Lords Chamber

Thursday 16th July 2026

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Lord Timpson Portrait Lord Timpson, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Labour)
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The noble and learned Lord is right to bring this up, because these are the most complex individuals, often in our whole prison estate. And the level of self-harm amongst this cohort can self-harm amongst this cohort can be pretty terrifying. There are a significant number of IPP prisoners significant number of IPP prisoners in secure mental health hospitals, and that is the best. That is the the right place for them. But what we need to do is to ensure that we have them in the right prison.

That's what I mentioned before about HMP and HMP Warren Hill being therapeutically informed environments, but also the Phoenix wing that we are. We're starting next month in HMP Aylesbury is a specialist wing where we're trying things we've never tried before. People who are what we call. There are red ratings, they're the furthest away from release and these are often the most challenging IPP prisoners to get that progression support around them and to give them the hope, because what we need, what we need for them, is to believe that they can get out.

Because too many times they've seen people go to progression panels and they haven't got out. But we need to make sure

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hope. Yeah. Fourth Oral Question Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.

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of Kings Heath. I beg leave to ask a question. Standing in my name on the Order Paper. My Lords.

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My Lords. Pearson have fully apologised for their failure to return the Key for their failure to return the Key Stage two results on time and for the impact on schools, pupils and parents. The delay was unacceptable,
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Baroness Evans of Bowes Park Portrait Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Conservative)
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broaden it. Opportunity is the foundation of a free, prosperous society and economy. It's what society and economy. It's what allowed a child from any background to succeed in education a young person to secure their first job, and an individual to build an independent life through work. Yet independent life through work. Yet across education, employment and welfare, the government has appeared increasingly determined to appeared increasingly determined to substitute individual aspiration and institutional freedom with central direction and state intervention.

The result is not only a larger state, we just have to look at the eye watering levels of government spending. But it is a society in which the pathways to fulfilling an individual's potential are becoming increasingly constrained and, in too many cases, cut off entirely. At a time when Britain faces economic and technological change. That is the wrong direction to travel. My Lords, I begin with education. The central question for any education system should be simple are we giving the next generation the greatest possible opportunity to succeed? For much of the past two decades, the academies programme has helped answer that question positively.

By giving schools greater freedom over recruitment, curriculum delivery, governance and innovation. Academies have been an important driver of the significant improvements in standards and outcomes that have been achieved. Between 2009 and 2022, England rose from 21st to 11th in the Pisa league tables for maths from 25 to 13 for reading and from 11th to ninth for science. Yet rather than building on this success, the government in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act chose to curtail many of the freedoms that helped enable this progress.

The reforms introduced by the government to academies have represented a shift away from institutional autonomy and back towards central control. Schools now have less freedom to innovate, less flexibility to respond to local circumstances, and fewer opportunities to develop distinctive approaches to excellence. At the same time, concerns have been raised that proposed curriculum reforms may reduce academic rigour. At precisely the moment when the demands on young people are increasing. And this matters because today's pupils will graduate into a labour market unlike any we have previously known.

AI is transforming entire sectors of the economy, entry level roles that once provided a foothold into professional careers are rapidly changing and in some sectors, starting to disappear altogether. Young people will need stronger skills, high levels of knowledge and greater resilience than ever before. So if opportunities is our objective, then we should be strengthening the institutions that have delivered educational improvement, not restricting them. But it's not just academies. The government has weakened. It has deliberately undermined the independent sector.

Independent schools offer choice and the chance for social mobility through the standard of education they offer and the scholarships and partnerships they provide. And yet, because of the government's decision to impose VAT, an unprecedented tax on education, four times more students have left independent schools than expected, and a number of schools have had to close entirely, putting unnecessary strain on the state school system. My Lords, the closest thing we have to a silver bullet in public policy is education.

To give children the best chance to realise their potential. So we should be backing all institutions that broaden their horizons, raise standards and equip young people for the challenges of a rapidly changing world. We should not be undermining them. My Lords, the same concern around restricting opportunity applies to employment. Britain today faces significant labour market challenges. Global economic uncertainty, technological disruption, high energy costs, a high tax burden and changing patterns of work. All of these are affecting employers and employees alike.

Now, many of these forces are not within the government's control, but the the policy response most certainly is. And as the curtain is drawn on this Prime Minister and Chancellor's tenure, their signature policy, and possibly one of the most damaging, has been a £25 billion a year increase on the tax on jobs, despite warnings of the damage that would be caused, the government imposed a higher rate and lowered the threshold at which National Insurance is levied. Instead of focusing on creating the conditions for job creation, investment, economic dynamism and growth.

Government action has led to employers facing rising costs and growing regulatory burdens through the Employment Rights Act that increased both the cost and risk of taking on staff, and the consequences are being felt most acutely by those trying to enter the labour market. For the first time in the hospitality sector alone, one of the biggest employers of young people, the 2024 budget amounted to £3.4 billion of annual tax increases, resulting in 100,000 job losses, falling most on those seeking entry level and part time work.

My Lords, the figures show that more than 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 are now not in education, employment or training. The first time that figure has exceeded 1 million since 2013. Until the pandemic figures fell to below 10% in 2021, from nearly 17% in 2010. Youth unemployment has increased to 16.2%, equivalent to around 735,000 young people actively seeking work but unable to find it. And my Lords, we know these are not merely statistics,

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they represent opportunities lost, young people Unable to gain their first

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Unable to gain their first experience of work skills left undeveloped, confidence undermined undeveloped, confidence undermined and ambitions postponed. Indeed, the recent Milburn Review warned of a growing risk of a lost generation a growing risk of a lost generation because when opportunity disappears at the beginning of a career, the effect can last for. My Lords, of effect can last for. My Lords, of course, there is a very important role for programmes that support young people into work, particularly if they find they do not have the skills needed to do the jobs in their area.

And indeed the last government had such schemes. But we are now in the slightly surreal situation of the government offering subsidies of £3,000 to employers to fund jobs for young people in order to deal with the damaging consequences of the employment taxes it has increased and the regulatory and wage costs it has imposed. My Lords, this surely cannot be the answer to increasing opportunity across the jobs market. And my Lord, that, my Lords, that brings me finally to welfare. A compassionate welfare system is essential.

It should provide support during periods of hardship, illness and transition, but it must at its heart be designed to help people move towards independence and participation in the labour market wherever possible. Increasingly, however, we appear to be moving towards a model that places greater emphasis on long term dependency than on economic mobility. Yet every day a thousand people are signed off on to benefits with no requirements to look for work. Welfare spending is set to hit £370 billion by the end of the Parliament.

My Lords, this is simply unfair. It's unfair to taxpayers, the people going out to work to pay for those who don't. And it's also unfair to the people who are written off and not supported to find a job. The Work and Pensions Secretary has said all his colleagues want to talk about is how to raise more tax to spend on welfare. This is not simply fiscally unsustainable, but it leads to the gradual erosion of the principle that work provides dignity, purpose and independence.

When young people say limited rewards from entering employment and growing financial incentives to remain outside the labour market, the long term effect is fewer opportunities for advancing and greater dependency on the state. I believe that's neither socially desirable nor economically sustainable. My Lords, the government's response to the challenges we face in education, employment and welfare has too often been the same. More intervention, more regulation, greater centralisation and increased cost. Yet evidence suggests that lasting opportunity is rarely created by government direction.

Opportunity is created when schools are trusted to excel. When business is confident enough to invest in hire, and when individuals are empowered to build independent lives through work. The challenge facing Britain today is not merely one of economic growth. It is a question of whether the next generation will enjoy greater opportunities than the last. On education, welfare and employment, the government should ask itself one question are its policies expanding opportunity or are they restricting it? Unfortunately, too often over the last two years, that answer has appeared to be the latter.

If we want to give young people the chance to succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we must reverse that trend. We must trust individuals more, trust institutions more, and trust business and enterprise more. We must place opportunity, not state control, at the centre of public policy. So I do hope the new Burnham government will learn the lessons of the past two years and look to change course to reduce the welfare bill and focus tirelessly on supporting those who can work into employment, to cut taxes on jobs and ensure businesses can grow their workforces, invest in their futures and thrive again, and to futures and thrive again, and to once again trust headteachers to deliver the best education they can for their pupils.

My Lords, I beg for their pupils. My Lords, I beg to move.
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Lord Rooker Portrait Lord Rooker (Labour)
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May the question is that this

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motion be agreed to. My Lords. My text for this simplistic opposition attack on the simplistic opposition attack on the government is simple. I'm going to point out the legacy of the noble Lady who's just spoken. She was in the Cabinet for six months. On the Cabinet for six months. On January the 20th, 25, the economic. The Economic Affairs Committee of The Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships' House produced a 42 letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

This followed a short inquiry to understand what was driving the massive change to incentivise benefits and inactivity under the Tories time permits. Just two paragraphs. Paragraph one spending on incapacity and disability benefits has risen by more than 40% in real terms since 2013. This is around 20% higher than the UK defence budget and equal to 22% of the total health budget. Spending on incapacity and disability benefits forecast to hit 100 billion, pushing the total welfare bill way over 370 billion.

The latest figures show that around 3.7 million people of working age receive health component of Universal Credit. That's 1.2 million more than in February 2020. And the Office of Budget Responsibility noted that before Covid pandemic, the rise had been uniform across age groups. There is a context. There have only been 1.5 million people registered unemployed. In paragraph seven of the letter. The. We said. The committee said while it is difficult to unravel the data to provide a clear picture of the level of economic inactivity, administrative data shows that spending on health related benefits has risen.

This has occurred in all parts of the economy and all age groups. The OBR noted, and I quote, the proportion of working age population in receipt of incapacity benefit reached a post-financial crisis high of 7% in 2020 324, and is forecast to reach a high of 7.9% in 2829. This reverses the steady declining caseload prevalence from the early 2000 to the mid 20 tens. The labour time. So it was a complete reverse of what had been happening under the Labour government.

And my final quote, because I want to keep it short, was an interesting piece by the Financial Times data expert John Burn-murdoch. What if the UK isn't actually the sick man of Europe? On the seventh, 8th of December 2024? And really, time permits, because I don't want to go straight to the time. Time permits. The final paragraph of his piece, and I quote it turns out the apparent rise in Britain's illness related inactivity is mostly not about deteriorating health, but about the incentives within the benefits system, the incentives within the benefits system that have been put there by the government, of which the noble Lady served in the Cabinet for six months.

And I finished the quote. Policies focussed on the latter stand the best chance of getting Britain's working. In other words, it's an absolute con. There was good progress under the Labour government until 2010, and after that it reversed. It became. We couldn't understand it on the. On the Economic Affairs Committee. We thought we got rid of the system where it was paid not to work. Everybody was gobsmacked around the table, and yet he'd been made possible to be better off not working under the Tory government, of which the noble Lady was a key member.
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Lord Mohammed of Tinsley Portrait Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (Liberal Democrat)
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My Lords, can I start by thanking Baroness Evans for thanking Baroness Evans for securing this? Really, it's this really important debate. And can I say, I was really you know, I looked at the list of speakers and I really thought, this is going to be a fantastic debate about our children's future. And what I don't want this debate to be is about how bad one side or the other was, because that will not help any young person. Look, I have always been passionate about young people throughout I am, I am, I will return to that.

