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Mr. Tom King: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I am sorry to interrupt an excellent opening. We have heard about telephone cards and about all the ways in which we try to meet the problems of separation. However, there will be no recruitment and people will not join the armed forces in significant numbers unless their families know where they stand. I am deeply concerned that the Minister did not answer my question. I realise that it is difficult for him to say exactly what will happen, but for what tour interval for unaccompanied tours are the

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Government planning? If the Government cannot answer that question, what on earth are members of the armed forces or people considering joining supposed to think?

Mr. Ottaway: Perhaps the Minister for the Armed Forces wishes to respond to that intervention.

Mr. Brazier: As the Minister has not responded, may I remind him that the Chief of the Defence Staff reported to the Defence Committee that the tour interval for infantry units is down to 15 months, and for individual infantry men it is much worse, perhaps 12 or 13 months--half the length projected in the White Paper and unsustainable in the long run.

Mr. Ottaway: It is a pretty tale when the Opposition must supply such information in an important debate. I recognise the important point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater. The matter is of great concern to the families. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury will deal with welfare matters in his winding-up speech.

That Government said that one of the most important elements of the strategic defence review was their policy for people. The supporting essay states:

"Addressing the personnel problems that affect the Armed Forces will take time, trust and money. Trust needs to be earned and will only arise from"--

this is the important point--

"the delivery of tangible improvements in overstretch and undermanning."

We share that view.

Overstretch was well described in the SDR as a "vicious circle"--the armed forces have fewer men, so those men are deployed more often; they spend longer periods away from their families, so they become more inclined to leave, which leaves the armed forces with fewer men, and so on.

The SDR continued:

"We must break this vicious circle. To do so we must match the commitments we undertake to our planned resources".

We share that view too, but we question in this debate whether resources are matching the growing commitments.

Mr. Martlew: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the strategic defence review examined the armed forces as the Conservative Government had left them?

Mr. Ottaway: Obviously, the SDR examined the armed forces that we left, but Labour tabled a motion in the last defence debate before the last election opposing the defence estimates and stating that it

"notes that the shortfall in the strength of the British Army numbers 4,000 personnel; is concerned that the resulting overstretch is undermining the morale and operational effectiveness of the armed forces."

As I shall shortly demonstrate, that seems to have been a golden era compared with the present position.

Mr. Soames: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and apologise for interrupting him. I endorse the remarks

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of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King). Of course telephone cards are important, and of course welfare issues are important, but what makes our troops so exceptionally brilliant and effective is the fact that they are highly trained and have superb confidence in their equipment and in their ability to undertake their task. What is so dangerous about the tour interval is that it means that the training is severely curtailed, thereby affecting the service men's confidence in their ability to do the job.

Mr. Ottaway: My hon. Friend is right. As the training cycle tightens, it affects the quality of training and the opportunities for training.

We agreed with the statement in the SDR that commitments should match planned resources, but we question whether resources are matching growing commitments. Are the assumptions in the SDR already out of date? The Government recognise that overstretch remains a major problem, as the Minister confirmed today. Nevertheless, even before major deployments took place in the Balkans, MOD figures revealed that more than 36 per cent. of Army personnel are currently committed to operations, with a further 22.5 per cent. warned to deploy for operations. Of Land Command personnel, 55 per cent. are committed to operations, with a further 34 per cent. warned to deploy for operations.

Mr. Brazier: Impossible.

Mr. Ottaway: As my hon. Friend says, it is virtually impossible.

Ministers tell us that recruitment is up by 18 per cent. this year. They point to a number of initiatives that have been undertaken as part of the SDR, which we welcome. However, the problem of overstretch remains and is getting worse. Only last week, the Secretary of State admitted that the Army is losing soldiers faster than it is recruiting them. The soldiers that it is losing are the trained, skilled ones, who are being replaced by raw recruits.

The review undertook to increase the Army's strength by 3,300 men, but it did not expect full manning to be achieved before 2004. That is five years away. In October 1997, the Army was 4,500 under strength. Today, it is more than 6,000 under strength.

The Chief of the Defence Staff told the Defence Committee inquiry last year that increasing the size of the Army by 3,300 would be a demanding challenge. Will the Minister confirm that if the Army is 6,000 below strength and its complement is being expanded by 3,300, he has to recruit 9,300 more men and women to get it up to full strength, and he has to do so when numbers are falling, on the Secretary of State's admission, outflow is more than 15 per cent., and the United Kingdom labour market is tightening? That is a huge challenge, particularly as most of the increase will be in signals, engineers and logistics troops, of which we are desperately short. We accept the Government's good intentions, but we shall judge their achievements by the number of people recruited.

Those manpower shortages give rise to our concerns over the nation's ability to meet the commitments made. The Chief of the Defence Staff expressed similar views to the Defence Committee only last week. Let us take a

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brief look at the armed forces' current major commitments. The deployment in Kosovo is moving towards 13,000 men. We have 4,000 men deployed in Bosnia, and I should be grateful if the Minister would confirm in his winding-up speech reports that that number is about to be reduced. We have 15,000 men deployed in Northern Ireland and a garrison of 23,000 men in Germany. We have a garrison of 3,000 men in Cyprus and the Falklands garrison numbers 1,000 men. With 89 per cent. of Land Command, which is the deployable Army, deployed or warned to deploy, we do not have a lot of room for manoeuvre to confront contingencies that may emerge.

Obviously, the future for Kosovo is unclear, but everything points to the deployment being long term; it would probably be better measured in years rather than months. In an article in the Daily Mail last month, General de la Billiere, who knows a thing or two about these matters, said:

"It is a military rule of thumb that for every soldier seeing active service on the ground, you need one undergoing training and one unwinding in some less demanding environment.


In other words, to fulfil our planned commitment to Kosovo, we will need up to 30,000 troops. And if things go wrong--as they have a historic habit of doing in the Balkans--we may need to increase that number suddenly and sharply."

He then reviewed the commitments that I have set out and continued:

"In my judgment, these figures demonstrate that our armed forces are already dangerously and unacceptably overstretched."

Using the de la Billiere formula, the overstretch can be measured as more than 20,000 at present.

At Defence questions last week, the Secretary of State said that he hoped to reduce our troop numbers in Bosnia and in Kosovo and that he expected a "significant reduction" after about "six months". I made that point in my intervention. The Chief of the Defence Staff also said last week that half our troops in Kosovo could be home by the autumn. The Minister's remarks have left the situation rather unclear. We want to know the criteria by which those assumptions are being made. That is an important point and it affects the overstretch situation.

Mr. Doug Henderson: Perhaps I can help the hon. Gentleman a little if my reply to his intervention was not clear. If one counts the beginning of June as the start date of the troop deployment, after about six months other nations will have had time to begin to assess what contribution they can make--they are doing that now--as well as when they can make it and how they can bring it to bear in Kosovo. At that stage, we would be able to bring back some of our troops and reduce our numbers to allow some to rest and some to train. That is what I said. It is exactly in line with what the Chief of the Defence Staff said and what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said. There is no difference at all between us.

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