Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Robathan
Many years ago, I served in the same regiment as my hon. Friend, and he raises a good point. Nobody would pretend that we wish to reduce the regular Army, but unfortunately we are in a dire financial position left by the last Government. We are quite confident that we will be able to recruit up to the 30,000 trained reserves that we want, and we are making good progress.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
Timely and financially prudent training of reservists who will be able to deploy at short notice alongside regular personnel will require the Ministry of Defence to have accurate figures on how many reservists it has, how many it is recruiting on a monthly basis and how many will actually turn up for training. Will the Minister agree to supply, on a monthly basis, figures that show the number of new recruits to reservist forces?
Mr Robathan
I will not agree to do that on a monthly basis, because I do not think it is necessary. However, I will give the hon. Lady some figures. In 2000, under the last Government—whom she supported—the number in the Territorial Army was more than 40,000. We inherited approximately 25,000, and we are very hopeful that we will get the figure up to 30,000, which is what we want to see. The figures will be obvious and we will put them in the Library on a regular basis, but not monthly.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Robathan
I am not entirely sure that my right hon. Friend did give that assurance, but no doubt the hon. Gentleman can discuss that with him. The decisions were made by the Army itself—by generals looking carefully at future recruiting patterns—and I am sure that they will keep the matter under constant review as well.
I understand that Pay As You Dine was introduced at the request of members of the armed forces under the last Administration. Although not universally popular, it does mean that people pay less for food that they often did not eat under the old system.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
Wales has an excellent reputation for recruiting into the Army, and the loss of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Welsh has come as a huge blow there. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that Welsh men and women who wish to join Welsh regiments will continue to do so following the loss of the 2nd Battalion?
Mr Robathan
As I have said, I think that everyone regrets the loss of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Wales, but Welsh men and women do join the armed forces. Welsh men join the Welsh Guards; they join all the corps, and so forth. I spent 15 years in the Army until I was kicked out, and I think that it still provides a very attractive career for any young man or woman.
Armed Forces Day
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Robathan
I am happy to give the hon. Gentleman an answer on that score. We have been working hard on those plans; indeed, I spoke to my French counterpart earlier this month about exactly that. Of course the French are particularly concerned about the great war, as it was fought over their soil, so we are working with them. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), as the Prime Minister’s representative, is going around the Commonwealth and the allied nations to see how we should mark the anniversary in two years’ time. There are no surviving service personnel from the first world war, but its memory is deeply etched in our regimental traditions and in the psyche of Britain and other nations. It is important that we commemorate—not celebrate—the first world war with the right level of remembrance, that we understand the awfulness of it and the impact it had on 20th century history, and that we educate the young people of this country to understand what it was about and the effects it had. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we are taking the matter seriously, not least because people such as him will harass us if we do not.
Armed Forces day is a celebration of the unique contribution that committed servicemen and women continue to make to the nation. It has become a valuable occasion in the last few years, although this year marks only the fourth Armed Forces day. The first time such a format was adopted was in 2006, when Veterans day was initiated—I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) was responsible for that. The day sought to raise the public profile of veterans and the support available for that diverse community. There was a series of events throughout the country, including one at the Imperial War museum. The following year, an event in Birmingham included a parade of standards, and Blackpool had its turn in 2008. However, it was thought that more could be done, because Veterans day did not seem to reflect the fact that current service personnel were deployed in the most demanding area of conflict. The previous Administration commissioned an inquiry into the national recognition of our armed forces that led to measures to highlight the contribution of all those who serve and have served in the armed forces. One measure was to expand Veterans day to a more inclusive Armed Forces day, and the strap line “Show your support” was printed on flags that were flown on all Government buildings and town halls on 25 June 2009. A national event took place in the Historic Dockyard in Chatham the following day. Members of the reserve forces were invited to wear their uniform to work, as will be the case next week, and former service personnel were encouraged to wear a veterans’ badge. In addition, local communities held their own Armed Forces day events. The Yorkshire Regiment marched through Stockton and received the freedom of the borough.
In 2010, the celebrations took place on 26 June with the national event being hosted by Cardiff. That built on the success of the previous year, with some 260,000 fans being recorded on a dedicated Facebook page and Armed Forces day getting almost 1,300 followers on Twitter. The fly-the-flag initiative continued to expand and, once again, wearing uniform to work was encouraged. That year more than 170 registered events were held to mark the occasion throughout the country.
In 2011, Armed Forces day was hosted in Edinburgh. There were some 1 million followers on Facebook. I am not a devotee of either Facebook or Twitter—I see the shock on the faces of several hon. Members—but I do vaguely know what they are. As a matter of interest, some 72 celebrity supporters provided messages and videos of support for the Armed Forces day website, which had more than 41,000 visits on the day and more than 142,000 page views.
