Future Capability of the Armed Forces
(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Harlech
To move that this House takes note of the future capability of the United Kingdom’s armed forces in light of the current international situation.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have signed up to this debate. I am grateful that your Lordships are able to debate the United Kingdom Armed Forces’ capability shortly after the publication of the defence investment plan. I look forward to all contributions, not least that of the Minister and the valedictory speech from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. I declare an interest as a serving officer in the Army Reserve.
Let us confront a single stark reality: the United Kingdom remains the third-largest defence spender in NATO, surpassed only by the United States and Germany. Yet NATO’s own internal assessments rank us 31st out of 32 members in delivering on capability targets, with only Iceland, which has no armed forces at all, sitting below us. This is the critical gap I intend to scrutinise—not the disparity between our forces and our adversaries, real though that is, but the profound disconnect between the funds we invest and the capabilities we can deploy. This is the gulf between the promise and the product.
Let me say plainly what this debate is not. It is not a party-political point. I belong to the party that was in government for 14 years and, for much of that time, we did not spend enough on defence. Many of us said so then, and I say it again now. I have no interest in a quarrel about who cut what a decade ago, or who is pledging what for 2035. The two great alibis of defence policy are the distant past and the distant future, and both are used to dodge the only question that matters: what are we spending now, and what will we feel tomorrow in the years in which we might have to fight?
Those years are not theoretical. Admiral Sir Keith Blount, who stepped down only this year as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, DSACEUR, warned a fortnight ago on the “The General & The Journalist” podcast from the Times that Britain now risks losing influence within the alliance if it fails to deliver what it has promised. When our most senior recent commander at NATO says that in public, the Government should listen.
I give credit where the Motion invites it, on future capability. The strategic defence review was serious work, and I support its direction of travel. The best decision in last month’s defence investment plan is the one that looks furthest ahead—more than £5 billion for drones and autonomous systems, the largest such investment we have ever made. That is the right instinct. It is the lesson of Ukraine, where innovation cycles are measured in weeks. It is, in the Government’s own phrase, investing for
“the next war, not the last one”.
My concern is not the direction of travel; it is that £5 billion is not enough and that, when you open it up, the wider plan does not bear weight. Consider the headline of £298 billion over four years. It is a number designed to end an argument. But only around £15 billion is new money over last year’s settlement, and the Defence Secretary has acknowledged that most of that £15 billion is not for new equipment at all but for day-to-day running costs—keeping the ships and aircraft we already own available and our people trained. That is necessary, but it is not rearmament. It is paying to run the force we have and calling it the force we need. Is even that money real? Of that £15 billion, only around £10 billion is funded. The rest, some £4.7 billion, waits on a Budget that has not yet happened. That is not a funded plan; it is an IOU. The plan leaves the years from 2030 to 2035 all but blank, reaches 2.7% of GDP in 2027 and then flatlines. It funds neither the 3% promised for the next Parliament nor the 3.5% signed up to for 2035. Set against the threat that the Government’s own advisers place before 2028, this is a plan matched not to the danger but to the Treasury’s accountants.
My disagreement with the review centres on its approach to personnel. The proposal to expand our reserves by a mere 20%—even then, only when financial conditions permit—is far too cautious. Currently, we field just 30,000 trained reservists compared to 137,000 regulars, rendering our Reserve Forces only a fifth of the size of our regular military. In contrast, Finland, directly confronting the Russian threat, maintains a formidable trained reserve many times the strength of its modest regular army. My goal is far bolder: we must aim for a trained reserve that is not a fraction of our regular forces but three times their size. Achieving this will require a generational pivot, but it offers the only cost-effective way to restore the strategic depth this nation has neglected for far too long.
Numbers, though, are the easy part. I would not have the House think I am merely asking for a longer list of names. A reservist without equipment, training days and a drill hall to train in is not a capability, and here our record is dismal. The Public Accounts Committee found that the volunteer estate, the reserve centres on which all this depends, is in what the department calls “managed decline”. The reserve estate optimisation programme, REOP, has all but stopped. Tranche 1 was delivered, but the funding bid for tranche 2 failed and had to be rebid, and the department has still not secured funding for the phases beyond. Yet the department’s own evidence to that committee was that this estate is the critical enabler of the very reserve growth the review promises. We have written the ambition and declined to pay for the foundations beneath it.
This is the habit I most want the Minister to break. When budgets tighten, the reserve is always the first to be raided because it is dispersed and part-time and, sadly, too many decisions affecting it are taken by regulars. If the reserve is genuinely part of the first echelon, as the review implies, because our regular forces are so small, then it cannot also be the balancing item. You cannot ask a formation to be ready to mobilise while treating its training, equipment and accommodation as discretionary spending.
This matters most for the mission closest to home. Homeland defence and national resilience are not some additional burden for the reserve. They are its natural work. It is the reserve that is local, dispersed and embedded in every county. These are the people who would guard critical national infrastructure or reinforce the response to a flood, a cyber attack or an act of sabotage, drawing on their skills and experience from their civilian life. Every reserve centre we allow quietly to decay is a node of national resilience dismantled, and a link severed between the Armed Forces and the communities who must ultimately sustain them. If we are serious about resilience, the drill hall is not an overhead; it is infrastructure.
I add one further warning on the industrial base. Small and medium firms build the drones this plan celebrates. They are the least able to survive a Government who cannot make up their mind, and techUK warns that the delay to the publication of the defence investment plan has already forced firms in the supply chain to issue redundancy notices. You cannot switch an industrial base off and on. Once the engineers are gone, they are gone, and our allies see all this. The Public Accounts Committee has warned that the delay has damaged our credibility with the very partners the review tells us to put first. “NATO first” is good and the right doctrine, shared across this House, and I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, in his place. However, a nation ranked 31st out of 32 on NATO’s own scorecard is practising “NATO first” in the press release and “NATO last” in the plan.
I have three questions for the Minister. First, when will the £4.7 billion of unfunded commitment be confirmed and, until it is, why should the House treat this as a funded plan? Secondly, will the Government raise their ambition on the reserves well beyond 20% and will they fund the volunteer estate and the training and equipment on which such growth depends? Thirdly, given that the sharpest risk is placed before 2028, what capability will reach the front line inside that window?
I tabled this Motion not to embarrass the Government but because the distance between our words and our capability is now visible to our adversaries as well as our friends, and because the years in which that distance matters most are these ones, not some comfortable decade hence. We spend enough to stand third in the alliance. We should be able to field far more than 31st. The task is not to spend more in 2035. It is to spend well, spend diligently and spend now. I beg to move.
Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for securing this important debate. He speaks with great authority, particularly about the Reserve Forces. I agree with everything he said about that subject and congratulate him on his service.
I speak to employers and employers’ organisations who are keen to support our reserves. I take this opportunity to once again talk up the role of the voluntary reserve. They give us a continually refreshing source of capability and long-term resilience. They are central to our Armed Forces’ present and future capability to defend and deter, and they need to be nurtured. Employers need support to shoulder their share of responsibility. I ask the Government once again to continue to encourage more employers to take on reservists. I look forward to progress reports on the SDR’s medium-term aim of seeing the active reserve expanded by 20%, although I acknowledge that the ambitions of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, go beyond that.
The subject of this debate raises huge questions about national priorities in an era of new external threats. Other speakers in this debate are far more qualified than I am to speak about matters of national security and war-fighting readiness, but I can comment on one essential component of national resilience: the role of the defence industry, which the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, already touched on. The future effectiveness of the UK’s Armed Forces depends in large measure on their access to platforms, munitions, cutting-edge skills and capabilities that match the challenge of modern warfare and deterrence.
The SDR said that the defence industry must play an indispensable enabling role. It said that our Armed Forces needed to be underwritten by a thriving and resilient industry, ready to scale and innovate. As we meet today, we are falling short of this ambition. The SDR called for changes in procurement practices. It said that industry should be partners, not clients, with companies engaged early in processes and rewarded for productivity and risk-taking. The Industry and Regulators Committee is currently looking at this. The evidence the committee has heard so far chimes with what I have been told separately by defence companies, and by the people who work for them and their trade unions.
Prime contractors have told me about their supply chain vulnerabilities. They have talked about problems in sustaining UK suppliers where they cannot provide predictability to smaller companies, and they are all too aware of MoD bureaucracy that stifles innovation and speed. This is fundamental to today’s debate. Down the chain of dependencies, the capability of the Armed Forces is tied to the strength of the defence industry’s sovereign supplier ecosystem. Safeguarding these small businesses is critical to national security and not a secondary consideration.
The SDR asked the MoD to develop a support package for industrial partners and remove barriers to collaboration. I invite the Minister to tell the House what progress is being made towards this goal.
In conclusion, I note with great joy today’s announcement of a new partnership with 35 universities to boost defence skills and research. I have met many graduates and apprentices in defence companies who tell me that their universities and schools did not encourage them to seek careers in the defence industry. I invite the Minister to take that back to colleagues.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, the most obvious and urgent thing to say about military capability is that we have nothing like enough of it, either now or as currently planned for the future. This must be addressed as a matter of urgency but, in the limited time available to us in this debate, I want to make three points about the nature of those capabilities.
First, I warn against oversimplification when considering future force structures. Recent debate has focused on the need for much greater numbers of uncrewed and, in some cases, autonomous vehicles in all three environments—what are commonly but inaccurately termed drones. I agree with the general proposition, but such vehicles are not the solution to everything. Ukrainians have used them very successfully to make up for their relative shortage of front-line personnel, and we can certainly employ them to create more mass. They will be a key feature of the future force mix, but they will form part of the force structure, not the whole of it. It is crucial that we adopt transformational technologies, but we should not imagine that any one of them will solve all our problems.
Secondly, whatever capabilities we have at the start of any high-intensity conflict, they will not be sufficient to sustain our effort through to victory. Some, perhaps much of them, will be destroyed in the early fighting and will have to be replaced. At the same time, technological developments and enemy initiatives will force us to adapt accordingly. It is worth remembering that many of the capabilities the Ukrainians are employing so successfully against Russia today did not exist four years ago. Therefore, we will need an agile, innovative and rapidly scalable industrial base that can support such an effort—not just traditional defence companies but the high technology sector more widely. This will require a substantial and steady stream of investment over time to underpin the necessary research and development and, importantly, to attract the necessary private sector investment.
