The Territorial Army has been told to stop training for six months to save millions of pounds from the Army’s budget because of growing financial pressure on the Ministry of Defence.

Drill-hall instruction, weekend exercises and all other training associated with the TA will stop, cutting costs by about £20 million.

The Land Force budget of the Army has been cut by £54 million, and the TA is the first to be affected. The huge cut in TA spending will mean that the weekend warriors will not be paid. “They are paid to go training, and if there is no training, they won’t get paid,” a Ministry of Defence official said.

A spokesman insisted that the savings and the ban on training would not affect the TA’s operational contribution to Afghanistan, where about 500 Territorial soldiers are serving. There are also ten TA soldiers in Iraq.

The spokesman said that TA training for Afghanistan would carry on as normal. TA soldiers train with their regular army counterparts, before deployment to Helmand province. The MoD’s pledge to keep the operational TA safe from cuts was, however, greeted with scepticism by senior officers in the volunteer reserve force. “This is dangerous. When you cancel training at one end, it is bound to have an impact through the TA, especially if this goes on longer than six months,” one senior TA officer told The Times. “If the MoD shuts the whole place down and says, ‘Come back in April’, there will be a number of TA members who will just go off and find something else to do, and all the skills they have learnt will fatigue.”

That would have repercussions throughout the TA, and could eventually affect the availability of volunteers for Afghanistan and other operations, he said.

One MoD official said that care would have to be taken to ensure that the temporary suspension of training did not undermine the TA’s role in Afghanistan. The official also said that, given the budget restrictions, the training suspension could last longer. The annual budget for the TA is about £143 million. The TA officer said: “This decision means that people’s advancement and promotion within the TA will be arrested, and the MoD will find it cannot get recruits to join the TA if the whole thing is being put in mothballs. You cannot suspend training and expect people to come back as normal six months later.

“The decision is tragic and dangerous, especially when you look at the contributions made by the TA to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. The regular Army could not have done these operations without the TA. People will feel undervalued and not properly respected and they’ll just go off.”

Another former senior officer in the TA said: “Here we go again, cutting back the TA.”

The size of the TA has fallen rapidly since Labour came to power in 1997. The following year there were 57,620 in the TA. Today the Territorials, trained and untrained, should be about 39,000-strong, but the trained strength is only 19,300, according to the latest MoD figures.

The senior TA officer told The Times that the downward spiral in numbers was shocking and reflected the dangerous neglect of this part of the services. In 2003, 9,500 reservists, the vast majority from the TA, were mobilised to take part in Operation Telic, the campaign in Iraq. About 1,200 members of the TA continue to be deployed annually on tours of duty.

The trend in recent years has been to pare down the TA and integrate them more into the regular Army, preparing them for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. An MoD spokesman said: “These are challenging times and, like all government departments, we have to live within our means. We routinely review spending to balance priorities, focusing on the highest priorities, including on our operations, particularly in Afghanistan.”

• Yesterday a soldier from the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was killed in an explosion near Camp Bastion in Helmand province. His death takes the number of British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001 to 221.

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