Member

Clauses 38 and 39 hark back to 1688 and Parliament’s desire to control the size of the British Army. Of course, in those days there was not really a navy to speak of—certainly not in the way we would think of it today—and there most certainly was not an air force, so having to split the numbers down by service was not an issue then. It was simply a question of the number of men we had under arms. While I understand the purpose of the changes that the Minister is proposing in clauses 38 and 39—that is to say, aggregating numbers and simply presenting the results to Parliament—it will reduce the granularity of data available to us.