Speeches by Pollard.

“In some areas, certainly, I have regular conversations with some of our DH colleagues about some of those questions, but I am happy to take that detail away.”

“I might ask colleagues to come in on the details of the metrics. I will take the broader piece about the journey that we need to be on and why metrics are an important part of it, and then I will ask colleagues to come in on the detail. When I came into office, I was quite surprised about some of the poor performance o…”

“Absolutely. It is one of those key bits. If our service personnel do not feel that the offer and their experience in service life is good enough, we know what they do: they leave. That creates gaps and is one of the reasons contributing to the fact that, when we took office, for every 100 people joining, 130 were leavi…”

“No, we will continue to make an effort to fill those vacancies as we go through.”

“As part of our model, we expect to continue to fill those vacancies.”

“No, absolutely not. The point I am trying to make is that we are making a clear statement that, to succeed to the highest levels in the Ministry of Defence and in military roles in the future, we have now set an expectation about roles. Over time, that should help people at early stages in their career inform the caree…”

“It certainly does, and that is why it is important to have the 80 and the 8.6% alongside each other. That demonstrates that the vast majority of our NATO roles are filled. I looked at the breakdown and at just how many roles have been gapped for some time. If a role has been gapped for five years, that is not a proper,…”

“If I recall, the PQ that I replied to on that matter—I think it was yours—said that it was 8.6% or something like that.”

“I will give the headline and then I will ask the AVM to come in. Setting the ambition and the clear direction in the SDR is a really important part of signalling to the entire system, and to our people, that a career at NATO is going to be more valued than it has been in the past. As part of that, as we look at impleme…”

“Good morning. Yes, NATO first is an absolute golden thread throughout the strategic defence review, and deliberately so. It has been very clear that we are focusing on the Euro-Atlantic as our primary area of concern, and that is why the SDR rightly contains a lot of NATO. You will note that it also contains a commitme…”

“It certainly provides more opportunities. I would say that this capability is not being developed from scratch. That is useful for us to look at. Frankly, as a defence nerd in this House, there has not been much debate since I was elected about NATO’s nuclear mission prior to the F-35A announcement that we mentioned in…”

“In the respect that an air leg to our nuclear deterrence provides an update and a change from where we were before we announced it, we will add it to our fighting spirit and to how we plan. It provides options for our management of any crisis, escalation and support. That would be a given. However, I do not think that …”

“I do not mean to put words into Lord West’s mouth. That is a dangerous pursuit for anyone, let alone a Minister. On the fundamentals of the question about updating our nuclear doctrine, clearly if we have an air leg to our nuclear capabilities, that does in effect update our nuclear doctrine because our nuclear doctrin…”

“First, it is good to see more west-country MPs involved in defence, so it is good to see you back doing that. The decision to purchase F-35As is deliberately designed to increase the strategic dilemmas we can pose, as the United Kingdom but also as a NATO ally, to Russian nuclear escalation. Our current proposition onl…”

“We are already stepping up as a country and looking at that. The Americans have asked Europe as a whole to spend more on defence, to step up support for Ukraine and to demonstrate our ability to refill stockpiles—so we are better able to warfight and therefore have greater deterrence. We are already doing many of those…”

“The US global force posture review is ongoing at the moment, and it will be for them to decide what capabilities they seek to redistribute across their priorities globally. I think, to be fair to the Americans in this respect, they have been saying under various Administrations for quite some time that it is their inte…”

“No, I don’t think it is. It is about how you implement that objective. We have to be very cognisant that if we want to fundamentally change the incentives within the system about attractiveness of job roles and attractiveness of an individual for their next job role, we have to have that throughout their entire career …”

“I entirely agree. Having an element of churn in our overall post fill is quite normal. NATO allows for a 5% churn, and we are nearly at that point. Not many of our NATO colleagues are anywhere near that, so that is welcome. Our offer has to be about family life, service life and career. The SDR set this out very clearl…”

“It is absolutely something that we are aware of. I realise that not all NATO roles are in the European Union—some are further afield—but for the ones that are EU based, especially where we are filling at NATO headquarters, SHAPE, or the maritime missions in Italy, for instance, the Brexit deal removed the opportunities…”

“In the NATO-first approach that this Government will have, we aim to fill more vacancies and make service in NATO roles more attractive to people—especially European NATO roles, where we know there are some obstacles. If you compare the UK participation and fill rates with those of some of our comparable NATO allies, w…”