Defence Reform Bill

Thomas Docherty Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is a gallant and, indeed, very honourable friend, but party politics do come into this from time to time. I cast no aspersions on the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), but it is a fact that, sometimes, if the Opposition see an opportunity to defeat the Government, they will use it. That is the way in which our system works, notwithstanding what the shadow Secretary of State has said about the general cross-party agreement on defence. Such agreement never existed when I first came to the House in 1983, so it is refreshing to debate matters in a much more intelligent way than in the mid-1980s.

I will conclude, because others wish to speak. We are not where I particularly would like to be, but the Army is to be commended for its professional approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury is also to be commended for the lead he has given. Our duty now is to crack on and make this work and, in the meantime, to address some of the longer-term structural issues as we approach the 2015 strategic defence review. I put my right hon. Friends on notice that I want the Conservative party to commit to giving more money to defence and it has to come out of the aid budget or any other budget—frankly, I do not care which. I think that the world is a dangerous place and we need our armed forces. The world has seen how professional they are. They are the finest armed forces in the world and they really can deliver what the Prime Minister wants, which is for this country to help shape the world in which we find ourselves.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), even if I do not agree with everything he says. I wish to speak in favour of new clause 6—in my name and those of the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), and others—and about our broader debate this afternoon.

It is worth reminding the Secretary of State and other right hon. and hon. Members that the British Army is of course Parliament’s Army; it is not the Crown’s Army. That dates back to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which is why we have to have an Armed Forces Act in every Parliament.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I am sorry to be a little outraged, but surely the hon. Gentleman would be the first to admit that it is not Parliament’s Army, but Her Majesty’s forces. It has nothing whatever to do with Parliament, although Parliament may deploy the forces on behalf of Her Majesty.

[Thomas Docherty]

I have to disagree with the hon. Gentleman. Parliament must give permission for a standing Army in peacetime and, despite our actions in Afghanistan, we are in a time of peace. It is therefore specifically Parliament’s Army, not the Crown’s.

[Mr Ellwood]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Thomas Docherty]

No, I will not. We hear quite enough from the hon. Gentleman at other times.

It is not the Royal Army: we have a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force, but a British Army. I make that point not to take up valuable time, but because the Secretary of State seems to think that it is the job of Ministers of the Crown, not of Parliament, to make decisions about the Army.

In an earlier exchange about the Back-Bench debate, the Secretary of State said from a sedentary position that it was a Back-Bench vote. The problem with his approach, and the one advocated by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), is that if there is an annual report that Members of Parliament want not only to debate but to vote on, it is clear that the Secretary of State’s intention would be to ignore any such decision.

This is our last chance to tell the Government that although the House supports the broad thrust of the Army reforms, they are clearly not going according to plan. The Secretary of State has already demonstrated that he has the courage to change tack, as he did on the aircraft carriers, when something is clearly going wrong. I am genuinely surprised that he is not prepared to say, “This is not going as well as we want. We need to slow the rate of progress, so that we do not end up in a disastrous position.”

[Mr Philip Hammond]

For a moment, I thought that the hon. Gentleman was suggesting that we ought to slow the rate of progress on the reserves agenda, but if anything we need to speed it up. I would just tell the hon. Gentleman—seeing the Chairman of the Defence Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) in his place—that if he believes Ministers will not be regularly scrutinised from morning till night by the Select Committee and at Defence questions in this House throughout the implementation of the programme, I do not know what planet he is living on. Of course we expect to be scrutinised.

[Thomas Docherty]

If the Secretary of State had been paying a bit more attention, he would have heard me say that it is quite clear that he does not intend to respect any such vote in Parliament. I am sorry, but this Parliament, not Ministers of the Crown, should be sovereign. If he is not confident of carrying his plans for the Army in Parliament, something is fundamentally wrong.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

In the time that it will take the Bill to travel through the other place, could we have a report similar to the annual report, so that when the Bill comes back to this House for final approval we would have an idea of the real situation? We could thereby avoid this problem completely and, frankly, it might get the approval of my good friend the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron).

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful for that intervention. I hope that it would not be a career-damaging move if I called the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) my hon. Friend, because I have had the pleasure of serving with him on the Defence Committee for the past three years. That is a perfectly reasonable suggestion and I am sorry that the Secretary of State has not offered that option.

There is genuine good will on both sides of the House. The armed forces and the defence of the realm are not issues that should be party political. This has been a good debate so far because we have managed, on the whole, to keep party politics out of it.

