Lord Harlech (Con)

My Lords, it is a new day in Committee, so I declare my interest as a serving officer in the Army Reserve once again. In moving Amendment 40, I shall also speak to Amendments 41, 45, 69 and 70. I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Penn and Lord De Mauley for adding their names in support of my amendments. Let me also preface my amendments by reiterating my intent behind all of them, as I did on the first day in Committee. They are all aimed at improving the lived experience of reservists in order to boost recruiting and retention and therefore to enhance the operational effectiveness of the Armed Forces. I begin by welcoming the Government’s Amendment 38, which allows call-out notices to be served by email. It is sensible and I support it. But it also illustrates the point behind this group. We are getting steadily better at calling reservists up, but we have said almost nothing about the civilian conditions that determine whether they are still serving and able to be serving reservists when we call. I think that there is common ground across your Lordships’ House on that objective. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, has amendments for consideration later today that approach the same problem from a different direction. The Select Committee on this Bill in the other place put the point plainly. It welcomed the changes to recall liability and then noted that the measures focus on the strategic reserve and do not in themselves achieve the strategic defence review’s ambition, which in my humble opinion is too modest anyway, of an increase of 20% to make a larger active reserve. That growth will be produced by the conditions in which people serve—and those conditions are set at the reservist’s desk on a Monday morning rather than in the drill hall. Amendment 40 would therefore require employers with 50 or more employees to publish and maintain a policy of employment of reservists. There is no sanction. There is no civil liability. The Secretary of State supplies a model policy and, under Amendment 69, this would not commence for 12 months. This is already the required standard of silver and gold employers under the defence employer recognition scheme. The difficulty with a voluntary scheme is that it reaches the converted. The employers who need a policy have never heard of it. There are roughly 38,000 medium-sized businesses in this country and that is where a great many reservists work but where there is no human resources function to absorb the question when it arises. A reservist in a firm with no policy negotiates from nothing. Every request for time away is a personal favour rather than an entitlement, granted or refused according to the temperament of whoever is in the chair—and when that person moves on, the answer changes. A written policy would end the line manager lottery. Subsection (2)(b) requires the policy to address what happens to pay, pension, seniority and continuity of employment during mobilisation. Most reservists have no idea what happens to any of those things, because nobody has ever written it down. That is a remarkable thing to discover at the point of deployment. My main effort is Amendment 41, which is at the heart of this group. Most reservists fund their own training out of their annual leave. They spend their holiday entitlement on annual camp and have to spread the remainder among family commitments, personal holiday and the incidentals that real life throws in their path. That is the position we are in today and I do not think that it is defensible. This amendment would give 10 working days of unpaid leave a year for annual continuous training or for promotion courses. It would become applicable only after the employee had completed 26 weeks with the civilian employer. It requires 28 days’ written notice and a certificate from the commanding officer. It excludes employers with fewer than 10 employees, it confers no right to be paid and it counts against any contractual entitlement that the employer already offers. Section 50 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 already gives unpaid time off for public duties to magistrates, to local councillors, to school governors and to members of health bodies. Parliament has decided that sitting on a planning committee merits protected time off, but it has not yet decided that training for the defence of the realm does. I think that that is a very difficult proposition to explain to a reserve soldier. Ten days is already the gold standard under the defence employer recognition scheme, and the Civil Service has offered paid leave of this kind for well over a decade. It is a fair question why what the Government expect of themselves as an employer is too much to expect of anybody else. Let us look at our Five Eyes counterparts. Australia’s Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001 requires employers to release reservists for training—not just for mobilisation, but for training. Our own 1985 Act protects mobilisation only. The current gap is legislative, not cultural. Let me anticipate the objections, including those on my own Front Bench. The first is that this is a burden on employers. It is unpaid, it is capped at 10 days, it requires four weeks’ notice, it excludes the smallest firms and, under Amendment 70, it would not commence for a year. If that is an unacceptable burden, we should be honest and say that we are not really serious about the whole force. The second objection is that an absolute right is too rigid and employers must be able to refuse. A refusable right is precisely the position that reservists have now and it is exactly why they use annual leave instead. The notice period and the annual cap are what protect the employer, and they are real protections. The third objection is that this is a day one right. It is not. It arises only after the reservist has completed 26 weeks of employment with the civilian employer—the same qualifying period that this House insisted on for unfair dismissal. Let me turn to something that has happened since these amendments were tabled. Last Friday, the BBC and the Times reported that the Army has been instructed to halt non-essential training exercises and that collective training for United Kingdom-based units has been suspended for most of this year on budgetary grounds. The Army has not denied it. It says that it is prioritising the activity that contributes most directly to readiness. I understand why it would say that, but this bears directly on the amendments before your Lordships. A reservist books their annual continuous training months ahead, clears it with their employer and, very often, pays for it out of their own annual leave. If the exercise is then cancelled, they do not get that leave back, and the employer who has released them draws their own conclusions about how seriously the department takes its own training. Every cancellation of that kind spends employer good will that took years to accumulate. I therefore ask the Minister three things. First, will reserve collective training and the annual continuous training period fall within the scope of the current pause? Secondly, what has been cancelled or curtailed for the reserves so far this financial year? Thirdly, £4.7 billion of the £15 billion in the defence investment plan remains to be confirmed at the Budget on 28 October. I would be grateful if the Minister could say whether reserve pay and training will be protected within that settlement, as well as undertaking to write to members of the Committee once the position is known. I put that in support of these amendments, rather than against the Government. If money is tight, the measures that cost the Exchequer nothing become more, not less, important; everything in this group is of that kind. Amendment 45 is the mechanism that makes Amendment 40 matter. It would require the national procurement policy statement to address how contracting authorities take account of a supplier’s arrangements for employing reservists. These authorities must already have regard to that statement under the Procurement Act 2023, so this would create no new machinery and no new liability. There is one fact here that the Committee ought to have: the current statement disapplies the social value priority for the Ministry of Defence in relation to defence and security contracts. So the one department whose suppliers most obviously employ reservists is the department least required to weight it; I would be grateful if the Minister could explain how that came about. Amendments 69 and 70 are consequential. They would provide the 12-month commencement period for the two duties. The Bill asks reservists to be available later in life, at shorter notice and on lower thresholds. Attendance at annual continuous training is the single biggest determinant of a reserve unit’s readiness. Promotion courses generate the non-commissioned officers, without whom mobilisation at scale is not possible, whatever powers the Bill confers. These are modest amendments and would cost the Exchequer nothing. I beg to move.