Finally, I warn against focusing solely on capital investment. Military capability requires not just the right equipment but the people who can operate it effectively in the most demanding and dangerous conditions. That means that both regulars and reserves need regular and rigorous training. Without it, we will be sending them into combat inadequately prepared for what they will face. This not only weakens our war-fighting effectiveness but exposes our people to unnecessarily high risk. This would be an act of criminal negligence.
Our training requires not just equipment but the fuel, the spares and the other support necessary for its operation. This is paid for by resource funding, not capital. Such funding is under pressure and, despite some rebalancing in the investment plan, it remains insufficient. Our people are already inadequately trained for high-intensity conflict. In-year pressure on the defence budget means that this will get worse. I understand that the MoD can do little about the problem in the current financial year, but I ask the Minister to assure the House that the position will be transformed in future years. The Government simply cannot go on failing our people and the country more widely in this way.
Most of what I have urged—I could have urged much more—comes down to funding. The settlement in the defence investment plan was inadequate and incoherent in the light of the commitment that the Government have rightly made to NATO. This failure endangers us all and it must be put right very quickly.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, it is a very great honour to follow the noble and gallant Lord. I find myself in no man’s land, squeezed between a former Chief of the Defence Staff and a valedictory Bishop, so I shall try to navigate as best I can through what could be dangerous territory.
I particularly welcome back my noble friend Lord Harlech; it is very good to see him. He was sent to the scrapheap. The REME have got hold of him, reconditioned him and polished him up. He has come back to serve on these Benches and we will get a lot of usage from him over the coming years, of that I am certain.
I draw attention—not only because I need to under the rules of the House but because it is appropriate to our deliberations this afternoon—to my involvement with BOKA, a company dedicated to security and defence, aerospace and space, sovereign resilience, AI and quantum. I chair the investment committee of that company, which is involved in many of the technologies that we have been discussing and will continue to discuss this afternoon.
I listened carefully to what the noble and gallant Lord just said, and he is right. I suspect that many of the speeches this afternoon will dwell on similar topics to underscore the fact that there is a profound change in the economics of warfare. The demand from defence comes from changing defence patterns resulting from our most recent experiences in Ukraine and Iran—two very different military scenarios, but with some common themes.
We are now witnessing a rapid pace of newly iterating technologies and attributable systems. These act as force multipliers to defence forces that are struggling with recruitment, and they assist in combating new threats in both conventional war-fighting and in the grey zone, such as the cyber domain. As such, defence procurement must be more focused on annualised budgeting with agile deployment and testing. It must rely more readily on partnering with private capital not only to share the burden of finance but to assist with the proper due diligence of new technologies in quick time. Further, the larger, exquisite systems will require dedicated sovereign funds for longer-term procurement cycles, but the number of items procured is likely to fall over the next decade.
In conclusion, I remain unconvinced that we have properly addressed and adapted our procurement policy in a rapidly changing environment. We need to be smarter and quicker. Our Armed Forces need equipment now and simply cannot wait for long-term projects to be realised. The funding of this sea change, which is what is required, will require a change in Treasury thinking, without which none of the desired changes will be achievable. It also requires leadership from the new, as yet untested Prime Minister. Tackling the country’s economy and unsustainable welfare budget must be his priority, without which the Government will simply be unable to fund the spending on defence we need in order both to honour our international commitments and to ensure the safety of our own people.
The Lord Bishop of Southwark (Valedictory Speech)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for bringing this debate. Let me begin my valedictory address by making it clear that it is not my intention to advise His Majesty’s Government on the number of dreadnought battleships they should be laying down or what the future of the Blue Streak missile programme should be. I wish to address some wider issues that I believe are directly relevant to our future capability and which arise out of our current situation.
Quoting from the Global Peace Index 2026, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich reminded the House during a debate on the Armed Forces Bill on 6 July that
“the world has continued its longstanding trajectory of deteriorating peacefulness”.
It has always been my contention that, since the UK left the European Union, the costs of our security, diplomatic efforts and cultural reach will need to rise, since we no longer benefit from the partnership and pooled resources that the union provides. Instead, our defence spending has stagnated and NATO is in difficulty, with the United States now in unpredictable mode. We are planning to reduce the Diplomatic Service, and the BBC and other major cultural players continue to make cuts.
I appreciate that, as we shall hear, a different trajectory is planned for UK defence. A good deal will be said about the changing nature of warfare in the light of the appalling assault on the territorial integrity of Ukraine by President Putin. However, the continued reduction in what we used to call manpower across all three services is worrying because, at the end of the day, fearful decisions need to be taken by human beings, and some situations should be addressed only by a human presence, not an AI-driven remote response. AI and drones are no substitute for physicality, presence and engagement.
It may seem strange to hint at a moral dimension in a business which is never decorous or happy, but the basis of international humanitarian law in conduct of war finds its origin in the Christian doctrine of a just war with its tests of necessity, proportionality and restraint. The Geneva conventions, our more elaborate and contemporary responses, were themselves born of fearful conflict and barbarity, not wishful thinking. Yet increasingly, in conflicts such as in Sudan, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and, I so regret to say it, in the manner in which Israel has responded to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, international law is set aside for reasons of expediency, and with appalling results and much innocent suffering, not least in Gaza. That is why the other issues I alluded to, such as the size and effectiveness of our diplomatic service, matter, and why good quality journalism matters, including British journalism and British values in the form of the BBC, to help uphold international rules, because when these become degraded, people suffer, and we all become less safe.
Finally, I wish to thank the House for the consideration given to the Lords spiritual and to me, for the great privilege of serving here, for the high calling of your Lordships and for the dedication of our staff, not least the doorkeepers, many of whom served in our Armed Forces. As someone who has led your Lordships in prayer at the beginning of business, I am reminded of the words of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, that “the largest party in this House is the praying party”. I give thanks for that and assure all your Lordships of my continued prayers.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, it is always a distinct privilege to rise in your Lordships’ House, particularly when the subject matter before us concerns the key priority of any nation: the defence and security of the realm in an era of unprecedented global volatility and conflict.
However, before I turn to our physical defences, it is my great honour to pay tribute to a defender of a different kind, one who has spent years fortifying the moral and spiritual armour of our nation. I refer of course to the right reverend Prelate—and my dear friend—the Bishop of Southwark, and I congratulate him on a poignant and reflective valedictory speech.
I feel immense warmth towards the right reverend Prelate and his neighbourly affection, for he is the person who is the spiritual guide for many of the good people of Wimbledon—indeed, he is the shepherd, as many remind me. I have always maintained that trying to guide people spiritually, especially when they are quite diverse, including the occasionally highly opinionated folk of south London, requires a level of tactical patience, strategic diplomacy and sheer resilience that would challenge any seasoned peacekeeping commander around the world. Yet, the right reverend Prelate has done so for over 15 years with quiet but effective diplomacy and, as we have seen again today, boundless grace and deep humility.
In this House, the right reverend Prelate has been a reassuring and welcome presence. He has never been one, as we have heard again today, to shy away from what I would call difficult issues. Indeed, over many years in the very place where the Minister sits, I was on the receiving end of his quiet but very effective challenges to the Government of the day. He has consistently championed the homeless, the marginalised, and a cause that we share and which is incredibly close to my own heart. I live by the mantra that the greatest test of our own faith is when we stand by and for the faith and belief of others. He has lived by that. We have stood together on many platforms advocating for human rights, and I have always been struck, as I have already said, by his gentle yet effective moral clarity.
While the Ministry of Defence has frequently struggled with its logistics at times, the diocese of Southwark has operated with enviable precision under the right reverend Prelate’s stewardship. It has proved, perhaps, that faith can not only move mountains but manage complex organisations. We worked together when the right reverend Prelate was the lead bishop on the issues of the Middle East, and again—I quoted that mantra earlier—he stood for justice, not just for Christians or for the Jewish community but for the Muslim community, and he addressed the challenges both in Israel and Palestine with equality and justice.
Together, we worked with Archbishop Hosam of Jerusalem, a friend to us both. I was proud to lead on the issue of Christian persecution, where the support of the right reverend Prelate and others on the Spiritual Benches was vital. I am sure that I speak for all in this House when I say that we will miss deeply his wisdom, his pastoral warmth and his profound service to this House and to the nation. We wish him every blessing for his well-deserved retirement, which is with our sincere prayers.
Turning back to earthly challenges, I thank my noble friend Lord Harlech—we will hold the “gallant” for a moment or two, but I am sure that it is something for the future—for tabling this debate and join the chorus welcoming him back. When I look at the international horizon, I am reminded of my own time representing our nation and our interests globally. As a Foreign Minister, one learns very quickly the value of diplomatic tact. However, as any seasoned hand will tell you, diplomacy is greatly assisted when the person whom you are negotiating with knows that you have something more formidable behind you than a beautifully drafted joint communiqué. In my case, it was my noble friend Lady Goldie. We were a double act often on the world stage.
However, on a serious note, we find ourselves surveying a world that is, to put it in our customary British way, “highly complex”. To our east, state-based threats are no longer looming but are real and are redrawing borders. In maritime lanes around the world, we see state and non-state actors operating with technology that makes some of our procurement processes look positively glacial.
This brings me to the capabilities of our own, magnificent Armed Forces. Our men and women in uniform are, without a shadow of doubt, world class. Their courage, their adaptability and their professionalism are second to none. I have seen their work on the ground and witnessed what they did in places such as Afghanistan. The only issue, as has already been highlighted in this debate, is that there are ever fewer of them. We have a Navy of sublime sophistication—the noble Lord, Lord West, is in his place—but, on certain Tuesdays, one wonders whether we have enough hulls to cover the water that we are legally obliged to protect and to fulfil our duties to the treaties that we are signed up to.