I will always fight for young people. I did it before I arrived in your Lordship chamber and I do it now. When I spoke earlier this month about actually helping young people gain work experience in this in your Lordships House by coming and helping the system. And I've had a fantastic student from North London this week studying A-levels, Olivia, who's actually helped me draft my speech and done some of the research into it. There's going to be a lot of speakers after me.

I'm going to restrict my area of of my speech to two bits NEETs, those young people that are not in employment, education, training and primary schools, as we've seen from the recent Milburn Review, that young people are being devastated by the side effects of lack of government intervention. And as the House of Lords library research showed us recently that over a million, 1,012,000 young people are now not in aged 16 to 24, not in employment, education and training.

And as Baroness Evans reminded us, that Alan Milburn warned us about a rise in the lost generation. And the real issue now is about the system. Is it obsessed by ticking boxes, or are we just pushing our young people through to chase qualifications but not actually finding destinations for those? And by that I mean long term secure jobs. We are we are missing a proper participation system that actually guides our teenagers from the classroom into a career. And we also need to support our schools who are struggling.

And which brings me on to the issue around the government's target of recruiting 6500 new teachers, which completely, in my opinion, ignores primary school. The challenges of primary schools because there is a drop in primary school school trainees and it's now massive. And I'm worried that there's an issue here with the falling roles in primary schools that's putting pressure onto teacher recruitment, and that's dropping. Primary school pupils will now make its way through to secondary schools, and there's a challenge there.

And we can see that happening here in London in particular, where places like Lambeth and Hackney now are seeing pressures on schools. And we heard in the Public Services Committee, actually in open evidence from one school teacher who said he was going to his head teacher was going to his school was closing. So there's a real issue around how the government looks at the funding formula, because that is based on pupil numbers rather than the actual cost of running schools. And there's a huge issue.

It's not just a London based issue, it's rural communities and it's coastal communities. My Lords, we're not going to be able to build a strong economy if our school system is hollowed out. So the questions I have for the Minister is, we know from Milburn and House of Lords library research that over a million young people are Neet now, and we're going to get Milburn's recommendations. So can I ask the Minister, could they confirm that the government will fully fund all the recommendations from the review? And secondly, what is the government going to do about tackling the drop off in primary school teacher trainees? Because if, like I said, if you don't fix this problem now, it's going to follow through because both Milburn and the fantastic work that Esther Morris did to Baroness Morris has done around tackling the the issues around white working class boys not achieving their potential is the fact that these issues start at a very young age.

And first, the final thing I want, because I'm running out of time is could the Minister please comment about the funding formula, which is causing huge issues for our primary school children and schools?
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Lord Bishop of Newcastle Portrait The Lord Bishop of Newcastle (Bishops)
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My Lords, I'm grateful to the noble Baroness Baroness Evans of noble Baroness Baroness Evans of Bowes Park for bringing this debate today, and it's an honour to follow the noble Lord Lord Mohammed of the noble Lord Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. Thank you. I want to focus my comments on opportunity and social mobility in assessing the government's record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024. We cannot ignore the growing loss of humanities provision across higher education. Universities are autonomous institutions, but their decisions are shaped by the wider financial and policy environment.

A successful education system is measured not simply by qualifications or apprenticeships, but by the breadth of opportunity it offers. The Social Mobility Commission's State of the nation 2024 reminds us that opportunity remains profoundly shaped by geography, and courses disappear from universities across whole regions. It's often students without the financial means to relocate, who lose more opportunities first. Those from more affluent backgrounds can frequently move elsewhere or absorb the additional costs of studying further from home. Those from less advantaged backgrounds often cannot, and as a result, talent is constrained not by ability but by circumstance.

Social mobility depends not only on opening doors, but on ensuring those doors exist in every part of the country. If whole disciplines become concentrated in a handful of institutions or regions, educational choice increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right, and that risks reinforcing existing inequalities and undermining the government's stated ambition to widen opportunity and spread growth beyond our major cities. Unemployment these cuts affect lecturers, researchers, librarians and professional staff whose expertise underpins teaching, innovation and the wider economy.

Humanities graduates go on to become teachers, civil servants, diplomats, lawyers, journalists and leaders in our creative industries. They also develop the critical thinking, communication and analytical skills that employers consistently value across many sectors. Weakening that pipeline weakens the nation. These concerns have been brought home to me through a friend and colleague at the University of Exeter, who has described the uncertainty surrounding proposed reductions in humanities posts. And sadly, Exeter is not alone. Similar pressures are being felt across the sector, with consequences for staff, students and local communities alike.

If we are serious about improving social mobility, we cannot allow educational opportunity to become narrower or more geographically uneven. The country that values aspiration must ensure that students, wherever they live and whatever their background, continue to have full access to the breadth of higher education. Social mobility is not simply about helping individuals to succeed, it is about ensuring that every community can retain and develop its talent, and that no young person's ambitions are limited by where they happen to grow up.

I therefore ask the noble Baroness, the Minister, what steps will the government take to ensure that our universities remain financially sustainable, that students continue to enjoy a broad range of subjects, and that the vital contribution of the humanities to our economy, our public services and our national life is not lost.
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Baroness Shephard of Northwold Portrait Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Conservative)
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My Lord. >> Baroness Evans on her excellent. >> Introduction to this important debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the right Reverend, the Bishop of Newcastle. My Lords, I am going to concentrate on NEETs, that is, young people who leave school without entering sixth form or Fe employment or training. They are at the centre of Alan Milburn's interim report on young people at work, and that report reveals very bleak prospects for NEETs. There are nearly a million of these young people.

That is 1 in 8 of our school leavers and the numbers are rising. Nearly 60% of them are economically inactive, meaning detached from the labour labour market and not looking for work. The Milburn report describes this as a moral crisis with economic consequences. My Lords, the economic consequences are that the annual cost to the taxpayer for the present numbers is £125 billion. My Lords, all other EU countries apart from Romania are doing better than us on this issue. And alarmingly, over the past decade, the number of leaks citing health problems has written by risen by 70%, four out of ten citing mental health problems.

The position has developed under successive governments. I accept we now have the aftermath of Covid, war and a volatile world. We need economic growth. I can do no better than quote the noble Lord Lord Walker of Broxton. I think he is not in his place today in the welfare debate of 11th of June, we will only cure the problem of NEETs. By growing the economy. The government needs to be more business friendly. It is only business that creates wealth and jobs and pay tax.

He is of course, right. Employers are key players for NEETs. They provide entry and part time jobs in retail, in hospitality and hairdressing. How many people here started off in that way? I certainly did. They also support apprenticeships, but those functions on which for which we depend on business have been well made, well nigh impossible for many employers by the government's imposition on them of higher national insurance costs already mentioned, increases in the national minimum wage, higher business rates and heavier regulation.

And my Lords local government also in the past, was a key partner in helping to equip school leavers for the world of work. But sadly, the government is creating yet another barrier to the improvement of NEETs prospects by the chaos it is currently imposing on that sector. With uncertainty, delay and confusion surrounding its structure and its functions. And nor now can there be any sensible planning ahead, because we are told that the new Prime Minister is intent on creating a new regionalised structure on top of, or maybe instead of the structures that we had, we are not to know currently.

And that means that any kind of sensible planning which is currently taking place will be ended by the uncertainty that the government is imposing on the entire thing. But of course, time doesn't stop for the needs. They need urgent help to get on with their lives. The noble Baroness, the Minister at the last debate on the 11th of June, outlined a number of measures to be useful, and indeed many of them were. But actually, what the government needs to do is not introduce limited measures, but to tackle the fundamental issues I've described, and I look forward to hearing the noble Baroness Minister's response at the end of the debate.



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Amen. My Lords, the level of youth

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My Lords, the level of youth unemployment in England today is 16.2% because so many youngsters 16.2% because so many youngsters are leaving school at 18 without any employability skills, and that is a disgrace for the fifth richest is a disgrace for the fifth richest country in the world. It is also an indictment of the failure of the indictment of the failure of the education policy of conservative governments and Labour governments since the year 2000, because they have created a million people now, at 16 to 24, who are unemployed.

And that is an absolute shaming figure to do. The colleges that
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Lord Baker of Dorking Portrait Lord Baker of Dorking (Conservative)
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I've been trying to stimulate over the last 15 years, University the last 15 years, University technical colleges has an unemployment rate of lower than 3%. unemployment rate of lower than 3%. 20% of our students become apprentices, 50% go to universities apprentices, 50% go to universities to study Stem subjects, and the rest get jobs locally because they've worked with the local they've worked with the local employers for four years. That is what is needed, and I think that what is needed now is a revolution in education.

And I think that revolution is going to be introduced by our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, when he is appointed on Monday, because he has made many speeches on the importance of technical and practical and vocational education. Many, many speeches. No Prime Minister from such, no Prime Minister, from John John Major to Simon Starmer has made any speech on technical education, on practical education and learning by hand. No Prime Minister has done it. Search as you will for it.

You do not find them. And the point about this is that I think he will introduce significant changes. About two years ago, Andy Burnham made a statement in Manchester that he wanted to scrap the EBacc. That was the the academic curriculum and replace it by EBacc. And since then, my charity and my organisation of Utcs have been working with him to find a way through. And we have found a way through. And the answer is to look at the curriculum of all secondary schools, particularly church schools and bog standard comprehensives, and make sure that you can insert into that good technical education, and you can only do it by inserting a sleeve of education, a sleeve of education from 14 to 18.

And that is what Andy Burnham asked us to provide him with for the last two years. And a school in Manchester will open next September. Well open with a sleeve and school is going to open this September in Barrow in Furness, which is the headquarters of the British Aerospace, and they cannot recruit from the schools in Cumbria, students that are talented students that are, are committed. And so what will happen in that particular school is that 120 students are going to join in September, 90 have already selected the technical sleeve and 30 have protected the academic sleeve.

Now, I think that that sort of pattern the Prime Minister is going to try to to to repeat some substantially over the country, and that is something we should welcome. That is the only way we will get economic growth. It's the only way that we'll be able to reduce youth unemployment significantly. And so I think we're going to face a revolution, which is I very much welcome. The the position in our country. At times you need to make great changes.

I was lucky in the 1980s when great changes were necessary. I think Andy Burnham is going to be lucky because there are now great changes that have to be made, and it just does. I'm not just talking about young men. We know in our colleges we have many young women, particularly from the ethnic minorities, who desperately want to study engineering and computing and master that. And so I'm very optimistic. And I say, before I sit down, just one warming word to the Minister who's going to reply, could I say to her that I consider she is the only Minister in the government, including the Commons, who really understands education deeply.

