Territorial Army

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 1:13 pm on 6 May 1998.

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Photo of John Reid John Reid Minister of State (the Armed Forces), Ministry of Defence, The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence 1:13, 6 May 1998

And of the regular forces, which is precisely why we are changing the regular forces. I say to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), who is today the aide-de-camp to the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald, and, in his own right, a robust defender of the TA, that, if we modernise the regular forces in all three services, the TA must be modernised.

However pessimistic we may be, none of us expects to wake up tomorrow to the threat of an imminent drop of spetznaz troops on the UK mainland. We must examine the TA's traditional role and consider how we can update it. The previous Government, of which the right hon. Lady was a member, started to change the Territorial Army's role, and that process is continuing and being updated.

I know that the right hon. Lady is a strong supporter of the Territorial Army, and I point out to her that to leave any part of the TA languishing in an outdated cold war role while modernising the rest of the services would do it no service, and would render it irrelevant, subject to criticism and unusable in the future.

Our review has shown that there is a particular need for certain elements that have been mentioned in debates on the TA: signallers, drivers, artillery men and women, military police, intelligence and survey teams. Those are specialists. We need Territorial Army soldiers who can repair battle-damaged vehicles, operate sophisticated military equipment such as the multiple-launch rocket system, deal with local civilian populations, and engage in a wide range of specialist and core military tasks.

It does the TA no service continually to diminish its range of capabilities with the speculative scare stories that we sometimes hear during debates such as this. I expect that the review will conclude that we need many more medical reserves. The review of the whole force configuration shows that there are serious weaknesses in the medical force.

Secondly, we need a Territorial Army that is usable. Achieving that would do the TA a service in future commensurate with what it has done in the past.

A clear, and perhaps not surprising, conclusion of our foreign policy-led analysis is that speed of deployment in an international crisis is important. Reserves are often a cost-effective source of military capability, but they take longer to get ready than regulars. That is particularly true in the case of front-line infantry and armour roles, which demand a great deal of all-arms training.

There are roles for which we can expect to call on reserves at short notice. Some units and individuals must be capable of being deployed on operations with little warning. At present, almost all the Territorial Army is held at low readiness against the remote possibility of a major attack on NATO. That must change. One way in which the TA must change is that, in the event of a major crisis—