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6:00AM GMT 23 Jan 2014
Around 1,400 soldiers including hundreds of Gurkhas will be made redundant
later this year, the Ministry of Defence is expected to announce on Thursday.
Up to 70 RAF personnel will also lose their jobs in the fourth round of job
cuts to sweep the Armed Forces following Coalition cost cutting.
The head of the Army said the cuts were the final wave of a “forced exodus” of
troops as the number of regulars falls to 82,000 by 2018. Thousands of jobs
have already gone in the past three years and the cuts will leave the
regular Army its smallest since the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
The latest losses to be announced by Philip Hammond, Defence Secretary, will
include around 350 Gurkhas. Other soldiers to go include combat construction
workers in the Royal Logistic Corps.
Gen Sir Peter Wall, Chief of the General Staff, said the final redundancy
tranche would be “the end of a period of significant uncertainty”.
He said: “This actually draws a line under the forced exodus of people from
the Army. We are now concentrating on drawing in the right talent to
populate the future Army structure, which is all about our operational
readiness for future challenges.”
The Army was told to restructure and cut numbers from 102,000 after the 2010
defence review and currently stands at around 92,000-strong. The rest of the
reduction will come from natural turnover over the next four years and
slowing recruitment, rather than new redundancies, defence sources said.
Defence chiefs are hoping to offset the loss of regulars with a controversial
plan to boost the number of reservists from 19,000 to 30,000.
But the cuts are announced as the Army admits it has struggled to attract new
recruits and is failing to hit targets to sign up both regulars and
reservists.
Recruitment
has been badly hit by IT blunders after paperwork for Army applications was
outsourced to the services firm Capita. Potential recruits have
complained of lengthy delays and a difficult-to-use online application
system.
More than 1,000 troops have had to be drafted back into recruiting offices to
fix the fiasco at a cost of more than £1 million per month.
Recruiting chiefs say falling unemployment, news of Army job cuts and the
prospect of joining a force conducting fewer operations are also putting
people off.
Defence chiefs said the shortfall of recruits and the number of people
quitting have meant they have had to make fewer people redundant in the
latest wave of cuts.
Until recently, they had feared up to 3,000 would need to be made redundant
this year.
Soldiers will have several months to apply for voluntary redundancy packages
and troops will finally be told if they have lost their jobs in June.
Defence sources said no one in Afghanistan would lose their jobs.
Last
June the Army made 4,450 soldiers redundant and nearly 85 per cent of those
who left were volunteers. Commanders expect around 70 per
cent of this year’s job losses will be volunteers.
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