East
Belfast MP Gavin Robinson has criticised 'penny pinching', cuts to
Royal Navy reservists. He raised the issue in the House of Commons
following reports that 2,700 reservists would be stood down until April
next year in a bid to save £7.5million.
Mr Robinson, who is a member of the Defence Select Committee in Parliament said afterwards, "Northern
Ireland has a very proud history of services across our armed forces,
but we have a particularly high level of participation in the reserve
forces.
Local
members, and those right across the UK find it deeply demoralising to
read in a newspaper that training and drill is to be "paused" in order
to save a total of £7.5million. Army reserve training will not be stood
down, but will be cut from 38 to 32 days also.
This
report appears less than 24 hours after the Defence Committee spent two
hours interrogating MoD accounts yet there was no mention of such news
that so many Royal Navy reservists would be stood down.
This is a decision which is both short-sighted and ill-judged yet
neither Members of Parliament nor those directly affected by the
decision have had any warning or ability to question its rationale.
Over
recent years the importance of our reserve forces has been increasingly
highlighted and their numbers boosted accordingly. They are an integral
part of our nation's defences and they deserve to be treated better
than to read about their future in a newspaper article."