Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
31 MARCH 2004
RT HON
GEOFFREY HOON
MP AND SIR
KEVIN TEBBIT
Q140 Mr Viggers: May I say that I am
disturbed to hear that Sir Kevin did not mention defence medical
services?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: So am I. I should
have done; it was an error.
Q141 Chairman: I can see now that if
loyalty to regiment means nothing, then why have loyalty to a
pretty awful football team? There is a loyalty to an identity.
Mr Hoon: On the contrary, Chairman,
I know that there are those people who support Walsall.
Q142 Chairman: Even Derby County.
Mr Hoon: Irrespective of how well
or badly they do, they still support them.
Chairman: We move on. I think we shall
have to come back to this subject again. I do suspect we might
be moving and some people, former Chiefs of Staff, have argued
this case. The regimental system is inefficient, why not recruit
people into the army in the same way we recruit into the Navy,
allocate them to ships and dump the 300-year history of a regiment.
If that is the thinking, it would be a good idea to engage us
in that thinking to avoid any embarrassment and a good fight afterwards.
The precedent is shown: the MoD does not always win. David Crausby,
who has been very silent, has quite a lot of infantrymen in his
area too.
Q143 Mr Crausby: I was quite concerned
that you did not mention Lancashire, where they are thin enough
on the ground; but at least we have a decent football team in
Bolton. The Chief of Defence Staff expressed some concern that
the number of 14- to 16-year-olds was going down quite dramatically.
That of course is a problem which faces the whole nation, but
disproportionately must face the Armed Forces. Given the MoD's
quite reasonable concentration on key enablers and IT literate
forces in recent statements made by MoD, can you tell us how you
will be able to recruit and retain the appropriate skilled personnel
in the medium and short-term future?
Mr Hoon: That is a very good question
and it is something we are spending some time thinking about because
of the challenge which you have identified of changing demographic
profiles. It certainly means that we have to maintain our recruiting
effort and, as I indicated, it would be a serious mistake to turn
the tap off in the way that happened in the past. We have to maintain
those numbers through people's service careers. The other thing
to bear in mind which is often overlooked is that for most people
who join the Armed Forces—most of them—that is not
their only career. Someone who joins an infantry regiment in their
late teens, serves for 22 years, decides not to stay on any longer
thereafter, that person in their early to mid-forties has an enormous
range of skills, abilities, has enormous range of experiences.
Certainly at the moment he or she is finding that they can choose
from a variety of opportunities which are presented and that is
why we put quite a lot of emphasis in recent years, and this will
go on, on providing people with skills and qualifications which
will allow them to market their experience once they leave the
Armed Forces in a way which is even more attractive. Quite a lot
of effort is going into lifelong learning, into ensuring that
the training is not only training for us, for the skills we require
of people in the Armed Forces, it is training which is marketable
but allows them to go out into the world and secure further employment.
For the great majority we are not talking about people who join
the Armed Forces when they leave school or university and serve
throughout their career in the Armed Forces. We want to make sure
that those people who stay with us, for however long they stay,
make an effective contribution for that period, but then are able
to go out and choose a further career which is based on the experience
they have had in the Armed Forces. All our indications are that
employers are looking for precisely those kinds of people with
the discipline, the experience and the qualifications. We need
to do more to ensure they have those appropriate portable qualifications.
Q144 Mr Crausby: You have mentioned some
of the skills you want, but what are you doing from the point
of view of additional resources for training and to encourage
what will be a smaller and smaller number of people?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: First, we are
lifting slightly the minimum standard of entry. From 1 April we
are requiring standards of literacy, numeracy and communication;
not to university level for everybody, but ensuring that even
basic recruits are pretty bright kids. Once they are in, there
is a whole range of efforts we are making to skill our people.
You cannot buy them from the private sector already skilled, it
is just not possible, so we do have a very good investment in
training. The Armed Forces have a fine reputation for training
up their people. We are focusing it more clearly on the skills
we need and we are linking the learning credits and the skills
we develop to qualifications which are recognised in the private
sector. That is to encourage people to do it in the first instance.