I agree with the Chairman of the Defence Committee about the growing value of cyber-warfare. When the Defence Committee visited the United States earlier this year, we went to cyber command and saw at first hand the key role that is being played by reservists. I think that Members on both sides of the House would agree that we need more such reservists coming through.

The problem is that the bald facts show that we are not recruiting sufficient reservists. When the generals appeared before the Defence Committee earlier this year, they said that we needed to recruit 6,000 reservists annually. I am sure that the Secretary of State has the most up-to-date figures, but I doubt whether a huge number of reservists have been recruited in the past few days. We are clearly falling short and we have been falling short for years. This is not just a teething problem; it is an ongoing problem.

As the Chief of the General Staff has said, there is no plan B on this project. It is therefore crucial that we get it right. At the moment—I say this in a genuinely bipartisan manner—the Government are not on track to meet these important targets. It is entirely sensible for the House to ask for a pause so that the Government can get back on track. The excellent observation was made earlier that that would help to focus minds. Having robust targets and the threat of a pause hanging over the Ministry of Defence might get it to pull the finger out.

The point on which I disagree gently with the hon. Member for Canterbury is that the problem until now has been that the regular generals have been siphoning off the money. They have not made enough progress.

[Mr Philip Hammond]

indicated dissent.

[Thomas Docherty]

The Secretary of State shakes his head, but the £180 million that was allocated to the reserves in the first year was spent on upgrading the regulars. The generals told the Defence Committee that that was what they did. The threat of a pause if they do not get things sorted might compel the generals to make greater progress.

[Mr Havard]

Does my hon. Friend agree that a pause, rather than creating confusion or demoralising reservists, businesses and others, might have the opposite effect of showing people that there is a proper re-examination of a plan that they do not yet have the confidence fully to join? It might give them that confidence, rather than destroy it.

[Thomas Docherty]

I agree with my hon. Friend, whom the House will recognise is one of the experts on the Defence Committee on the issue of morale.

[Mr Brazier]

The hon. Members for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) and for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard) are both good friends and colleagues on the Defence Committee. However, may I suggest to the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife that what he is saying just is not right? What the reserves want is a strong voice of their own in a regular-dominated process. That is exactly what new clause 1 would give them and the Government have agreed to that. What they do not want is what is in new clause 3. Proposed subsection (2) states:

“Further implementation of the plans shall be halted 40 days after the laying of the report”

unless there is a resolution of both Houses. That would put yet another level of uncertainty into their thinking.

[Thomas Docherty]

I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman, but I gently disagree with him. The reserves already have many strong voices in the British Army. He would agree that Major-General Munro is one of those strong voices. I think that the hon. Gentleman means that the reserves need stronger voices in the British Army.

I am sorry to disagree with the hon. Gentleman but, like many colleagues on both sides of the House, I think it is clear from present morale—I am not sure how it could be much lower—that our reserves are not being given adequate support. New clause 3, which is supported by respected figures on both sides of the House, would send a clear signal that we will not simply go along with the plans, come hell or high water, but that we want to see genuine progress.

[Mrs Moon]

We talk as if the members of our armed forces are delicate little flowers, whose sensitivities are such that debates in this House have them crying into their cocoa at bedtime. The reserves and the regulars, for whom we all have huge respect, want to ensure that the service in which they proudly serve is organised and run efficiently and effectively. They, and this House, do not have that trust at the moment, and that is what we are looking for.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I just ask for short interventions? Many Members still wish to speak. Let us make sure that everybody’s voice is heard.

[Thomas Docherty]

On new clause 6, we have all heard, in the Defence Committee and elsewhere, that the biggest disincentive to joining the reserves, of whichever service, is getting time off work. These are the words of the Secretary of State’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt):

“a lot of reservists find it difficult to get time off for deployment or training courses”.—[Official Report, 23 April 2013; Vol. 561, c. 273WH.]

I am sorry that she is not in her place today. Perhaps she is training. [Interruption.] She is away on a course and we wish her all the best. Even the Secretary of State’s PPS has acknowledged that this is a huge challenge.

The White Paper sets out an ambitious goal of increasing the annual training requirement to 40 days, and I think Members on all sides of the House recognise the importance of that. I hope the Secretary of State will support new clause 6—his Liberal Democrat colleagues will, for reasons I will explain in a moment—because it seeks to provide a simple way to address that goal: reservists would receive an additional two weeks unpaid leave from their employer, provided that their firms had more than 50 employees. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) made the point that we have to careful about the impact on small and medium-sized enterprises, and it is right that we provide protection to smaller companies. The proposal is sensible and measured, because reservists will receive their military pay at no cost to their employer. In the rare cases of resistance from an employer, we propose that complaints are referred to an employment tribunal for arbitration.

