Defence secretary is stifling debate on British armed forces, says senior Tory

Chairman of Commons defence committee James Arbuthnot criticises Philip Hammond for clamping down on communications

The most senior MP responsible for scrutinising the work of the defence secretary has accused Philip Hammond of stifling a much-needed debate about the role and future of Britain’s armed forces.

Understanding between the public and the armed forces has “gone adrift”, James Arbuthnot, chairman of the Commons defence committee and a former Conservative minister, told the Guardian.

Engaging civilians and the outside world with the military was not achieved “by clamping down on communications” just to get a ministerial line, he said.

In a particularly sharp observation by a normally extremely measured backbencher, Arbuthnot said: “Hammond does like being in control – there is much to be said in a system like ours to allow a thousand flowers to bloom.”

He said that while morale of troops in Afghanistan was high, it was obvious the programme of redundancies in the armed forces was “deeply upsetting”. The armed forces were their own best advocates and that task could not be achieved by a rigid controlling hand, he said.

Reflecting a view held by many senior military figures, though not civil servants, in the Ministry of Defence, Arbuthnot said that suppressing information in the MoD had “got substantially worse” since the summer of 2012 when he first criticised Hammond for being secretive.

When he recently met Hammond “there were signs there were chinks in this armour and a change may be forthcoming,” said Arbuthnot. “But we have not yet seen the major change we need. Hopefully things will get better because by God they need to.”

Arbuthnot said his committee’s priority was to ensure that the next strategic defence and security review, due in 2015, would be better than the last one. The 2010 review was a product of the Treasury’s response to huge overspending on weapons projects by the Labour government and led to panic decisions, notably the last-minute move to get rid of the aircraft carrier the Ark Royal and its accompanying Harrier jets.

The army is being hit hardest, with its numbers to be cut from 102,000 to 82,000 by 2020. Plans to help fill the gap by increasing the number of reserves by a third to 30,000 are in serious trouble.

Arbuthnot did not want to dwell on the army’s future as it is the subject of a pending inquiry by his committee. However, he made it clear that some regiments and battalions would have to go. The existing regimental structure “may not be the answer to tomorrow’s wars”, he said. Changes in the structure of the army are almost certain to provoke a furore among veterans as much as serving soldiers.

The new chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, suggested in a recent BBC interview that the cuts were not as dramatic as they might seem. He said: “You can’t compare these 82,000 regulars of the 21st century with Victorian figures. These are 82,000 regulars, the vast percentage of which are deployable capability, not mess waiters or guards.”

Houghton added: …read more