Our defence procurement has historically operated on a philosophy that I can best describe as bespoke tailoring. We do not merely buy a helicopter; we commission a flying work of art, hand stitched by many committees, adjusted for 32 different eventualities and delivered precisely three years after the conflict that it was intended for has resolved itself. The Government’s own SDR is so ably led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who I am delighted is in his place and who chairs the International Relations and Defence Committee which I am honoured to serve on. He highlighted this very issue of procurement. Yet I want to be fair. The SDR and the welcome and final publication of the delayed Defence Investment Plan is a move forward and shows that we are waking up to the reality of the challenges that we face in 2026. We are investing heavily in cyber, space and AI, areas where a well-placed line of code can do the work of an entire regiment. This is commendable, as is the £5 billion for drones.
Yet you cannot deter a hostile frigate with a sternly worded PowerPoint presentation. At some point, hard capability must mean physical presence, be it in the Middle East or defending the Falkland Islands. We are a nation that prides itself on punching above our weight. It is a marvellous face, but without that punch behind it having the force of our Armed Forces, you eventually bruise your knuckles. Our friends, but more importantly our foes, are looking at us very carefully.
We have rightly stood together in unity on Ukraine. I commend the Prime Minister’s comments today in Ukraine and thank him for his service in that area.
Let us continue to work together, as my noble friend Lord Harlech said, in supporting government steps to modernise. However, let us do it with a healthy dose of reality and realism. Let us ensure that when we speak of deterrence, we are talking about forces that are ready to be deployed today, equipped today and sustained for tomorrow. We need the defence readiness Bill. When will we see that?
Our adversaries are not waiting for the next strategic defence review to conclude. They are acting. When it comes to peace, the pen may be mightier than the sword, but it would be incredibly reassuring for all of us, in a typically British way, to have a highly sharp, fully serviced and readily available sword in the umbrella stand, just in case we need to deploy.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Ahmad in congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark on his final speech. I hope he enjoys an excellent retirement and has every opportunity to go on worshipping God and doing his best to swell the congregations in our churches. I think he will find that easier when he is no longer encumbered by the necessary political compromises that have to be made in your Lordships’ House.
My noble friends have made the point that we do not have enough money for the defence budget, but nobody is asking why. A tremendous amount of money is being spent by this Government on welfare that is not achieving what it is intending. It is supposed to be lifting people out of poverty, and it is not; it is condemning people to poverty. There are enormous savings to be made in the welfare budget but, unfortunately, the Labour Party in the other place will not allow those reforms to go through. That has grave implications for our democracy, and I would be very worried if I were a member of the Labour Party. If it cannot fulfil its functions as a Government with the enormous majority that it has, one has to ask whether it would ever be worthy of forming a Government again. If I were in the Labour Party, I would be very worried about that.
This comes at a particularly unfortunate period in defence. There have been a lot of false forecasts of peace in Ukraine, but as the Ukrainians develop technology in the amazing way that they have and, with western help, develop longer-range missiles that can penetrate central facilities in Russia, I think we will eventually bring this conflict to an end. At that stage, NATO must ask who is going to fess up, come to the plate and say that they are prepared to help provide Ukraine with the essential security guarantees that it needs to ensure that Russia does not invade again. That is going to be a big test for NATO.
I look back to the Joint Expeditionary Force, which was established by NATO in south Wales in 2014. Two years later, two countries joined—Finland and Sweden—that were not members of NATO at the time. We could expand the Joint Expeditionary Force to become a nucleus of the coalition of the willing. I was on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly but was slung off when the Conservatives did so badly in the election. However, I gather from a former colleague that Poland might join the Joint Expeditionary Force. That would be very significant indeed; it would form the nucleus for a coalition of the willing that might be able to change the price of fish in European NATO, as we look to a future in which the United States plays a reduced role in defending European interests. You might have some sympathy with the United States when it reminds us that Russia has an economy smaller than that of Italy. It is therefore a great pity that we cannot properly fund our Armed Forces at this critical moment, when we should be setting an example to all our allies and not be laggards in the business.
Baroness Antrobus (Lab)
My Lords, I appreciate that this debate has already focused, and I am sure will continue to focus, on the challenges facing our Armed Forces—issues around funding, the defence investment plan and, of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, eloquently argued, the role of our reserves. I declare an interest, as my husband is a reservist.
However, in the context of a strategic defence review that put NATO first, and a defence investment plan which headlined our NATO commitment as its first priority in stepping up UK leadership, I want to focus on our Armed Forces’ nuclear deterrent capability. Sir Adam Thomson, former UK permanent representative to NATO, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on Monday and made an important point that I wish to amplify in this Chamber.
The UK is one of only two European nuclear powers, and the only one that has committed its nuclear capability to NATO. In the DIP, our Government set out their key investment commitments, including to the UK nuclear deterrent. The plan committed to over £20 billion more investment in the defence nuclear enterprise over the next four years, compared with the previous four, to modernise the UK’s nuclear capabilities and the facilities that deliver them, including new submarines. This is a commitment that contributes significantly to European deterrence against our adversaries.
It also recommitted, following the original June 2025 announcement, to joining NATO’s dual-capable aircraft nuclear mission. This will see the Royal Air Force, in the form of the acquisition of F35A combat aircraft, returning to the airborne nuclear role it relinquished in 1998. In the last 12 months, I have reconvened some of our now-retired RAF “Cold War warriors” from the Tornado, Jaguar and Nimrod aircraft forces to distil lessons from that era. Although there are many differences—the weapon will not be a UK weapon, the technology has changed vastly, and the likely readiness commitment will be significantly less—there is also much to learn from the past. I, of course, say that as a history scholar.
The Chief of the Air Staff and the Chief of the Defence Staff have both talked about the need for the RAF to rediscover its “nuclear IQ”. Those who joined the RAF during the Cold War were fully aware that they were joining a nuclear-armed force and that they might be stationed at a nuclear-armed base, regardless of their branch or trade. Now, the RAF is constituted almost entirely of personnel who joined after the Cold War, during the era of wars of choice. Similarly, politicians and the public have lived through the decades of expeditionary warfare.
This future airborne capability—the theme of today’s debate being, of course, future capability—will add an important rung to the escalation ladder. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, wrote in a recent paper, co-edited with Daniel Skeffington,
“the stronger …the ‘ladder’ … – through the possession of credible capabilities on a sliding scale between small arms and strategic weapons – the stronger the deterrent effect”.
To conclude, there are many challenges facing our Armed Forces, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that we should find, in Sir Adam’s words, “fresh ways” to emphasise the importance of our nuclear deterrent to the UK and to our NATO allies in Europe.
Baroness Helic (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Harlech on introducing this debate. I join other noble Lords in wishing the right reverend Prelate the best for the future and in thanking him for his work and his valedictory speech.
I begin by commending the Lord Speaker’s lecture, delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, yesterday evening. I encourage all noble Lords to read it, if they have not already. He posed a fundamental question: is Britain really safe? His answer was very clear: the threats that we face are real, they are growing, and meeting them will require urgency, resilience and sustained national resolve.
Our Armed Forces, regular and reserves, remain among the finest anywhere. But the question is not the quality of those who serve but whether they are being given the equipment, support, resources and training they need. The strategic defence review, led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, recognised that Britain is responding to an immediate and growing threat, not preparing for a distant possibility. The Government’s acceptance of the recommendations is welcome. The challenge remains delivering on them at the pace that the security environment demands.
The Prime Minister has warned that Russia could pose a direct challenge to NATO before the end of this decade, a view echoed by NATO’s secretary-general. If that is the Government’s assessment, procurement and investment must reflect it. Yet some priority capabilities are not expected until the early 2030s. Every delay narrows our margin for deterrence.
The war in Ukraine has reinforced enduring lessons. Technological advantage remains essential, but so are ammunition, logistics, industrial capacity and the ability to sustain operations over time. Tomorrow’s technology cannot compensate for today’s shortages. Deterrence depends on forces that are trained, equipped and ready and on a resilient defence industrial base. Production cannot be expended overnight, skilled workers cannot be created in a crisis, and supply chains cannot be rebuilt once conflict has begun. Industry needs confidence that government decisions will be timely, consistent and backed by long-term commitment. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, has warned, we are running out of years. If the threats are accelerating, our response must accelerate too.
National security is not solely a Ministry of Defence responsibility. It also depends on a resilient energy supply, secure communication, cyber resilience and the protection of critical national infrastructure. Defence is now a whole of government and whole of society responsibility, requiring an honest conversation with the British people about national preparedness. Our allies will judge us, and our adversaries will too, not by the quality of our reviews but by our ability to deliver them. Britain’s influence rests on credibility, demonstrating that when we identify a threat, we have the resolve and the means to respond. Preparing for conflict is not about expecting war but preventing it. The stronger our deterrence, the less likely it is to be tested.
I have several questions for the Minister. First, what concrete steps are being taken to accelerate the implementation of the strategic defence review so that delivery matches the urgency of the threats we face? Secondly, how will the Government ensure that our Armed Forces have the equipment, munitions and industrial support they need before the end of this decade rather than after it? Thirdly, what are the Government doing to give the defence industry the confidence to invest in skills, production and innovation so that it can respond rapidly in a crisis? Finally, when will Parliament see a credible pathway to defence spending that matches today’s security challenges and enables the ambitions of the review to be realised?
Britain retains exceptional Armed Forces, world-class intelligence services, innovative defence industries and alliances that remain the cornerstone of our security. We understand the threats we face, and we know what we must do. The question now is whether we will deliver in time.
Lord Craig of Radley (CB)
My Lords, much has been said in recent months about the possibility of a Russian conflict with NATO. Such a war will be deterred if we and our allies react to strengthen our weak arms posture now. NATO’s potential military, economic and technical strength far exceeds that of any potential adversary. The challenge is to ensure that this strength is credible, visible and ready to deter any prospect of open conflict. Such determination must be led from the top of Governments. For the UK, a clear graph of intended progress to 3% then 3.5% is required, not ring-fenced with any “if fiscal conditions allow” type caveats of uncertainty.
As it takes two to tango, the assessment by the potential aggressor of their own warlike capabilities and chances of strategic success matter. If Russia were that opponent, what is there to learn from its fight with Ukraine? Far from being what was expected, namely, a quick conquest of Ukraine and a change to a Russian-subservient Government in Kyiv, the Ukrainians, after great difficulty and challenge, are now able, with much NATO help, to hold Russian advances and operate far into Russia itself, to Moscow and St Petersburg as well as into Crimea and elsewhere. Maybe Putin sacked some senior commanders for bringing him only bad news. Maybe their successors rely on holding their posts by reporting only good news from the front. Maybe Putin even feels that all adverse results reported reflect western propaganda and so cannot possibly be true, but what he feels and believes is what will drive him on.
