Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what he plans the force generation ratios to be for the expeditionary force of 50,000 personnel announced in the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015; and if he will make a statement.

In the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 (Cm9161) we have increased our ambition so that for Joint Force 2025 we will be able to deploy an expeditionary force of around 50,000 including greater contributions from the air and maritime domain. This is is the largest scale operation that Defence plans to be able to deliver whilst continuing to conduct a range of concurrent "fixed" tasks such as defending the homeland, running military bases and training our military personnel. The scale and nature of the deployment means that there is no specific force generation ratio associated with it.