MPs: protecting civil service while troops are sacked is 'grotesque' - Telegraph.co.uk

The MPs were angered by Ursula Brennan, the MoD's top civil servants, who suggested that civilians were "flexibly employable" whereas the military were not.

She told them: "A very large number of the Civil Service have flexible skills that enable them to work in a variety of places."

The report said her view ran "contrary to the committee's experience of the breadth of the military training and the skills shown by personnel as witnessed on operations."

It added: "We were not convinced by the reasons given for this situation by the MoD—that civil servants had generic skills and could be more readily transferred."

James Arbuthnot, the Tory MP and chairman of the committee, said: "The stark and shocking differences between redundancies in the MoD require an exceptionally persuasive explanation, which we are yet to hear.

"Look at the areas where the Armed Forces are undermanned."

The Forces are short of more than 500 intelligence specialists, 120 Navy nuclear engineer and nearly 300 medical staff.

The Armed Forces redundancy programme is expected to deliver up to 11,000 redundancies across the three Services while civil servant redundancies are 15,000. The rest of the reduction in personnel will be through natural wastage or posts being removed.

The report recommend that sacked troops should be given the opportunity to retrain for trades needed in the Armed Forces, in particular, pinch point trades.

The MPs demanded that the MoD gave a detailed explanation of how it planned to address the shortfall in specialist posts.