Member

I have two other points. Through the Ministry of Defence Votes A, your Lordships will realise that Parliament sets the upper limit of the numbers of our Armed Forces. This is perfectly logical for the regular Army, because we have a fixed number and they all have to be paid for. However, we also fix the upper limit of the number of the reserves. I see no logic why, because they are entirely different. The control mechanism for the number of reserves is not how many we have, because we pay for them only when we use them, but the budget we allocate to the reserve, which we can divide as and when we need. There is no logic as to why we would have a maximum number, as the demand signal for the number of uniformed personnel will only go up and we have no specific figure to date for how many we will need for homeland defence. The upper limit for the volunteer reserve and the regular reserve—those who have served in the regular Army but still have a reserve liability—in the reserve land forces is 67,580, for the Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Marines Reserve it is 23,420 and for the Royal Air Force reserves it is 17,450, according to this document. If you add all those up, I fear that the demand signal, once we factor in what we will need for homeland defence, is significantly more, so why are we artificially restricting ourselves to those numbers?