While much of Putin’s available forces are fighting in Ukraine, there is much more uncommitted, with advanced capabilities in missile and maritime offence. Sub-conflict measures are already occurring and increasing in dangerous ways. But faced by a strong NATO alliance, would Russia believe it could wage and win a war of conquest, not just with arms but to achieve political mastery? One judgment might be that without the latter, the incentive to go further than sub-conflict measures may exist only if the NATO alliance appears to be weakening or even breaking apart.
While there are differences between last century’s Soviet belief in the worldwide spread of communism and today’s Russia, we learned from our spy Oleg Gordievsky of the Kremlin’s abiding view that NATO is an aggressor from its perspective. Since 1949, NATO has moved from the original 12-country transatlantic alliance to one of 32 that has grown and reached eastwards to the very borders of Russia, from its far north all the way down to Turkey—far too close to Mother Russia for its own sense of security. Now, NATO’s strong support of Ukraine and the US assault on Iran, with the expectation of NATO help, must only further alarm the Kremlin’s paranoia about NATO, so real and abiding tensions exist. It may not be possible to ease such confrontation in the military domain, but more might be done with arts, culture and sporting events to ease the existing tensions, and Putin is not immortal.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)
My Lords, a week ago in the Times, Andy Burnham wrote that
“increasing our national security … will be my first priority”.
It made me ask: does he really mean this? This Government have had loads of top priorities. The current Prime Minister has said:
“Growth is the number one priority”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, told the House that the
“absolute priority for the Government”
is
“to have a water Bill”.—[Official Report, 6/1/26; col. 1046.]
The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, disagreed: she told this House that “making creative careers accessible” was the Government’s “key priority”. I have a whole dossier of number one priorities tossed out by government Ministers, all utterly meaningless.
I have to ask myself: does Andy Burnham mean what he says? Is he really going to give a cast-iron guarantee that service chiefs will get the equipment and resources to meet our NATO commitments? Is he really prepared to make the money available, and for domestic programmes to take the hit—and, if so, which ones? In the annual spending round, Ministers have to pit the claims of their department against the competing claims of other departments. If one department is always to get its way, you would no longer be evaluating its bid for more money. By the way, which departments win and which lose does not always depend on a rational evaluation. It also depends on who has the political weight in the Government and the Cabinet.
I hope Andy Burnham means what he says and will throw his weight in support of defence, but that will mean standing up to his Back-Benchers, which the current Prime Minister has failed to do, most notably on welfare reform. He needs to do it. We have had warning after warning from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, about this. We are highly vulnerable to Russia on the warpath, not just potential military attack but attacks on our domestic infrastructure that could bring down our energy networks, our banking and financial systems and the day-to-day life of the whole country.
Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister next week. We will eventually have the opportunity to question and challenge the new Government in this House. The House has great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, so I very much hope that the Defence Minister in this House in the new Government will still be the noble Lord.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, I join with the noble Lord, Lord Swire, in welcoming the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, has been recycled; the value of that is before us this afternoon. We have talked repeatedly about percentages of GDP to be spent on defence. I do not like the concept of percentages of GDP. The amount of money you need to spend is what you need to spend, and some artificial percentage does not make much sense. We need to re-evaluate that.
I was fortunate enough to be present when President Zelensky came into this building in March. I attended the meeting in Committee Room 14; many noble Lords will have been there. He had a big screen and a laptop, and he was able to show us in real time what was happening on his own battle-front: what was coming in and what was going out. There were four other laptops in Ukraine that were doing the same thing. Most of us went to that meeting on the understanding and acceptance that he presumably wanted more money or more ammunition. No—he was selling at that meeting, not begging. With his colleagues, he has developed a wartime economy. He has been agile and innovative, not simply for commercial reasons but out of sheer necessity to survive.
The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, started his lecture last night by mentioning that we are not engaging in a meaningful conversation with the general public on what confronts us. This is not a political thing; the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, opened the debate with that point. This goes back 40 years, to the end of the Cold War. We were all very happy, whether we were Ministers or whatever, to spend the money on things that we felt were important—non-defence matters such as education, welfare or health. We were all happy to do that and all allowed it to happen, so we are not throwing stones here, but we need to recycle—in our own minds, and in the minds of the general public—the issues that confront us now.
I do not believe that Putin’s tanks will roll up Whitehall or that his submarines will come up the Thames—although most of us would hardly notice if they did. The fact is that we do not have the right mindsets. We need to engage with the public to educate people on what we are confronted with: the damage that can be done to our infrastructure, such as the undersea cables on which so much of our wealth and commerce is dependent. Hardly a day goes by when we do not have a photograph in the paper of some ship or other that has been decommissioned or is laid up in a port somewhere. It is not good enough. We have to start a conversation, and I hope the new Prime Minister will do that, because we have to get the people onside. Unfortunately, that means difficult choices. We will have to rethink the post-Cold War spending profile and begin to get our heads around the fact that we face an enemy driven not by logic but by ideology.
Lord Risby (Con)
My Lords, this debate is particularly timely as the Farnborough International Airshow begins on Monday. We do indeed live in a volatile and dangerous age, but there is no Member of your Lordships’ House who cannot recognise that, over time, our influence on the world stage has been reducing. At the heart of this has been an anaemic economy and an insufficiently sizeable and focused defence budget.
Nowhere is the lack of direction more glaring than in the space domain—the very central nervous system of modern high-intensity warfare. Instead of accelerating our surveillance satellite programmes, a new plan cancels critical narrowband communication networks. By failing to secure our own space infrastructure, our future forces will risk being dependent on non-sovereign networks controlled by external providers. Furthermore, our approach is drifting. Space resilience is heavily cited in official documents but remains entirely unfocused, lacking specific variable requirements for system recovery and capability generation. Worryingly, we are falling critically out of step with the United States, which has made a fundamental conceptual shift towards an offensive space control mindset.
The strategic defence review called space
“a domain that is central to warfighting”.
Indeed, rapidly increasing congestion in space means that there are now 16,000 satellites compared with 3,000 five years ago, and 100,000 are expected by 2030, offering nefarious actors more opportunity to conceal their activities. In the context of the international environment, space can no longer be viewed merely as an enabler of other domains. It is a critical war-fighting domain and the backbone of our critical national infrastructure.
Underpinning developments in fifth generation warfare is the role that space-based assets play. This is important, particularly as digitalisation increases, delivering precise navigation, instant communications, global surveillance and early missile warning systems. Without space-based assets, co-ordinating fast-paced multidomain operations and combined arms manoeuvres becomes very difficult. The recent defence investment plan announced that the incoming Skynet 6 narrowband satellite system would not proceed. Cancelling Skynet 6A will have a demonstrably adverse effect. This is so disappointing when many in the industry felt that, for three years, the significance of this had been understood clearly by government.
By contrast, if we want a model of a country that has really understood the challenges, we turn to Poland. It is investing 4.5% of its GDP into hard and visible capacity, helping to create greater defence capability from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Even Germany, casting off the Merkel inheritance, is projected to spend more on defence than France and the United Kingdom put together, without the huge debt situation in both countries. Recently, I had the chance to learn all about this by talking with government officials who are in Poland. What was spelled out was impressive yet depressing, because this great success has arisen from fiscal and pro-business policies which had stimulated growth in the private sector. For us, the lessons are obvious.
Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on securing this debate, which is essential to the future of our country. I thank him for his service, as I thank all our Armed Forces volunteers for theirs. I associate myself with many of the comments he made in his opening remarks.
I begin with a simple truth: the world has already changed, but our defence capabilities have not kept pace. The threats we face are no longer neatly divided into war and peace, foreign and domestic, military and civilian; they are hybrid, continuous, complex and aimed at undermining the very resilience of our society. Across Europe and beyond, nations have recognised this shift. Finland’s total defence, Sweden’s civil military integration, Israel’s Home Front Command and Singapore’s multi-pillar resilience doctrine all demonstrate one lesson: the defence of the nation is no longer the job of the Armed Forces alone; it is a job for the whole of society. Our Armed Forces remain world class, but they are being asked to do too much with too little in systems designed for a different era. We cannot meet today’s threats with yesterday’s structures. With the winds of political change in the air, I want to argue for three radical shifts.
First, we must build a whole-of-nation resilience—not a patchwork of agencies or a set of disconnected emergency plans, but a statutory, integrated approach that brings together defence, civil contingencies, local government, critical national infrastructure and the private sector. Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency shows just what is possible: strategic stockpiles, shared planning and clear duties on every sector. We need the same here: a UK resilience agency with real authority, real resources and real accountability.
Secondly, we must fuse civilian expertise with military capabilities. Our Armed Forces need engineers, cyber specialists, medics, logisticians and data scientists, but we cannot recruit and retain all of them inside the military. Other nations have solved this through dual-track service approaches, where civilians can be mobilised rapidly into defence roles that match their professional skills. I believe we should create a UK national reserve: a modern, flexible force that draws on civilian expertise, is trained for crises, both domestic and international, and is integrated into defence planning. That would be not conscription but a national capability-building exercise for every community and every nation in this country.
Thirdly, we must redesign command and co-ordination for the hybrid age. Israel’s Home Front Command integrates civilian protection directly into military planning, Japan’s self-defence forces train routinely with civilian disaster agencies, and Norway’s civil and military co-operation doctrine plans for peacetime, crisis and conflict. We need a UK equivalent: a joint civil-military resilience command, responsible for dealing with grey-zone threats, infrastructure protection and rapid mobilisation in times of crisis. It should sit alongside the military’s Strategic Command with equal status and a clear mandate.
If we are serious about future capability, we must stop imagining defence as something that happens over there. Cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and the undermining of trust in institutions is all happening now to our people, our economy and our country. Our Armed Forces will remain essential, but they cannot and should not be asked to defend the nation alone. Modern threats demand that we build a system where every sector, every skill and every citizen contributes to the security and resilience of this United Kingdom. That is the scale of ambition we need and the future capability that our times demand.
