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Mr. Brazier: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way so early in his speech. The devastating figure that he has cited for pilots is underlined by the fact that, unlike many other industries, the aviation industry is currently
depressed and airlines are not recruiting large numbers of pilots. It is difficult to imagine what will happen when there is an upturn in recruiting.
Mr. Key: My hon. Friend is right. I am the first to acknowledge that Ministers have a difficult task. Last year, when I accompanied the Minister's predecessor to Corsica and Italy to visit Royal Air Force personnel at the end of the Kosovo conflict, it was clear that they felt that they had achieved all that they could hope to do. One unit had carried out 900 bombing missions between 16 pilots in four months. The personnel said that they would never do that again. It is true that there are great temptations in the civilian world, but Ministers must decide how they will reverse the downward spiral.
The naval service is 1,900 short in trained strength; the Army is 5,600 short and the RAF is 1,200 short. I am the first to congratulate the Army on a substantial improvement in recruitment, but retention remains a serious problem. My worst fears were confirmed this week in an answer to a parliamentary question in which Ministers revealed the gravity of the position of the Scottish regiments. They are undermanned by approximately 600 people. That is the equivalent of a whole Scottish regiment, given that those regiments are mostly battalion strength. It is bad news for Scotland as well as the United Kingdom. That underlines my earlier point that Scottish National Members should be here, participating in the debate.
Mr. Dalyell: The hon. Gentleman makes that point for the second time. I do not want to make a yah-boo point against Scottish National Members, but never a week goes by without their defence spokesmen sending letters from the Mound that make pronouncements on defence policy. The problem is that they believe that defence policy belongs to the Holyrood Parliament.
Mr. Key: The hon. Gentleman is right. However, I am a Unionist and I believe strongly in the Union between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I endorse the hon. Gentleman's points by drawing attention to the extent to which the civilian work force at Faslane resent Scottish Nationalists' absurd obsession with a separate defence policy.
An especially worrying consequence of undermanning and overstretch is the rising divorce rates for couples of which at least one spouse is in one of the three services. Since 1990, the divorce rate has risen in the Army from 1.8 per cent. to 2 per cent.; in the Royal Navy, from 3.7 per cent. to 3.8 per cent., and in the Royal Air Force from 2.9 per cent. to 3.4 per cent. Those increases may not seem especially startling, but in the same period, the figures for the civilian population have fallen from 1.25 per cent. to 1.07 per cent. The RAF therefore has a divorce rate that is nearly three times as high as the civilian average.
Sometimes there are major problems. More often, the details of daily living cause the most friction. Friction at home occupies the mind of the service man or woman on the front line. That is why it is right to raise such issues while acknowledging our pride in the success of our armed forces personnel.
It therefore genuinely mattered when the Defence Housing Executive announced that it would cut the £2 million that was assigned for the purchase of carpets
and curtains for married quarters. It mattered to service families out of all proportion to the sum saved to the defence budget, as the Army Families Federation has told us. A much bigger problem arose as a bad example of overstretch when the tour intervals for a commando gunner became meaningless because he was posted overseas five times in only two years, during which his eight-year-old daughter attended seven schools. That is just not on.Although statistics always lag behind events, the serious divorce level among Territorial Army families is becoming apparent. Wives are proud of their TA menfolk, but with 2,800 TA members serving overseas--in spite or perhaps because of the 18,000 cut in TA strength--unreasonable strains are being put on marriages. The Army Families Federation is not alone in looking after the interests of those who follow the flag. I pay particular tribute to Airwaves--the Association of RAF Wives--whose patron is the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell) and which recently held a highly successful annual conference at the Royal British Legion college at Tidworth.
We are all relieved and delighted that RAF wives and dependants are building a successful and professional support organisation. RAF families are inevitably spread wide and thin across the United Kingdom and overseas, and need all the support that they can get. May I make a particular plea for armed forces personnel in Cyprus? I hope that Ministers will press their colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food over passports for pets for service personnel serving there--Cyprus has particular problems--and elsewhere, in particular Germany.
Also supporting the whole military community at garrison level are the Army welfare services. I pay particular tribute to them. Their budgets are being constantly squeezed by Land Command as the defence budget continues to be cut. Every garrison produces its newsletter, but I pay particular tribute to those who produce "Drumbeat", the Tidworth, Netheravon and Bulford community newsletter, which has run for 35 issues. This substantial source of supportive information contains everything from the times of church services and news on the citizens advice bureau, Relate and family entertainments to Defence Housing Executive and police news, holiday activities and rubbish recycling information.
Mr. Gerald Howarth: I am most interested in my hon. Friend's remarks about "Drumbeat". I am sure that he is about to mention the "Aldershot Garrison Herald"--a marvellous publication that occasionally reports my speeches in the House, I am pleased to say.
Mr. Key: There is an idea for "Drumbeat". I shall give way to any hon. Member who has recently read his garrison magazine.
I mentioned the RBL training centre, and any consideration of forces personnel must include the RBL's amazing work. It not only looks after former service men and women, but firmly looks to the future and plays an important role, particularly through its training college, in the education and training of those who are about to leave or have left the forces. The RBL has always been about more than poppy day and we owe it not only our thanks and admiration, but our support for its future role.