We are very much linked into the Sector Skills Councils for example.
Charles Clarke, the Minister, is very keen that we should be doing
that sort of thing. When they leave they are very productive in
the economy, but it is essentially an incentive also for them
to do it while they are in the Armed Forces. Basically the education
and learning effort and skilling effort in the Armed Forces is
carrying on as strongly as before. What we have to watch is that
we have the right agreements with private sector employees, so
they do not try to snaffle our people as soon as they are fully
trained and that we get the full use out of them. In fact retention
is improving at the moment. We had a 5% reduction in our loss
rates last year, which is good. We can allow them to go sensibly
into the private sector afterwards rather than lose the people
we have just won.
Mr Hoon: One of the points about
life-long learning is that we recognise that many of our people,
particularly people with communications skills and so on, are
in huge demand in the private sector. They face understandable
pressures to go out into the civilian world. If you are thinking
about planning the rest of your career and there is an offer there,
there is a temptation to take it. We can give people the kinds
of qualifications which give them the confidence and assurance
that whenever they choose to leave, they will be able to find
employment. We think that is a way of improving and continuing
to improve retention, because those people then can say that they
are not yet ready to leave the Armed Forces, they are enjoying
what they are doing, they do not need to take this opportunity
now and they can decide in the future when they feel ready to
take what opportunities exist. They have the confidence of qualifications
they have secured to know they will get a job when they need one.
Q145 Mr Crausby: There is already some
concern about the levels of skills we have at present in the armed
forces in the sense that we already have gaps in some key areas.
For example, the First Sea Lord told us that ships were being
sent on operations without the full range of specialisms and were
not fully manned. Is this something we shall have to get used
to in the sense that we will not be sending out our armed forces
with a full range of skills, rather only with that range of skills
which can be expected for that operation? It concerns me that
we should deploy in that way.
Mr Hoon: No, the emphasis is entirely
in a different direction. The emphasis is on giving people a range
of skills, not actually simply concentrating on the kinds of training
and skills that we require of that individual for our purposes
and ensuring that they have a range of portable skills which will
allow them both to do an effective job for us, but also to provide
those skills to the private sector when they choose to leave.
If you think about the background of this discussion that we are
having about the use of technology, about the linking up of the
Armed Forces, ensuring that there is ever more sophistication
in what we do, as we all see, as Members of Parliament, when we
go around local factories, exactly the same issues arise, that
technology has replaced a lot of manual labour. What it means
is that the people who are needed in those factories and places
of employment have to have a range of ever more sophisticated
skills. That will be true of the Armed Forces as well.
Q146 Mr Crausby: I accept completely
that it is a different range of skills sometimes; sometimes not
much more sophisticated, but a different range of skills. What
do you say about the First Sea Lord's comments about the lack
of skills now? He clearly expressed some concern about ships going
out without a full range of crew specialisms and not fully manned.
If that is the case now, in the light of what I had to say about
a smaller group of young people, how can we possibly expect that
to get better?
Mr Hoon: Because, as Sir Kevin
mentioned earlier, we have identified across the Armed Forces
a number of skills in short supply as we continue to make the
kinds of adjustments I have been describing. We have to make sure
that we have the right kinds of people to deliver the kind of
military capabilities which I have set out and that has caused
adjustment problems. We provided in some cases financial inducements,
bonuses, retention payments, in order in the short term to fill
those gaps, but in my judgment that is only a short-term solution.