Baroness Eaton (Con)
My Lords, I join with others in thanking my noble friend Lord Harlech for initiating this debate. This House meets to consider a question that goes to the very heart of our future national security. Just weeks ago, the Chief of the Defence Staff publicly stated that the United Kingdom is running out of time to boost its Armed Forces, and that our adversaries are definitely “raising the stakes” and risk “crossing a line”.
Let us be clear: this is not a distant, hypothetical threat; it is a present reality. Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered its fifth year; our critical infrastructure is being tested daily in cyber space and beneath our sea, and there is an assumption that the sustained decades of relative peace in Europe no longer hold. Meanwhile, the conflict in Iran has shown how trade routes can be easily disrupted and the prosperity of our nation threatened by the closure of vital international waterways that we might be required to help unplug. We must resist the temptation to treat defence policy as a matter of budgets and spreadsheets alone. To do so would be to diminish what is really at stake: the ability of this country to keep its people safe, honour its alliances and deter those who would do us harm.
This is a moment for not only ambition but candour, because the hard truth is that our war-fighting readiness has been degraded for years. It did not happen in a single Parliament and it will not be restored by a single spending review or investment plan. It is a structural problem and it demands a structural answer. The defence investment plan, which was published only recently, was meant to deliver the strategic defence review’s vision of a stronger Army, a hybrid Navy and a next-generation Air Force, yet even the Government’s own assessment points to a funding gap of billions of pounds in the years ahead, as decisions will need to be made about discretionary spending.
Even after the DIP, our defence spending will reach only 2.7% of GDP by 2027-28. This is a welcome commitment but, given that we have an objective to reach 3% in the next Parliament and 3.5% in “core defence” by 2035 to align with our NATO commitments—with no sense of where the money will come from—we are entitled to be concerned that our Armed Forces will be short-changed. Intentions and actual capabilities are not the same.
Of particular concern must be that the British Army now stands at its smallest size since the start of the Napoleonic Wars over two centuries ago. The Royal Navy is at its smallest size since the mid-17th century. We all understand and appreciate that the nature of warfare has changed and that size does not necessarily matter, but the ability to project power clearly still does. For all the technological advances promised in the DIP, mass will still count for something, and there are fears that here we are falling behind. We rightly welcome new investment in drones and autonomous systems, in the Dreadnought programme and in AUKUS. These are opportunities to modernise, to deter and to protect those who serve. Let us be honest, however: the scale of the challenge ahead means that we are beyond easy answers. Rebuilding warfighting readiness cannot happen overnight and requires a laser focus that has eluded us—by choice or by neglect—for generations.
Today, therefore, as we take note of the future capability of our Armed Forces in the current international situation, let us also use this debate as a moment of real scrutiny and ensure that we support whatever measures are required so that the men and women of our military have the capability, the equipment and the support they need to keep this country safe.
Lord Magan of Castletown (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Harlech for initiating this debate. I declare my interest: my grandfather was a soldier, my father was a soldier, my brother was a soldier and my son was a soldier. My son Edward, a captain in the Irish Guards, saw active service in the second Gulf War in Basra, Iraq, and subsequently served with Special Forces in Afghanistan.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, widely respected on all sides of this House, has spoken movingly about members of his own family who served the Crown in conflict. He will recognise, as all serving families necessarily have to, the traumas of uncertainty, apprehension and fear, hoping the telephone is not going to ring, which are part and parcel of such family involvement and commitment. One does not forget those days of such very considerable anxiety. Yet, once again, we face the prospect that our own forces will find themselves increasingly on a front line where technology is changing the character of warfare at the fastest rate in history. The UK is woefully and inadequately prepared for the challenges now likely to be faced. Starmer’s Administration have comprehensively failed to meet their responsibilities for the very necessary further rapid enhancement of the defence of the realm.
It is all the more notable that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has presided with increasing exasperation over the extensive debates held in this House on the June 2025 strategic defence review and, subsequently, the long-delayed defence investment plan, which certainly has not, as was promised, delivered a vision of warfaring readiness and transformation over the next 10 years and beyond. In fact, the delayed publication of the defence investment plan in June this year was so poorly received that it led to the immediate resignation of John Healey as Secretary of State for Defence and of the Defence Minister Al Carns, who said that the defence investment plan was
“not built for the threat we face. It is neither transformative … nor sufficiently funded”.
That is a damning indictment of a wholly inadequate, much-delayed priority policy requirement.
Further, Al Carns asked, what will Putin do? When Russia finds itself cornered, it escalates. I believe that Russia will escalate horizontally, sending drones over a NATO country, daring the alliance to respond. We are on the brink of serious conflict, in which the lives of our service men and women are going to be lost, maybe at scale. Responsibility for such potentially disastrous procrastination, prevarication and indecision lies fairly and squarely with outgoing Prime Minister Starmer. The dangers now have to be faced rigorously. There is no time to be lost by incoming Prime Minister Burnham.
First, the total funding package of £15 billion, one-third of which is unfunded—heinous fiscal legerdemain—is woefully inadequate. The Chief of the Defence Staff has made it clear that £28 billion in extra funding is the minimum requirement, committed and delivered on time. Secondly, under the current plan, we will be spending just under 2.7% of GDP on defence in 2030; 3% was the target. John Healey, the outgoing Defence Secretary, has said that we need a target date for 3% and a
“clear, credible funding plan to meet our NATO commitment of 3.5% … by 2035”.
Thirdly, it must be remembered that, at the height of the Cold War, we were committing 5% of GDP to the defence budget. We can do it, but this Labour Administration’s priorities need to be straightened out fast. Fourthly, it is essential that the £10 billion munitions plan is reinstated. It is necessary to rebuild our munitions stockpile, now much depleted, particularly after the war in Ukraine. So where are you, Mr Burnham? Do not keep hiding. Come out and face the music. Show now that you truly have the mettle needed for equipping our forces—
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
I am sorry. Will the noble Lord wind up, please?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for securing this debate. The level of engagement on a Thursday afternoon shows the interest in your Lordships’ House. The debate has been particularly useful in that, unlike nearly all the discussion in the other place and in the media, it has not just focused on, as the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, framed it, “What are we spending?” but rather on “What are we using defence and security money for?” Is it on capabilities that make us more secure, or is it driven by imperatives of private profit or pride?
There is one form of defence spending to which I want to draw attention and to question. It is one that noble Lords who are regular Tube users here at Westminster Station will know. As we descend the escalators, we are confronted by, blared at by, a shiny advert for BAE Systems. Future jet fighters; Navy capabilities: the subject occasionally varies, but, for the seven years that I have been in this House, that prime and no doubt very expensive advertising spot has been permanently occupied by BAE Systems. Ultimately, of course, the cost of that no doubt very expensive, endless advertisement, directed at a small number of Tube users—parliamentarians and officials—is part of our defence budget. But it is not, I suggest, spending that makes us any safer.
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark for, in his valedictory speech, introducing another point that I want to make: that our security is about much more than defence. Soft power, diplomacy and the international service provided by the BBC World Service are crucial, and all this together needs to be treated as a package. Last week, I put to the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, that the FCDO was in turmoil and the noble Baroness denied it fervently. Well, this morning, I was on the picket line in King Charles Street with PCS members who are FCDO staff, expressing their anger and fear about the turmoil—and that very clearly is an accurate word—in the department. That is a workers’ rights issue, disappointing to all there in the light of having a Labour Government, but it is also a security issue for us all.
I will pick up another point, from noble Lords on the Conservative Benches, who have suggested that the welfare budget must be cut to allow for more defence spending. Yet we have also heard, occasionally from the Conservative Benches and from around the House, about the most basic defence resources of all—human capability and human will. The foundations of our welfare system were laid after the Boer War, with an awareness that child poverty and general deprivation meant that many young men were unfit to serve. If people have not been cared for by society and have been left without the basic resources to live decently, while they see the few—the “have-yachts”—harvesting the resources that might have been sustaining them, that is not going to build the will, let alone the physical capability, to stand up to the threats we face.
On defence procurement, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, we have huge problems with the tradition, established over decades, of commissioning works of art, and, I would add, making decisions for economic rather than military reasons. We often heard from the previous Government—there are similar hints from the incoming one—that they used defence spending as a form of economic development funding. But that risks doing two things badly, rather than focusing on the activity that is supposed to be the spending’s purpose.
Lord Mott (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate, which was secured and opened so powerfully by my noble friend Lord Harlech. I begin by referring the House to the register of interests, in particular my support for the charity Ukrainian Action, which provides humanitarian assistance, recovery and reconstruction in Ukraine. When you visit Ukraine, you see first hand not only the destruction caused by Russia’s illegal invasion but something else: I saw a country that continues to innovate, to manufacture and to adapt, despite fighting a war for its very survival. That resilience deserves not only our admiration but our attention, because Ukraine is no longer simply a recipient of military assistance; it has become one of Europe’s foremost centres of defence innovation, as highlighted earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Empey.
One of the defining lessons of this conflict is that innovation has become a strategic capability in its own right. Modern warfare is no longer determined solely by who possesses the most sophisticated equipment, but increasingly by who can improve it most quickly. Ukraine has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to shorten the cycle between identifying a problem on the battlefield, developing a solution, testing it under operational conditions and rapidly scaling production. That culture of continuous innovation is something all Ukraine’s allies should be studying carefully. I believe that Britain has much to learn from Ukraine, and Ukraine has benefited from our support.
That is why I believe the next phase of our partnership should place greater emphasis on defence industrial co-operation. The United Kingdom possesses one of the world’s leading defence technology sectors. Alongside our established defence companies, we have innovative SMEs developing autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and electronic warfare capabilities. These businesses have enormous expertise to offer, yet many tell us that procurement remains slow, that barriers remain high and that opportunities to work alongside Ukrainian partners are often more difficult than they should be. Of course, there must always be appropriate safeguards around defence exports, technology transfer and national security. No one would argue otherwise, but speed has become a capability in its own right, and procurement systems designed for peacetime must continue to evolve if they are to keep pace with modern conflict.