We should not blame our armed forces personnel or their families if they ask, as they do increasingly, "What is it all for?" General Sir Mike Jackson, Commander-in-Chief, Land Forces spoke about that at last week's excellent Ministry of Defence seminar at the Royal United Services Institute on the future of defence training and education. I am grateful to the Minister of State for inviting me to attend. With characteristic bluntness, General Jackson reminded us that, in the final analysis, a member of Her Majesty's forces knows that it is kill or be killed. In those circumstances, he said, education is all very well, but what is needed are qualifications for the after life.
General Jackson reminded us that British forces need physical, moral and conceptual training that will equip them with an ability to make sensible judgments in deserts and in the Arctic, in towns and cities and in jungles, with allies who speak, train and think differently. Service men must make judgments in the public eye, in the dark, under chemical attack and under attack from the air. British service men and women have to operate in three dimensions. They must handle fear. They must know how to react when they make mistakes. They usually find themselves with insufficient information and maximum disinformation.
Professional forces are a permanent target for deception. They must be highly technical. They face endless intricate requirements for co-ordination with unreliable communications. They will be pitted against a highly intelligent foe. They must make their judgments within the law. Service men and women know that the hardest part is not the physical, but the psychological. As von Clausewitz said, in wartime operations even the easiest things are very difficult.
For our professional forces, day-to-day friction is inevitable. On operations, there will always be uncertainty and chaos, violence and danger and a great deal of human stress. General Jackson made it clear that the course of education and training on which the Ministry of Defence has embarked is for everyone at every level, from general national vocational qualification to higher education. As I added, it should also be for forces families and dependants, and for civilian Ministry of Defence employees. The Ministry has set itself a huge challenge. Last week's seminar was an early point in the process, which Conservative Members warmly endorse. We shall do our bit by keeping the Ministry up to the mark on behalf of our service men and women and their dependants and civilian personnel.
Are the members of Her Majesty's forces different? Do we want Her Majesty's forces to reflect British society? Before 1997, the agenda of political correctness was creeping up on the military, but there was no enthusiasm for it. In the past three years, some of the eight Ministers who have served in the Ministry of Defence have, with their political advisers, been more keen than others, but it is unquestionably true that Ministers now welcome the correctness agenda.
United States forces are ahead of us, of course. President Bill Clinton's agenda has been to build an army whose diversity of race and gender makes it look like America. As The Sunday Times told us last weekend, on American bases special exercise classes are held for pregnant soldiers. Training standards have been lowered. The obstacle course at one base has been renamed a confidence course so as not to intimidate women.
Men must be able to throw a grenade 35 m, while women can pass muster by tossing it over a concrete wall. A new book on women in the armed forces by Stephanie Gutmann, "The Kinder, Gentler Military", has raised hackles in the Pentagon. The author writes:
- When we are involved again in a real war the fiercer, angrier, most blood-lusting force will win . . .
Do we want such an Army, Navy and Air Force for Britain and is it inevitable that we will get them? The passage of the Armed Forces Discipline Bill through the House and the other place has shown the irresponsible attitude of Ministers. There was no attempt to justify the wholesale weakening of the chain of command and no attempt to answer the fundamental questions put by Conservative Members or, indeed, by noble and gallant peers of no political persuasion in the other place.
With the qualification that, on our return to office, we shall ask the chiefs of staffs to review the impact on operational effectiveness of the change of rules on homosexuals in the forces, we warmly welcome the introduction of the new tri-service disciplinary code, which judges all personal behaviour in all three services against the overriding criterion of operational effectiveness.
Another landmark publication, after many years of work at the adjutant-general's headquarters, is the excellent new document "Values and Standards of the British Army". It is worth reminding the House of the foreword by the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roger Wheeler:
- The Army is proud of our achievements and our reputation for excellence, none of which would be possible without the commitment, drive, courage and quality of our men and women. These Values and Standards have been developed to underpin our ethos, and formally to codify the standards of conduct essential to sustain the moral component of fighting power. They have to be more than just a form of words; they must be comprehensive yet understandable, inspiring rather than threatening, contemporary yet enduring, underpinning combat effectiveness yet morally defensible, and above all robust enough to sustain us in war. They also form the basis of a covenant between the Army and its soldiers rather than a set of commandments . . .
- Soldiers volunteering for the British Army accept that, by putting the needs of the Service before their own, they will forego some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces. But in return they can at all times expect fair treatment, to be valued and respected as an individual, and to be rewarded by reasonable terms and conditions of service.
- Because discipline is so vital to success on operations, commanders must be able to enforce it when necessary. That requires clearly understood rules and a military legal system which can deal with offences such as absence, desertion or insubordination which are not found in civil law. And if it is to work in war, such a system must be in place in peace, for it cannot be turned on and off at will.
Those sentiments are wholly right. Long may they continue to have precedence over the tone of the arguments advanced by Defence Ministers during the passage of the Armed Forces Discipline Bill.
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