She is she's really deep into it, and if there was any justice, she should be the new Secretary of State. But I don't think that the. The new Prime Minister will appoint Secretary of State from this House, but I hope we don't lose her because she likes you. She sees she went to one only last week, one of the most difficult ones to reach up in the northwest of England next to Sellafield, and she likes them, and so I. I hope very much she keeps her job because she does like Utcs.
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Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway Portrait Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Labour)
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My Lords, I thank the noble Lady, Baroness Evans for introducing this Baroness Evans for introducing this debate and it's a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who in my experience always has important and interesting things to say about vocational training and also, it seems, about ministerial appointments. But I'm very proud that this government's mission is to reindustrialise Britain to make work pay and to lift living standards. And there has been real progress. The UK is now the fastest growing economy in the G7, better job security and higher wages through stronger employment rights.

Incentivises workers and reduces turnover costs for business. NHS waiting lists are falling, delivering a healthier workforce and that benefits business too. And the Resolution Foundation reports that this year the lowest income half of families in Britain will see a significant improvement in their standard of living. And I have to say, when we talk about social mobility, let's remember that the single greatest contribution to social mobility in this country has been when this government scrapped the two child benefit limits and lifted half a million children out of poverty, that's the kind of schooling I'm interested in, because that will transform not only their lives, but the lives of their families and their communities too.

Now, of course, to generate fair growth, we must tackle Britain's record of low investment and poor productivity, government action to accelerate clean energy production shows what can be achieved. The CBI reports that the net zero sector now supports over a million jobs, and over 23,000 firms, whose productivity is 48% above the national average. We need to see that success across sectors to fund decent welfare and education and deliver the good, skilled jobs that the British people demand.

That brings me to a new report by the University College London for the Etuc, which was published just last month. For two decades, the debate about economic competitiveness has been framed around the diagnosis that labour costs are too high, which in turn requires pay restraint and deregulation. This new report draws on a 25 year firm level analysis of Europe's 300 largest publicly listed corporations operations, and provides the evidence that that diagnosis is wrong. In fact, what's holding back growth is not the cost of labour, but the misdirection of capital.

Profits have been increasingly diverted away from productive investment and into shareholder payouts, debt funded distributions and financial reserves. The report recommends making government business support conditional not only on decent labour standards, but on meeting reinvestment requirements. It also highlights the importance of corporate governance reform, and that is vital to address the British sickness of short termism, which puts shareholder returns above the long term interests of the company. Does my noble friend the Minister, agree with the diagnosis that Britain needs more value creation, more productive investment? And does she agree that we need more government action, including on procurement power and corporate governance rules, to drive it? Let me also most warmly congratulate my noble friend for a completely brilliant speech in which she said all that needed to
12:28
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Portrait Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Conservative)
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be said. I think the Bishop will understand. I think many of us will understand. I think many of us will repeat the same message, but we do that in church and we just learn the message in the end. So I hope the message in the end. So I hope I'll be forgiven for doing so. Education, employment and welfare Education, employment and welfare can't be judged in isolation. Together, they determine whether people can build secure and independent lives. Now, what much of what the government wants to happen is commendable, but too much of what has actually happened is deplorable.

Mission isn't the point. And the noble Lady who's who just spoken. I've always had a great regard for. But lifting the two child limit isn't the point. This government is so good at doing easy things. They don't seem to have any stomach or courage to introduce unpopular measures, but most of us know that to achieve success, you have to do difficult things. I had to shut hospitals. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, had to shut mines. If you want to have progress, you have to do extremely tough things.

And this government too often to the gallery, I'm afraid, and not prepared to have the courage to tackle what has to happen. I want to say a bit about teachers and lecturers who provide such vital service and again, commitment that 4000 of the 600 of the promised 6500 additional teachers have been delivered. But the real problem is retention. How can we make teaching a more worthwhile activity? And I've just returned from the University of Hull, where I received an honorary degree.

I'm delighted to say mine was a long service award for 17 years as Chancellor, I was being given the award alongside the most distinguished noble, Lord Norton, who has done decades of proper service at the University. But the ceremony was a teacher graduation and I was so impressed by the dedication, the professionalism, the commitment, but above all by the support the university can offer those teachers in the region. At the moment. They get burnout when they get depressed, demoralised when they're.

They have compassion fatigue. They can provide mentors, networks, further training. I just commend it as an example. Now, much has been made of this appalling figure of 1 million young people not being in education, employment or training. Now, those who don't study history are destined to repeat it. And for many of us, we came into public life at the time of the race riots, terrible unrest, because young people, then black people had no work, no no self-esteem, no recognition, no respect.

And that leads to crime, lawlessness, despair. So the urgency of actually practical steps which will lift this generation forward can't be exaggerated. I must commend my noble friend Lord Baker, because again, I visited his UTC in Hull, the Baker, Dearing, Hull UTC, and it's extraordinary. The way the UTC works with employers, works with the university and delivers results at a time when there's a disenchantment, it seems, with university. Although my noble friend Lord Willetts, I no doubt will address this problem.

More and more young people are wanting skills, vocation, jobs. It's extraordinary how many have said, I don't think universities for me. So we have to look even more urgently at technical and other education. And I support those who argue for greater regionalism. I've long been a great admirer of Lord O'Neill of Gatley, and I very much hope he's going to be a leading light in the new Burnham government. He argues that skills should be completely devolved, because Whitehall can't know what each labour market needs.

We make some powerful case for joining health, welfare and employment, but I'm very much hoping that in the same way as Andy Street did in Birmingham and that has happened in Manchester, we will have a better result if there's more regionalism, innovation and opportunity. The critical test is delivering a complex, achievable plan. Let's bring an end to

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government by press notices. I'm grateful to the noble Baroness Evans for introducing this Baroness Evans for introducing this debate at a time of over 1 million young people who are Neet. In 2009, I was appointed employment Minister I was appointed employment Minister in the teeth of the global financial crisis. The Prime Minister was clear. My job was to prevent the scarring effect of long term youth unemployment and to get the headline rate to fall in time for the 2010 general election. When
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Lord Knight of Weymouth Portrait Lord Knight of Weymouth (Labour)
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for the 2010 general election. When I told the then Permanent Secretary at DWP that this was my task, he told me that to do so was to defy history and was impossible. He was wrong. We rapidly rolled out the Future Jobs Fund to give those young people who'd been on benefits for more than six months real paid work, rather than a life on benefits. It created some 150,000 jobs, and the department's later evaluation found participants far more likely to be in unsubsidised employment.

Two years on, and a net benefit to society of around £7,750. For every young person who took part. My Lords, with determined focus, we can tackle impossible problems. The Future Jobs Fund was, of course, scrapped by the incoming government in 2010, before the evidence they published that it had succeeded. This government inherited 872,000 young people, more than 1 in 8 who are Neet and rising much faster than they are today. The Milburn Review tells us the cost of NEETs is £125 billion a year, more than our entire schools budget.

The attainment gap between poorer children and their peers stood as wise, as wide as it did three decades ago, and the generations mental health was left to fray. Close to a million children referred to mental health services in a single year, yet fewer than a third see tens of thousands waiting over two years, many reaching crisis before anyone reached them. Apprenticeship starts for young people fell by more than 40%. The entry level rungs of the ladder were pulled away for over a decade, and now artificial intelligence is removing the very junior roles that are the way in.

This, my Lords, is not a blip. It's not about NI and the minimum wage. It is structural. It was many years in the making and we should all hold our hands up. My Lords, this crisis begins in our schools. We need a curriculum that develops and challenges all young people. And with Lord Baker, I would love us to end the national curriculum at 14 and build a single 14 to 19 phase with genuine academic, technical and applied routes and a space for local content designed with employers that fit with local industrial strategies.

What our Minister is achieving post 16 is important, but it needs a better experience in key stage four, and we must change school behaviour by introducing accountability. Accountability measures built on destinations on whether a school actually lowers a child's risk of becoming Neet. As suggested in the Milburn report, reward only exam results and we should not be surprised when the system loses sight of the child. My Lords, behind the headline figure of 1 million are 1 million lives.

These young people have not given up on work. They've not given up on learning. They've not given up on the hope of a better life. The only question that should trouble this House is whether we have given up on them. In 2009, we did not let us resolve that. We will not. Now that we will stop building exam factories and start once more to build hope.
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Lord Willetts Portrait Lord Willetts (Conservative)
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My Lords, I to congratulate the noble Baroness Evans on on calling noble Baroness Evans on on calling this debate and one can sense in the interventions from all sides of the House the deep disappointment the House the deep disappointment and frustration that we now have once again, shockingly, a million young people Neet. And it is particularly frustrating as tackling the problem is not some deeply mysterious, intractable issue that cannot possibly be addressed. It is absolutely a solvable problem. And the noble Baroness Evans set out in her excellent speech the wider policies that are necessary in order to bring down the number of NEETs.

I would like to focus, if I may, on specific policies aiming at those young people who, tragically, are already Neet or who may be about to become Neet, and the evidence from a range of initiatives under successive governments, including going right back into the 1980s and 90s, is it some combination of the following? It is direct support for building up employability skills so that employers don't think it's high risk taking on someone who is Neet or about to be neat.

Plus, it's some lowering of the cost of taking them on, which can either be a general reduction or it can be specific incentives and rewards for employers taking on these people. There have been lots of initiatives over the decades. They work, but the trouble is they cost money and they cost money, partly because there's a deadweight cost. Some young people get off benefits into work anyway. The Treasury don't like does not like these expensive schemes. So to win the argument for more of these programmes, they have to be as well targeted as possible.

And there is now increasing across Whitehall data from the NHS about family circumstances, from the Department for education itself, from other government bodies which would enable us to identify the young people at greatest risk of being Neet and for whom interventions will be most effective. But across Whitehall, what you hear GDPR stops us sharing the data. The data is not brought together. Those 16 and 17 year olds are tragically lost to the system. There is an initiative, the initiative, the kickstart initiative, trying to break down data barriers to pooling information across Whitehall.

The Department for education participates in this initiative and its programme. Typically, if admirably, is about early years, it is identifying children who, at the age of two and a half, are at risk of turning up at school at five. Underprepared. Why doesn't the Department for education also run a kick start initiative on identifying NEETs? By pooling data from across Whitehall, so that in. So that policies and programmes to help young people into work are effectively targeted and more affordable.

It is just possible that these programmes will still have a cost, so we need to find a means of financing them. It is striking that the triple lock on pensions is now costing £12.6 billion a year extra in benefit expenditure than if the pension had simply been linked to earnings since 2012, when the triple lock was introduced. So if, as well as effective use of public spending through linking data, if further resource is needed, may I suggest that pension expenditure, which is the most rapidly rising and most expensive part of the total welfare benefit budget, should be where expense savings are found? In order to tackle the problem on which all sides of the House are clearly committed.
12:41
Baroness Coffey Portrait Baroness Coffey (Conservative)
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Yes. >> Friend on introducing this debate. So well, and I'm conscious that there have been a lot of statistics thrown around. I'm genuinely surprised to hear from both the noble Lord Lord Rooker and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, where they got their figures from, because it's not what the ONS says, it's not what the ONS says. What it does say is in 2001, seasonally adjusted, which is the preferred figure being used, 833 000 means by March 2010, that was 111.12 8 million, and in June it was 1.074 million.