As we have heard, Plymouth, a city with a rich military history, will be acting as host city on 30 June. Activities are planned up and down the country for schools, cadet forces and veterans’ organisations. Uniform-to-work day is planned for 27 June, which will highlight once again the vital contribution our reservists make to the armed forces. Naturally, the armed forces themselves will be taking part in Plymouth and elsewhere. Once again, this will be an opportunity to celebrate their vital and wide-ranging contribution to our nation.
Armed Forces day allows communities to come together and plan their own events to show their support. Sometimes they are social occasions in a village hall or a community centre, or they can be something involving “Star Wars”—I am not sure what that is exactly. Other Members also look slightly puzzled, but we shall see in a couple of weeks. An occasion does not always have to be formal, with service personnel in uniform, for it to be successful. I know that service personnel welcome the personal tribute as a sign of appreciation. On this day, they want to be shown that they are special because of the work that they do.
Of course, our armed forces are busy on operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They will form a notable presence to support a number of diamond jubilee events as part of Her Majesty the Queen’s regional tours. Their support during the Olympic games will be an important defence task this summer, and we are contributing a large number of personnel—mostly regulars, but some reservists—to provide support to the police, and other civil and Olympic authorities.
The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) talked about the reorganisation of the Army but, if she will forgive me, I will not go into the details of that because a decision is yet to be made and it would therefore be inappropriate for me to speculate about what the announcement might contain. I genuinely do not know what it will say about individual units, and I think that we all understand the importance that individual units can have, particularly in local traditions.
The very basis of the armed forces covenant is to remove any disadvantage incurred as a result of service. It acknowledges that the armed forces community is entitled to recognition for the unique contribution it makes on behalf of this country.
A few things that I shall now discuss were mentioned by Opposition Members. We are working on a defence discount scheme to help to provide special offers and discounts to members of the armed forces when purchasing goods and services, and I will update the House on the scheme shortly. In addition, many businesses provide concessions to servicemen and ex-service personnel. The “tickets for troops” initiative allows service personnel and their families to attend sporting fixtures and film premieres free of charge. The covenant sets out the principle that those who serve or have served in the armed forces, as well as their families, should face no disadvantage compared with other citizens regarding the provision of public and commercial services, and that special consideration is appropriate in some cases, especially for those people who have given the most, such as the injured and the bereaved.
The interim annual report on the armed forces covenant, which was published last year, was written in conjunction with our key partner charities, the families federations, other Departments and the devolved Administrations, all of which are members of the covenant reference group. The report highlighted progress across a range of areas and identified work still to be done. Such work has to evolve, because times and conditions change.
My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) made a good speech in which he raised several issues related to the covenant, particularly schooling. We are determined that when service personnel move around the country or come back from abroad, their family members will not be disadvantaged in schools, and that is specifically written into the covenant. That involves co-operation with teachers and schools, although we do not necessarily want the heavy hand of the state banging down on a primary head teacher who is struggling with a lot of other problems. We are determined that children and families should not be disadvantaged because of service elsewhere.
My hon. Friend also mentioned the pupil premium. The idea of the premium, which we introduced, is to compensate for movement. There are other ways in which we will support the children of service personnel who have been killed in combat, so I am not sure that the pupil premium is the right way forward on that point. There are, for instance, scholarships for the children of those who have been killed in service.
My hon. Friend talked about reservists’ mental health, and I can assure him that we are very concerned about that because if reservists disappear back into the general population, it is more difficult to get hold of them. He also mentioned employment. Not all, but most people who leave the armed forces are very employable, and I would encourage any employer to look favourably on them because I think that they would find that they, not just the person they took on, would gain from that.
Discrimination has been mentioned, and I was delighted to hear Labour Members describing Lord Ashcroft as an exemplar that they wish to follow, because it is fair to say that that has not always been the case over the past few years. For 18 years, I had the privilege of being proud to wear Her Majesty’s uniform. There was discrimination, but one was proud to wear one’s uniform, although, as I have mentioned, one tended not to wear it out of barracks. I recall going to a club called Joe Bananas in the Wan Chai area of Hong Kong—I see one or two Opposition Members with guilty faces; they have obviously been there as well—and there was a sign that I think said “No troops”. It was just down the road from the royal naval base, HMS Tamar. I and my two colleagues—all of us company commanders—remonstrated with the very large bouncer on the door about that, and he let us in. Such signs are not that different from others that were put up in windows in the past, which we have now outlawed.
