Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the (a) recruitment target and (b) number of candidates recruited was for (i) the Royal Navy, (ii) the Royal Air Force and (iii) the British Army in 2021-22.

The recruitment targets for the Armed Forces for financial year (FY) April 2021 – March 2022 are as follows:

These figures include Regular Officers, Regular Other Ranks, Reserve Officers, and Reserve Other Ranks.

Intake to UK Regular Forces for FY 2021-22 up to 31 December 2021 can be found in the published Quarterly Service Personnel Statistics at table 5a of the data within the accompanying Excel sheet: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-2022. The full FY 2021-22 intake figures will be published in the 1 April 2022 Quarterly Service Personnel Statistics, which currently has a provisional release date of 16 June 2022.

It should be noted that recruitment targets are not directly comparable to the published intake statistics because of differences in definitions/populations used in the underlying data.