Defence Reform Bill

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Julian Brazier

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

A whole string of changes affecting the recruiting group are already taking place, and I am sure that the Secretary of State will address some of them. The key point—I am really grateful for the hon. Lady’s support in signing my new clause and in raising questions in the Select Committee and so forth—is that we would not have lost 18 months if people had listened to the RFCAs, to which all this was painfully obvious 18 months ago, instead of having some regular officers arrogantly cracking on without talking to the units or the RFCAs.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

rose—

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Brazier]

I hope my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) will understand if I take an intervention first from my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood).

[Mr Ellwood]

I would be happy to give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), but that would be out of order. I declare an interest as a member of the reserves and a former member of the regulars. I am able to relate to what is being said by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier). Does he recall in his time that the recruitment officers were manned by “the sick, lame and lazy”, as they were called? These were the people in the regular battalions who were sent to the recruitment offices because they could not keep up with the rest of the battalion. Would he like to see the commander taking a greater interest in who is signed up as a yardstick for promotion, so that numbers are kept up to par?

[Mr Brazier]

I have some sympathy with my hon. Friend’s point, but to be honest, the long-term solution is to sort the software out so that people do not have to go into the recruitment offices at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Brazier]

I wish I could show my hon. Friend some of the e-mails and texts I received before the debate. I know this is not his intention, but if Parliament passes his amendment, that will strike a hammer-blow to morale in the TA. Many Members on both sides of the House are concerned about the future of the reserve forces. Many Labour Members fought very hard when we were having the battles towards the end of the last Labour Government, and I am delighted that the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), is present, as he took a very close personal interest in this, and I note that the problems that arose at the end were not of his making. I urge Members on both sides of the House to think very seriously before they send that message to the reserve forces.

[Mr Ellwood]

This Bill is the starting gun for allowing TA recruitment to move from 18,000 to 30,000. Anything that is done to delay that recruitment will cause confusion in the TA, and that is exactly what we do not want at this difficult time of change.

[Mr Brazier]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend.

I want to bring my remarks to an end as many other Members wish to speak. A number of noteworthy people have come through the Territorials and the other reserves—I have said nothing yet about the RAF and naval reserves. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), was recently commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve and the Air Force Reserves heritage goes back to two of the three highest scoring fighter squadrons in the battle of Britain. The reserves have produced a number of distinguished individuals, including the grandfather of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex, Sir Winston Churchill, and our greatest general in the last war, Bill Slim. People fondly imagine he was a regular officer who went to Sandhurst. He was not; he was a Territorial who sneaked in through the back door of the Birmingham officer training corps because his brother was a student there and nobody realised he was not a student too. There is also David Stirling, who founded the SAS. Again, people think of him as a Scots Guards officer. Yes, he was; he was a Scots Guards reservist. He had done his officer training at Ampleforth combined cadet force and then, through mountaineering, he had developed the qualities of character and team leadership that were so vital for setting up the SAS.

There are three reasons why we need reservists. First, because we can keep far more capability if we keep some of it at much lower cost—about a fifth of the cost—at lower readiness. Secondly, because they bring the energies, extra skills and imaginations of the wider civilian community into the armed forces. Thirdly, because that keeps the link with the local communities, which just after Remembrance Sunday we should all remember.

New clause 1 will give a strong independent voice back to the reserves. I am very grateful to the Government for accepting it and I must ask the House once more not to be persuaded by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay on new clause 3, because that will send a devastating message to the Reserve forces.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

I hope that the Secretary of State will respond to that point, because in an earlier intervention I asked the question to get to the heart of that aspect.

I am concerned about the message that would be sent to our allies, both NATO allies and the United States, if Parliament halted or interfered with the recruitment drive that the Bill is designed to enable. The redundancy notices for the regulars have already gone out, so it is clear that there is no quid pro quo and that we cannot stop this plan and keep the regular forces at the size we would allow. The Bill allows a method of influencing, and indeed improving, recruitment, through the relationships with employers and so forth.

On the capability gap, an important question was asked: how will the wider world perceive that? Any pause in the recruitment of reservists would be dangerous, because the TA is at a lower state of readiness. The idea is to replace 20,000 regulars with 30,000 reservists. Are they the same? No, of course they are not, but that raises the question of what world we are now working with.

I was interested in what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said. He touched on some of the concerns about how the conduct of war is changing. I asked those on the Opposition Front Bench to say exactly what it is, with our withdrawing from Afghanistan and reducing in size, to have a standing commitment, and what the armed forces, however they are comprised, will actually do, because the balance between war fighting, stabilisation and peacekeeping has changed. The idea that we have to win over local support is now more central than it ever has been. Infrastructure, development, local governance and the drive for agriculture have all been mentioned. All that is secondary to the war fighting that takes place, but in Afghanistan and Iraq the war fighting was conducted and completed relatively quickly. We lost in those cases in the peacekeeping and nation-building. That is where it is very interesting to see the TA provide value, because it has the linguistic skills and can come in when skills in banking, cyber-technology, civil service and governance are required.

