Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps he is taking to help reduce the time it takes for (a) Army and (b) RAF applicants to complete the recruitment process.

This Government inherited a recruitment crisis, with targets being missed every year for the past 14 years and is taking decisive action to get recruitment back on track. This has included the largest pay rise to personnel in decades and scrapping 100 outdated policies that slow recruitment down.

I refer the hon. Member to the answer given to Question 34507 to the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies).