Afghanistan

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman asks the question in the abstract—[Interruption.] It is not a yes or no question at all. At the time when redundancy decisions are made, a defined group of people will be excluded from consideration. That will be people deployed on operations, people preparing to deploy on operations, and people recovering on leave after operations, but I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman, as the right hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) asked me to do, that anyone who is now or at any time in the future deployed in Afghanistan will not be eligible for redundancy. That would reduce the field eligible for selection to a tiny number and would be most unfair.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I welcome the ongoing United Kingdom commitment to give £250 million a year for development in Afghanistan. This represents about 10% of the pledged total. Does my right hon. Friend have confidence that the remaining 90% will be found and that the United Kingdom will not be left to pick up the difference?

[Mr Hammond]

I think my hon. Friend might be confusing two things. There are, rather unhelpfully, two separate 4 billions here. There is £4 billion of development aid that was pledged at Tokyo, and there is $4 billion a year of support for the ANSF, of which the United Kingdom has committed about $100 million—around £70 million. We are confident that these sums will be found and that they will be available to the Afghans on an ongoing basis. We have set out our commitment and we do not intend to change from that position.