What we have to make sure is that we train the right kinds of
people to do those sorts of jobs for the future. It involves a
lot of planning. One of the big challenges we have had in recent
times has been the number of qualified pilots we require. We have
had to take a range of retention measures, as well as making sure
that we have enough people going into the training pipeline. This
is a huge planning process, not something which is necessarily
easy to turn on and turn off, which is why I am very reluctant
not to take precipitate decisions in relation to recruitment.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: This is an opportunity
to say the facts of all this. We have 124,000 people in the Armed
Forces registered for enhanced learning credits. We have 44,755
registered for nationally recognised qualifications. We have 14,272
modern apprenticeships; and there are far too few apprenticeships
these days. We have 14,272 of them actively training up. We have
13,000 people studying for NVQs. We have 450 foundation degree
courses. The Armed Forces really are putting in an awful lot of
work into upskilling and being successful. The thing about the
Navy is that it is rather special in that when a ship leaves port,
it is traditionally equipped to do everything which could possibly
and conceivably take place, including total war fighting. The
truth of the matter is that actually ships do not necessarily
need to leave port with all their capability, because they are
not necessarily going to be doing those things. There are occasions
where the First Sea Lord can afford to make judgments about whether
he can leave some people ashore still training or doing other
things and not necessarily cover every single function. There
is also a thing called Top Mast, where the navy are cross training
people so they have more than one capability in each individual,
so they have more flexibility. There is a specific issue about
the navy which is rather particular to the way the navy operates,
which is that one should not take a general lesson or be generally
concerned from that.
Q147 Mike Gapes: I was going to ask a
number of questions, but some have been touched on already and
one was specifically asked by Mr Blunt, so I shall not ask it.
May I take you back to your opening remarks? You talked about
the ability to plan three concurrent small- and medium-scale operations.
That is based upon the current budget we have. You talked in a
different context of catastrophic reductions. If there were to
be a catastrophic reduction of, say, £1.5 billion out of
your budget over the next two years, would that mean you would
still be able to do three concurrent operations?
Mr Hoon: No.
Q148 Mike Gapes: So we hope that will
not happen and hope that Mr Soames is listening. Can we take the
point further with regard to unexpected developments? Ten days
ago we had to deploy at very short notice extra forces into Kosovo.
We are talking about the unexpected situations which could arise
at short notice, where we have forces which are heavily committed
in different parts of the world and suddenly in an uncertain world
where operations vary we have to move very quickly. The White
Paper talks about graduated readiness and the concept in the strategic
defence review having been vindicated. Are we really ready to
deal with these Kosovo-type situations which could of course get
much worse? Let us say, for the sake of argument, the Argentinian
new president has made some remarks about the Falklands in the
last few days which have led to an incident and if we have Kosovo,
Falklands, suddenly coming up the agenda whilst we have our commitments
in Iraq, Afghanistan, everywhere else, can we cope with it and
what will have to give?
Mr Hoon: We can cope and the Kosovo
deployment, despite all of the other commitments we have, was
a textbook illustration of our ability to cope, in the sense that
we held these forces at short notice, we had a requirement from
NATO to make them available within four days and actually made
them available within 24 hours. I anticipate they will be there
for a relatively short space of time. That is the key to this.
In terms of being able to put troops into theatre quickly and
to maintain them there for a relatively limited period of time,
we are perfectly capable of coping with that. What causes over-stretch
in my view are long-term commitments where you have to continue
to replace those troops every six months or so and know that if
anything does then arise, you only have a more limited capability
available to react quickly. As Sir Kevin indicated, even at a
time when we had 19,000 of our armed forces fighting fires across
the country, we were still able to generate a very significant
force, the largest force in very many years, to conduct Operation
Telic. Again I accept that if I needed to maintain a fighting
force of 46,000 troops and continue to replace them every six
months, that would be an enormous challenge and beyond our capabilities.
The truth is that if you want to get that number of soldiers into
theatre for a very limited period of time, which we were able
to do, you then reduce numbers, which is precisely what we have
done. We did it in Afghanistan, we did it before that in the Balkans,
we have done it again in Iraq. Then you come down to a level which
you can manage and maintain, recognising that there will be a
requirement to replace those troops every so often in theatre,
but also have available contingency forces to deal with whatever
emergencies arise. In the end the proper answer to your question
is that it will depend. I cannot give you that blanket assurance
because I will have to be able to deal with whatever occurs tomorrow.
