Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of the retention payment introduced by the armed forces to private soldiers and lance corporals in 2025 on recruitment and retention of personnel.

The Army forecasts the impact to be in the region of 290 retentions to date. While there is no way to isolate the impact of this specific initiative from wider retention efforts, in seeking approval for this initiative, an assessment was made that c300 service personnel would be retained per year with an indicative saving over the cost of replacement. Therefore, the overall assessment is that Army Retention Payment is performing as anticipated.