Armed Forces Bill (Sixth sitting)

Mike Martin Excerpts

Select Committee stage
Thursday 16th April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. We are continuing line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill. We will begin with a few preliminary reminders. Hon. Members know the rules about food and drink. Could you email your notes to [e-mail] or hand a copy to the Hansard colleague in the room? Please bob if you want to catch my eye. You can remove your jackets if you are warm; I intend to remove mine.

Clause 31

Transfers between regular and reserve forces

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 31, page 51, line 2, at end insert—

“(5) The Secretary of State must, in respect of each financial year, publish a report assessing the impact of the provisions under subsections (3) and (4) on the retention of personnel within His Majesty’s forces.

(6) The report under subsection (5) must include data on the number of personnel who have transferred between the regular and reserve forces, broken down by service and rank.

(7) The first such report must be laid before each House of Parliament within a period of 12 months after the day on which this Act is passed.

(8) Each subsequent report must be laid before each House of Parliament no later than 12 months after the publication of the last report under this section.”

This amendment would require the Government to publish an annual report on the impact of provisions related to transfers between regular and reserve forces on retention in the armed forces.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss clause stand part.

[Mike Martin]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford, and I thank you for the invitation to remove our jackets. Amendment 7 was tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon. I will just briefly introduce it to the Committee.

The idea of a zig-zag career is incredibly important. Unlike previously, when the qualification needed to join the armed forces was the ability to run around a muddy field with a heavy backpack, we now live in an age in which we recognise that we need a much greater range of skills in the armed forces, and the ability to move from reserve to regular and back to reserve is incredibly important, so we welcome that the Government are introducing that. When I served, a number of people regularly moved between the regulars and the reserves—in fact, I did it myself.

However, there is a question mark as to what effect such movement has on retention. In an ideal world, we would expect it to improve, as more flexibility should mean that people are more likely to stay in the regular forces or the reserve forces. But we do not know that; this is an untried experiment, so the amendment would mandate the Ministry of Defence to provide a report to Parliament on the effect of the implementation of this clause—of this zig-zag career pathway—on retention.

Specifically, clause 31 as it stands amends the Reserve Forces Act 1996 to make it easier for personnel to move in both directions. It also amends the Armed Forces Act 2006 to enable that to happen. Amendment 7 would simply add an annual reporting and accountability mechanism on top of those transfer provisions. It would not change the function of the clause, but just require the Government to enable Parliament to monitor the situation accurately. As we know, recruitment and retention is a big problem for the armed forces.

Without such a reporting requirement, the provisions could be enacted—again, we are in favour of that—but never meaningfully evaluated. As we heard in evidence, there are so many different categories of reserve forces and many different types of engagement. They have grown piecemeal over time, and one reason for that is that there is no effective oversight mechanism, looking at things in the round. Under this amendment, the reporting requirement would establish one element of an oversight mechanism.

I conclude by saying that our amendment does not seek to amend the function of the clause, which we are in favour of, but it seeks to mandate the MOD to provide a report to Parliament, so that Parliament can exercise proper oversight and scrutiny.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

Good morning to you, Mr Efford, and to all members of the Committee. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again today. I will lead for my party in this section on reserve forces. I will begin by offering some comments on Liberal Democrat amendment 7, which relates to retention and transfers between regular and reserve forces, and will follow with a few remarks on clause 31.

In one of our evidence sessions, I raised the potential complexity when people wish to leave the regular armed forces and transfer into the reserves. That point is often a good time to catch them, as many people who have enjoyed their regular service but wish to earn their living in a different way are still often tempted to transfer to the reserves to keep their hand in and to continue to serve the nation and maintain the bonds of comradeship and friendship they have developed as regulars.

However, in recent years, that transfer has often proved to be administratively difficult. I have heard anecdotal horror stories of former regular personnel who have attempted to re-enlist in the reserves when their regular service has come to an end but have had to overcome an assault course of bureaucracy to do so. In fact, I spoke relatively recently to a reserve officer who had had to fight his way through what he described as “the Capita circus”.

