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Armed Forces Bill

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, thinks there is some intellectual coherence in the Government’s approach to regionalisation, given that in the last 24 hours, they have abandoned large swathes of it, including in my part of the world. However, I understand and take on board what he says.

I do not want to make a political point—having just made a political point. I strongly agree with the noble Lord in suspecting that this has the hands of officials all over it. Knowing the Minister as I do, I am not wholly convinced that this has his support. Of course, he will have to support it, as a government proposal, but I think he will get the arguments against it as well as anyone else would.

I am always nervous about any form of military reorganisation when it comes to recruitment. I bow to more distinguished military figures in this Chamber than I was, and it is very dangerous to speak about military experience, given how long ago, in my case, it was. However, I have witnessed over the years—and in the other place was a critic of—the move to change how we recruit our Armed Forces, not least through the use of Capita, which I always thought had disaster written all over it, in capitals. Indeed, that was a view shared at one point by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I am pleased that the Government are transitioning to the Armed Forces recruitment programme, which will come into force next year. We can only hope and pray that it will do us better service than did the Capita project.

But, of course, what we lost during all that was the whole issue of recruiting regiments from their localities, which has been enormously important over the years, not least because it engenders comradeship among those who join together from different parts of the world when they serve abroad. We have seen that throughout history. I agree that to try to centralise everything goes against the Government’s idea of localism. I can quite understand some officials sitting in the MoD on a quiet Friday afternoon thinking, “We must bring all this together. We cannot have all these independent organisations. It is much easier to have one”. But I think it would be a great mistake.

In an article in today’s Telegraph, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, Louise Sandher-Jones, talked about the mobilisation of some of the 95,000 retired people who have served in the Armed Forces for an exercise next year. I know they have raised the age at which veterans can be mobilised from 55 to 65—unfortunately, that excludes me by a year or two, although I hope I might have some use somewhere along the line if they are going to do that—but my point is that, if we are talking about a mass mobilisation, it goes back to the debate we had on an earlier clause about how to contact people. We are talking about contacting people who have not been in contact for decades. They live all over the country. What better way of connecting with those people and fostering some sense of purpose and community than by doing it through the existing structure?

The whole way that we do our military, to use rather bad English, is going through a transition, with much more concentration on our Reserve Forces and mobilising them in the case of an emergency. I therefore urge extreme caution to the Government, and to stop tinkering with this at the present time. Of course, the RFCAs are not above criticism—I understand a lot of improvements have already been made—but it is senseless, and the timing is wrong, to follow what the Government are proposing to place in their wake.