According to Lt Gen James Everard, recruiting more gay people into the Army makes it more effective.

His comments come as commanders try to widen the pool of potential recruits for the UK’s armed forces.

Lt Gen James Everard said “diverse teams” of people, if well led, are “far more effective than bog-standard teams.”

The Army’s push to seem more welcoming to the LGBT community comes as commanders believe they have to work harder to recruit from “non-traditional” parts of society.

The Army is already holding a review into whether it should open up combat jobs to women and is also trying to attract more recruits from Britain’s ethnic minorities.

… [Diversity] in our ranks gives us a breadth of understanding and capability we don’t get in any other way … we need to reach into [places] that probably people would have said were non-traditional – away from the working class of Middlesbrough and all that sort of stuff and into a more diverse and broader range of characters. That’s hugely important for us.”

The UK dropped its ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people openly serving in 2000.

At the start of this year if started to record soldiers’ sexuality on a voluntary basis. So far only 230 serving troops have come out as gay or bisexual.

Lt Gen Everard said the Army was still struggling to change attitudes among some soldiers and some gay recruits found the “lived experience” was not ideal.

He added:

Like most problems, [fixing] the first 70 per cent is quite easy. It’s closing out the last 30 per cent [which is hard] … and that’s to do with attitudes.”

He said the Afghan and Iraq wars to the past 15 years, where gay troops had served openly for the first time, had changed attitudes on the front line.

Those that were slightly frightened of what they didn’t understand; what they learned from those wars, there they fought alongside gay people, was that you can be homosexual and extremely brave … people came back saying, these guys are part of the team.”