The number of personnel who left Britain’s trained regular forces in 2014 and later returned to uniform peaked in 2016, two years after they departed, before declining in every subsequent year, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.
The figures were released in a written answer to Tan Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough and chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, who had asked how many service leavers from 2014 subsequently rejoined the regular forces in each year up to 2022. The reply, dated 21 May and signed by Veterans and People Minister Louise Sandher-Jones, tracks the 2014 cohort of trained and trade-trained leavers as they flowed back into the UK Regulars over the following eight years.
Across all three services, 11 of the 2014 leavers had rejoined within the same year, a figure that climbed to a peak of 114 returners in 2016, according to the MoD. Numbers then fell each year afterwards, to 77 in 2017 and, among other ranks, to 55 in 2018, 41 in 2019, 29 in 2020, 13 in 2021 and just five by 2022. The clearest pattern sits in the other ranks data, the most complete series in the table, where returns rose from 11 in 2014 to 107 in 2016 before tapering off.
The Army accounted for the largest share of those coming back, with 82 of its other ranks rejoining in 2016 and 62 the year before, the figures show. Returns to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines and to the Royal Air Force were smaller throughout, generally in the single digits or low double figures each year. Officer returns were smaller still, with the MoD recording seven across the services in 2016 and five in 2017, and many of the yearly entries withheld.
Several cells in the table are suppressed under the department’s disclosure rules, which replace any figure below five with the marker “[c]” and also hide the corresponding total where a subtotal is concealed, so the smaller number cannot be recovered by subtraction. The MoD further cautioned that, owing to data quality, an individual is recorded as rejoining only on their first distinct return to the regulars more than 60 days after leaving, and that some of those counted may have served in other military roles, such as the reserves, before re-entering as a regular. On the disclosed other ranks figures alone, more than 400 of the 2014 leavers had returned to regular service by the end of 2022.
Ministers have brought in a range of measures since mid-2024 aimed at both recruitment and retention, among them a 35 per cent pay rise for new recruits, the removal of more than 100 outdated medical policies, a target of issuing a conditional offer within 10 days, and retention payments for hard-to-keep specialists such as a £30,000 incentive for some tri-service air engineers. Sandher-Jones, herself an Army veteran who left the service in 2020 and whose brief now spans recruitment, retention and resettlement, has told Parliament that reversing the decline is a priority.
