Strength of the UK’s Armed Forces

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab) [V]]

May I place on record my sympathy for the family of Cheryl Gillan, our colleague? She was not in my political party, but she was somebody whom I both liked and respected.

Today’s debate is very important; I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) for introducing it from the Front Bench. The Minister for the Armed Forces was absolutely wrong to pose it as technology versus the size of our armed forces. That is the wrong calculation to make. It is not about sentimentality, for those of us who have had the opportunity to see our armed forces in operation around the world, in conflict zones and in peacekeeping roles. They do a magnificent job—pound for pound, they are probably among the very best-trained and best operational armed forces on this planet—but they need numbers. We saw that in places such as Sierra Leone, where the numbers of people mattered. We saw it with the rotation of troops in Afghanistan, when our troops came back tired from their tours of duty—too tired, on some occasions. We need numbers there.

To pose the question as being about numbers of Army personnel versus technology is simply wrong. Yes, of course we need investment in the technologies of the future, in cyber, in space and in deep ocean activities, but that does not preclude the need for numbers in our armed forces. The significant reduction that my right hon. Friend pointed out—some 35,000 fewer personnel in our Army by the end of the process—is difficult to comprehend, because it means that we will end up making hard choices.

I put it to the Minister: will those hard choices mean that we cannot engage in a Sierra Leone of the future? Will they mean that our armed forces cannot fill the £17 billion-plus equipment deficit or go into conflict zones properly equipped? Those would be unacceptable hard choices. Will they mean that in future, because of our lack of personnel, we cannot do things we ought to do? As the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) said, they are choices that we simply should not be making in this period of enormous uncertainty around the world. I appeal to the Minister to appeal in turn to his Government colleagues to think very hard about these cuts.

At the height of the cold war and as we began to come out of it, one thing we learned was that making the world secure for our armed forces was also making it secure for those whom we saw as our adversaries. President Biden has offered President Putin a summit. I have no truck with President Putin and the malign way in which he operates his Government, but we do have to talk. We have to begin to see whether there is any capacity —there may not be—to revive the treaties on conventional forces in Europe and on nuclear deployments.

In the end, making the world a safer place, at least in those areas of activity, will make a material difference in easing some of the pressures on our armed forces and what they do. That is not a pipe dream and it is not pious; it is common sense to say, “Yes, we need the right numbers in our armed forces and we need technologies, but we also need to work to create a safer and better world.”