Lord Astor of Hever
That this House takes note of the role of the armed forces and their contribution to the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever)
My Lords, I begin by giving a warm welcome to my noble friend Lady Garden in her role on the Defence Front Bench. I am very much looking forward to working with her, just as I enjoyed a very good partnership with her predecessor, my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire.
The title for this debate is wide-ranging, and deliberately so. It will allow noble Lords and the noble and gallant Lord to speak on a wide range of subjects, from the welfare of our service personnel to their equipment; how our Armed Forces are structured and funded; and the operations that they are on now, and those that they will be prepared for in the future. I start by paying tribute to the men and women who now serve in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. Their selfless commitment, dedication to service and professionalism is inspiring to us all. They do not choose where they are sent, but they are willing to risk life and limb, on our behalf. As a country, we owe them a great deal. In this period of remembrance, let us pay tribute to all those who have served in the past, particularly those who have paid the ultimate price to keep our nation free.
Next year will mark the centenary of the start of the Great War. The ranks of those who fought in the trenches have now passed away, but we remember them in the poppies we wear and in the way in which we honour those veterans of other battles of the 20th century who are still with us—and, in this century, all those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our Armed Forces exist to protect our country and provide the ultimate guarantee of its security and independence. Everything we do in defence is directed to that aim and, in the globalised world we inhabit, that means projecting power abroad to protect our national interests, demonstrating our determination and our values. In the uncertain and rapidly evolving security environment of today, we need to be prepared to meet a complex range of threats and challenges. We will always use our influence to reduce the risk of conflict, but we must be ready to fight and win on difficult and dangerous operations against determined opposition. We cannot do everything on our own, so we must work effectively with our allies and partners. That is what we are doing today in Afghanistan.
The mission in Afghanistan is the first priority for the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence. The reason we are in Afghanistan is to protect our national security and to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a safe haven for international terrorism, as it was under the Taliban before 9/11. Our goal is not a perfect Afghanistan, but one able to maintain its own security and prevent the return of international terror groups. The plan is clear: training the Afghan forces to take on the burden of security so that we can bring our troops home while ensuring the gains that we have made. The reality on the ground is that Afghan forces are increasingly taking the lead. This is allowing us to gradually reduce our force levels; we will have reduced them by 500 to 9,000 by the end of the year, and we expect to make further, significant reductions by the end of next year, with all UK combat operations finishing by the end of 2014. We are firmly committed to the strategy and timescales agreed at Lisbon and to the principles of “in together, out together”.
As the NATO Secretary-General set out earlier this year, the decisions made at Lisbon,
“will remain the bedrock of our strategy”.
When the ISAF mission completes in 2014, it will be for the Afghans to manage their own security. This is how it should be. But the end of our combat mission does not signal the end of our support to Afghanistan and its people. NATO will establish a new non-combat mission in Afghanistan, in which Britain will play its part, on top of the bilateral relationship which we will maintain with the Afghan Government and armed forces. Although Afghanistan will continue to face many complex challenges, the agreements for financial and other practical support made in the summits at Chicago and Tokyo will help to underpin Afghanistan’s security and future.
As we move towards the end of our mission, we need to plan for the post-Afghanistan environment and the transformation of defence to meet the challenges of the future. Operations and standing tasks aside, the past two years since the publication of the SDSR have been dominated by the urgent need to implement its vision: to ensure that our forces are prepared for the very different challenges they will face in the future; to eliminate the black hole in the MoD budget; and to learn lessons from the failures of the past so we do not repeat them in the future. Not everyone will agree with every decision we have made, but at least we have not ducked them. None of the ministerial team at the MoD came into politics to cut the defence budget or to reduce the size of our forces.
I regret some of the decisions we have had to make, particularly the redundancies and the retirement of some of the platforms, but in May 2010 we were faced with one of the biggest deficits in the developed world. We had to make some tough choices: tough choices that were necessary to set a sustainable course for the transformation of our Armed Forces to ensure they are structured, supported and equipped effectively to protect our national security in the face of the threats they will encounter in the decades to come. They were necessary, too, to tackle a forward defence programme that had been allowed to grow way beyond the resources available.
Budgetary discipline has to continue to be the supporting foundation of the transformation to Future Force 2020 or the tough decisions we have had to make will come round again. The defence equipment programme needs to be balanced and sustainable if the Armed Forces are to have the confidence that the capabilities promised will actually be delivered on time and to requirement. Thanks to the hard work and tough decisions taken over the past two years, we in the Ministry of Defence now have a balanced budget with an affordable equipment programme, backed by the world’s fourth largest defence budget. This changes the dynamic. By maintaining discipline we can begin to release the contingencies that have been built into the budget to support further investments in capability, confident that there is a sustainable funding stream to deliver them. For instance, since the beginning of this financial year, the new discipline in our budgetary regime has allowed us to give the go-ahead for a series of equipment projects above the committed equipment programme. This includes 25 extra Foxhounds for Afghanistan, enhancements to Merlin helicopters and new targeting pods for fast jets.
