Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with which NATO allies the UK is working to establish a Joint Expeditionary Force; and if he will make a statement.

The UK is developing the Joint Expeditionary Force with Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Norway, outside the framework of any particular international organisation. A letter of intent to develop the Joint Expeditionary Force was signed by Defence Ministers from these nations at the NATO Summit in Wales on 4 September 2014.

The Joint Expeditionary Force is a pool of forces, drawn from all three Services and the Joint Forces Command and held at high readiness. It covers a very wide spectrum of military capabilities. The UK units allocated to the pool are not fixed, but rotate to allow a cycle of training and exercising between periods of readiness.

This pool contains up to about 20,000 UK Armed Forces personnel and is used to generate scalable joint task forces, the size and composition of which are tailored to the specific tasks to be completed. They may include forces provided by Joint Expeditionary Force partner nations.