I must confess that I am confident that the Liberal Democrats will vote for new clause 6 because the idea was originally developed by them and was passed at their party conference only seven weeks ago. I suspect that the former Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), has had a large hand in writing their defence policy, and that, in the regrettable and unforeseen event of there being a Division, he will vote for the new clause.

[Sir Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD)]

I admire the hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm for the proceedings of the Liberal Democrat conference—I only wish I shared it. I confirm my party’s support for the idea of two weeks’ military training and, although I do not purport to speak for them, I am sure many Conservative Members take the same view. The difficulty with legislating for that now in the manner the hon. Gentleman is suggesting is that there is a serious cost implication: he is proposing that military pay will be provided for that period of time. I dearly hope that this Government or a future Government will at some point be able to find the resources, but a gargantuan effort has been made to balance the Ministry of Defence’s books and the resources are not there. I know the Labour party has a bit of form on making unfunded commitments, but it would be irresponsible to legislate on this when we do not have the funds to pay for it.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am genuinely baffled. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman was before he came into the Chamber, but reservists already receive pay when they are on training. This proposal is not about additional training time; it is about meeting requirements for the training they have to undertake. If his only concern is about the funding element, I can reassure him that there is no additional spending cost. It actually—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman stops chuntering for one second, I will finish. There will be no cost to the business and no additional cost to the Ministry of Defence, because it is already providing pay for that training period. Having given him that reassurance, I look forward to his confirming that Liberal Democrats will support us in the Lobby, in the unfortunate event that we cannot just adopt the proposal as a whole and someone calls a vote.

I am conscious that many others wish to speak; I will therefore finish with this thought. This Parliament is sovereign. It is up to us to send a clear signal that we want to support our armed forces, whether they be regular or reserves, on land, on sea or in the air. It is crucial that we provide a robust target for the MOD to do what it should be doing and ensuring that we have an adequate number of regulars and reserves to meet the aspirations that we all have for them.

[Patrick Mercer (Newark) (Ind)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty). Many of his remarks I agree with; some I disagree with. However, I particularly admire my close and hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier)—who sadly has gone for a cup of tea—and my other close and hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). They have opposing views, but they both have the good of the nation and the armed forces at their heart. I have no doubt about that.

I think I am right in saying that of all the ex-regulars and ex-Territorials in the House, I am the only one who has been a professional recruiter. My last job in the Army was as a colonel in the Army training and recruiting agency. I use the word “agency” with a curl of the lip: it was not a command or a military formation of any sort, which was one of the reasons I resigned from the Army—because of its disgraceful conduct, particularly over recruiting. I will return to that in a moment. I also had the privilege to belong to and to command a battalion that, at the height of the Territorial Army, had to find permanent staff instructors, adjutants and the like for up to four Territorial battalions—our third and fourth battalions, and what were then called the 1st and 2nd Battalions the Mercian Regiment.

That is where I first heard about STABs, which stands for stupid TA—and then a word that means “illegitimate people”—and about arrogant Regular Army “illegitimate people”. That is an example of the desperate confusion and rivalry between regulars and Territorials, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury made such clear reference, from the first and second world wars, and so on. I am a little out of date now, but in my experience that was a deeply divisive and extremely unhelpful view. In the Regular Army, we had to provide a lot of those individuals, which absolutely was a nuisance. None the less, anybody who looked at the colours of my regiment—or, indeed, of the fusiliers or any of the infantry or cavalry regiments in the British Army—would have seen that the majority of the battle honours on those colours were won by battalions and regiments from the Territorial Force or the Territorial Army. It is a fact; we cannot get away from it. Any Regular Army individual who ignores the importance, the potential or the sheer enthusiasm of the reserves—the TF, the TA or whatever we want to call them—is simply daft.

However, there are reservations I would like to express about the future of warfare and the type of forces we need to fight those wars. Turning to new clause 1, my experience as a commanding officer is that I was told in the late ’90s that my battalion was about 40 men under strength and that we could not recruit more than that, which, in a recruiting famine, would be quite impossible. I talked closely to what was then called the recruiting group of the Army training and recruiting agency, listened to its advice and did precisely the opposite.