§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Bach)My right honourable friend the Minister of State for Defence (Mr Adam Ingram) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
60WSMy right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence informed the House in his Statement on 21 July (Official Report, Commons, 21/7/04; col. 348.) that changes in the force structure of the RAF and the achievement of planned organisational efficiencies would lead to a reduced RAF trained manpower requirement of around 41,000 by 2008. I can now inform the House that the RAF has completed initial work on how that reduction will be achieved, while maintaining a satisfactory balance of personnel with the skills and experience levels throughout the service to enable the delivery of operational capability in a more flexible, deployable and responsive way.
The RAF will achieve the required reduction from a current regular trained strength of around 48,900 through a balanced strategy of normal outflow, reduced recruitment and a targeted redundancy programme. The service is therefore reducing its recruitment targets by some 4,000—to around 6,000 in total—over the next three financial years and has identified a need for some 2,750 redundancies over the same period. Redundancy will be effected by a compulsory scheme, for which applications will be invited. It is hoped that as many of the redundancies as possible will be applicants but, in order to ensure the long-term balance of ability and experience across the RAF, it may not be possible to accept all applications received, in which case it may be necessary to select some non-applicants.
Applications for the first 450 redundancies are being invited today and those selected will leave the service by 31 March 2006. Details of the remaining redundancies—approximately 2,300—which are expected to be managed in two further phases, will be notified to RAF personnel when further work is complete.