Rishi Sunak’s plan to reintroduce compulsory UK national service has been criticised by military figures, who fear the need to train up to 30,000 18-year-olds a year could place new strains on the armed forces.
There was also criticism over Sunak’s plan to partly fund the £2.5bn national service scheme, if he is re-elected prime minister, by raiding funds now allocated for levelling up projects in the north of England and other regions.
Most teenagers on the scheme would have to carry out 25 days a year of work in the community, but Sunak also wants 30,000 people to work for a year with the armed forces or in cyber security to help Britain in “an increasingly uncertain world”.
Andrew Murrison, a defence minister, told the Financial Times last July that he was not attracted to a model that allowed people to join the forces for short periods of time, such as a year.
“If we have to involve all our people with training other people and looking after them, then that would divert us from the task in hand, which is keeping this country safe,” he said.
“There’s a cost — and that is training people up, looking after them, managing them, and then they disappear as they’re becoming vaguely useful.”
Sunak’s plan — the first big policy pledge of the election campaign — is seen by Labour as an attempt to win over older, more traditional voters who might be considering backing rightwing Reform UK.
Murrison on Sunday declined to comment but one Tory MP said Murrison’s remarks did not apply to Sunak’s scheme, which would have separate funding and therefore not be an additional burden on defence.
The paid scheme would be capped at a finite number and would be highly competitive, attracting more high calibre candidates who may be likely to pursue longer-term careers in the military, the MP added.
There was also scepticism in military ranks about reintroducing national service, which was abolished in 1960. One British Army officer said more personnel were needed and this policy was “cheaper than more regulars in the long term”, but echoed Murrison’s concerns.
The proposal would “make the regular army less effective for a couple of years minimum”, the officer warned. “Scarce resource has to be shared, but more importantly training establishments need to be built and trainers allocated.”
Another army veteran said: “It’s ridiculous. It’s a vote winner with an older generation that weren’t forced into it themselves. Where will these people be housed? Defence doesn’t have the numbers to train them, or equipment.”
However, some former military commanders have given the proposal a more positive reception. Edward Stringer, retired RAF air marshal, said on social media platform X that the “devil will be in the detail” of the precise construction of the national service scheme, which would be informed by a Royal Commission.
Stringer added: “Some form of national service has been a popular success in the JEF countries [Scandinavian and Baltic nations] that have used it as a part of building national resilience.”
Home secretary James Cleverly confirmed that the 30,000 teenagers doing national service with the armed forces would be paid. Tory insiders said they would receive “a stipend to cover living costs”. Those doing community work for one weekend a month for a year would not be paid.
“Nobody is going to be compelled to do the military element,” Cleverly told Sky News on Sunday, adding: “We want to build a society where people mix with people outside their communities.”
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves criticised the plan as “a desperate gimmick”, adding that the government said it believed in levelling up poorer regions but “then they raid the levelling-up budget to pay for it”.
But a Tory official insisted the scheme was fully funded — money for the plan is also supposed to come from a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion — and came on top of the pledge to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2030.
The idea of compulsory national service is not the preserve of the Conservative right: it was also proposed by David Lammy, now shadow foreign secretary, in his 2020 book Tribes.
“If you’re serious about nation building, which is what I think we’ve got to be serious about, then you have to be serious about obligation as well as choice,” he said in April 2020.
Meanwhile, one of the leading lobby groups for businesses in the north of England hit out at the idea of partly paying for the national service scheme through money previously used for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund from 2028-29.
The Northern Powerhouse Partnership said northern communities were already receiving less from the fund than that previously available under EU structural funds, which the SPF replaced.
Henri Murison, NPP chief executive, said metro mayors, including the recently re-elected Conservative Lord Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley, would “lose all the resources they had for important projects”.
“The areas which voted to leave [the EU] and were promised they would be better, not worse off, in funding terms, will have their monies sent to pay for a scheme which will do little or nothing to remove the huge disparities between north and south in this country,” he added.
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