unit level, and that is the driver of all the changes we are announcing today.