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9.3 pm
Mr. Matthew Banks (Southport): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key). He was entirely right to draw attention to the fact that we have a superb team at the Ministry of Defence. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State recently paid a highly successful visit to the middle east, my hon. Friend the Minister of State for Defence Procurement is doing an extremely good job and batting for Britain to boot, and, if my hon. Friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces will permit me to say so, he is known throughout the armed forces as a class act in our so-called classless society.
I listened with great interest to my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Cambridgeshire (Sir A. Grant), who described himself as one of the few old soldiers left in the House. I agree wholeheartedly with a number of his remarks. In particular, we share his delight in the decision to award the contract to Land-Rover.
I listened with interest, but some disappointment, to the remarks of the hon. Member for Motherwell, North (Dr. Reid). Hon. Members who have listened to the hon. Gentleman in previous debates will know that he was not on good form tonight. He cannot believe for a moment that there would be any compulsion on jobcentres to send people into the services, particularly the Army. That is utter nonsense and was dealt with first by my hon. Friend
the Minister for the Armed Forces when the hon. Gentleman was not listening, and by my hon. Friend the Minister for Defence Procurement.
Several of my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Godman) mentioned the Army Cadet Force, which I agree is not simply about Army recruiting. It is also a means by which young people can be acquainted with the armed forces, particularly the Army. I believe that, over a number of years, the cadet force makes them better citizens and we should continue to support it. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre (Mr. Mans) that we should spend more on it--we are getting good value for money.
I should like to pick up a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Cambridgeshire. It is important that many hon. Members take part in the parliamentary armed forces scheme. I keep getting letters from Colonel Thorne, who is a former hon. Member, and I keep telling him that I was in the Army, but he still writes to me. I am probably being told that I should spend some time with the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force. It is clear that hon. Members have benefited a great deal from that scheme.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre that we made a mistake in doing away with the Junior Leaders Infantry Battalion.
I was interested in what the hon. Member for Motherwell, North had to say about Army recruiting. I was not so concerned about jobcentres becoming involved in recruitment. It is entirely right that the Ministry of Defence should examine the way in which service recruiting centres have operated, and may operate in future, and consider what changes might be made.
If I might make one constructive criticism, it is that regimental headquarters should have a little more support in keeping the Army in the public eye. My hon. Friends on the Front Bench know full well that I disagree totally with the merger of the Gordon Highlanders and the Queen's Own Highlanders. Perhaps they will take on board some constructive criticism now that it is water under the bridge. If we change the method of recruiting, we must ensure that the regimental teams have sufficient petrol and vehicles that work to get them round the countryside. When my hon. Friends consider the vast areas of Scotland that have to be covered, they will understand that I am making a constructive point.
Mr. Soames:
My hon. Friend has raised an important point, and I share his concerns. He will acknowledge that performance of different regiments is extremely varied. Some regiments do well; others do not. The Chief of the General Staff and the Army Board are considering what guidance they can give individual regiments to establish a more standardised process, not in terms of tying them up, but to help them get the very best out of the resources that are available for recruitment. My hon. Friend is on to an extremely good point.
Mr. Banks:
I want to follow the example of other hon. Members, to whom I am grateful, and be brief in order to allow those who want to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to have the opportunity to contribute, but I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks.
It is 12 months since we last debated this subject. While there is no direct threat on our doorstep, there is still considerable risk in the world. The nature and direction of that risk is fluid and unpredictable. At the beginning of the decade, it lay in Baghdad, but we can now identify risks in the Balkans. I am conscious, however, that we may be receiving intelligence reports that suggest that there is a further build-up of forces within Iraqi borders, about which we should all be concerned. My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and others who drew attention to that were entirely right to say that we have to be careful about cost savings. The defences of the United Kingdom and of our allies are vital.
Much discussion has focused on the institutional and bureaucratic mechanisms by which the European Union might implement policy decisions involving some sort of military action by member states. Our contribution to European security has been, and will remain, unique and substantial. As long as nations have experience of working together in some context, such as NATO or the conventional forces in Europe talks, they can work together in another organisational context.
Any attempts at reorganising European defence purely for political reasons, therefore--especially any fanciful notion of equalising the importance of NATO and the Western European Union--must be subordinated to the continuing examination of future challenges and to the proper equipment of our forces with the necessary hardware at the best possible prices. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will remember those comments, come the intergovernmental conference later this year.
There will soon be more than 13,000 British troops stationed in Bosnia--the largest contribution to the peace effort after the United States. They form part of NATO's first land operation in almost 50 years of existence and are led by a British General, Sir Michael Walker. Their objectives seem to be clearer than was formerly the case in Bosnia. They are there primarily to help and persuade, by their very presence as well as their actions, the warring factions to stick to the Dayton agreement.
I hope that no military action will be necessary, but our troops should be given every chance to defend themselves, within the NATO rules of engagement, from any attack. They are not going to Bosnia to fight a heroic battle or to fight other people's battles. They will leave their mark on military history. After all, as Milton wrote:
No less renowned than war."
