Future of Army Reserve training at Grantham unresolved

The Ministry of Defence has said it cannot yet confirm how Army Reserve basic training will be delivered once the Grantham barracks closes, or what any change would cost, pointing to a review of training across the UK due to report in autumn 2026.

The Conservative MP for Grantham and Bourne, Gareth Davies, whose constituency contains Prince William of Gloucester Barracks, home to Army Training Regiment Grantham, had asked where the reserve basic training delivered there would move once the barracks closed, what it would cost to replicate that capacity at an alternative location, and what modelling the department had done of reserve training capacity after the closure.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence, Louise Sandher-Jones, said the Army was conducting an Army Reserve Basic Training Review that would make recommendations by autumn 2026, setting out options for how reserve basic training is delivered across the United Kingdom in future. “Until future plans are fully determined, we cannot provide costing estimates at this time,” she said.

The answer leaves open the central questions for the site and for the reservists who train there. With the review’s recommendations not expected until the autumn, a decision on where the training goes, and what it will cost to move, remains some months off.

The scale of what is in question is set out in figures the minister released in response to further questions from Davies. Army Training Regiment Grantham trains only reservists, and over the past five years it has handled a majority of all Army Reserve basic training. In 2025-26, 609 of 1,051 reserve recruits, or 58 per cent, completed an element of their basic training at Grantham. The proportion was 57 per cent in 2024-25, 66 per cent in 2023-24, 69 per cent in 2022-23 and 67 per cent in 2021-22, with the number passing through the regiment ranging from around 545 to more than 920 in a year.

Prince William of Gloucester Barracks, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, has been identified for disposal as part of the long-running programme to reduce the size of the defence estate, under which the Ministry of Defence has been closing and selling sites it judges surplus or too costly to maintain, consolidating activity onto fewer locations. Army Training Regiment Grantham is one of the Army’s centres for the basic training of reserve soldiers, the initial course that recruits to the Army Reserve must complete before going on to further trade and unit training.

The Army Reserve forms a significant part of the Army’s overall strength and is intended to be mobilised alongside regular units, making the throughput and quality of reserve basic training a question of how readily that force can be generated. Where the courses are run affects how accessible they are to reservists, who balance their service with civilian jobs and travel to training in their own time, a consideration that tends to feature in decisions about the location of reserve training.