coalition ministers are being urged to sign their staff up to the Army reserves to help solve a recruitment crisis after thousands of soldiers were sacked.
The Government also wants more school-leavers to become reservists.
The drive comes as the size of the Army is being cut from 102,000 personnel to 82,500 by December 2018.
To fill the gap, ministers want to almost double the number of reservists from 15,000 to 30,000, but the latest figures suggest there are just in excess of 19,000.
Now ministers have set a target to sign up one per cent of all staff working for UK Government departments.
The Defence Secretary Philip Hammond stressed the importance of reservists at the Coalition's weekly Cabinet meeting yesterday.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "All departments have signed up to what is referred to as a "one per cent challenge" which means one per cent of their employees participating in the reserve."
Last month a damning report by the spending watchdog the National Audit Office warned that there were "significant risks" surrounding the reservists plan. And the current head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, has said the policy could be in jeopardy if defence spending is cut further.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article