The Minister sought to reassure the Committee in evidence by saying that this will be dealt with as a relatively straightforward administrative matter. That flies in the face of much of the anecdotal evidence to the contrary. If someone tries to initiate the transfer while they are still serving, it seems that the process works better, but if they leave it until after they have left the regulars, or if they perhaps have a change of heart after having left the regulars and decide that they want to re-enlist as a reservist after a few years, it is really difficult. In fact, I have been told that in some cases it is worse than if they just tried to join the reserves straight off, ab initio, as a civilian.

I pressed the Minister specifically on whether the new tri-service armed forces recruitment programme—the AFRP—contract was written in such a way as to allow the contractor to facilitate the process in an effective and efficient manner. Again, the Minister sought to offer the explanation that it could all be done via administrative procedures. I want to press the Minister on how exactly these administrative procedures are intended to apply in practice. Under the new contract, what, in practical terms, will be different from the rather cumbersome arrangements that we still have in place? In short, how will the creases in this system, which everyone agrees exist, be ironed out to make the transition sufficiently smooth that those leaving the regulars are not put off by mind-numbing bureaucracy if they wish to convert to reserve service?

Those are my comments on the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells, which he introduced very well. I now turn to clause 31.

Reserves are a fundamental part of our armed forces, as both the Minister and I can attest, having served in the reserve forces at different times in our careers—although I handed back my kit shortly after the Berlin wall came down in 1989, whereas the Minister is still undertaking reserve service. Indeed, we understand he has been on manoeuvres only recently.

However, it is a fact that compared with many other nations, we still have very small numbers of reserves, with some 26,000 in the active Army Reserve and many fewer in the Royal Naval Reserve and the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and related reserves. If we put those numbers in context and compare them with the United States, which has both an army reserve and large numbers of national guard—they are organised on a state-by-state basis and report to governors in peacetime, but they can be federalised in wartime—or the reserve elements of the Chinese and Russian armies, they pale by comparison, even though, as the Minister often likes to remind us, we had very large citizen armies in both the first and second world wars.

The Army Reserve can be augmented by what is now generally referred to as the Strategic Reserve. For the avoidance of confusion, that is former regular soldiers and officers who would be liable for recall to service with the colours in a national emergency up to and including full-scale war. Indeed, the Bill extends the provision for recalling the Strategic Reserve to up to 18 years, I believe, from leaving the colours of the regular armed forces. For the record, we very much support that measure.

When asked in evidence for his estimate of the size of the Strategic Reserve, the Minister gave a definitive figure of approximately 95,000. However, to put it in context, the 2021 census—after much campaigning over quite a few years by the Royal British Legion and some MPs who backed the proposal—specifically asked respondents whether they had ever served in His Majesty’s armed forces, and just over 2 million people positively answered the question. Since then, sadly, a number of those veterans will have passed away, but given that the question was not included in the census forms dispatched to Northern Ireland, which has historically proved a very healthy recruiting ground for our armed forces, it seems not unreasonable to assume that the current number is still probably somewhere around 2 million living veterans, or relatively close to it. Moreover, the Minister also revealed to the Committee, assisted by witnesses from the Ministry of Defence, that about 1 million of those people are still of what he called employment age. I take it that he means males aged up to about 67.

I cite those figures to try to estimate the maximum theoretical strength of the Strategic Reserve—or, in military parlance, the absolute right of arc—if all those living veterans were included. Of course, in practice they would not be if they were in their 80s or 90s. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not think we are proposing to put Chelsea pensioners in the Strategic Reserve.

We can discern from that calculation that the absolute maximum is theoretically about 2 million—assuming for a moment that we also include veterans who have also served in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, because they will have ticked the same box. If we cut it differently and include only those of employable age, the Strategic Reserve would come out at about 1 million. If we believe that 95,000 is too small a Strategic Reserve to act as a credible deterrent, particularly given the darkening international situation that we face at present, could we, as it were, draw a line or establish a set of criteria that would achieve a Strategic Reserve of somewhere between 95,000 and, for the sake of debate, a quarter of a million? That would be a much more credible figure in deterrent terms.

I ask the question deliberately to provoke debate about how we could, if we chose, expand the Strategic Reserve from the Minister’s 95,000 figure. If he cannot answer that question off the top of his head, perhaps he could write to me, to you, Mr Efford, and to other members of the Committee prior to Report about where, at least theoretically, a line could be drawn—perhaps defined by age or some other criterion—to create a Strategic Reserve of about a quarter of a million troops, rather than just under 100,000.