I am glad that attitudes are now rather better—not that I have been to Joe Bananas in the past 25 years—but they are not perfect. The covenant tackles genuine problems that have been raised. I am rather sceptical about whether legislation is needed, but I am happy to talk about it. The sort of discrimination that has often hit the headlines has been, for instance, “Officer training course banned from freshers fair at university”, or “Uniform forbidden in student unions”—or indeed in schools, because some teachers object to it. Perhaps the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle) will pass on to the right hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) that I seem to remember National Union of Students motions about getting troops out of Northern Ireland. Such motions were pretty unfriendly to the armed forces, so I am glad that that attitude has changed—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for East Renfrewshire was a president of the NUS, as I am sure the hon. Lady remembers. We need to be careful before we create more work for lawyers. We need to consider whether the best way forward is to introduce legislation, or whether we need to work further on attitudes, although they have changed dramatically over the past few years, as we have heard.
Mrs Moon
The right hon. Gentleman referred to the troops out of Northern Ireland campaign—I remember it well—but we have an ongoing problem with differentiation. We had it with Iraq. Many people were unhappy about the involvement of our armed forces there, just as there were people who were unhappy with our forces being in Northern Ireland, but it was not the armed forces they objected to, but our political decisions. We must be careful to differentiate between the political decisions that lead the armed forces to carry through our wishes, and the armed forces themselves. These are attacks not on the forces but on the political decisions, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman does not object to my making that differentiation.
Mr Robathan
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. That is the right differentiation, and it is particularly true for Afghanistan. Polls show that a large proportion of the population perhaps opposes our involvement in Afghanistan, yet at the same time supports our troops there. That is an important distinction. There has been a change in attitude because, if we go back 30 years, that was not the case in Northern Ireland. Our troops there took a lot of individual abuse—I know that to be the case. The hon. Lady is right to raise this important distinction, and I applaud that. It is not our soldiers’ fault that they are in Afghanistan; it is because they are following the will of the Government and of Parliament.
It is important to recognise that we as a Government cannot do everything. The hon. Member for Stockton North talked about the community covenant. The covenant was launched by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister last year in Oxfordshire and is hugely popular. There are now some 50 community covenants, with another 50 pending, and I will be at Westminster council next week to witness the signing of the covenant there. Covenants are voluntary statements of mutual support between a civilian community and the local armed forces community, in the form of a written pledge. Usually, such local partnerships are made between the armed forces in an area and the local authority, being joined by local businesses, organisations, charities and other public bodies. I understand that the lord mayor of Plymouth will, on behalf of the city council, sign the area’s community covenant during the national event.
To turn to redundancy and pensions, may I say that making members of the armed forces redundant is not anything that we as a Government or I as an individual would wish to do? The redundancy terms are actually quite good. The hon. Member for Strangford mentioned the 18-year period. Soldiers normally have to serve for 22 years before they qualify for an immediate pension, but the redundancy scheme has reduced that by four years so that after 18 years of service, those selected for redundancy can qualify for an immediate pension. That will enable many individuals to receive an immediate income for which they would otherwise not have qualified. I am afraid that there always has to be a cut-off date. We have shifted it by four years, as I understand it, but unfortunately there has to be a cut-off date at some time.
Mr Robathan
The problem, as I have said, is that there always has to be a cut-off. We have shifted the date by four years—that was done by the services—which is a sensible allowance. Otherwise, we would have to allow everybody to serve up to the qualifying period. Redundancy is not something we wish to do. We are faced with a very difficult situation—I will not make any partisan points—and we cannot afford the level of defence spending that we had. Regrettably, we therefore have had to instigate redundancies, but I should say that the redundancy terms are pretty good. More than two thirds of those in the armed forces who are being made redundant are doing so voluntarily because they can see that such good terms will allow them to pursue another career. Everybody has to pursue another career in the long term, even me—I had to come into Parliament because I needed a job. Everybody has to leave the armed forces at some stage.
The hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire asked about other vacancies in the armed forces. I would be grateful if she would table a parliamentary question about that so that I can give a specific answer with the assistance of my excellent civil servants. I will need to write to her about the issue she raised about the guarantee of employment that we give to reservists. I promise her that it is not our intention to disadvantage reservists in any way; if that is the case, we will make sure that we do not do it.
May I say how much I appreciated—I do not often say this—the point made by the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) about valued national institutions? This is one I think a great many people believe in. I would still recommend a career in the armed forces to anybody. My son, who is 15, surprised me recently by saying that he wanted to join the Army—his mother said, “Over my dead body,” but we shall see. This is something that we should encourage.
