Army: Recruitment
(asked on 27th January 2020) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many applicants for enlistment into the Army were aged (a) under 18 and (b) 18 or over in each of the last 10 years for which figures are available.
This question was answered on 30th January 2020
Data is not available prior to 2013-14 as it was not collated centrally and so is unreliable.
Applications received to join the British Army from 1 April 2013 – 30 March 2019 are in the table below.
| Recruiting Year | Under18 Applications | Over18 Applications |
| 2013-14 | 14,910 | 74,666 |
| 2014-15 | 19,207 | 100,249 |
| 2015-16 | 17,876 | 96,678 |
| 2016-17 | 23,706 | 153,233 |
| 2017-18 | 21,288 | 114,381 |
| 2018-19 | 24,978 | 122,197 |
- This data has been provided from a single service source rather than official statistics produced by Defence Statistics. This is because Defence Statistics do not start to record an individual until they attend their first day of basic training.
- In order to generate the response, application data has been extracted at the earliest point an application is generated. This means that for the purpose of this question, if an individual generates multiple applications, they will be counted as multiple separate applications.