It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, and I declare an interest as a serving member of the Army reserve. I confirm that I have no intention of resigning from the Army reserve, as that would not help numbers at all.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) on securing this important and timely debate. It follows a number of other debates on similar themes in recent months in Westminster Hall, the main Chamber, and another place. The Government welcome every opportunity to emphasise their strong commitment to the armed forces and the defence of our country, and I am pleased to do that again today.
I also thank my hon. Friend for his insightful observations. As a former officer in the British Army with many years of distinguished service, including in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has brought a wealth of knowledge and personal experience to the Chamber this morning. Other right hon. and hon. Members have also made contributions, and it is a privilege to respond to a debate of such quality. We have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), and the hon. Members for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis)—I was particularly impressed by that speech and will return to it—for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman) and for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes).
I also enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald), but may I gently say that, in my limited experience after 12 years in this House, this is supposed to be a debate? I was simply going to make a helpful comment, which I will return to, and the House tends to appreciate it if we can have a debate, rather than Members simply standing up and having a bit of a rant. I admire his passion for the subject, but Members get a bit more respect in this place when they are prepared to have a debate. I am gently chiding him.
This debate has been about the size and strength of our armed forces, so in a major sense it is about our people. I therefore pay tribute to the many tens of thousands of servicemen and women whose selfless service keeps our country and people safe. We must do everything we can to persuade our young people that the armed forces remain a great place to work with many development opportunities, both professional and personal. We accept, however, that recruitment remains a challenge—that point was raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex.
Record youth employment and a diminishing number of 16 to 24-year-olds entering the workforce over the next few years means that there will always be strong competition for new people. We are responding with a range of short and long-term initiatives to ensure that the offer of a career in the armed forces remains competitive. The services are recruiting though active and targeted campaigns, and increasing engagement and activity in communities where recruitment has been low. We are also working on recruiting and retaining specialist skills. There are some encouraging signs. The number of applications to join the Navy and the Army has increased compared with the same point last year, and outflow from the regular armed forces in the past 12 months has reduced. The reserves are a success and continue to increase in number.
British society is changing, and young infantry soldiers who come from our traditional recruiting grounds in the north-east and north-west now represent a much smaller proportion of our society. That is why we have set ourselves challenging targets to recruit from the black, Asian and minority ethnic community, and to get a better gender balance in the armed forces. There are signs that we are beginning to make progress in those areas, but it is difficult, not least because we must ensure that the right role models in our armed forces can inspire other people to join.
Being a bottom-fed organisation, it is sometimes difficult to get those role models in the right place at the right rank. Hopefully, the Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill, which is proceeding through the House, will give us greater latitude in how we bring people into the armed forces, and potentially allow people to take career breaks, or—perhaps at an important point of their career—to work part-time or job share. No one suggests that that will be a silver bullet that will solve the problems, but hopefully it will make serving in the armed forces a little more compatible with the challenging pattern of modern life. I am pleased that in general there has been support for the Bill.