[Mr Brazier]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. The new commander of Sandhurst in the sand, which will be our most long-lasting legacy in Afghanistan, is of course a TA brigadier.

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is a long-term aspiration in helping Afghanistan.

My concern is whether this House will ever again entertain putting boots on the ground. I would like us to have a large standing Army, as others have mentioned, and to be that leader in the world, carrying that big stick. I ask that question because of my concern about the vote this place had on Syria. It was a very simple action that we would have been participating in, yet this House voted against the Government. Others say that perhaps that is not a yardstick for potential future interventions, and I quite understand that, but it could be that, because of the ghosts of Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions in future will have a light footprint and will be very different. I simply pose a question as to what our armed forces need to look like: do they need to look like what we have had in the past, or should they adapt to the type of footprint we will need in the future?

Defence Reforms

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Julian Brazier

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

It depends which frigates we are talking about. It will be rare for us to participate in a conflict without an international flotilla, so we need to think about frigates other than our own. I want to focus on Britain’s military capability, which goes far beyond providing the senior service with a replacement for the Invincible class and thinking of carriers in terms of the battle of Medway and so forth.

We either need carriers or we do not. If we need the capability, we need a minimum of two carriers to guarantee that one is permanently operational. Let us bear in mind what happened in the operation in Libya. Halfway through the operation, the Charles de Gaulle had to head back to France for a refit. Previously, 40% of air operations had come from it. Let us also bear in mind our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, which highlight the need for a new and adaptable, but arm’s length, doctrine of intervention, with the flexibility for upstream engagement and stabilisation, including humanitarian tasks, based on a much lighter footprint. The carriers could become the centrepiece of British expeditionary capability.

The Queen Elizabeth class carriers provide an opportunity to facilitate a step-change in long-range manoeuvrable technology and capability, and allow us to recalibrate our joint-service approach to littoral, expeditionary and inland conflict prevention and upstream engagement. In a wider context, strategic carriers allow us to extend and embolden Britain’s diplomatic soft power and hard power in a manner not seen for a generation, for the reason my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere has given. In my view, we are not reaching the carriers’ potential.

[Mr Brazier]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that there is no way we can fund that objective, which I strongly support, if we have an all-regular Army?

[Mr Ellwood]

I will come to funding in a second.

In my view, the full potential of the carriers needs to be exploited. For example, we are not considering having unmanned aerial systems on board, but that will become the norm in future. Drone systems like the ScanEagle, the Fire Scout and the X47-B are already available and exist on other carriers, yet we do not have a programme to consider them, even though our ships will be around for the next 40 years. On capability, it is worth noting that two thirds of airborne operations conducted over Afghanistan by the Americans took place from aircraft carriers based in the Indian ocean. We need to recognise that those are versatile bits of kit.

Rotary systems have been mentioned. The Apache played a pivotal and interesting but new role in Libya, with the use of Hellfire missiles, extending the range at which we can use our force capability. Hellfire has a range of 8 km, the Storm Shadow 500 km, and Brimstone 12 km. I stress these points because two thirds of the world population lives within 250 miles of the coastline. That is where future conflict will take place. If we do not want to put boots on the ground, it is aircraft carriers that will allow us to conduct and expedite such operations.

Continuing to operate two carriers will send a powerful message to potential adversaries, both state and non-state, but also to our allies, such as the US, allowing us in turn to employ greater leverage on their decision making. It will also save millions of pounds because we would not have to create forward bases or undertake long-range operations. In the operations in Libya, Tornados had to be refuelled five times—three times on the way there and two on the way back, putting massive strain on the airframes. Operating two carriers will give us greater flexibility compared with running just one. With one carrier, operations are likely to be carrier-strike only—there would be little expeditionary capability.

Hon. Members have spoken passionately about retaining the soldiers who live in their constituencies. My question is this: what are the soldiers expected to do? Huge work needs to be done on expeditionary capability, upstream engagement and stabilisation. We could win the war quickly, but lose the peace because we do not have such stabilisation. Aircraft carriers can play an important role in that. Two aircraft carriers could have a tailored expeditionary capability that we have never had.

Other nations are watching us with interest. The Americans have the Wasp class carriers, which are 44,000 tonnes, and the Nimitz class carriers, which, because of sequestration, are likely to be removed. They are looking at the 65,000 tonne class with interest, and also saw what we did with the Apache. They may want to follow suit. We do not talk this up. Building a third aircraft carrier is not even being considered because of the embarrassment and the legacy problems of the past.

I believe that the additional annualised cost of a carrier, which has been mentioned—about £65 million a year—is a small price to pay for the diplomatic signal and military statement of intent it would send to potential adversaries, state and non-state alike. It would significantly reduce the operational cost of war fighting, conflict prevention and peacekeeping roles. It would also elevate Britain’s ranking as Europe’s senior military power, justifying our permanent membership of the UN Security Council. I hope that hon. Members on both sides the House support my call for operating two aircraft carriers.