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Armed Forces: Absence Without Leave

Volume 469: debated on Monday 10 December 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many service personnel were reported as absent without leave in the (a) Royal Air Force, (b) Royal Navy and (c) Army in each year since 1997. (171474)

The following table shows absence without leave statistics by calendar year for each Service since 1997:

RN

Army

RAF

1997

30

1,450

15

1998

30

1,850

15

1999

35

2,055

20

2000

60

2,710

25

2001

95

2,650

25

2002

105

2,950

25

2003

120

2,820

35

2004

185

3,030

55

2005

195

2,715

35

2006

155

2,330

10

2007

105

2,060

20

Notes: 1. Figures are rounded to the nearest 5 and are as at 20 November 2007. 2. Differences in figures for individual years compared to previous answers occur because personnel may have been wrongly reported as AWOL in the first instance, or conversely they may have subsequently been found to have been AWOL and the records rectified later. AWOL statistics are recorded by the number of incidences of AWOL rather than the number of people who have gone AWOL, so there may be a number of people who are represented more than once in these figures.