I judge our planning, our preparation is the best possible. The
United Kingdom's armed forces and the Ministry of Defence are
arguably the best in the world at managing those kinds of arrangements,
that kind of planning to be able to react quickly and it is precisely
these kinds of White Paper, the conversations we are having today,
which give us that edge when it comes to deployment. Most countries,
perhaps with the exception of the United States, are profoundly
envious of our ability to get forces into an operation within
24 hours. It is not something which is that easy. I have explained
sometimes to fellow defence ministers, whom I am encouraging in
other countries to emulate our example, just what it means to
the men and women involved. They have to be available 24 hours
a day for me to contact them, they have to carry pagers, mobile
telephones. They cannot necessarily go too far from home or their
base. It is an enormously demanding process, but we are able to
achieve that across a range of forces. My judgment is that the
world needs more of those kinds of forces and we have to go on
encouraging other countries to emulate our example.
Q149 Chairman: I would not want people
to reach the conclusion that deploying so many people in the firemen's
dispute had no consequences for the numbers, the quality of people
that we sent to Iraq. As far as I can recall, maybe even Sir Kevin
pointed out, the pool to draw upon to send to Iraq was in fact
diminished and people had to be plundered from one unit to another
in order to meet commitments.
Mr Hoon: May I absolutely emphasise
that it had absolutely no effect on numbers at all. There were
some adjustments and I think I made this clear to the Committee
and certainly to the House. As the planning was refined as to
what kinds of military capabilities we needed to conduct Operation
Telic, there were some paratroopers who had been trained for fire-fighting
whom we then replaced and brought into our operations for Iraq,
but essentially it had no impact on the numbers. As far as the
quality of the capabilities we required was concerned, we had
exactly what was needed as far as the military planning to do
the job was concerned.
Q150 Chairman: Could you repeat what
you said, Sir Kevin, to save me rushing out and looking at our
report?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: I said it certainly
had no effect on numbers, although we were not discussing numbers.
I think what I said was that because of Fresco, some troops were
used whose notice to move was in a more extended state that required
of them. In other words they had to move faster than their readiness
time would have normally required. It is the same point that the
Secretary of State is making, saying that we had to juggle a little
bit with the actual units we were sending. That did not affect
the total numbers which went on the operation.
Chairman: Our wonderful Clerk has actually
got your quotation here. Paragraph 56 "Although the Armed
Forces commitment to Operation Fresco did not prevent them from
putting together an effective force package for the operation
in Iraq, it did limit the total numbers. It also adversely affected
some elements of the force (by for example requiring high readiness
units to move at short notice from fire-fighting to deploying
to Iraq). In the longer term it could have undermined the Armed
Forces ability to sustain combat operations". I am merely
making the point that I would not want people to have the impression
because soldiers and sailors and airmen were firemen that we still
had the capacity to mount such a large operation. We will look
through our evidence again and perhaps we could exchange correspondence
on this, Secretary of State.[1]
Q151 Mr Havard: I want to deal with the
question of reservists specifically within the White Paper. There
has been the suggestion that not only are they going to be integral
to the whole operation in future, but some greater integration
of reserves and certainly improvements in terms of links with
their families and employers is crucial. Their role and their
function and their place in the scheme of things is such that
it is taking on a greater significance. What do you see their
role and function being? Do you see any capacity by which that
could be extended? Are we currently at the maximum of what they
can be used for and also in terms of the numbers of people?
Mr Hoon: We have talked for many,
many years about our reserves being usable. We have talked about
the way in which they could be integrated alongside our Armed
Forces and we have talked about the kinds of training they need
to be able to do that and a very considerable change in the previous
emphasis and the way in which reserves were to be utilised. We
have talked long about that, but I have talked to some reservists
lately who have said that at one stage they began to doubt whether
that was in fact true, that there was a long period of discussion
along those lines, but they were not entirely persuaded that we
were going to do anything about it. I would not say they were
shocked to hear that we were going to do something about it, but
what Operation Telic has demonstrated beyond a doubt is that all
those things we previously talked about we now can do. The reserves
played a very significant role in Operation Telic, simply because
their training, their exercising, their preparation, all the things
we told them were going to happen, actually happened and happened
in an outstandingly successful way.
