Afghanistan (Troop Levels)

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Yes. I attended last week the NATO Defence Ministers conference in Brussels, where speaker after speaker asserted the principles of “in together, out together” and reaffirmed their commitment to the Lisbon 2010 declaration principles. We all understand that we are now in the last stretch of this campaign, but we have to do it properly in order to secure the legacy.

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Because of the need to balance the Ministry of Defence budget, a number of service personnel will be made redundant later this year, including, I suspect, a number who have recently returned from Afghanistan and a number based in my constituency with the Royal Logistic Corps. However, those people have skills that are much sought after by local employers, so will my right hon. Friend ensure that MOD officials work with the local community to set up a social enterprise to ensure that the skills of the service personnel who are made redundant are made known to local employers as swiftly as possible, and so that as many of those skills and those people can be brought into the local labour market as swiftly and speedily as possible?

[Mr Hammond]

I should say first of all that nobody who is on operations in Afghanistan nor anyone who is recuperating in the six-month period after returning from Afghanistan is eligible for redundancy, but my hon. Friend is right. As we balance the MOD budget and reduce the size of the Army to around 82,000, there will be a series of redundancies. Many of the people being made redundant will fortunately have skills that are of value in the civilian economy. I am not sure I agree with him on the need to create a social enterprise, but I can assure him that very robust arrangements are in place to ensure that local jobcentres are alerted in advance to the availability of the skills that those people have.