I fear that unless I say something to win the hon. Gentleman over, we might go around this merry-go-round many times. I will certainly look at this, but in Australia and other countries that have successfully gone down this road, the initial take-up has been so small that introducing a measurement system would delay the initiative’s introduction, and the numbers will be so small that it would be difficult to determine whether the effect is the result of the initiative or others that are being introduced. To discourage him from intervening again in two minutes, let me say that I will be more than happy to look at this and discuss it with him in the future.
The Ministry of Defence meets its obligations under the public sector equality duty to provide information on the workforce in relation to the protected characteristics identified by the Equality Act 2010, through the disclosure of information relating to the gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion and age of personnel. Our new UK armed forces quarterly service personnel statistics will, like the monthly publications they replace, provide detailed information and analysis on the number of service personnel by strength, intake and outflow, and detail is provided for both the full-time armed forces and the reserves. The number of people who take up the new arrangements will be significant to us, because obviously they are the people we want to retain, but it will be modest at first— somewhere between 0.5% and 1% of the armed forces. We therefore judge that collating and reporting information on a cohort of such a size would not provide significant or beneficial data, particularly in the early stages.