Air Police
My sincere apologies The figure I quoted was from memory and I should have checked the source article first before posting. I was planning to do that this morning anyway. My source was an article in the Yorkshire Post of 21 October:-
"The Army still seems incapable of deploying more than 10 per cent of its
strength on a regular basis. We are told that it is losing 7,000 personnel from its inflated numbers, half the proportion of people that the far more efficient Royal Navy is losing. One wonders what fraction of the Army's 3,000 horses, each the cost of a lieutenant colonel, is being cut."
This article was written by Prof Eric Grove and the figures do disagree with those from Hansard in 2007. The reply in Hansard appears a little strange mentioning Horses "stabled" by the Army but not "owned" by them. It avoids giving a more detailed response by claiming it could only be done at "disproportionate cost"! So the Army "owns" 626 but could be paying for the upkeep of a greater but unknown figure.
Prof Grove can be contacted by e-mail. We may need to contact him for his source of information to try and resolve this issue!