When the Conservatives left office March, it was 935 000 June 921. So we have actually just seen a disaster in what is going on. And that a lot is due to the policy, sadly put in place by this government thinking it would do more to help jobs and in fact has killed off growth and jobs. Now let's give some credit. There are more people working there before. That is true, and I'm not surprised given the rise in population. And I do actually support most of the changes that have been made to the apprenticeship schemes and the apprenticeship levy.

I also welcome the fact that a lot of stuff has been moved out of education, who showed no interest in young people, really, once they'd left school in what they were going to be doing in the future. And that is now with DWP, and I think that has been a really good move. But let's not shy away from this. Unemployment is up. NEETs are up now. It takes a lot of drive. I was very proud of my record in DWP during Covid, but actually working with my noble friend Baroness Stedman-Scott, we got unemployment rate down to a record low since 1974.

We had the lowest figures on NEETs and youth unemployment. That is not done by accident. It's done by drive, but also making sure that different parts of government work together, but also working in the areas. And that's why we enhanced or try to enhance some of our working, not only with mayors but councils through our Jobcentre Plus network. Now, my Lords, the whole design of Universal Credit was there to make it that you'd be better off in work than not working, and it was always estimated by Sir Ian Duncan Smith that it would actually cost taxpayers more because of wrapping six benefits into one.

But still, the underlying principle was you're better off working than not. And that is still true until recently. So what's happened recently is that thankfully, we got rid of tax credits. And again, I understand some of the incentive around that initially, thinking, let's subsidise low pay and we'll do it through tax credits. But I don't think that was the right approach. But I understand why it happened. But by at that how that was designed, that if you worked a minute over 16 hours, you'd be worse off.

And so huge employers, big employers, redesigned their work system so that people basically had 16 hour contracts. And it's been quite difficult to shift that. But UC allowed the opportunity to do it. But the reason why this is now more of a challenge is that instead of, well, we've got quarter of a million families with over 45,000, 40,000 household income are now there's about just under a quarter million of them will now get free school meals. And so there is a number of incentives to not come off benefits.

There's a huge number of incentives to not go full time. And there are definitely still challenges, which I appreciate the government will continue to try and do in the availability of childcare all year round, not just when schools are sitting. Now, we're speaking next week on PIP, so I won't devote much more time to that. But all I'll say is that with the cost of living challenge, a lot more people did start applying for benefits where they hadn't done so before. So I go back to the beginning of this as education.

think actually we can see the difference that happened in the United Kingdom. The Conservatives came in working in partnership with the coalition, but had a big drive from my noble friend Lord Gove and also Nick Gibb in getting into phonics, getting into the foundations, the basics. When I first visited schools, I was astonished to find the poorest performing school in my constituency offered 50 GCSEs and they wondered why they were struggling. Let's get back to the core of what is going to give a young person the absolute opportunity to grow and contribute to our great country.



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Yeah. My Lords, I congratulate. The noble Lady, Baroness Evans,

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The noble Lady, Baroness Evans, for her securing this debate and for her excellent opening speech. And, my Lords, Britain's economic problems did not begin with this government. That would be an unjust government. That would be an unjust accusation, I'm afraid. Governments of all parties have laboured diligently over many years to
12:45
Lord Frost Portrait Lord Frost (Non-affiliated)
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diligently over many years to produce today's situation. The fundamentals can be summarised in one simple set of figures. Since 2008, productivity growth has consistently fallen back before the financial crisis. The ONS tell us that multifactor productivity grew at nearly 2% annually. It's now growing at about half a percent or less, and actually has recently stagnated the 20. In 2025 per capita GDP is actually lower than that of 2022. Now, no party in government over this period can really regard this record with satisfaction.

All three. And that includes the Liberal Democrats, of course, to varying degrees, regulated, tax subsidised drove energy costs up and industry out. And then came Covid, Ukraine and inflation each inflicted genuine damage, but each also provided Whitehall with that most renewable of resources. A convenient explanation to hide bad policy. Now there is a glimmer, perhaps, of something better. Maybe artificial intelligence is finally going to raise output per worker. And indeed, the ONS experimental measure of productivity suggests that it's actually risen by 4.2% since 2019, rather than 2.3% under the old measure.

So perhaps something is going on. But precisely this delicate moment, the government have chosen to test whether a green shoot can survive being repeatedly struck with a Treasury shovel. The tax burden is forecast to rise to 38.5% by the end of this decade, the highest since records began. The government is planning to spend nearly half all the money in the country. The reforms to education brought in by the noble Lord Lord Gove have been reversed out, and we know from Wales and Scotland what the result of that is likely to be.

And as we've been hearing, the Employment Rights Act has undone one of this country's few remaining strengths our flexible labour market. Unemployment at its highest level for a decade. Youth unemployment is even worse. Net zero is compounding the problem. It's zeroing one industry after another, like Denbigh Potteries. In my own home region of Derbyshire, Denbigh Potteries survived the Napoleonic Wars, two world wars, the early 80s recession and the pandemic. But they couldn't survive Ed Miliband and of the terrors.

Yet in prospect under Andy Burnham, we are currently left to guess since he refuses to face any parliamentary scrutiny until September. We know, though, because he told The Pillar that pillar of our Constitution, Gary Lineker, a day or two ago that he's going to quote, ask us for a little more. Well, maybe a wealth tax, maybe a land value tax. Certainly we're going to get municipal corporatism on a grand scale. Now, my Lords, I'm at a loss, really, to know what question to ask the noble Lady, the Minister today.

After all, she comes to your Lordships chamber without knowing herself. I suspect what's going to come next to tell us anything about it. And yet she has to defend as a programme for growth, an economic record of higher taxes, higher spending, riskier and more expensive jobs, a return to union dominated schools and among the most expensive energy in the OECD. My Lords, we know that Ministers want prosperity. Of course they do. The problem is they don't know how to get it.

Maybe they got lucky after nearly 20 years of stagnation. Maybe they just might have been handed the first genuine prospect of a positive productivity shock in a generation. But the problem is their instinct. Faced with something that might at last grow of its own accord, is to reach for weedkiller and try to convince us that it's really fertiliser, a persuasive effort which I suggest, my Lords, is most accurately described as a different kind of fertiliser altogether.
12:49
Lord Sharpe of Epsom Portrait Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Conservative)
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My Lords, I'm very grateful to my noble friend Baroness Evans for securing this debate, and if I may say, it's a pleasure to follow the say, it's a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. Lord Fox. My Lords, the government's stewardship of the economy over the past two years has been little short of catastrophic for our labour market. When the government took office two years ago, they inherited a labour market ago, they inherited a labour market that had recovered from the pandemic, although it still bore some of its scars.

And what did they do? As my noble friend Baroness Evans so powerfully explained, they immediately taxed employers for the act of hiring. Unsurprisingly, my Lords, as we've heard, unemployment has risen rapidly ever since and now stands at just under 2 million, with over a million young people unemployed. If business had then not had enough already, the government introduced their Business Busting Employment Rights Act, which their own impact assessment forecasts will cost employers at least £5 billion a year, with smaller businesses, of course, bearing much of the burden, further harming the prospects of the very people the government claimed to champion.

My Lords, noble Lords opposite usually mischaracterised our arguments against the most damaging aspects of this act is that we are somehow against workers rights. This is absolutely not the case. The simple fact is that the most fundamental right is to have access to a job in the first place. Yeah, the argument we advance is that extending rights to the moment a worker enters the building for the first time, removing the flexibility that suited both employer and worker, and making employment unaffordable, leads inexorably to the fact that too many aspirant workers don't even get a day one.

Never mind the rights that attach. And what has been the government's response to the unemployment that they've created a youth jobs guarantee, under which they now propose to pay employers to hire the young people, those same employers can no longer afford to take on, because the government put up the employers national Insurance in the first place. My Lord True genuinely couldn't make it up. My noble friend Baroness Evans rightly called this surreal. I think she was too polite. Throughout this period, we've had nothing but confirmation of what Pat McFadden himself admitted in private that in the Labour Party every conversation is about who we can tax in order to make benefits to others.

That is precisely what has happened with the benefits Bill rising and rising and disincentives to work multiplying with it, it became so serious that the Chancellor was forced to concede before the Treasury Committee in March that her jobs tax is responsible for the rise in youth unemployment, perhaps timed with an eye to saving her own job, which looks like another fail. My Lords, there was a moment of humility last week, a rare one in the other place, the house passed a motion regretting the combination of the rise in employers National Insurance, the impact of the Employment Rights Act of 2025, and the regulations that make it harder for young people to get their first job.

We now look to Mr. Burnham to reverse the failed policies of the last two years, though nothing in his conduct so far gives us confidence that he will. Perhaps the noble Baroness. The Minister, could tell us exactly what Mr. Burnham thinks of the government's employment related policies so far. My Lords, in the last century not a single Labour government left office with unemployment lower than

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when it arrived. Yay! Every other Labour government since, including the last two, has since, including the last two, has left it higher. Yeah, unless the government radically changes course under their new Prime Minister,

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under their new Prime Minister, that unbroken and unenviable record looks set to continue. Yeah, yeah. My Lords.

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My Lords. I have been. Reflecting on why. The lifelong. Learning commitment matters.

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Learning commitment matters. The world of. Work has. And continues to change. People will need new skills throughout their working lives, and we need to help people get into work. But just as importantly, stay in work as jobs and industries evolve. So I share the noble Baroness, the minister's ambitions. But there is a simple question we have to ask, and forgive me for putting it plainly. What is the point of helping people gain new skills if helping people gain new skills if into?
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Baroness Stedman-Scott Portrait Baroness Stedman-Scott (Conservative)
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Yeah. anything, it is. This opportunity depends on business being willing to hire. And what do we see, my Lord? Unemployment rising, vacancies falling and a diagnosis that the labour market is not at all well, my Lord, a job needs two things. Someone who is ready and willing to work, and an employer who is ready and willing to hire them. Too often the government talks about the first and forgets the second. For a business employing somebody full time on the National Living Wage Employer, National insurance costs have risen by around 68% over the past two years.

At the same time, the cost of employing a full time 20 year old has risen by around 26% since 2024. And when it becomes more expensive to employ people, business hire less opportunities become scarcer and more people end up on relying on welfare instead of wages. My noble friend Baroness Coffey put it very well there are too many incentives to stay on benefit rather than get off it. My Lords, we've all had, we all had. We've all had a briefing from the UK hospitality.

And they say that the. The UK hospitality is a barometer for the health of the UK economy. When the sector suffers, high streets, businesses and most importantly, people suffer as already represented. Referenced by my noble friend Baroness Evans of Bowes Park in 2024, 3.4 billion of tax increases was put on business and the result 100,000 jobs lost 38.7% of the workforce in the hospitality sector between the ages of 16 to 24 have been lost. Their first job denied them.

The hospitality sector represents 10% of jobs in coastal communities. 50% of local employment comes from it, and there's been a 25% drop in summer jobs. So, my Lords, I must ask this why I found it extraordinary that Stephen Timms recently said the current size of the welfare bill is not a matter of great concern. Can you believe it? So I ask the noble Baroness, the Minister. Does she agree with that statement? Because I believe a growing welfare bill should concern every one of us, and so should rising unemployment.

