Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many defence personnel are based overseas (a) at each of Her Majesty's Armed Forces bases and (b) as part of a joint operation abroad.

There are 13,650 British defence personnel permanently based on British military bases overseas. This figure includes those based in Cyprus, Gibraltar, the South Atlantic Islands, Diego Garcia, Germany, Canada, Kenya, Brunei, Nepal and Belize. This figure represents the number of personnel who are stationed at that location. It may differ from the actual number of people working on the base at the time, for example due to deployments. The breakdown of these figures into country and Service is shown below; where countries have five or less personnel, these are rounded to zero and the country does not appear in the table. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) regularly publishes the location figures for both military and civilian personnel, this can be accessed on the GOV.UK website.

Table 1

(Location of UK regular service and civilian personnel quarterly statistics- 1 January 2016)

The number of defence personnel (military personnel and MOD civilians) on joint operations overseas is approximately 3,600. Joint operations have been defined in this instance as those operations where the UK's contribution is run through the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ). This includes coalition operations.