I do not believe that we have heard anything about Labour's plans for the future. All we have heard about is the defence review. For a number of years, we have heard Labour party conference motions for £4 billion-worth of cuts--equivalent to some 40 infantry battalions.
Mr. Banks:
Well, £4 billion is a lot of money and troops are expensive. It is about time that the hon. Gentleman started to pick up on one or two simple points of arithmetic.
Dr. Charles Goodson-Wickes (Wimbledon):
First, I must apologise for the fact that other commitments have made my attendance at this debate intermittent. May I also say how much I enjoyed the exposition of defence policy by my hon. Friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces--both the content and, to echo the words of my colleagues, the style to which we have become accustomed. It was in marked contrast to the essentially parochial concerns expressed from the Opposition Benches.
There has been so much good news on the wide deployment and effectiveness of our forces, on the respect in which they are held and on their operational ability and flexibility, that I hope that it will not be considered churlish to highlight one or two concerns, which are held by several Conservative Members, that have already been expressed. I hope that, against a background of the inadequacy or absence of any Opposition policy, such observations are constructive.
The equipment situation is admirable. A progressively higher proportion of the defence budget is being spent on the highly sophisticated weaponry about which we have heard so much today. Our men have been given the kit that they want, to an extent that is the envy of the world. Indeed, we now have the world's best professional soldiers with the best professional kit. I doubt whether any socialist-run economy--overlaid with its particular political priorities--could possibly have achieved that.
I am sure that my hon. Friends agree, however, that the manpower situation is far from satisfactory. We have gone through all of the arguments about the right size for the Army, and the original "Options for Change" figures were--thank goodness--revised upwards, so that battalions earmarked for amalgamation were saved. The fact remains, as my hon. Friend the Minister said today, that there is a shortfall of around 2,000 men now, which is expected to increase to around 4,000 in 1997. That is a slow but alarming haemorrhage.
The Government may have been victims of their own success in reducing unemployment generally, thus decreasing the pool available for recruitment to the armed forces. My hon. Friend the Minister will be making sterling efforts to discredit the ridiculous myth that redundancies at the latter end of a military career mean that there is less need for young recruits to the Army at the outset. My hon. Friend will be educating the public about that obvious fallacy in the advertising campaign that he has announced today.
I understand that the trend towards closing recruiting offices is being reversed, and I hope that my hon. Friend agrees that there is no substitute for a recruiting sergeant, who is suitably sponsored and self-motivated, to gain recruits for his regiment. Indeed, the regimental system depends on geographical links and personal contact. I also believe that there are moves to reinstate the concept of junior leaders, but I am not certain that that subject has been addressed in today's debate. After all, it is probable that very few regimental sergeant majors did not start their career in that way. I would welcome my hon. Friend's advice as to the form and timing of any proposals--which I believe would be enlightened ones--to bring back junior leaders in one form or another.
One factor that detracts from the quality of life of service men is the emergency tour interval. I do not apologise for bringing up the issue again. Ever since
"Options for Change", the confident aspiration has been for the interval between tours to be 24 months. In 1992, it was described as the minimum, but later it was described as a target for 1995-96. Today, my hon. Friend admitted that, owing to extra commitments, 20 months is more likely to be the figure that we can achieve for infantry battalions.
The House will recognise that someone who is motivated to be a soldier expects to put his skills to good use and does not want to be kicking his heels in a barracks. For single young men, the attractions of service life in a variety of theatres and roles is obvious. The problem is that wives, young families and regular girl friends understandably find such separations intolerable. I doubt, and have always doubted, that the 24-month tour interval is ever achievable. It certainly will not be if the manning problem continues, and I wish my hon. Friend every success in the measures that he has announced today to counteract that problem.
In some specialist units, such as the sappers, the emergency tour interval is as low as 12 months and, in some individual cases, soldiers with a particular expertise have been working on a back-to-back basis. The problem is magnified when we have such an enormous percentage of forces who are either training, on operations or retraining. The House will know that the percentage involved in such activities is the highest since the end of the second world war.
May I broaden the debate to a slightly more international basis? While history will mark down NATO as the most successful military organisation ever, the fact that it has achieved its ends owes precisely nothing to having been undermined for years by Opposition Members who were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, even if they now choose to forget or hide the fact.
Shortly before the end of the cold war, I visited the newly formed Franco-German brigade at Boblingen. I assumed that it was only a political gesture but, in eulogies to the late President Mitterrand that we have all read recently, it was perceived as one of his and Chancellor Kohl's greatest achievements. I find it difficult to disagree, for it has developed into the 50,000-strong Eurocorps, no less, based in Strasbourg. That was no political gesture, but an affirmation of a Franco-German axis.
The traditional balance of power might be better served by developing the entente cordiale. We now have a bewildering proliferation of military organisations, for which one almost needs a glossary. Eurocorps has been joined by EUROFOR, now EUROMARFOR, and the rapid reaction corps, and now the Western European Union aspires to become the defence arm of the European Union.
"Peace hath her victories
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