I urge the Baroness, the Minister, to speak to her colleagues in the DWP about what it can be, can be done to make it easier and more cost effective to hire the people that we're in business to serve. And I congratulate my noble friend Baroness. Those of Baroness Evans of Bowes Park of her getting this debate. I commend the contribution by my noble friend Lord Sharpe, and would just say, in all honesty and genuine commitment, that we've got a few ideas for how that position could be improved.
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett Portrait Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Labour)
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Yeah, yeah. >> Take stock of what I'm sure my noble friend the Minister will demonstrate is a pretty positive record. I will focus on Social record. I will focus on Social Security called welfare in the motion. But first, a mention of the education reforms that have contributed to the child poverty strategy by reducing the costs of education action on school uniforms, free breakfasts and free school meals. And on the last, I'll quote Davina, a member of the Child Poverty Action Groups Youth panel, on why they matter so much.

It's not just about food, it's about dignity, equality and belonging. Hunger makes you tired, embarrassed and left out. A hot meal gives you the energy to focus on the confidence, to feel like you belong in the room. Turning to Social Security, the government can take pride in a number of measures, including the modest, real increase in the real value of Universal Credit, the fair repayment rate, which reduces the overall level of UC deductions and, most significantly, the abolition of what the noble Lord Lord Freud described as the vicious two child limit.

A self-described mother in a hard working family of five, writes that it feels like a heavy weight has been lifted off our shoulders. We can finally breathe after the devastating financial impact of the limit. Of course, I wasn't happy about the cuts, but at least the worst of these was averted by the establishment of the Tims PIP review, co-produced with disabled people. This is such a positive initiative, as has been the ongoing engagement of the Child Poverty Strategy with parents and children experiencing poverty.

I very much hope the government will build on such initiatives in its policy making. The Tims reviews excellent interim report pulls no punches in its critique, including of the dehumanising treatment of those claiming PIP, which raises wider questions about the need for a culture of dignity and respect in the social security system. The report also questions the false narrative of a ballooning overall working age benefits budget, one consequence of cuts by the conservative led governments has been a significant reduction in the real value of benefits, according to the Child Poverty Strategy documents.

The strategy makes clear that Social Security Social security plays a vital role in reducing child poverty, critical to both the goals of security and opportunity, a point emphasised to by charities in the field and by academic and think tank analysis. And far from restricting opportunity, as the noble Baroness Lady Evans, said, the child poverty strategy is increasing opportunity for children with experience of poverty. So wearing my Olivia Twist hat, I hope that serious thought will be given to further action, in particular on the benefit cap, the frozen local housing allowance and on the adequacy of UC in meeting need.

My Lords, the End Child Poverty Coalition speaks for many charities when it says we must shift from viewing Social Security as a as a sign of failure towards viewing it as an essential investment in children and families, according to research. By Turn to us, a more positive political narrative could increase public trust in the Social security system. So in conclusion, I would urge the government not to listen to the siren voices of those baying for cuts, but instead defend Social Security robustly as, to quote Minister Johnson, the bedrock of our welfare state.
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Lord Leigh of Hurley Portrait Lord Leigh of Hurley (Conservative)
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My Lords, can I congratulate my. >> Noble friend. >> Baroness Evans on securing this debate in her excellent opener? We are at the end of an end of term are at the end of an end of term moment, not least because the PM, who promised us in his manifesto. Economic growth has clearly failed and somewhat extraordinary. The Labour Party has not found one MP in its ranks who put himself or herself up for the job. So the mess we find ourselves in is as a nation is largely due to actions and words from the current government.

The noble Lady, the Minister should not underestimate the huge damage done in the early days of this government, when we were misled

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about a £22 billion black hole. Yes. Misled. Not one credible. I'm coming to this. Well, not one credible this. Well, not one credible economist supported the contention. And not one credible economist And not one credible economist supported that contention. I, I would welcome an intervention from anyone who can claim that any such anyone who can claim that any such an economist who did support the. an economist who did support the. There is none. The negativity that ensued was disastrous, and I understand the tactics.

Emulating George Osborne. Perhaps. But the response to break that manifesto commitments and increase in taxes killed any chance of economic recovery and, of course, jobs growth. It wasn't just the retrospective taxation such as on IHT, on pensions, but the. Any increases which sent the economy and youth unemployment into a tailspin. I put down amendments to exempt charities, care homes, even hospices where the CEO of a hospice. No Tory supporter told me that she would have to cut jobs as a direct result, and consequently people would die in greater pain and agony than need be the case.

I'm not sure that Labour were proud of that because it was unnecessary. Even worse, the increases in NI failed. It was. We were told it was going to raise £25 billion a year. But the OBR figures reveal that it will be nearer 16.6 billion, and I'm happy to be accused to be, as Baroness Sater says, a siren voice. But all the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had to do was to stand up to their own colleagues and bring welfare back to a reasonable level, and this would have been avoided.

They will now pay the price. Unfortunately, as a result of this, the cost of employing an 18 to 20 year old rose by £4,095 between 2024 and 2026. As a former Labour education secretary, Ruth Kelly put it, you cannot put up the cost of hiring young people and then wonder why few of them are being hired. And then, of course, the Employment Rights Act, mentioned earlier, dubbed the Unemployment Rights Act by many, has not just enforced employers to reconsider hiring new staff, it is actually forcing businesses to find ways to lay off staff and automate much faster than they had planned.

And I have spoken to manufacturers whose name I can reveal who have done that. This cannot be what H.M. government expected to see. Unemployment for over 16 is now at 4.9% inactivity rates of 21%, according to the Excellent Jobs Foundation's recent report. This week alone, the Entrepreneurs Network, who run the APPG entrepreneurs, of which I am an officer, published their fourth survey. 79% of founders of businesses feel that the government does not understand their needs. Only 18% are optimistic about the year ahead for the economy as a whole.

And most interestingly, 82% have a negative view of the level of taxation in the UK. And that is the point. It's not surprising when one reads the Policy Exchange study published this month, which points out that the tax burden is at a 70 year high and the UK's tax take of 34.4% in 2024 has risen to 36% of GDP this year. That's way higher than any other successful members of G7. This situation will not improve by the incoming PM.

A man with very little economic experience talking about land taxes and wealth taxes increasing. So the question I have for the noble Lady of the Minister is, does she understand the connection between increasing the tax take specifically on businesses and the consequential, inevitable rise on unemployment?
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Baroness Fall Portrait Baroness Fall (Conservative)
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Yes. >> My noble. >> Friend Baroness Evans on this timely debate and her excellent remarks? It's always a pleasure as remarks? It's always a pleasure as well to follow Lord Lee. My Lord, the first duty of government is the national security, including economic security of our country. And by that I mean delivering a functioning economy which creates jobs, underpins our national service services and provides a safety net welfare. It also means living within our means and protecting the right for future generations to do so.

Education. Employment, welfare topics of this timely and well-chosen debate and key to all of this is growth. Today, my Lords, I will focus my short remarks on employment and welfare, the legacy of the last two years of the Labour government has seen employment, unemployment up, hirings down, a welfare bill through the roof, growth flatlining, the OBR's latest Fiscal risk and sustainability report made for sombre reading, pointing out first that the fiscal problem is mainly spending led and will likely worsen with the pressures of an ageing population.

That debt is rising to unsustainable levels. The tax burden is already close to historic highs. So on the eve of a new Prime Minister, I have a plea for Mr. Burnham that we simply cannot afford more poor policy, which will only make our country worse off, less able to deliver good schools, good jobs and support those who cannot support themselves. So, my Lord, what is Mr. Burnham's plan for growth? Well, we hear that he wants to put taxes up, has ruled out so-called crude cuts to welfare, and is sceptical about what he calls tech boosterism.

His growth plan for devolution, which may or may not boost growth I do hope it does, is a long is a longer term, not an immediate growth plan. Yet just at the moment, this this is just a moment to be getting behind tech. We have the potential to play a leading role in AI to reinforce our competitive advantage for innovation and start ups, quantum and cyber, and to boost productivity. We so desperately need in the NHS. And let's look at tax policy.

Mr. Burnham is considering bringing a capital gains tax in line with income tax, which would make us the highest rate in Europe, with less money to invest in new businesses. Businesses who create jobs, as do. Tony Blair Institute warned just last week. Taxing our way to prosperity is both bad policy and bad politics. By hiking National Insurance, minimum wage for the youngest and adding regulation to working rights. Labour have hammered business not helped them, worsening job prospects, especially for the young.

As many laws have mentioned, adding to their job struggles as even the Resolution Foundation warned, we now have over 1 million NEETs. As many have said, 1 in 5 working age adults and benefits are growing. Where is the balance here? My Lords, this is a tragedy. Our society can ill afford. And let us remember what our commitment is to help people who can't and support those who can. Back to work. And if you don't want to listen to me, listen to your own advisers.

Alan Milburn, who speaks devastatingly the silence of the unheard voice of young people applying for jobs, or Lord Timpson who warns that PIPs are due to double by 2030 and must be addressed. Or even Charlie Mayhew, who tries to tackle sickness at work. We need urgently to reassess and rebalance. So I would ask the Minister and to urge the new Prime Minister that we that he has a strategy for growth and the bravery to address some of these very difficult issues in our country, getting behind businesses and entrepreneurs, incentivising work, getting young people afoot in life and tackling the tragic and increasingly unaffordable welfare bill.
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Baroness Gill Portrait Baroness Gill (Labour)
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My Lords. >> Parliamentary tradition prevents me from using the precise words required to describe the inheritance the previous government inheritance the previous government left behind on the topics of this motion. Allow me to remind the House of that baseline a classroom workforce in freefall, an economy addicted to insecure labour, and a welfare state that ran up a staggering 2.8 billion bill. Nevertheless, I welcome and thank Baroness Symons for the opportunity to set out this government's record of achievement.

We've had to step in to make good the severe macroeconomic impacts of a botched Brexit deal. The real impact of which has been felt up and down the country, permanently fracturing our supply chains, driving up core costs, squeezing our public finances and giving us the cost of living crisis. They built the crisis under their watch. Yet in just two years, this government has systematically reversed their negative trends and delivered measurable progress. Let us look at the hard numbers in education.

The noble Baroness party oversaw a catastrophic depletion of our classrooms, leaving around just under half a million full time equivalent teachers, with real term wages slashed by 9%. This government hasn't just lamented about the crisis. It has fixed the system. It set an ambitious target to recruit 6500 new expert teachers in critical shortage subjects like maths and physics. And in just two years, the data shows, we have already successfully delivered over 70% of that workforce.

Furthermore, this government has funded the national roll out of free breakfast clubs in primary schools, and I won't go into that. Baroness. My noble friend Baroness Lister has amply spoken about that topic, proving that opportunity in Britain is once again a basic right and not an afterthought. In employment, the previous government built an entire economic model on low wage, insecure, low productivity labour that allowed exploitative zero hour contracts to explode. The countless number of people I spoke with in my old constituency of West Midlands, who shared the reality of zero hour contracts with me.