Q152 Mr Havard: Clearly they are used
in different ways. A discussion continues about using, for example,
reservists in terms of the army as formed units or whether they
are specialists who infill here and there and that is particularly
the case perhaps in the other two services and so on. On this
question of what they are going to be deployed for, they cannot
be used, can they, as some sort of standby just to fill in the
gaps if there are problems in the general systemic issue of retaining,
recruiting and training the appropriate forces? That is not an
appropriate role for them, is it?
Mr Hoon: No, but what it does
do is give us that extra flexibility, particularly in this kind
of large-scale operation, to be able to extend the usability of
our regular forces. I am sure Peter Viggers will be raising the
question of medical support, but one of the key capabilities which
we were able to use in Operation Telic was the large number of
reservists who had medical qualifications and who were deployed
to provide that support.
Q153 Mr Havard: In terms of the role
and functions they will fulfil, there has been this debate before
in other places and it keeps coming back on the sort of role reservists
might fill as some form of reconstruction force and whether or
not they are going to be used in the traditional ways they have
been used or whether in some way a new process is going to be
established for their use that way. I asked this question of the
Chiefs of Staff when we met them last week. They have a particular
view of it. Is there going to be a new role for reservists beyond
what they have previously done?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: May I say that
is not really how we are looking at it. Medical reservists are
in a special category and I must say that because I forgot to
mention it before. In terms of post-conflict reconstruction, while
it has proved to have been very useful to have people who are
reservists, who also happen to have been bank managers or oil
pipeline specialists or whatever in civilian life, that is mainly
not why they are reservists: they are reservists to do other things.
The answer to the problem, and we accept there is a problem is
that we have been too slow—when I say "we" I do
not just mean the UK, I mean the international community, other
countries as well—in bringing the NGOs, the civil organisations,
in rapidly after stabilisation has occurred to conduct and begin
the post-conflict reconstruction phase. What we in the UK are
doing about this is firstly that there is a group of three departments,
in particular, Foreign Office, DFID and the Ministry of Defence,
which is seeking to set up a task force, a group, to speed that
process up, to have people assigned to move, to go into these
environments as soon as they are secure, to conduct these roles,
therefore not expecting the Armed Forces to do it, but expecting
them to do it. Companies, for example, will be invited to put
people on a roster who are engineers or whatever so they can deploy.
Q154 Mr Havard: What you say is very
helpful and very useful and it is an area which will be covered
elsewhere. What I was particularly concerned about, because we
have had this was that the guy you are probably thinking of, as
has been explained to us before, who became effectively Mr Money
or whatever for an area of Iraq happened to be a banker by profession
but that was not why he joined the reserves. If you draw on that
too much, people do not do it; they joined for another reason
and they joined to get away from the day job. There is all of
that.
Mr Hoon: That is a very good point.
We had a teacher running the education policy in southern Iraq
for a time and although he thoroughly enjoyed that, it was not
necessarily something which teacher training had prepared him
for, but he did a great job. The real lesson which Sir Kevin was
alluding to was the fact that here we are, discussing the need
to have high readiness military forces and the need to react quickly
to crises and to be able to get a multinational force into theatre
very quickly. What we have learned, certainly in my experience
in Kosovo, to some extent in Afghanistan, to a larger extent in
Iraq, is that for the post-conflict phase we need to be able to
call upon large numbers of civil servants with appropriate training
and expertise to deploy to some really quite difficult situations
and to be sustained there. Part of our thinking is that we should
plan for that and we should prepare for that.
Q155 Mr Havard: May I stop you there,
because I am treading on other people's ground and you might be
asked about this later. I was particularly interested to know
how the reservists fit into that, because maybe there is a role
for them. What I am also interested in is what the employers'
view of all this is going to be. As I understand it there are
six months and they are going to be asked to go as part of expeditionary
forces. Do you have a view not only of how they are going to look
at that, but also how their employers are going to look at that
because it is a lot to ask of people to go and not simply fill
in for a national emergency, but all this other stuff somewhere
else.
Mr Hoon: One of the things we
have learned from recent compulsory mobilisations is that we have
to recognise, particularly in modern economies, that many employers
are hard hit if highly specialised members of staff are removed
from them and required to participate in military operations.