Ukraine is already moving in this direction. Earlier this month it expanded its drone deal framework, creating long-term partnerships centred on joint production, technology transfer, industrial co-operation and significantly faster approval processes for participating partners. More than 20 further countries are now in discussions on joining similar arrangements.
At the same time, only this week the European Union announced a new defence industrial partnership with Ukraine, recognising that it is no longer simply receiving capability but helping to shape Europe’s future defence industrial base. Our defence industry has much to contribute. Can the Minister update the House on what discussions the Government have had with Ukraine about establishing a similarly deep defence industrial partnership with the United Kingdom—one that enables greater collaboration between British defence technology companies and Ukrainian partners and supports faster technology transfer, joint production and defence exports where appropriate—including the status of the ongoing negotiations for the UK to join the drone deal?
Ukraine continues to defend not only its own sovereignty but the security of Europe. It also demonstrates remarkable ingenuity, resourcefulness and technological innovation under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. We should continue standing with Ukraine. We should continue learning from Ukraine, and we should build with Ukraine.
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on initiating this debate. I apologise for starting with something that he might feel he left out, because I am inviting this House to remember 1968. Quite a number of us will remember it, but I am not sure how many noble Lords will remember where they were on 21 August 1968 and how they felt that day. I do remember. I lived in a small Bavarian village, about 80 miles from the Czech border. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries started to invade Czechoslovakia, and the tanks started rolling. We did not know if the tanks would stop at the border, but we listened to the World Service as the one reliable source of information. We did not need to be persuaded that defence was important or that there were bad actors out there, or that at some stage people would have to give their lives to defend our values and what we stood for.
Today we are discussing the future capability of the Armed Forces against a slightly different backdrop. We should remember that the Armed Forces do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of a whole society and need its support, because true resilience requires a complete approach from every sector. It also means that if you spend more money on defence, then you forgo spending on other things. Military capability requires an underpinning of soldiers and the right equipment, and I am sorry to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord West, because I am not asking for more ships, even though I am an Honorary Captain in the Royal Navy. However, maritime resilience is also important.
I am glad that, if the papers are to be believed, we are starting a national resilience campaign and that later this year the Government will hold the largest national home defence exercise since the Cold War. There will be new guidance for schools and colleges to teach children how to stay safe in emergencies. As an aside, after we knew that the tanks had stopped rolling at the Czech border, in those days, between finishing O-levels and getting the results, you did training on what to do in the case of nuclear attack or how to administer first aid, and general resilience training. That taught me that this does not require a single conversation. We have been promised a national conversation. It cannot be a one-off exercise because the public conversation has to be ongoing.
I also urge that we stop assessing risk, based what we think we can afford. It has to start with what the real risk is. Unless we have defined our national values and can protect them, we cannot defend or protect our national interests. We need to ask where our food, energy and medicine come from. I am very taken by the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, of pulling all this together.
The threats are real, not imaginary, and they are here now. We said we were going to be war-ready by 2029, but we have not explained to the public in a way they can fully engage with why we need to be war-ready by 2029. I am therefore asking the Minister for a long-term strategic plan on how we will engage with the public on an ongoing basis. Because we are an island, that kind of threat sometimes seems remote. We seem to think that bad things happen only to other people and somehow it will pass us by. We do not have that guarantee. We need public support for the Armed Forces and to be prepared to forgo spending on some things which we value, but we need to value defence even more.
Lord Altrincham (Con)
I thank my noble friend Lord Harlech of the Coldstream Guards for securing this debate and I thank the Minister for hosting us with such courtesy, as he always does.
I start by noting that the strategic defence review presented our defence position very clearly last year, but at that time made almost no commitments to expenditure and, fatefully, made just a reference to an ambition for 3% of GDP as being a kind of soft target. The Government at the time accepted all the recommendations of the strategic defence review, as noble Lords will remember. Notwithstanding their acceptance, it turned out that expenditure and the position of the public finances were central to the problem, and became central, alas, to the last Prime Minister’s fate.
We might ask how that came to be. Possibly rather unhelpfully for the Government, the OBR put out its financial sustainability report in July, which explains quite clearly that the public finances are on an unsustainable trajectory. That is because, as we know, and as we often talk about in this House, we are deficit financing the Government at the moment. The gap between the amount we raise in taxation and what we spend is very wide, and it is risky for the Government to be funding on that basis. We will be raising £150 billion of new money for the Government in debt this year, which is much more than we spend on defence, just in the current deficit. We are at quite a risky, delicate moment.
The need for defence arises at just the moment when the OBR points out that we are in no position to meet economic—or any other—shocks to public finances. It is a risky moment, not only because the Government are funding all the time in the government debt markets but because of inflation, the foreign exchange and growth. All of these factors lie well beyond this debate, but they place fundamental risk on us, just as the defence challenge does. It is very hard to know how we are going to fund defence in the next few years.
The Government have promised to consolidate the public finances by 2031 or so. That probably marks the limit of where deficit financing is going and the limit for the next Administration of what they can do. They cannot go much further than this promise of debt consolidation. By the way, that will still mean that we are deficit financing in the 2030s but just to a more modest level—but let us assume it is the limit.
Against that backdrop, the OBR took a look at what would happen in the coming years. Its approach was to ask why we do not just keep all the variables and expectations of public expenditure where they are and not change anything. This is not realistic, if you think about it. It accepts all the promises made on public expenditure as they are and expects all the spending on net zero, for example, to be unchanged.
The one variable that the OBR changes—which shows that the OBR itself is part of the national conversation about which the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, spoke—is that it talks about the need for defence. It says that defence spending is likely to pass 3.5% of GDP in the early 2030s and may go to 5%. At 5%, defence spending in the UK would be similar to where it is in Germany today, all of which is to say that it is completely unsustainable and completely unknown, and a degree of change will have to come. The clue for that change is in this national conversation.
I end by saying that this is a moment of opportunity for the Government, where we could restart a conversation on public finances and defence at the same time.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, I join everybody in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for introducing this debate and for the non-political way in which he did so. Across the whole debate and from all sides, we have recognised that the threat is real and our preparedness is inadequate—that is the message we are getting across.
In the fourth century AD, Vegetius said,
“si vis pacem, para bellum”—
if you want peace, prepare for war. That is precisely the point of deterrence. Our Armed Forces, as everybody has said, are highly professional and a credit to our nation. However, the peace dividend has left us seriously depleted in numbers and capability. As a number of Members have noted, the Government have talked about starting a national conversation, as did the strategic defence review—but where is it and what is it? Denmark has established a Ministry of Resilience and Preparedness and, as the noble Lord opposite said, other countries have engaged in preparing something like this. We have talked about it but we are not doing it, so can the Minister give us an indication of exactly when this will happen?
Preparing the public requires engagement. Recent YouGov polling showed that three-quarters of Britons consider it “important” to strengthen both the UK’s hard and soft power, including approximately four in 10 who rate it “very important”. However, only a minority favour tax increases or spending cuts to fund greater spending on the British Armed Forces. That is what we need to engage in. I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his excellent speech—we shall certainly miss him—and for raising the issue of soft power, which is absolutely relevant.
The International Relations and Defence Committee—of which I am a member alongside the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, and which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson—had an evidence session yesterday, in which I raised the issue of the cuts not just to soft power but to our diplomatic presence, in the wake of our aid cuts. I suggested that removing our diplomatic presence from across the world is not the way to protect our interests, which is what we are actually doing. Sir Matthew Rycroft, a former British ambassador and a former Permanent Secretary, was one of our witnesses. He said that
“diplomacy is more cost-effective than development, and development is more cost-effective than defence. One of the reasons why the aid cuts are so short-sighted is that they will end up costing us a lot more in the long run”.
Other witnesses echoed that and said that we have emerging powers around the world with which we need to engage. This is one way to reduce our defence risk and to engage support.
A helpful briefing from the Library has indicated the problem we have with strengthening our Armed Forces. That was an important point that the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, raised. The Baltic and Scandinavian countries have got the balance right in a way that we have not: they have strengthened their reserves. A point has been made to me, although I am not a technical expert, that suggests, ironically, that the great sophistication of modern defence technology makes it much easier to operate—there is a black hole in there that you may not understand, but you can press the right buttons and you get results. That suggests that we can train many more people as reservists in ways that would be effective, which seems to be a real priority, as well as building civilian capacity for other crises. Russia will target our infrastructure—it is probably already doing so—and we need to have people across the country who know how to respond to that. That is a very important point that we need to address.
If you take the hardcore of the Budget, a huge chunk of it is going on updating our nuclear capacity—as the noble Baroness pointed out—on the AUKUS submarine project and on the Global Combat Air Programme. All those things are important, but they are very expensive, and that is squeezing out money that could go to other sectors. We need more warships, drone capacity, ammunition, missiles and ballistic missile defence. The question is to what extent we can deliver all those things. Yesterday, I asked: if we are going to phase out our warships, battleships and destroyers, what is our line of defence against ballistic missiles? That is the only defence we have at the moment, and “We’ll think of something” is not a good enough response—we need to know. The British public assume that we have such a defence, but the reality is that we will not if we do not replace the destroyers or find some other way of doing it.
I want to be positive. I know that the Minister will say what we are doing, and I will not dispute it: “We are building frigates, drone support ships and amphibious vessels”. All of that is good and essential. I do not want to suggest to the Government that we do not recognise that they are doing things, but, nevertheless, we need to deliver a lot of things very quickly. We cannot assume that we will not come under direct attack, as Russia probably regards the UK as its number one enemy and will exploit any perceived vulnerability. A debate such as this is a clear advert that we are vulnerable.
Everybody is saying that we could face an attack within three years. Is anything we are doing now equipping us to be able to counter such an attack? At the moment, I think the House feels fairly insecure that that is the case. The outcome of the Ukraine war is crucial, but how that will affect the UK needs to be assessed and countered. What key developments of home defence do we need to develop, as well as supporting NATO? As long as Ukraine is holding out, it is holding Russia back from other adventures that it would like to have.
