Member

The overall co-ordination of national resilience and the resources required to ensure it will of course be conducted at the national level, but the tactical dealing with national resilience will be conducted at the local level. The emergency services will all be dealing at the local level. It seems to me incomprehensible to suppose that the reserve forces will not have a major role to play, particularly when we see severe challenges to our national resilience. That needs to be conducted at the local level. It also seems to me implausible to suggest that the sovereign’s representative in the locality will not be intimately involved in any responses to severe challenges to national resilience. The lord-lieutenant will have a role to play in all this. So the lord-lieutenant’s association with the reverse forces is not just an issue of representation and history—as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley—but a very practical issue in the future role of the reserves.