Moreover, if we were to consider something as ambitious as that in order to provide a greater deterrent effect, how would we track and communicate with those people, above and beyond access to the His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs database that Ministers have prayed in aid before? For instance, if we assume that quite a number of those veterans are in receipt of a military pension of one type or another, presumably they would be known to Veterans UK and at least their basic details would be recorded on the MOD’s joint personnel administration system. Could we not use that as a means of tracking down those people?

--- Later in debate ---

[Al Carns]

I mentioned some statistics about what we have now. It is circa 90,000 to 95,000 when we add in the four-year, six-year and 18-year mix that we have across our terms of service. If we then add on, say, five years times 15,000, we again get into the space of about 150,000 to just shy of 200,000.

When we look at the maths for the Army, we see that it needs about an echelon to two echelons in depth, and then it needs a training cadre to deliver that capability. That training cadre will primarily be the reserve forces we have already. Consequently, I think we have done enough to move the dial to give us a big enough number and to standardise the process. As always with these things—I am not a data expert—the trick is collecting the data and then being able to analyse it at the right time to get the right force that we need, because we may not need all of those individuals back. We may need very specific skills or individuals.

I will return to some of the tri-service changes. The tri-service transition framework will be launched this month. It aims to standardise the process for leaving, to tackle inconsistencies for vulnerable cohorts and in skills capture, resettlement, employment support and regular-reserve transfer. That is heading in the right direction.

A lot of the changes that I have just talked about will bring immense benefit to both those in the regular service and the reserve service, by removing the administrative issues that service personnel face, and have faced in the past, when leaving and rejoining, or as they seek to move between regulars and reserves and vice versa. This is vital to the wider work that we are doing to create a new framework that will allow for a more flexible service, ensuring that we have access to the right skills and increasing retention by offering alternative forms of service. That reflects many of the recommendations in the Haythornthwaite review, which was conducted under the last Government.

I hope that what I have said provides the necessary reassurance to the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells. I ask him to withdraw amendment 7 and I commend clause 31 to the Committee.

[Mike Martin]

In the light of the Minister’s comments, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 31 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 32

Call out for permanent service

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[The Chair]

With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 1, in clause 33, page 51, line 31, at end insert—

“(2B) This section does not apply to any person who was discharged from the regular services or the reserve forces for a medical reason relating to physical or mental health.”

This amendment makes former service personnel who have been discharged from the armed forces for a medical reason relating to physical or mental health exempt from being recalled to permanent service.

Amendment 20, in clause 33, page 52, line 1, leave out “65” and insert “67”.

This amendment increases the maximum age for service in the Reserve Forces from 65 to 67.

Amendment 21, in clause 33, page 52, line 10, leave out “65” and insert “67”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 20.

Amendment 22, in clause 33, page 54, line 6, leave out “12” and insert “18”.

This amendment would extend the duration of a recall order from 12 months to 18 months.

Amendment 23, in clause 33, page 54, line 43, at end insert—

“69C Prevention of recall for persons in reserved occupations

(1) The Secretary of State may make regulations to define certain categories of civilian work as reserved occupations.

(2) A ‘reserved occupation’ under subsection (1) is any category of civilian work which the Secretary of State deems as vital for defence purposes.

(3) Persons undertaking a reserved occupation may be exempted from a recall order under section 69A for which they would have otherwise been liable.”

This amendment would allow persons undertaking civilian work which the Secretary of State deems vital for defence purposes to be exempt from a recall order under section 69A.

Amendment 24, in clause 33, page 54, line 43, at end insert—

“69C Notice periods for recall

(1) Those reservists in Army Reserve Group A, or its equivalents, shall, following the coming into force of the Armed Forces Act 2026, have their standard notice reduced from readiness category R9 (180 days) to R8 (90 days)

(2) For the purposes of this section, ‘Army Reserve Group A’ has the meaning defined in the Reserve Land Forces Regulations 2026.”

This amendment would increase the readiness requirement for reservists in Army Reserve Group A from 180 days to 90 days.

Clauses 33 to 35 stand part.

Schedule 5.

Clause 36 stand part.