A few weeks ago, I took part in an IPU visit to Lithuania. We were left in no doubt about the determination of the people of Lithuania, and of all the Baltic and Scandinavian states, to defend their freedom. They took us to the former KGB prison in Vilnius to show us the horrors they suffered under 50 years of Soviet occupation and their resolve never to suffer again. They have a defence budget of 5.5%. They know what the threat is and they are determined to maintain their freedom—but they know they need our support too.
We went to the Belarusian border and saw the fence erected not for defence but to counter Belarus’s actions. It is taking immigrants, whom it is recruiting from central Asia and Africa, to the border and forcing them across in order to disrupt society in democratic states. It is a ploy. It is advertising cheap flights to come to Russia or Belarus from wherever you are and have a good life. That good life consists of being put at gunpoint in a truck and forced over the border into the EU, where the immigrants will be deported. That is a pretty shocking situation and is, in effect, a state of war.
Knowing what we do of Russian activity around our shores and its hybrid and other interventions in our territory, it is clear that our deterrent and effective strength need to be increased. The question to the Government is: how fast can we move? How do we engage the public in a way that enables us to take decisions and take them with us? Will the Government consider defence bonds—this idea came from the Liberal Democrats, but has now gone wider—as one way of raising short-term funding? I completely accept that bonds are still borrowing, but if they are ring-fenced and targeted, it might be done in a way that the markets find acceptable and release money that might not otherwise come into the public sector. That seems a legitimate matter for consideration.
The Government will change on Monday. The new Prime Minister will have a whole raft of stuff on his doorstep. I was also at the meeting with Middle Eastern ambassadors—I think the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, was there too—who expressed their concern that our new Prime Minister seemed to be highly focused on domestic issues and not terribly engaged in international issues. The honest truth is that we do not know, but they were concerned that this was an indication of an inward-turning UK, reinforced by our diplomatic retreat, soft power cuts and Brexit. All those things are giving the impression that the UK is not serious about our international relations.
I am not suggesting that the Minister, or the other Ministers who engage in this, are not serious, but when you look at what we are doing, it does not stack up as a credible strategy for a country of our standing. We have had respect in the world and we have influence, but we are not using or playing to them very well and there is a lot more we could do. NATO is the pivot of our alliance, but we need to explain to people not only that we are here to respond to an attack on NATO but that we have the capacity to defend ourselves, with or without NATO, from the attacks that we are told we will face in two or three years’ time. In his response, the Minister needs to give us an indication of how the Government will address this, take the public with them and ensure that we get where we need to be as fast as necessary.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, this has been an excellent and fascinating debate, with hugely perceptive contributions. I thank my noble friend Lord Harlech not only for securing the debate but for his insightful and powerful contribution, made in a characteristically elegant and gracious manner—which I do not promise to emulate.
The Government’s defence policy can be summed up in four words: too little, too late. It is too little money and too little equipment, all delivered too late. I make that claim because the plans the Government have laid out are for the future; they do not meet the threats we face right now. The NATO Secretary-General has warned that we may face war with Russia within the next five years. If that happens, we need to be ready to fight a major war by 2030, not after 2030. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that I know the advertisement to which she refers from BAE Systems above the escalator in the Tube station, but, unlike her, my view is: what an advert for British skills, and what a formidable capability this terrific British company is capable of delivering. May I see it translated into our defence capability before too long.
On the Secretary-General’s memo, the Government seem to have missed that point. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, reminded me—poignantly, because I remember where I was in August 1968—that the invasion of Czechoslovakia caused shock. As she rightly pointed out, you cannot assess risk on the basis of what you can afford. Risk is there, threat is there and the duty of the country is to have the wherewithal to counter it.
Where are we? The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, confirmed in a Written Answer that there will be no new deliveries of F-35s until the early 2030s. The integrated air, space and missile defence operations centre, announced in the defence investment plan as the future ballistic missile defence system, will not be operational until the early 2020s. The Type 91 uncrewed missile platform announced in the defence investment plan has no planned in-service date, and the only timeframe the Government can offer is “from the early 2030s”.
There is a pattern emerging. Virtually everything in the defence investment plan will not materialise until well into the next decade. The vital new equipment required by our Armed Forces right now will not be ready in time, and the Government simply do not get the urgency and the immediacy with which we need to rearm.
Last week, in front of the House of Commons Defence Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who obviously is one of the Government’s own, said:
“Quite simply, we are running out of years. The reality is that the challenge is now bigger, more serious and earlier than we had anticipated, yet the defence investment plan does not come up to it”.
His concerns were emphatically endorsed by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and reflected upon gently and philosophically by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark, to whom I also extend my best wishes for a happy and fulfilling retirement. I extend my thanks to him for his reassuring presence on those Benches, to which I often direct a glance at moments of tension.
The defence investment plan was supposed to do two things: prepare our Armed Forces for major combat operations within the next five years, and end the uncertainty and unease dogging our defence industry over the last two years. The noble Baroness, Lady Carberry, eloquently described the challenge. However, instead of allaying all those fears, the defence investment plan, unbelievably, made things worse. We have been left with less clarity as to the Government’s plans for defence than we had previously.
Take the Royal Navy, for example. The DIP confirmed that the Government will scrap the Type 83—the replacement for the Type 45 destroyers—and scrap the new light class of frigate, the Type 32. Yesterday, my noble friend Lord Minto mentioned the common combat vessel. This is the proposed replacement for both the Type 83 and the Type 32. The Type 83 was in the concept phase of its development. It was supposed to be the centre of the Future Air Dominance System, which had its outline case approved but has now been scrapped without a successor. We know absolutely nothing about these common combat vessels—how much they will displace, what armaments they will have, how many sailors will be required to crew them. We have no detail. It is a phantom concept, a ghost ship.
What was the MoD doing in the past year while it was preparing the defence investment plan? If it was planning to replace the Type 83 and Type 32 with the CCVs, one would have thought that it would have done more preliminary work so that when it published the DIP, it could tell us what a common combat vessel would look like. The suspicion is that the MoD did not decide to scrap the Type 83 until very recently. In September, in response to a Written Question from my honourable friend Ben Obese-Jecty, the Minister, Luke Pollard, said:
“The Type 83 is planned to enter service from the mid-2030s and is assumed to have a 25-year service life”.
So just last September, the MoD was committed to the Type 83s, but now it has changed its mind. It is frightening.
Let me express a caveat. This concept of a hybrid Navy deserves a word of caution. I am increasingly concerned that the lessons from Ukraine are being overlearned. We seem to be moving in a direction that assumes that drones and automation are the answer to every question of future capability. However, Ukraine is not the same as the north Atlantic. Providing a carrier strike, escorting supply ships, fighting piracy and defending a naval taskforce from air attack has no parallel with the Ukraine conflict. What of hard defence diplomacy, which the Government have said they are championing and to which my noble friend Lord Ahmad astutely referred?
An uncrewed missile barge does not have quite the same clout as a large, highly capable destroyer. I completely understand the benefits of uncrewed vessels and aircraft. They have their place and we must learn from their use in Ukraine. However, they should be additional rather than an alternative capability. They should complement destroyers and fighters, not replace them. We will need conventional warships for years to come. Yet, under these plans, Britain will have no destroyers at all by 2040.
I hope that the Minister will understand that my unrelenting and unapologetic focus is on the threat that we face now and the urgent response that is needed to address it. I am trying to impress upon the Government, as far as I possibly can, that the mid 2030s is, quite simply, too late. We know the threat. Sadly, we can predict the conflicts. We need more F35s, more modern Typhoons, more helicopters, more drones, more warships, more missiles, more tanks, more armoured vehicles and more air defence—and we need them as soon as possible.
The noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, delivering the Lord Speaker’s Lecture last night, to which many of us were privileged to listen, quoted Warren Buffett:
“Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does”.
This was a wise man quoting a wise man. Let me conclude by quoting a third wise man, Shakespeare:
“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends”.
That is my message to the Minister. I look forward to his response.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Coaker) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to respond to this debate. I thank everyone for taking part and I will try to respond to many of their points. I start by declaring an interest: my son-in-law is currently mobilised as a reserve, so I just make your Lordships aware of that.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on introducing this debate, on the way he did it and on his own service. We all recognise the importance of that. He made the point that the Armed Forces, the defence of our country and our work with allies and friends is not a party-political matter, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, demonstrate. It is about how we challenge each other to deliver the best defence that the country needs. That is an extremely important point for all of us, and I am very grateful that it is the attitude across the Chamber.
I will answer some of the specific points from the noble Lords, Lord Harlech and Lord Bruce, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, then move to some other matters. It is important to say at the start that, although much of this debate has been about the future capabilities laid out in the defence investment plan—we can debate and discuss whether it has all the right measures in it to develop our future capabilities and the spending that we will need for them—the concern expressed by many in this debate is about the capabilities that we have now and how we will develop them. That is an interesting debate. I am going to commission the Ministry of Defence to produce a paper that demonstrates what we are doing now and what we intend to do over the next two or three years, and I will put a copy of that in the Library. That will help, because it is important for us to have concrete examples of the sorts of things that are being done now and the sorts of capabilities that the MoD and the Government are saying we will have in the next year, the next two years and so on—not only that but some of the changes that we need to make and things we need to do. That shows that this debate is making a positive contribution to the sorts of things that we are seeking.
I will point to many of the things that are happening, for those who watch and listen to our debates. A number of people have asked what we are doing about Russia at the moment. We have an aircraft carrier in the north Atlantic with F35s all over it and other things around it, deterring the Russians with our NATO friends and allies. What are we doing in the Middle East? RFA “Lyme Bay” is there with a Type 45 destroyer, preparing itself for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, I hope. A noble Lord mentioned the Baltic states, and we currently have troops in Estonia. Others mentioned the nuclear deterrent. It is quite rightly being modernised at the present time, which is costing billions of pounds, but is a deterrent not only in Europe but across the world and it contributes to peace. All those things are going on at the current time.
We have Typhoons on quick-reaction alert, in case of incursions or threats to our airspace. It is quite right to challenge what needs to be done now and what should happen in the future. All I say in defence—this will be the only time that I am defensive about this—is that we ought to say to our adversaries alongside this, “We have capabilities that we are using at the present time to deter and to defend our people”. I know that that is accepted, and that there is a belief that we need to do more, but that is the challenge for the Government now and in the future. I hope that the paper that I will commission, a copy of which I will put in the Library, will help.
