Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many soldiers who enlisted aged (a) under 18 and (b) 18 or over dropped out of the army before completing their phase two training in the (i) 2015-16, (ii) 2016-17 and (iii) 2017-18 financial years.

The requested information is provided below:

Untrained Regular Soldiers Outflow from 1st April 2015 to 1st April 2018 Split by Age on Enlistment

Notes/Caveats:

The figures are for the Regular Army, excluding Gurkhas, Full Time Reserve Service and Mobilised Reserves.

Untrained outflow refers to personnel who left the Regular Army before completing their trade training (phase 2).

Personnel outflow more than once in the last five financial years is counted as a separate outflow. Age on enlistment is similarly separately counted.

Age on enlistment is calculated using date of birth and entry date. There are known problems with the entry date information extracted from JPA which is supposed to reflect their 'current entry date' but if personnel have transferred to the Army from another Service, served under an alternative assignment type (e.g. reserve forces), are re-entrants or have transferred from Other Ranks to Officers, their entry date may correspond to any of these events.

The figures are for outflow of untrained Regular soldiers broken down by financial years. This table has been compiled based on the year of outflow rather than the year of inflow used as the base for previous publication.

For presentation purpose, figures have been rounded to 10; numbers ending in "5" have been rounded to the nearest multiple of 20 to prevent systematic bias.

Totals and sub-totals have been rounded separately and so may not appear to be the sum of their parts.