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Mr. Donald Anderson (Swansea, East): The Territorial Army has always recruited well in Wales.As a Welshman, I am therefore pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) in this debate.
Equally, I attended in June 1994 at University college, London a conference on the future of the TA with the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier). The TA representatives hoped that the Bill would appear in the Queen's Speech at the end of that year. Although the draft Bill did not appear until May 1995, it is clear that the Government used the time wisely in consultation. I hope that that will be a precedent for other Bills. There was a thorough examination of the Bill in the other place, with a great deal of expertise and experience which, alas, is perhaps not wholly matched in this House. Given the degree of consultation and scrutiny of the Bill and the TA's impatience and enthusiasm, perhaps we can give the Bill an easier passage than we otherwise might have done.
One problem is that fewer and fewer people can offer the reservoir of experience that the right hon. Member for Dumfries (Sir H. Monro) can. Alas, his generation is passing on and there is an increasing gulf, both within and outside the House, between civilian society and the services, in part because of the ending of national service. One of the joys of the TA is that it is a means of bridging that otherwise increasingly yawning gulf. Such bridges must be built and the TA should be used for that purpose.
Some may argue that the Bill's key motivation was to get an army on the cheap and that the fingerprints of the Treasury are all over it. That may have been a part of it, but we are convinced that it is really to make our reserve forces more flexible and enable them to adjust properly to a changed world environment and to changes in our society. I shall not go into the details of parts III, IV and V, which are relevant to the need for increased flexibility.
Dr. Godman:
Has my hon. Friend given any thought to the circumstances surrounding the call-up of an unemployed person? Would such a person, when he finishes his service with the armed forces, be allowed to start at the beginning in terms of receiving the jobseeker's allowance?
Mr. Anderson:
That is a matter of detail for the Employment Service. I understand that a sizeable proportion of reservists are unemployed, but that employers are more and more ready to value the skills that reservists gain in their periods of training. That benefit will be enhanced by the aligning of qualifications in the service with qualifications outside so that employers will have a valuable product at the end of the service period.
I have a few points to make, which I hope are non-partisan. It is objectively true that a number of problems created by the Government impact adversely on reservists. First, the simultaneous reduction of the regular and volunteer elements of our defence forces had a cumulative effect which could have been avoided if our reserve forces had been reduced a year or so after the substantial reductions in our regular forces.
Another change--I appreciate that I would be out of order if I went too far down this road--is the effect of the Government's Sunday trading legislation, with the
increase in seven-day high street trading, which makes the concept of weekend soldiers more difficult and the weekend soldiers more difficult to identify, recruit and train progressively. There are also the Government reforms in the health service, to which I shall come in a moment.
It is essential to provide flexibility and to have a seamless regular-reserve concept which involves much closer liaison with civilian society, employers and trade unions. Short-term contracts are increasingly a feature of employment, but short-term service is a relatively new concept in our military, although one much advanced in, for example Canada. I hope that the Ministry of Defence can learn substantially from the Canadian precedent. Short-term contracts raise issues about the standards of professionalism as well as about the levels of training and competence required of military employment groups.
We rightly boast of our military as a centre of excellence. We therefore need to proceed with care to avoid dilution and we need to look carefully at the terms of service. A civilian employee is rarely expected to work under the terms of service offered by the Army. We must also consider the new nature of risk. We need to study, for example, the insurance of our new reservists because the British Army has been notoriously poor in terms of insuring its personnel.
The Bill will also have an effect on the ethos of our military units. A person who signs up for the military signs up for a quasi-family structure, with a supportive framework. If we are to have individual reservists who are not in formed units, it will be more difficult to maintain that ethos, which has been so valuable a feature of our services.
We assume that civilian volunteers can bring their skills smoothly into the military, although their military tasks are often very different from their previous tasks.In Canada, for example, there is up to six months of pre-training before the volunteers have overseas postings.
I have two observations on the link with the civilian sector. The Government have clearly made a strong effort to liaise with employers and to listen to their problems, and there have been a number of modifications to the Bill as a result of those consultations. Reservists have much to offer, but it is clear that there is some resistance by employers, which was expressed recently at a conference on the Bill held in Birmingham.
Industry is increasingly competitive. I understand that sectors of industry which are owned by foreign companies are more resistant to releasing people for volunteer service than others. The difficulties are enhanced by the fact that fewer and fewer of the chairmen of our major companies have had military experience, so companies are less willing to release people. It is therefore important that there be bridge-building exercises. I commend the efforts of the employer liaison committees, established nationwide since 1988, and I especially commend the recent initiatives by the National Employer Liaison Committee, the general national vocational qualifications scheme, the university student scheme and others.
With regard to the national health service trusts,I accept that the executive stretch training has in some cases been focused on the trusts. However, I had a discussion this morning with the chief executive of my local health trust in which he spelled out the fact that the shortages in the NHS trusts are in precisely the specialties
that are needed by the military. One thinks particularly of anaesthetists, orthopaedic surgeons, accident and emergency specialists and neurosurgeons. In my local health service trust in Morriston, there are currently four vacancies for anaesthetists. An adjoining national health service trust tried to recruit anaesthetists by employing a headhunter to tour Europe; after two attempts it appointed three people, but at double the normal salary in NHS trusts. It is difficult to fill key posts in specialties needed by the military.
That problem is, alas, a result of the failings of medical manpower planning over the years. Planning is increasingly geared to conform with the immediate requirements of the patients charter. In the new contracting environment in which the trusts must deliver their contracts by the end of the year, it will clearly be difficult for the NHS trusts, which are contractually bound to deliver certain contracts, to be expected to release specialists when they are needed. That is especially true of peacekeeping operations in, for example, Cambodia or Somalia. Reservists may be sent to Saudi Arabia and may have to wait for a month or two in the expectation that something may happen, but the NHS trusts have to fulfil key contracts even though their staff are stretched and although junior doctors are doing work that should be done by consultants. I ask the Government to look carefully at that problem. If, within the new internal market, the Government add more requirements, they must have let-out arrangements to cater for the problems of health service trusts.
Sir Geoffrey Pattie (Chertsey and Walton):
I emphasise the point made by the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) about the reserve forces being a bridge between the military and the civilian community, especially when there are fewer and fewer people around who have had any military experience. That was a point well made.
Like many others, I welcome the Bill. I hope that hon. Members who follow the fortunes of the air reserves and the naval reserves will not mind if I concentrate my remarks on the Territorial Army as I recently had the great honour and privilege of being appointed honorary colonel of the 4th Royal Green Jackets.
I especially welcome the great improvement in the procedures for embodying TA volunteers in the Regular Army during, for example, the humanitarian exercise in Bosnia. At present, when TA people transfer to the Regular Army on S-type engagements, a series of rather cumbersome steps must be gone through. People often lose a rank and they sometimes have to wait for several weeks while they go through a vetting process. That will all be taken care of in the new arrangements.
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