They didn't know whether they were going to work that day. They didn't know how long they would be working, and they didn't know how much they would be paid. Try and sort out your childcare with that reality or manage your weekly shop. That's why this government brought in the Employment Rights Act. In under 24 months, we have legally banned exploitative zero hour contracts. Instantly granting a statutory right to guaranteed hours to over 2 million workers. Finally, a couple of points on welfare.

The previous government used DWP to penalise vulnerability, pushing people into destitution. In two years, we have transformed the DWP into a genuine Department of Work, launched a £240 million Connect to Work scheme to move 100 and 100,000 people into safely back into careers and introduce a right to try guarantee. My Lords, this government didn't create the post Brexit fiscal headwinds, nor did we cause the delay of our public decay of our public services. But it is fixing them.

In two years we have done more to restore education, worker security and basic human dignity that the previous administration managed in over a decade. And the data is quite clear. The reversal

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is underway and Britain is finally moving forward. Hear, hear.

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Hear, hear. My Lords, it's a pleasure to take part in this debate this morning, and I'd like to express my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Baroness Evans, for presenting the Baroness Evans, for presenting the case against the government so eloquently at the start of the debate. It's been very interesting
13:14
Lord Evans of Guisborough Portrait Lord Evans of Guisborough (Conservative)
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debate. It's been very interesting to follow a number of distinguished speakers. It's a particular privilege to follow the noble, noble Baroness Gill, who I think made a stirring attempt to defend the government's record I. I hope that Mr. Burnham is watching this somewhere, and that he will be able to provide the rewards which which is so clearly deserved for. For that effort I would merely point out that sooner or later it is going to be impossible to blame the previous government for the current government's failings.

And of course, much sooner it's going to be impossible to blame the previous Prime Minister for the current government's failings, and we will see how things develop. My own experience in this area comes from having been the deputy mayor of London and dealt with with schools and businesses and employment and skills there, and perhaps it's a slightly unusual spread of experience in the House here. We've heard from a lot of former Ministers today, but I think perhaps it will become a more relevant piece of experience as the new Prime Minister takes over, because he has talked very much about learning things from the regions and applying them to to national government, and I'd be interested to see what he does.

I'll be interested to see if the Minister can raise the curtain on some of the things that we can expect from the new Prime Minister, because there are good things to be learned and not just, of course, from from Manchester, although I'm sure there are there are things we can pick up from there as well. My noble friend Baroness Coffee talked a lot about incentives, and I'd just like to touch on the way that regulation in particular, actually taxation around National Insurance, has disincentivized business from from employing people.

And we hear a lot about having how, how having a low paid job is a bad thing. But I would suggest that having no job at all is an even worse thing. And that is where a lot of people are heading for. Given the the current policies that are being pursued, I've not had the benefit of a briefing from UK hospitality, but I know because I go out in my own high street in Romford probably a bit too often, and meet people running restaurants and bars there.

How challenging it is for them to employ people. Now, under the new National Insurance rules, it's a very a very employee intense industry. You need to employ a lot of people and everyone you employ is an additional cost. So National Insurance has hit them particularly hard. They were doing well last night. The high street was absolutely full of people, but usually they don't. They don't do as well as that. And the government needs to start thinking about how it is going to help the hospitality industry to provide those entry level jobs that such a lot of people take on when when they first leave, leave education.

My noble friend Lord Lee talked about the impact on the care sector, and we have hospices in Essex who have struggled to deal with the National Insurance impact. I know the government provided some extra money for hospices as a result and that's very welcome. We should be grateful for funding from government, but we should also be aware that that funding was intended for capital projects, so it won't make any difference at all to the extra costs imposed on the hospice sector by the the national insurance problem that they're trying to deal with.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing the noble Baroness. The Minister's response to this debate. She and I spent some months working together in the Middle East in the past, so I know just how indefatigable and and how tough she can be. This is going to need every bit of her strength to to resolve this problem. So rather like my noble friend Lord

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Baker, I hope that she retains her role in the next government. Yes.

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My Lord, I thank the noble Lady, Baroness Evans for securing this debate. I declare my interest as debate. I declare my interest as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth and Honorary Professor of Women's Health at City Saint of Women's Health at City Saint George's University of London. Education, employment and welfare Education, employment and welfare are interconnected. When education fails, employment suffers. When secure work is out of reach, welfare, welfare dependency rises. If we are serious about breaking
13:18
Baroness Nargund Portrait Baroness Nargund (Labour)
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that cycle, the ambition must be a country where opportunity is not country where opportunity is not decided by your social status, but on your potential. This is exactly what the future this government is working towards. My Lords, I will focus on education aspect of this debate. Education is where opportunity begins. Research shows over a third of children start reception, not ready for school and 1 in 4 arrive without basic language skills. I welcome the expansion of Best Start family hubs, free breakfast clubs and 30 hours of childcare for eligible families this government has done.

These are investments in our children and our country's future. Education must prepare young people not simply for examinations but to live healthy, happy, productive and informed lives. My Lords, I have long argued that more health modules such as reproductive health modules and women's health modules, should form part of secondary and post 16 education for all pupils. Too many girls grow up believing pain is normal. Too many women spend years fighting to have their symptoms believed.

Knowledge changes, attitudes and stigma, helps tackle gender, health gap and prevent medical misogyny. My Lords, the need for change must continue in medical education itself. Our health care workforce should reflect the communities it serves and understand inequalities people face, particularly in access, experiences and outcomes. That means embedding cultural competency throughout health care, education and ensuring future clinicians understand the wider determinants of health, which account for 80 to 90% of health outcomes. I know that our government is introducing cultural competency education, and I hope it is there throughout health care.

Professional my Lords, as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth, I have seen how medical education can drive regional renewal. Portsmouth's new medical school is training future doctors entirely within the local health system. With a grow your own approach to reduce inequalities and strengthen local communities over time. The aim is also to encourage students to stay locally rather than moving to bigger cities like London, demonstrating a novel model to connect higher education with local employment and long term local economic growth.

I ask my noble friend the Minister, will the upcoming workforce plan consider a recruit locally trained, locally retain talent locally approach to create local growth? And will cultural competency be embedded throughout to tackle health inequalities? My Lords, good growth needs, good education, good education needs good health. Together they build a healthier,

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happier, fairer and more prosperous Britain. Amen, Lord.

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Amen, Lord. My neighbour friend Baroness Evans of Bowes Park in her in her excellent speech and many others excellent speech and many others have made strong points about the education achievement of the last government, which I will not repeat except to say that we are in the except to say that we are in the bizarre position of having delegations from overseas visiting our schools to see how we've our schools to see how we've achieved so much in education, even as the current government works to dismantle the reforms that enabled
13:22
Baroness Spielman Portrait Baroness Spielman (Conservative)
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this great progress. I want to speak today about young people and their trajectory from childhood to productive and satisfying adulthood. Our national aim should be to build children and young people's capacity and resilience on every front. Yet the current focus of education and welfare systems is working against that. Government education policy is overwhelmingly education policy is overwhelmingly targeted on disadvantaged and low achievement. That sounds lovely, but this policy is built around mechanisms that encourage children and young people to view themselves as damaged or less than capable.

Once a child is defined by and sees themselves that way, such as through having an S, e, n, d label and then perhaps a child disability allowance claim. It's now all too likely that a young person will become an early Pip claimant, from where their chances of ever moving into stable employment are increasingly poor. In fact, a decision to grant PIP to a young person who suffers, say, from some anxiety or from ADHD may be the single cruellest thing that a government could ever do to them all too.

Probably. Probably it consigns them unnecessarily to a lifetime of dependency. Yet such claims have rocketed in the past two years, and I'm afraid the Tims review shows, by its weakness and its omissions, that there is no real appetite to address this appalling waste of human life. It doesn't distinguish between fundamentally different types of condition. There are some disabilities that are lifelong and preclude work entirely. There are some that are lifelong, and that will limit some aspects of capacity permanently, but don't preclude people's ability and willingness to work.

Down's syndrome is a good example, and there are other conditions that may be temporary or permanent, but for most need only be temporarily debilitating. Most people diagnosed with anxiety or ADHD should ultimately be successful or happy at work, so a blanket disability label is failing so many of these. The review also doesn't recognise that the explosion in numbers may partly reflect a loss of confidence and resilience in our population, rather than any real loss of capacity, and it also dismisses the very real loss of public confidence in PIP.

Despite much evidence for this, and Dwp's own figures show fraud has tripled. Detected fraud has tripled in the past year. The review barely touches on the value of work to individuals, but we know there is a huge human cost of worklessness and the Minister, Sir Stephen Timms MP, seems entirely unconcerned about the apparently uncontrollable increase in PIP spending, described as not a great concern. Yet, as Alan Milburn has pointed out, we're spending a lot on young people but on the wrong things.

My neighbours, friends Baroness Coffey, Baroness Stedman-Scott, Lord Willetts and many others have made constructive suggestions and recent budgets and legislation have plainly worsened employer willingness and capacity to hire the young and youth. Unemployment is predictably rising. So can the nobility of the Minister tell us whether the government will direct the Tims review to address the difficult questions that. I'm afraid it's so far ducked? And will the government bring forward measures to modify the policies it's brought in that, no matter how well intended, are proving damaging to human lives?
13:26
Lord John of Southwark Portrait Lord John of Southwark (Labour)
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My Lords, when I saw that the >> My Lords, when I saw that the noble Lady, Baroness Evans, had put this subject down for debate today, for which I thank her, I thought I for which I thank her, I thought I should take a look at the statistics to examine whether I'd missed a particularly bad report on missed a particularly bad report on education or employment, so I was reassured to learn that GCSE and A-level grades in 2025 were slightly better than 2024, and whilst our employment rates have fractionally decreased over the past two years, the number of those classes economically inactive had also fallen by over one percentage point.

Looking at welfare, the latest ONS data suggests that the number of people claiming out of work benefits is just over 30,000 higher than in July 2024. But sadly, we do find that there's been a significant increase in the number of people claiming universal Credit. However, that increase also came at the same time that working tax credits came to an end and those claimants were shifted to Universal Credit. My Lords, my view is that we sometimes get the language around welfare wrong and moving from a system of working tax credits predicated on support for those in work to universal Credit, which perhaps suggests a life supported by government, was a serious mistake.

So I would ask the Minister to think carefully about how the government can better use language to make this kind of government financial support once again, appear more supportive of the notion of a hand up to those on low pay. Now, I don't share the nihilistic view of the subject matter of this debate, or some noble friend's noble Lords opposite. But perhaps the most worrying figure today is the number of young people, 16 to 24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training.

Now, there have always been needs. They weren't created or invented in July 2024, but it seems to be a post-COVID phenomenon that we've reached 1 million of them at this time. My Lords, I'm reassured by the preliminary report of Alan Milburn and the response of Pat McFadden as the Secretary of State, who have focussed rightly our attention on what we need to do. It is ludicrous that we spend only £1 on helping a meeting to work for every £25 that we give them in benefits.

Sometimes we do need to invest to save and give hope to those younger people who are entering a very different world of work. With the challenges of the gig economy and AI and Lord Dear. Lord Willetts talked about employability schemes, and I think it's important to recognise the work of organisations such as the Old Vic Theatre, of which I'm a trustee, who do run employability schemes, take the lead and frontline help over a thousand young people each year with basic employability, and I think that's commendable for a charity.

