Armed Forces Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I find it rather rich that the noble Earl, Lord Minto, has attacked the Government for not spending enough on defence when the Conservative Party is still calling for tax cuts, as well as economies in other areas, and we are still discovering just how thin our Armed Forces had become in the last five years and more, and how much now needs to be done to repair where we are. The message of the strategic defence review last year, now 12 months ago, was that we are now in a different situation. We are facing more serious threats to this country of different sorts, and we need political leadership from the highest levels of government in a national conversation to carry the public with it, and explicitly to spend more money on defence. That is a painful message, and it is undermined by those who are still calling for tax cuts without quite explaining how those cuts will be paid for.

Others on these Benches will address housing, military justice and other aspects of this Bill. I want to focus on the issues covered in Clauses 32 to 38: the Reserve Forces, their role, recruitment and retention, and conditions of service. The emphasis in the Bill appears to be primarily on regular veterans as the key to a strategic reserve, even into their 60s. I am conscious that there was a long history of Britain’s peacetime forces undervaluing volunteer reserve units. Our Army and Navy were designed for long-term deployments on other continents, not for defence of the homeland, neighbouring waters and countries, but, as the SDR clearly sets out, we are now facing different threats, many of them very close to home. As it states in chapter 6, we need to integrate homeland defence with Britain’s contribution to the defence of our continent, which is now again the chief priority.

Another of the traditional arguments for Regular Forces, as against short-term service reserves or volunteers, has been that it takes a long time to train an effective soldier. Again, the SDR questions this with its comment that the finance sector, civil society, academia and others all have much to contribute to countering the hybrid threats we now face. This is not new. I recall 15 years ago, when I was in government, the Ministry of Defence worrying about how to attract into the forces personnel with digital skills to combat the development of cyber warfare, and then discovering that one service unit, the Honourable Artillery Company, already contained a large number of workers in the financial sector with the advanced skills that were needed. I note the impressive contribution of one Territorial Army officer, Tom Tugendhat, in Iraq and Afghanistan, a volunteer officer whose language and other skills proved invaluable.

The experience of the Ukraine war has confirmed that civilian skills can now be immensely valuable in wartime circumstances. Hybrid threats must be faced with hybrid skills, many of which are often to be found more easily in civilian life than in the traditional military. We have also seen in Ukraine how quickly people can be trained to high effectiveness in fields where existing skills add value. The Armed Forces Bill in this respect falls far short of the vision set out in the SDR. It prioritises extending obligations for existing reserves up to the age of 65, rather than expanding and transforming the reserves for the defence of our homeland and UK waters and transforming the relationship between reserves and our broader national society. The cautious phrase that the reserves might usefully be expanded

“by at least 20% when funding allows, most likely in the 2030s”

declares how limited a role is still foreseen.

I have gathered some impressions about current dependence on reserve personnel from association with the London Scottish, a territorial unit in which my father served a very long time ago and which has now been transformed into the reserve company of the Scots Guards. I was struck when invited some years ago to a unit dinner by its honorary colonel, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, by how many of its members had been mobilised individually for short periods to fill the ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a sign of the current shortage of regular soldiers that individual reservists are also mobilised to make up the numbers for ceremonial events, including Trooping the Colour. One of our doorkeepers was marching round Horse Guards Parade 10 days ago.

I understood Chapter 4 of the SDR to be saying that the authors would have loved to recommend expansion and greater integration between regulars and reserves but hesitated to push that very far, given more urgent priorities for limited funding. They praise the Australian military’s gap-year model for short regular service with continuing reserve commitment. They note the positive relationship between skills training for military service and for civilian tasks and suggest that military partnerships with further education colleges could provide a way forward in civil and military apprenticeships. That should become a major part of the Government’s reskilling agenda through cross-departmental co-operation, and I would welcome the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, saying more about how that is to be implemented. Chapter 7 recommends that

“the Royal Navy should adjust its personnel balance to include greater numbers of Reservists to generate efficiencies and release Regulars for front-line and operational roles”.

That seems a highly practical way of reinforcing defence of our maritime waters.

So far as I am aware, little follow-up has been taken on any of this in the 12 months since the SDR was published. There has been nothing on the whole-society approach to defence that should more closely associate civilian skills and responsibilities with military. The authors recommended the national conversation to alert the public to new threats and how they might share in responding. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, told us recently that he has been designated the responsible Minister for the national conversation. No offence to him, but it should be the Prime Minister who leads this, and perhaps the new Prime Minister will realise that he must. The IISS, for example, has just published a report detailing Russian use of drones to overfly British military installations and airports, but it should have been Ministers who told us that to alert the public that we are facing real new threats and we need to respond.

When I asked which government department would be responsible for the proposed homeland defence force—a new iteration of what the Territorial Army was originally organised for—I had the impression that Ministers did not know before they told me that it was most probably the Cabinet Office rather than the MoD, which I suspect is a mistake. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, will be able to cheer me up by telling me that I am underplaying what has so far been done and that cadet forces and others are already helping to build a new relationship. I was rather struck the other week when talking to one of Britain’s major public schools about how political education will be adjusted when votes at 16 come in to be told that it had abolished its cadet force some years ago because of the cost and the feeling that it was not a vital part of its educational process.

On my reading, this Bill confirms that the Government have not reflected on the changing value of reserve and volunteer forces or followed the recommendations of the SDR. They have not learned the lessons of the Ukraine conflict or the changing nature of hybrid threats. Veterans in their early 60s will do their best to fill the ranks when called on, but there is so much more that should be done to recruit and mobilise reserves to contribute to national resilience and security and to link our Armed Forces more closely to our civilian national community.