Armed Forces Redundancies
Debate between Mark Francois and Jim Cunningham(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I remind the Minister that he is responsible for the double-dip recession—he should not blame the previous Government. More importantly, how many civilian jobs will go as a result of today’s decision?
Mr Francois
I should say that this process not only affects our regular armed forces. Civilians in the Ministry of Defence are affected by a parallel programme—I think that by 2015 we will have reduced our number of civilians by approximately 33%. It would be unfair to say that our regular forces are bearing the brunt of the process while our civil service work force are not, because they are being affected in parallel.