The Old Vic and others like it. The final version of the Milburn Review is due in September, but the work has already begun. Now, to make it a central mission of this Labour government to reduce the number of NEETs and to create a workforce fit for our times. I know that that will not change on Monday or Tuesday next week. Now, my Lords, I suppose the clue is in the name, but I am reassured that this is a Labour government that cares about Labour.
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Lord Addington Portrait Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat)
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Here. >> My Lord, sir, this has been a a debate which I'm afraid I could have predicted some of the lines. And indeed the first exchange we And indeed the first exchange we had, the Baroness Evans saying how dreadful everything is, and the response from the noble Lord Rooker reminded me of a guard dog having its tail stood on. He went back and justifiably, I think, because, my Lords, what have we got here? We have got government doing what government always does.

That's reacting to what's happened before. And although we can say wonderful things about various bits of the education system, there are things that didn't go right. The first the first report I got about, I say off roading, the wonderful product of the academy system. Everybody's going up there, everybody's passing more exams. You've also got fewer people in education. 2020 before Covid. And then the report brought forward by Lord Johnson of Marylebone about requirements to improve the urgent changes to the 11 to 16 age group.

Basically looking at further education, the fact that, once again, we've got overly academic going through there are problems that came with the Academisation programme and things which were not embraced. The first one was not everybody's good at passing exams, and you are actually saying in a very loud voice, no, that's what matters. And unless we start to address that in the education programme and the preparation for what comes next, further education for many people, and there is an agreement that possibly going back to New Labour, we put too much emphasis on universities, or that universities stopped doing level five and four courses.

Let's face it, some of the new universities came from a world where they successfully did this and it was dumped. We all have our history to deal with here, and the noble Lord Baker, as he always does, he has a solution. It's one that we probably haven't totally mind to get the best out of, but it certainly is one way forward. The fact that we make sure we take on further education, we up its status, and there is also a degree of agreement that we haven't done that properly.

So having said that, my questions to government now become fairly thick and fast. What is the government doing about not getting 6500 more teachers? What are we doing about getting all those teachers who have left the industry back into it? What about the Re recruitment? We have people we have invested in and trained who left in their droves. What are we doing about bringing them back in? Have we looked at which way? What would be required to make it more attractive to come back and teach? It is a fundamental thing about this process.

Two my Lords and everybody who would have put money on me raising this well, they've won it. They wouldn't have got very good odds that special educational needs. And I will reserve my comments on the noble Baroness Valentine comments there. But my Lords, we know that we have for years and years ignored, not recognised, not found out who had special educational needs, particularly girls, because girls are very good in classrooms and surviving by masking, just disappearing in the middle of it, not commenting.

They got through most of the time. It didn't cause too much trouble. Underachieved dramatically in most cases, had huge mental health problems and scars. Because of that, they got through the boy, typically. And these are stereotypes, of course, kicked off at the back of the class and got thrown out. He was in the pupil referral unit. My Lords, it was wasn't long ago. It was confirmed to me that every child in a pupil referral unit is expected to have at least one special educational need, and we have not dealt with it.

It was an acceptance that the government that the previous government's reform and it's a coalition reform. Fair enough. I should maybe I should should have acquired so many scars in my tongue on the inside of my mouth from not speaking at the time. Well, maybe some people will think I should have acquired a few more. But if we are not going to address this historical lag on this historical pressure that has pushed people outside, we are going to have trouble. We have trouble.

We're going to have more. And I would hope that the government, the Minister, when she replies, will be able to tell me exactly when we are going to get a practical system of supporting schools. You can then take it as read. As I have mentioned on other occasions, certain groups who are going to be very difficult to deal with in schools. We'll need a mixed economy, but certainly, and I remind the House that I am chairman of Microlink plc, which work in the assistive technology field, and president of the British Association and dyslexic myself.

What are we going to do to make sure that those people who have traditionally failed are allowed to get through? My Lords, we had a great emphasis on English and maths passing. Great. Well, you've taken one group, possibly the biggest group, and put an extra load on right on the back of the neck. You said you will not go to the next stage because you've failed. Now there have been exemptions gone through and the middle classes who can get the diagnosis and somebody to challenge for you, the Tiger parent, they get something out of it.

Those who do not come from exam passing background don't. And I would hope that the Minister can give us some practical guidance of how the teachers we are short of, we're trying to recruit, are better capable of spotting and putting in fairly easily administered support structures. In the case of the group dyslexics, well, let's use some assistive technology to allow you to deliver in English in a format somebody can get around. Voice recognition is a standard factor in every computer that you have been given to any member of this House or the other.

Is there a couple of buttons I can show you how it works? It's also on every mobile phone, hence the reason why I thought that 1 or 2 caveats about the demon of mobile phones. So what are we doing there? Then you can go on to other groups like Dyscalculics with the noble Baroness Bull sitting on the woolsack. I would be a fool. Not to mention that and the other groups that go through there. How are we going to identify how are you going to help? Are you going to support? These people are at their most vulnerable.

And an education system that says pass an exam or get stopped, we'll have to go down a secondary route. And people know when they're branded as stupid. They know it. They carry it with them for the rest of their lives. I was very lucky. I had that Tiger parent. If you are not going to address this properly, you're going to guarantee a group of people who are going to find it increasingly difficult to get employed. Now, to be perfectly honest, upping any taxation threshold that falls directly on employment, I don't think is the best and smartest move in the world to get people out and get it into the marketplace, and it hasn't helped.

But if you are looking for a high skilled, high value workforce, you have got to start to address those problems that get them ready for that world. Everything is changing. We don't even know what will be required. It's your average recruitment strategy in the future and at the moment, whether it's a bump due to fear or something, it looks like that the undergraduate route just isn't going to work any more. And it comes with debts. What is the government going to do about accessibility to good further education is the big question we should all be addressing here.

And unless we come away with it, with a series of a series of answers and strategies, we are going to start to let down that big group that don't find the academic system that easy to access, who aren't going to succeed at the top end, but still have an expectation of being prepared for the field of work. I would hope that the Minister starts to answer these questions today. But my Lords, these are questions which weren't invented two years ago.

Though the current government has responsibility for finding coherent answers.
13:39
Baroness Cash Portrait Baroness Cash (Conservative)
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My Lords, what an excellent >> My Lords, what an excellent debate. The House at its very best, I've actually lost count of the number of former Ministers and Cabinet members speaking in their areas of expertise, and I thank them all. What's striking is how much we agree on. No one here disagrees that children should be lifted out of poverty, that they should realise their potential, that they should have productive and fulfilling lives, and that we want to see our country flourish and thrive.

Where we differ is about how we get there. My Lords, we're not going to agree on all of that, but there may be some things that we can learn from today. It is the case that the government inherited record on record employment. Some of the strongest reading and numeracy results in the Western world and narrowing disadvantage gap in our primary schools and an economy back in growth. But it would be wrong not to acknowledge the profound and lasting effects of the pandemic on school attendance, on mental health and on our national working culture, and the fact that the government inherited those challenges.

Also, the question today is whether they have risen to the challenges. My Lords, I don't know if you're aware of parallel play. It's a phrase used in child psychology to describe how children up to the age of two play next to each other with similar toys, but do not actively interact. It's how the government's own reviewer, Alan Milburn, has described this government's lack of strategy. Perhaps that lack of strategy itself the consequence of what the Prime Minister's former Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, admitted was a failure to prepare for government.

But my Lords, playing at governing has real life consequences and it is our young people who pay the highest price. The problems can be traced. The problems since July 2024, and the government's performance can be traced to the contradictions that lie within. So much it has done. It couldn't be more vividly or sadly illustrated by the way in which it has torn down a cornerstone of its own party's legacy under Tony Blair in 2021, to England's ten year olds were ranked fourth in the world for reading the best in the worst in mathematics.

We had climbed from 27th to 11th. By 2018. The disadvantaged gap at the end of primary school was down to 9.2 months. The narrowest ever recorded. That work began under the last Labour government, and I paid tribute to the part that the noble Baroness, the Minister opposite me, played in that herself when she was education Minister in the Blair government. When we entered government, we built on those foundations proudly. Policy Exchange Research found 83% of the highest performing schools serving disadvantaged children are academies or free schools.

But inexplicably, this government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act will end that success by returning to the old default of central control without a shred of evidence that that will affect outcomes. This government has said it wants to eliminate the advantage gap. We all do, but then inexplicably undid the very reforms begun by their own party that had helped the most disadvantaged. And what about our young adults? We've heard so much about them today. More than a million young people now outside education, employment or training.

The first time we have crossed that line since 2013, Alan Milburn is clear that the causes are complex. The noble Baroness, the Minister, has had the same in this House, I agree, but his verdict is still damning. He puts the cost at £125 billion a year, and describes the young victims of this chaos as a lost generation. 84% of them want to work, yet nearly two thirds have never held a paid job. In his words, the aspiration is there.

The opportunity is not. Why not? Well, we've heard today from the benches behind me about the economic consequences of the taxation rises. What has the government done to opportunity? It's raised the cost of taxation on business and hit the cost of employing young people from three different directions £25 billion of new costs through National Insurance rise. And yes, young people are exempted from National Insurance. But the burden those businesses are carrying has been stated repeatedly by our public bodies to be the reason why they're not hiring young people.

It's no good to say they're exempt. When businesses talk about having to cut all their jobs, and a record 16% rise in the minimum wage for 18 to 20 year olds makes them much more expensive to hire. Excessive new employment rights make taking on an untested young worker a bigger risk for many smaller firms, which they simply cannot afford, the government was warned so many times, the IFS warned the combined changes would reduce opportunities for younger workers. The Bank of England's chief economist told the Treasury Committee that it would hit age 16 to 21 hardest.

The Low Pay Commission said employment would fall most among the young. The government ploughed ahead. The result has been brutal. Today, two years after this government was elected, youth unemployment is close to 1 in 6. At 16.2%, according to the Labour force survey. That is the highest in over a decade, and the number of NEETs is tracking upwards. And that's according to Alan Milburn, who says it will reach 1.25 million, another quarter of a million within five years.

The ONS has confirmed firms are not hiring because of the cost of employment. And so, again, contradictions at the heart of government, with one department spending public money on youth scheme we've heard about today to coax young people into work while the others have taken the jobs away. As one of the great heroes of the left, Aneurin Bevan said, we know what happens to people when they're unemployed. Their skill goes, their hope goes, their self-respect goes. They are an army of the defeated, an army, my Lords, that is now 4 million people of working age and more than half since the war.

More than 1 in 10 are on health related benefits, and more than half of the rise since the pandemic relates to mental health. Here again, the government's left and right hands do not meet, its health secretary says this country overdiagnosis, mental health and rights, too many people off. So much so that he has commissioned Professor Donaghy to examine the striking rise of diagnosis of anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism. But the welfare system continues to pay out in ever greater numbers on precisely those diagnoses.