Earlier this year we received the first Joint Strike Fighter. This state-of-the-art, fifth generation fast jet will be flying from the deck of the new aircraft carrier HMS “Queen Elizabeth” in just over five years’ time. New vehicles, new helicopters, new aircraft, new ISTAR, new ships, new submarines, new cyber capabilities—the advanced, adaptable and powerful forces of Future Force 2020 are being built piece by piece. It is smaller than before but able to reach across the world and operate across a spectrum from high-intensity combat to enduring stabilisation activity, deploy overseas and sustain a brigade-sized force indefinitely or a division-sized force in time of need. It is able to command in the coalition context and is more interoperable with our main allies. It is fully integrated between regular and reserves, with predictable obligations for the reservists that will require a real commitment to service, and with a more systematic use of contractors for support and logistics, allowing greater focus of military manpower on fighting tasks. This is the shape of the future force we are building.
I turn to the issues we will be facing over the coming year to help make this a reality. By the latest reckoning around a quarter of the commitments in the SDSR involving defence have now been completed. The rest of the headline targets are on track. Now the Army has set out its future structure in Army 2020 we can begin to deliver on another part of the jigsaw—Reserve Forces. We will be publishing our Green Paper in the coming days. At the heart of this will be renewing the proposition for both reservists and employers, ensuring that the contributions of those individuals who serve are recognised and properly supported and that the mutual benefit the reserve service provides to the state and to employers is grounded in a new, open and tailored relationship.
Despite the incredible contribution they make to operations, the reserves have too often in the past been the forgotten part of our Armed Forces: no longer. They will be larger, receive new equipment and be better integrated with their regular colleagues. I know that there are those who doubt we can achieve our ambition for the reserves but this betrays very short memories. The new levels we have set are well within historic norms. In 1990, the TA was 76,000-strong: the Army reserve we are proposing is modest in comparison. I accept that the new targets are ambitious in the current climate. We will need the support of employers, reservists, their families and society as a whole to make the changes we need in the right way. The Green Paper consultation will be all about establishing how best to do this.
The work we are doing on the reserve is part of the process of providing certainty for our people and transforming the structures that support them and their families. We will announce, by the end of the year, a rebasing plan so that families will know where their future homes will be. We will accelerate work on the new employment model to make service terms and conditions more flexible to better reflect the complexity of modern family life. We will do what we can to make a reality of the Armed Forces covenant because we want our service men and women to know that this Government and the British people recognise the debt of gratitude that we owe to them and to their families.
We will soon publish the first annual report on the Armed Forces covenant, setting out the progress we have been able to make since we enshrined the key principles in law last year. We will therefore, quite rightly, be held to account for what is done to make the covenant a reality. I am particularly pleased about how entrenched the covenant is becoming across all departments of Government. There has been a cultural change in Westminster, driven by the Prime Minister, with Ministers from other departments approaching the Ministry of Defence with ideas on how they can help. The Education Secretary has found money to increase the level of the service pupil premium and extending its reach. The Chancellor has proposed to hand £35 million of fines levied on the banks after the LIBOR scandal to service charities. There continues to be limited financial room for manoeuvre; we will have to prioritise strictly and only make promises we know we can fulfil.
However, these initiatives say that where the Government can act we will, not just in the MoD but as a whole. Underpinning all this work is the reform of the management of defence itself. Procurement has been dogged for years by weak relationships between parts of the department. We have lacked the right business skills and capabilities to manage capital and infrastructure projects that are among the largest in the public sector. We are, therefore, putting in place a new blueprint for the management of defence, as recommended by the report of the noble Lord, Lord Levene, on defence reform. We are creating a leaner, more strategic head office, empowering the service chiefs to run their individual services and their delegated service budgets. By pushing accountability down the chain of command, we are encouraging innovation and budgetary responsibility. This last message is underpinned by introducing a stronger financial and performance management regime across the whole department. The materiel strategy being put together by Bernard Grey and his team in Defence Equipment and Support is the next big piece of that puzzle. This will set out how we will sharpen the boundaries and align incentives internally to ensure consistent, focused decision-making. We are seeking to instil private sector skills and disciplines into our acquisition process, driving up productivity by bringing a private sector partner into the process.
Ultimately, it is the people of defence who deliver the battle-winning capabilities which protect and defend us. As we turn to face the Cenotaph this coming weekend and as we listen to the strains of “Oh God our Help in Ages Past”, as we remember those who have given their lives in the cause of freedom, let us together reaffirm our debt of gratitude to the men and women of our Armed Forces and show them how proud we are of their service.
I beg to move.