Mrs Moon
Youngsters in cadet forces in my constituency who were planning careers in the armed forces have raised with me the uncertainty that they feel. They particularly feel uncertainty in relation to the RAF, in which I take a particular interest. A number of youngsters were days away from completing their training when they were made redundant. We have to ensure that this round of redundancies, particularly those involving youngsters who have lost early commissions, does not leave young people who are about to enter the armed forces with the feeling that they might not be able to have a lasting career and complete the service that they so wish to offer their country.
Mr Robathan
The hon. Lady speaks with passion. Each individual case can be a matter of great pain for the individual concerned, so I entirely take her view. The problem is that if we are reducing the armed forces—frankly, that is not what we want to do, but we are compelled and constrained so to do—there will be fewer opportunities, so some people, I regret to say, will have to be made redundant or will not be given the job that they would wish to do.
Nevertheless, I still maintain that joining the armed forces is an excellent career and I wish everybody the best opportunity. It is true that a lot of people who wish to get into the armed forces now cannot do so, whereas not so long ago, when the economic situation was more buoyant, we were frankly a bit short of recruits. In many ways, although it is unfortunate for those who cannot get in, we are in a fortunate position in that we can pick and choose more than before. As I said earlier, it is important that people can learn valuable things, such as attitudes, values and skills.
The hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde mentioned replacement medals. If he would like to grab me, I will be happy to talk that through with him. He raises an issue, but it is one with two sides, as most issues are.
Our armed forces want and deserve to be valued. Not everybody in the armed forces is perfect, but they do an excellent job on our behalf. They do not want to be patronised. Most of them are high-quality individuals who can make their way in life, and they do not want to be talked down to; they want to be given opportunities, not to be discriminated against, and to carry on their lives in the best possible way. They deserve our support and recognition because of their outstanding contribution to this country. They make personal sacrifices to defend the United Kingdom and its interests, and they contribute to international peace and security.
A wide range of support and advice is already available from the Government, ex-service organisation charities and the voluntary sector. We are unwavering in our commitment to ensure that our armed forces and their families are not disadvantaged by service, and we will continue to raise awareness of the role of the armed forces in society. I urge all hon. Members and all members of society to show their support on Armed Forces day and to make it the success that service personnel, their families and ex-service personnel so richly deserve.
Armed Forces Personnel
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Oliver Colvile
The body should be asked to give advice, but perhaps ultimately, the decision ought to be made here.
Mr Robathan
The Honours and Decorations Committee might be obscure, but it exists to give advice to Her Majesty the Queen, who is the fount of honours and who gives medals, not this House. In my opinion, with which hon. Members may disagree—the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) is right that we are having a review—it is important that politics and party politics should not be involved in decisions on medals, because that should be done in the chain of command. I have been under pressure to intervene in gallantry awards for people whom I have never met. However, the granting of honours must be decided not by politicians, but by others who are involved in campaigns.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Robathan
My hon. Friend is quite right to raise that issue, and I pay tribute to those reservists who go out to Afghanistan, including those from 6 Rifles. We have the Reserve Forces Act 1996 and the Reserve Forces (Safeguard of Employment) Act 1985, both of which should protect reservists deployed on operations, but he is quite right to raise the issue, which we keep under close review.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
Ministry of Defence medical services has a good record of engagement with the carers of wounded service people, but when servicemen are transferred to the NHS system, carers are often told that, because of patient confidentiality, they cannot be engaged with and information cannot be shared. Will the Minister ensure that such continued engagement with carers takes place for service personnel, especially those with traumatic brain injury or mental health problems, once they enter the NHS?
Mr Robathan
The hon. Lady raises a very important issue, of which I was not aware. Practitioners in the NHS certainly should get full medical records from the military medical services. If she were able to raise some specific cases with me, I would be most interested to hear them, and I look forward to hearing from her.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Robathan(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Robathan
I can certainly reassure my hon. Friend that I pay tribute to those organisations. The cadet movement is extremely important; as I said, it is one of the most successful voluntary youth organisations in the world. It has been somewhat under-appreciated in past years, and we very much hope that it will now raise its levels of appreciation. Indeed, tomorrow I am going to the march-past and parade in the Mall to celebrate 150 years of the cadet movement.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
During the series of Government cuts that we all face, will the Minister consider whether buildings belonging to the Government that are being closed could have a future life in providing headquarters for the cadet movement? Many cadet forces are struggling to find accommodation, and there could well be small offices or equipment stores that they could use. Will he look at that, please?
Mr Robathan
I would be very happy to look at it. The Government welcome any submissions, from wherever, about broad or individual cases such as those that the hon. Lady mentions. We cannot prejudge the results of the SDSR, as she will understand, but I would, by all means, be grateful if she would make a submission on individual or general cases.