Iraq: Call-out of Reservists (Hansard, 30 January 2003)

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Bach)

In the statement made by my right honourable friend the Defence Secretary (Mr Hoon) on 7 January (Official Report, cols. 23–5) in another place we informed the House that we had made an order under Section 54(1) of the Reserve Forces Act 1996 to enable the call-out of reservists for possible operations against Iraq. We explained that the overall scale of mobilisation would depend upon the continuing evolution of our contingency planning, that we envisaged initially sending out sufficient call-out notices to secure around 1,500 reservists, and that we would issue further notices as appropriate.

That process of calling out and mobilising reservists is under way. By 24 January, the services had issued 2,063 notices. As was explained in the Statement on 7 January, the number of notices issued has to be significantly larger than the number of reservists required to allow for the proportion who are likely to be genuinely unavailable.

Further contingency planning has now clarified the likely size and shape of our additional requirements, in particular in the light of the decision we reached recently on the size and composition of land forces that we plan to deploy, which was described in the Statement made by my right honourable friend the Defence Secretary (Mr Hoon) on 20 January (Official Report, cols. 34–5) in another place. Our latest assessment is that our overall requirement for reservists is likely to be up to 6,000, including those currently in the process of mobilisation. We will now issue further call-out notices over the coming weeks to enable us to meet this requirement. The size of the requirement will remain under review as our planning continues.