I come specifically to two or three of the questions posed by the noble Lord, Lord Harlech. He asked about the £4.7 billion gap, as I think he described it. The Treasury clearly confirmed to me, in preparing for this debate, that a further £4.7 billion will be confirmed in the 2026 Budget in a fair and balanced way. That is the information that I have had from the Treasury.
On the question of the ambition for the reserves, the noble Lord knows what is in the Armed Forces Bill currently going through your Lordships’ House. Investment is going into the infrastructure, training and equipment needed to support the reserves, and we recognise the importance of that.
I have answered the point about what we are going to do about current priorities. I think the paper will be of interest not only to the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, but to all of us more generally, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, as the Front-Bench spokespeople for their respective parties. As the shadow Defence Minister for His Majesty’s Opposition, the noble Baroness I think will find it very helpful.
I fundamentally agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, that you prevent war by preparing for it. I do not like thinking that, but it is a crucial point. A national conversation is important, as a number of noble Lords have said, and soft power is crucial. I wrote the defence diplomacy strategy in the Defence Investment Plan, along with my department, and I shared it with the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, just before publication. It talks about the importance of soft power and developing those relationships with other countries, as well as hard power, of course. The idea that it is a choice—that you have one or the other—is nonsense. You have to have both alongside each other.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
I appreciate that, and the Minister and other Ministers frequently say that, but the reality is that the British Council is nearly bankrupt, the BBC is struggling and our diplomatic forces are being reduced. On that particular point, can he feed back to the Government that, if we do not have diplomats on the ground, we are not able to influence the world?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
I will feed that back to the department. All I am saying is that there is now a much more co-ordinated, effective diplomatic strategy that links the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence together to deliver the objectives that the noble Lord wants.
The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, made the point about immediate threats. I hope that putting a paper together and putting in the Library will answer the particular questions she asked about what we are doing about those immediate threats, as well as future threats. I say to her that there are difficult decisions to be made. She made difficult decisions when she was in government. This Government made the really difficult decision to replace the Type 83 and Type 32 with the common combat vessel. That will help develop the hybrid Navy that we will need, rather than continuing with vessels that we were advised by the military advisers will not meet the threat in 10 or 15 years’ time. To have a warship that can deliver drone capability, above the surface, on the surface and below, increases the mass available to tackle the threats we face. That is the hybrid Navy concept.
We had the debate and we said, “We’re going to get criticised, you know? They’re going to say, ‘There you go, you’re cutting ships. You’ve taken away this capability and that capability’”. All I would say is that, if I have to take some criticism by doing that with others, because we believe that opens up the opportunity to create the Navy we need, I am willing to take that criticism.
However, I fundamentally agree with the point the noble Baroness made that drones are not the only answer. Of course you need warships, fighter planes and land vehicles—all those things are fundamental—but, alongside that, you need the increased capacity of drones.
On being optimistic, I know that a number of noble Lords were at the retirement of Pedro Serrano, the brilliant EU ambassador to the UK, who said:
“The United Kingdom is one of the most important military powers in Europe with a very important defence industry. If we’re going to be successful, we will be successful together”.
I spotted that when I read the Financial Times, as I normally do in the morning, and I thought, “I’m going to use that”. I am not being sarcastic. In the article, he points to the fact that the UK has joined the €60 billion EU defence loan scheme for Ukraine. The noble Lord, Lord Mott, asked me what the Government were doing to open up opportunities with respect to Ukraine. There is one example that I hope specifically answers the question the noble Lord raised.
I thank my noble friend Lady Carberry for her points about the importance of the defence industry, Rolls-Royce and SMEs. She is absolutely right.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, made a crucial point about RDEL and CEDL. He has made this point to me before. We made this point in the defence investment plan. I have the figures here. In 2026-27, RDEL was increased by £2.1 billion and CEDL was increased by £0.7 billion, so there was a significant uplift of RDEL rather than CEDL. Next year, it will be £1.6 billion compared to £1.2 billion. We absolutely accept the point about RDEL and CEDL, the necessity to focus not just on capital projects and the importance of resource allocation.
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Swire, about partnering more with private capital to try to do that—the defence bond argument—alternative financial mechanisms to support what we do are crucial.
I wish the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark well for the future. In his valedictory speech, he reminded us of the importance of international humanitarian law. That is important to our country and our democracy. We understand the need to use force sometimes, but we question ourselves about whether we have the legal basis to do so, and I think we should commend ourselves for trying to act, sometimes with force, in a legal way. I wish him well for the future. We all struggle with moral dilemmas, so I look forward to him struggling with that and trying to help others with respect to that when he preaches.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who spoke about the importance of soft and hard power. He and I have talked long and hard about that. Soft power is crucial, but it is not, as I said before, a choice, as he agrees, between soft and hard power. I totally agree with him about the speed of procurement and trying to deliver things much more quickly. I hope the paper that I am going to ask to be put in the Library will help answer some of the points on that. He asked about the defence readiness Bill. It will be in this Parliament, and it is being worked on as we speak.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, about complementary groups under NATO. NATO is the crucial umbrella, but underneath that you can have other organisations, such as JEF or whatever, as long as it complements NATO—I think that is particularly important. The role of the US remains crucial. That is the only point I would say. We have to retain the strategic alliance with the US.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
The JEF point is interesting. Does the Minister agree that, if neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden can join, then so could Ukraine?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
That is a matter for discussion between all of us. The relationship with Ukraine remains crucial. How that is taken forward will have to be discussed.
I thank my noble friend Lady Antrobus. We are committed to the nuclear deterrent. I sometimes think we should talk more about it. When people ask what is the UK’s commitment to Europe, it is not a bad start to say that the UK has been committed to the nuclear deterrent for the defence of Europe for decades. It is a proud thing for us to state. I know the point she made about the ladder of escalation and the involvement of tactical nuclear weapons in future through the F35A.
I think the spending review of 2027 will answer some of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, made about spending. She will recognise the point about defence and security being the number one priority within that.
I agree with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, about thinking imaginatively as well as responding in a tough way to Russia and about some of the other things that he mentioned in dealing with that.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, that the Prime Minister-in-waiting clearly means what he says about defending our nation. I thank the noble Lord for his kind words about me.
The noble Lord, Lord Empey, mentioned the national conversation, which is fundamental and crucial to us, and the priorities for the public. Particularly important, as he mentioned, are the grey zone, underwater cables and cyber attacks. Those sorts of things are crucial.
The noble Lord, Lord Risby, talked about space. I take the point about Skynet 5 being extended rather than a new Skynet 6, but when we look in the Defence Investment Plan, as I know he will have done, it is quite interesting. I was looking at it while he was speaking, and on pages 48 and 49 there are some quite interesting investments into space. I understand the importance of space technology and satellites if we are to fight the wars of the future, and the noble Lord is absolutely right to remind us of the importance of all that.
I thank my noble friend Lord Forbes for his points about the whole-of-society approach. By raising the age of reserves to 65, we may be able to recruit more of the engineers, doctors, cyber specialists and so on, as he was talking about.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that we are accelerating our war readiness plans. The spending debate will continue, but it is going up; the debate is just about how fast it goes up and how much it should be.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Magan, for reminding us of the service of his own family, because that reminds us of the service of so many families and family members across this country. Again, we will come to a debate and discussion on the spending point, particularly around the 2027 spending review.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, made a point about soft power—that is a terrible name for it in many ways, but it is crucial to delivery. I will just make this point about soft power and defence diplomacy: everywhere I go across the world, irrespective of the view of the UK, countries are queuing up for the UK to stand with them. They do not necessarily want a warship, a tank or a fighter jet. They want the status, legitimacy and confidence of what a British military uniform gives to them when they make difficult decisions to deal with the challenges they face in their countries or regions, and I am proud of that. It has been hard earned by our service men and women. I think it is something we do not appreciate enough and should speak much more of, because they make a huge difference in huge numbers of countries across the world.
I have mentioned the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mott, about the article that I may wish to look at. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, about the importance of the national conversation; the plan is developing. The noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, also made the point about the importance of a national conversation.
Let me say a few concluding remarks. I know that these debates are watched and read. I want to say clearly to Russia, to China or to anybody else who believes that this country is weak, and that we will not stand up for democracy, freedom and the values we cherish, that we will and we do. Do not misunderstand that in a democracy, people such as the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, can challenge me and think I am wrong. They can think that the Government are wrong and challenge them to do more. That is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength, and it is how a democracy works. That is what we have struggled and fought for through many decades and centuries. So if anybody is watching this, let them not mistake an honest, open, frank exchange of views as anything other than all of us being proud of what our country stands for, and what we will continue to stand for.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I am truly grateful to all noble Lords, all noble and gallant Lords, and the right reverend Prelate for taking part—I wish him godspeed in his future endeavours. I am extremely grateful to the Minister for answering my questions and those of others, and for his powerful, impassioned reply at the end, which we all fully support. I add my voice to those. Whatever happens in terms of a reshuffle, we hope very much that the Minister stays in post.
This has been a fascinating strength/weakness, opportunity/threat analysis, because it has been cross-party, from all sides of the House. Again, I am truly grateful to everyone who signed up. It has also been a cross-interest debate: we have had the defence voices, but we have also heard diplomatic, economic and political voices too, which has added to its richness. I truly want the media to play its part in stimulating the national conversation; I just wish that it would give more column inches to this debate and others like it, rather than the Punch and Judy stuff that happens in the other place.
It is rare to have such unanimity of opinion but, as the Minister has said, we have heard that today. The direction of travel is right, but we must go further and faster. To govern is to choose. Yes, 3.5% or 5% is more, but it is a damn sight cheaper than the alternative of fighting a war with a peer adversary.
I will finish, as I know there is additional business to come. The campaign slogan of the right honourable Member for Makerfield, the incoming Prime Minister, was “Vote Andy, Vote Hope”. Those of us who have had a military career—and there are some here who have had much longer military careers than me—know that you learn pretty early on that hope is not a planning tool. He must understand that the defence of the realm can, and must, be a Government’s top priority.