Army ‘should be family-friendly’ to help recruitment

thE home Secretary yesterday said more family-friendly regulations were needed to stop soldiers leaving the army.

Amber Rudd admitted that recruiting reserves and maintaining the army at 82,000 was a ‘challenging and ambitious target’.

She told MPs and peers that she had discussed with Defence Secretary Michael Fallon how to combat the problem.

their plans included introducing more ‘family-friendly regulations’ and rolling out incentives such as a help to Buy scheme to tackle the recruitment crisis.

She made the comments as she appeared before Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.

She was speaking as the chair of the National Security Council sub-committee on the implementation of the strategic, defence and security review.

Miss Rudd said: ‘We are looking at how to improve recruitment in an economy which is doing well. it’s not obvious necessarily how to attract the best people.’

in January it emerged that only 6,910 cadets signed up to the Army in 12 months – despite top brass setting a target of hiring 9,850. the Army is now 4 per cent below its required strength of 82,000, according to official statistics released by the MoD. Excluding redundancies, 15,140 regular troops left the Armed Forces over 2016, with 13,450 new troops coming in.

Falling numbers have been blamed on the legal ‘ witch- hunt’ soldiers faced over incidents in iraq and better paid jobs elsewhere. Soldiers have also become frustrated by the lack of frontline action.

Millions of pounds has already been spent on recruiting campaigns.