In parenthesis may I say, in answer to one of your observations,
that I would not as a matter of principle expect us to mobilise
reservists simply because of their peacetime skills. They should
be mobilised in principle because of their military skills. The
fact is that from time to time in extremis we have had to use
their peacetime skills, but I would not say that was good practice
or the kind of principle we should follow.
Q156 Mr Havard: There is this other issue,
is there not, that for whatever reason they are called, they are
more routinely going to be called compulsorily presumably. There
is a new experience here and that is why I was asking the question
about their relationship not only with their families and where
they go and what they do, but also the relationship with their
employers and how that process is designed to work.
Mr Hoon: This is something which
we have discussed and debated, certainly in the time that I have
been Secretary of State. It is no secret to say that we came close
to compulsory mobilisation as far as the Balkans were concerned.
At that stage I judged that it was not necessary and we managed
with the regular forces we had. Compulsory mobilisation cuts both
ways in those terms. I have spoken to very many reservists who
want to be compulsorily mobilised because otherwise they feel
that they are volunteering twice. They volunteer in the first
place to join the reserves and then they have to volunteer to
go on operations. The difficulty that causes them both domestically
and with their employer can be profound. I prefer not to go into
any particular examples. It is much easier to be able to explain
to your employer—leaving aside anyone else you might need
to explain it to—when you have a letter from the Ministry
of Defence saying that they are going to compulsorily mobilise
you. These are issues which actually cut in a slightly different
way from perhaps the way that most people assume.
Q157 Mr Havard: Presumably you have been
looking at resignations which have come from the recent experience,
that people have tested this particular model now for the first
time. Do you have any observations to make about what you have
learned about how you inform them for the future?
Mr Hoon: We have learned a number
of lessons: notice periods in particular are important. We need
to try to maximise those as far as we can. We have learned a lot
of lessons about employers. I was speaking earlier about the mobilisation
of employees who may have a particular and vital role in a company.
If you think about the pattern of our employment in our economy
today, there are lots of much smaller firms, smaller workforces,
not having the same interchangeability which might historically
have been the case. Clearly we judge that we need to talk far
more to employers about the kinds of skills people have, the kinds
of time they may be deployed by. I have done this in a number
of areas. We have had a number of meetings with employers across
the country after people had returned from Telic and I have to
say that the overwhelming majority of employers are not only pleased
but proud that their employees had been able to participate in
this operation. I think one of the things we need to do is to
give the employers more information about what their employees
have been doing, the contribution they have made. Actually most
employers I have spoken to wanted to communicate that fact across
their workforce, because it is something they all strongly supported.
Q158 Mr Havard: I have to say that is
a similar experience to mine. May I finish with one question which
comes back partly to what I was asking before about recruitment
generally? I am told, particularly in relation to army recruitment,
that there is some idea of blending together—I understand
there is a new word now "blending"—the recruitment
of reservists and regulars or TA and regulars. There are differences
between reservists and we saw that. You said that some reservists
turned up and did not realise it was for real, it was serious.
There were some like that in my experience and others were saying
"Good, fine, I've got the chitty, that's helpful, thank you
very much". There is a range of these experiences, but reservists
are in a different position to the Territorial Army for example.
Often the demands made of these people and the way in which it
has to be pitched, both to the individuals to get them in and
to the employers and the extended relationships they have, is
not necessarily the same as it is for regular serving personnel.
Can you make some observations? If you are going to say these
people are this vital component and will be, what is going to
be done to look seriously at how you are going to recruit, retain
and deal with them properly as a particular group, whilst at the
same time dealing with their integration?
Mr Hoon: There are several different
issues there, which I will do my best to deal with. The general
point is that we do have to recognise that if we are going to
mobilise people compulsorily, we have obligations to them, to
the families to their employers to be clear about timescales and
to provide as much information as we possibly can. It follows
from that, and it is too soon to say, that there will be implications
for recruitment. Actually the promise that we made to train people
to be more usable has been fulfilled and people appreciate that
because they recognise the kind of opportunities they have had.
