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The Defence Secretary has announced that teenagers who will be summoned to complete military service will “only serve 25 days” in the military under the Tories “national service plan.”
Teenagers aged 18-years will do national service and the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has said they will only serve 25 days in the Armed Forces.
The Tory manifesto said that military service will be “a year-long full-time placement in the armed forces or cyber defence,” PA news agency reports.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in May, “We will introduce a bold new model of national service for 18-year-olds, to be spent either in a competitive, full-time military commission over 12 months, or with one weekend per month volunteering in the community.”
Shapps was asked on Good Morning Britain is there is training facilities which will accommodate 30,000 new recruits annually.
Shapps told the programme, “From a defence secretary’s point of view, the very concept of being able to introduce 30,000 people for experience, they’re not going to be – this is 25 days in a year thing.”
He added: “The reason why this is, I think, so important is it is a commitment to do exactly that, to build the accommodation, to find the space to ensure that we can do it.
“It’s not as you present it, 30,000 people for over an entire year. It’s 25 days a year for those 30,000 – and I think those places will be massively sought after.
“And if we don’t think that we can ever expand our footprint, in other words attract more people into the armed services, then that would really be a problem.
“Instead, what we’ve done is come up with a plan with how we’ll fund it as well. We’ve actually described the funding for this as well.
“And I think it’s, from a defence secretary’s point of view, it’s a wonderful idea to introduce more people to serving the country, so of course it solves problems for me.”
Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth said that his is a “symbol of the utter desperation” of the Tory general election campaign.
Ashworth said that Shapps has “completely blown up” Sunak’s flagship manifesto.
Ashworth said, “This is what happens when you have a Conservative Party making up policy as it goes along, and working out how much their pledges will cost the taxpayer after they’ve already been announced.
“It is a symbol of the utter desperation at the heart of this Conservative campaign, and the chaos at the heart of their government.”
He added, “When the Tories can’t even decide between themselves from one day to the next what their flagship policy is supposed to deliver, it is clear that all Rishi Sunak offers is five more years of chaos, a scattergun of unfunded pledges, and the £4,800 more on family mortgages that will result.”
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