Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Glenarthur Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glenarthur (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the deep analysis, thoroughness and hard-hitting contents of this review. Many have made speeches here and elsewhere over the years, raising concerns about the depleted state of our defensibilities in an increasingly volatile world. But if this report can reinforce the need for Governments now and in the future to act upon it and fund what is required, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his co-authors will have done a great service.

I will dwell on an aspect of chapter 4.3, entitled

“‘One Defence’: People, Training, and Education”,


and particularly on the crucial matter of reserves. The strategic defence review acknowledges the essential role of the reserves, as of course it does the regulars. It highlights the theme:

“‘whole force’, outcome-focused, and skills-based”.

For several years, I was a member of the National Employers Liaison Committee or chairman of its successor body, the National Employer Advisory Board for the reserves, under the acronym NEAB. Our purpose was to take informed advice to the Secretary of State and the Chiefs of Staff on how to win and maintain the support of employers for whom deployment of their employees on operations was required. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, these operations might involve an employee being away from their civilian occupation for up to a year, which was of course very often to the employers’ economic disadvantage.

We worked closely with a body of marketing and other very skilled individuals who were under the acronym SaBRE, Supporting Britain’s Reservists and Employers, which in turn worked very closely with the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association, which my noble friends Lord De Mauley and Lord Soames have highlighted. NEAB and SaBRE no longer exist, but this review indicates to me that in due course some similar organisations will need to be reinvented.

During the Iraq and Afghanistan operations, about 10% of those deployed were reservists, some of them in very niche roles. As a former honorary Air Commodore of a Royal Auxiliary Air Force medical unit, and as honorary colonel of an Army Reserve medical unit, I can give personal testament, from visits I made to them in the field, to the amazing fortitude and skills that medical experts brought to bear on casualties in those campaigns, and how the skills they acquired were highly relevant to their peacetime work in the NHS. That organisation could benefit from their experience.

In our delicate economic climate, we must find ways of constantly bringing the enduring employer aspect into the mix. Whether within the public or private sectors, among so many other aspects of our public life, it is they who help to generate the funds for or sustain the skills that reservists provide.

My advisory board at the time developed the concept of defence career partnering. It aimed to achieve a much more flexible—some might even say radical—route for individuals to move between being an employee and a reservist and even into regular service, together with the support and understanding of employers, as well as of the regular and reservist chains of command. Something imaginative along those lines might now be a fruitful and enterprising way of helping to find and developing the personnel necessary to source at least some of the varied and essential roles necessary to fulfil our military manpower requirements.

I have no doubt whatever, as I and my former colleagues, as employers, have seen with our own eyes when visiting deployed reserves abroad, how much their employers gained from the skills and enterprise that their reservist colleagues developed on operations. However, we must recognise that their sacrifice in terms of their day-to-day work was also marked. The recommendations in chapter 4.3 go some way towards this, most certainly in the necessity of the whole-force concept—or indeed, as has been described by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, the whole-society concept.

However, while again congratulating the authors of this excellent report, I believe there may be even more imaginative ways of developing what is recommended in the people, training and education aspect, which this excellent review highlights, and which the Government should consider.