That has largely worked well. Where we have to think about the
future is if in fact this became a still more regular feature.
I would not want you to assume that simply because we have done
this as part of Operation Telic, a large-scale deployment, that
this is necessarily something we would do routinely. I do not
anticipate that being the case. It certainly has been a very rigorous
test of both the preparation we made for reservists, as well as
their use on a real operation. The only other category which I
always feel the need to mention, which we rely on quite heavily,
particularly in the Balkans, is those people who in effect turn
up on a fairly regular basis at Chilwell and are deployed for
six months at a time, come back and decide how long they want
to spend at home before then choosing to go off on another deployment.
We have a new category which falls between the two; they are full-time
regular reservists. It is a very significant contribution, because
it gives them a degree of flexibility, I suspect, in almost being
able to choose where they are going. The options are a little
broader at the moment, so it is not quite as straightforward as
it was in the Balkans. It is actually a very important contribution
in the Balkans.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: The Secretary
of State asked the Chiefs of Staff and me to keep in much closer
contact with the employers and we do that through the National
Employers' Advisory Council. We had a meeting not very long ago
and the Chiefs of Staff would have said some things to the Committee
quite recently based on that dialogue we had. As a result of that
we do have a rather more sophisticated understanding of exactly
what is going on in the reserve community than perhaps we had
before, which is necessary because of the use we make of reserves—we
still have 1,600 of them in Operation Telic today—and also
because of the nature of the people. I had not realised before
that 30% of our reservists are public servants, which is quite
interesting. I know a lot of them also work for very small firms
and some of them come in and out, regarding this as a good six-month
thing to do in their overall life. There is a wide spectrum of
different sorts of people there, which we need to make sure we
have the right tailored arrangements to serve and fit in with.
The sense we have is that it is just about right at present, but
we have to keep that dialogue going in quite a differentiated
way, according to the various groups we are serving. We are now
doing that, but certainly they are being used as much as employers
can sustain generally at this point. It depends whether you are
a government department, where it is obviously easier to handle
the one-in-three-year deployment, or whether you are a smaller
employer who cannot do that sort of thing.
Mr Hoon: One of the other things
we have learned, but footprint issues arise as well, is where
individuals are mobilised, they may not actually live anywhere
near a unit or a base. Their particular unit may have its headquarters
a long way from their home. We have to do more to make sure that
family members in particular are informed as to where they are
and what they are doing and that there is the kind of support—going
back to Rachel's point—which otherwise a regiment would
provide. Given the nature of reservists and where they live and
how they operate, that is actually quite an important factor.
Q159 Chairman: One further question which
follows on from a question last week to the First Sea Lord from
Dai. You said you did not want specialists, you did not want guys,
women, joining the Territorial Army or the reservists in general
and using their specialism. Is that your personal view or is it
MoD policy? I can think of so many counter-arguments. The largest
employer supplying personnel into the TA, as far as I am aware,
is British Telecom: 600. If you have guys who are used to doing
whatever they do, why put them in general functions where their
expertise is lost? We met a young guy who was working for BAE
Systems, who was doing a wonderful job creating all of these quick-fix
projects and he was a civil engineer or something closely related.
Last week the First Sea Lord said this of his reserves, "
. . . they were all extremely important down in Umm Qasr when
the port was being got up and running. It was very interesting
the commander RNR, with whom I was most impressed and to whom
I said, `You have done a fantastic job' said, `It is not really
a problem, I normally run Southampton'!" If a guy runs the
port of Southampton, it seems to me pretty important that he should
run the port of Umm Qasr rather than being a bandsman or infantryman
or whatever. I am not trying to be provocative on this occasion
but I should really be interested to know whether yours was just
an emotional spasm or actually policy of the Ministry of Defence.
Because if it is policy, Secretary of State, I honestly think
there are nuances and elements of it which frankly, from what
you have said, are slightly dubious as far as I am concerned.
Mr Hoon: Until you made the observation
about "emotional spasm" I was going to be polite.
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