The state has become quicker to pay for a condition than to treat it, and the science reinforces what Bevan knew. The research warns about excessive labelling. One of the world's most cited neuroscientists, Lisa Feldman Barrett, shows that the brain learns to expect what we teach it to expect label difficult behaviours as fixed incapacity and people believe they are incapable. So one part of government says we label too much and another is funding the labelling and calling it support. And Milburn is describing a welfare gateway that has become a one way valve, cohorts staying longer and longer, funding the problem but not solving it.

And so the vicious circle remains closed. The very taxes used raised to fund the welfare bill have destroyed the entry level jobs that, on the government's own evidence, would have kept young people busy and well, the revenue measure has defeated the fiscal aim. Funding more diagnosis defeats the health aim. Each department, as Milburn says, plays alone next to the others, and real young people fall through the gaps between them. None of this evidence is mine.

It's theirs. Their data, their reviewer, their health secretary, their own party's research. They were warned. They were asked to stop. But they have carried on. And a generation of young people, our nation's taxpayers and the British economy are paying the price.
13:49
Baroness Smith of Malvern Portrait Baroness Smith of Malvern, Minister of State (Education) (Labour)
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My Lords, I want. contributions today. And the noble Lady, Baroness Evans, for bringing this debate to the to the floor of the House this afternoon. If it's a Thursday afternoon, it must be a debate on education, employment and young people. As I say, it has been a broad debate. But as a Minister who works across both the Department for education and the Department for Work and Pensions, I know all too well just how interlinked the areas we have covered today often are.

Whichever system we're talking about education, employment or welfare, none of them operate in a vacuum, and they all have an important role to play in extending opportunity so that everybody can fulfil their potential. This is key to raising living standards and boosting economic growth. Sadly though, as very robustly, my noble friend Lord Rooker and my noble friend Baroness Gill identified, we inherited a broken system that too often did the opposite and held people back. And if we were examining the record of this government so far, it is important to consider what the starting point was when we took office.

Education not working for all children, school attendance at an all time low, local authorities being bankrupted by rising costs of special educational needs and children's social care. The number of children growing up in poverty increased by 700 zero zero £0 700 000 since 2010, to 4 million. Nearly 1.5 million adults unemployed. And between 2021 and 2024, the number of young people not in employment, education and training increased by 250 000, and we had a welfare system that all too readily wrote people off and left them without the support they needed.

This was an unacceptable waste of human potential, and that's why this government is putting opportunity at the heart of our education, employment support and welfare systems. We are doing this by giving children the best start in life, and by lifting half a million children out of poverty. AM I a noble friend? Baroness Lister is absolutely right about building about about identifying the link between poverty and education and opportunity. We are increasing the number of people in education, employment and training, particularly young people, and we are shifting from a welfare state to a working state which provides not only a safety net, but a platform upon which people can change their lives for the better.

Noble Baroness Stedman-scott and Spielman bemoan the fact that the welfare system incentivises people to stay out of work. They are right that that is a bad design. It was, of course, the design that we inherited from their government. My noble friend Baroness Nargund was absolutely right in talking about education when she described it as where opportunity begins. And that's why this government stands for excellence everywhere across education and care. To break the link between background and success, we are fixing the foundations of our education and care systems by ensuring attendance is going back up, hiring more teachers, social workers and nursery staff, rebuilding more schools and opening free breakfast clubs, stabilising our universities and increasing training opportunities.

And on the issue of universities, can I say to the right Reverend prelate, the Bishop of Newcastle, I share her view about the significance and importance of humanities for us, understanding our world and being able to tell the stories and build the analysis of where we need to go. Of course, this is not the role of government to tell universities what courses to offer, but it is our task to deliver financial stability, to ensure proper planning and provision of all courses, including humanities courses.

And that is what we are doing through our increase in maximum tuition fees and through our focus in the office for students on Financial stability. But despite this progress, we must go further and faster to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to succeed. And we must start early, which is why we are investing £1.5 billion over the next three years for our best start in life strategy to expand and strengthen family services, to make early education and childcare more accessible and affordable and higher quality, and why we will improve the quality of early education and childcare.

It is why we are making sure that every child is achieving and thriving through the work of our rise. Teams that are driving school improvement. It is why we are recruiting more teachers in secondary and special schools and of course, through our ambition to halve the disadvantage gap for children with special educational needs and disabilities, the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, particularly raises the issue of primary schools, where, of course, we do see a real challenge from the falling numbers of primary pupils.

But even this week we have talked about imaginative ways of enabling school buildings, for example, to be used to develop community and other facilities. And we will continue to consider the challenges for schools as that demography changes. The noble Lady Baroness Bottomley and the noble Lord Lord Addington, rightly raised the point of teachers. And that's why. And that's because, of course, high quality teaching has the biggest positive impact on a child's outcome in schools, which is why we pledged to recruit 6500 additional teachers across this Parliament in secondary and special schools and Fe, and we have already achieved over 70% of our target, including 3008 more teachers in secondary and special schools.

Since this government came to office, we are continuing to offer bursaries worth £29,000 tax free to encourage more talented people to train to teach key Stem subjects. But both other noble Lords suggested, and I agree with them, that retaining high quality teachers is also key to our plans. So I am sure they will welcome the fact that we are making strong progress. With leaver rates dropping to 8.5%, one of the lowest ever on record. And of course, part of the reason for that is because we have been willing to find the resources to pay teachers properly.

With a 10% pay increase over the last two years and acceptance of the Strb recommendations for the next two years. And we've set out plans to invest in a new teacher retention programme from autumn 2026, in order to ensure that everybody who can benefit from our world class higher education system is able to. We're reintroducing maintenance grants for courses for academic year 2020 829 to ensure anyone with the ability can access university and. We are prioritising skills and further education.

As the noble Lord Lord Addington demanded that we should. And as we set out in our Skills White Paper, including through record investment in post 16 education and skills, with over £18 billion a year in funding and an additional £800 million for 16 to 19 education in 2020 627. We are expanding high quality technical and vocational pathways through new V levels, more T levels and by establishing 29 Technical excellence colleges. And whilst I am loath to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, given the very nice things he said about me, it was of course, the current Prime Minister who made a strong speech about the need to reinvigorate non-academic routes and to develop a prestigious Fe sector, which we have been delivering on.

And of course, we will also and have already given local leaders more powers and funding to shape provision, to meet local skills needs, to boost employment. We are not just making sure that people get skills, but that they get the skills that employers and our economy needs. That focus is precisely why I am now working across both departments. With DWP now responsible for adult skills, able to link that skills, capacity and understanding more closely to the employment support that we're offering through the new Jobs and Careers Service.

It also why we set up Skills England to assess skills needs to inform national planning. It is why we have made the skills system more flexible, for example, with shorter, more targeted training options to meet specific and fast changing needs in the form of new apprenticeship units. Developing the flexibility in the growth and skills levy to meet the needs of employers. And it is why we are investing in skills packages for key sectors in construction, in defence, in clean energy and advanced manufacturing.

And it's why we've introduced fast track approval of new apprenticeship standards to get rapid skills support in place for major projects in England. All of this is about making sure that people are able to seize the opportunities of the future. And while some noble Lords may paint a

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All that pessimistic picture of the labour market are others. My the labour market are others. My noble friend Baroness O'Grady, for example, is right in being more example, is right in being more optimistic. The facts are that there are 400,000 more people in employment than last year. We have the third employment rate in the G7. And since this government took over, And since this government took over, real wages have risen more than in the first ten years of the previous government.

These figures don't show a government that is failing, but one that is creating opportunity and security for its people. But of course, we know that there is more to do with over a million young people not earning or learning, and nearly 3 million people out of work due to long term sickness. We are determined not just to help people into work, but to ensure that it is good work. And my noble friend Lord Knight is absolutely right to say that a determined focus on employment can make a difference.

And that is why this government is determined not to give up on a generation of young people. And that is why we are investing £3.5 billion in employment support for disabled people and those with health conditions through our Pathways to Work offer. It is why we are overhauling Jobcentres to be places where you sign up for work, not benefits. And when it comes to young people who are not earning or learning, we, as has been emphasised by several noble Lords during the course of this debate, we are creating half a million opportunities for young people to earn or learn.

Backed by £2.5 billion of additional investment through our Youth Guarantee. These include hiring bonuses for businesses. More work experience and workplace training. Subsidised jobs for young people who are out of work for 18 months. And we are rebuilding the apprenticeships for young people. Given the 40% fall in young people's apprenticeship starts that we saw over the last decade. Many noble Lords opposite have raised the issue about national insurance increases and the minimum wage. And it is, and I understand and recognise why.

But it is a common refrain. But they do it at the same time as praising the Milburn report that this government commissioned. And as I've pointed out previously, it was Alan Milburn himself, of course, who identified the fact that it is neither National Insurance nor National Minimum wage, which is at the heart of, or even really key in the numbers of young people who are out of work. And furthermore, the Resolution Foundation Lost in Transition report found that reverting to national Insurance levels to the 2024 threshold for under 25 would raise the job total by 7000, but would cost the Exchequer £1 billion.

Scrapping the entirely for under 25 seconds would only create 38000 jobs and cost £5.1 billion. And noble Lords opposite who want to talk and always do about National Insurance contributions also I think need to answer the question about what they would cut in order to revert to this government's National Insurance contribution changes. Presumably it would be the investment. Presumably it would be the investment in our health service, which is helping to cut precisely the waiting lists that keep people out of work and that create additional burdens for employers.

And the Resolution Foundation also said that whereas our through our £2.5 billion funding through the Youth Guarantee, our hiring Incentives and jobs guarantee will unlock up to 200 000 employment opportunities. So, my Lords, I believe that we are focusing in the right place. But of course, we also need to prevent people becoming out of work learning in the first place. And that's why we're also focussed on prevention, better support for young people with send more support for those with mental health challenges as we roll out support across schools.

I think my noble friend Lord Knight is right as well, that schools need to have a greater responsibility for the destination of their students and for the transition of young people at 16, so that they do not fall out of the system. The noble Lord Lord Baker is right about the contribution of technical education here, and I've already outlined the changes that the government is making. And the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, is right that we need to use data effectively to be able to identify, at an early stage those who are at risk of becoming Neet, which is why we have provided for local authorities the risk of Neet indicator tools to be able to, at a at the earliest stages of secondary school, to identify those young people who are at risk and to take action to prevent them falling through the gaps.

All of this is designed to get more people into work, and we are ensuring that it is good work, and we make no apology for that. By boosting the national minimum wage, by partnering with employers through the Keep Britain Working Review to build healthier and more inclusive workplaces and bolstering workers rights with the Employment Rights Act. I wholeheartedly agree with my noble friend Baroness O'Grady on her argument for productive labour, not just for cheap labour. My Lords, much of what I have already set out is welfare reform in action.

It is how we are putting work skills and opportunity at the heart of the welfare state. Welfare spending as a percentage of GDP continues to be broadly stable as it has been for many years, and we have slowed the increase in the number of people coming onto health and disability benefits. But this is where spending is increasing the most so far, from circling the wagons around the status quo. We are determined to rewire the Social security system itself. As my noble friend Lord John argued for, to promote and to support work, including through the changes we have made to universal credit, to reduce disincentives, to work by legislating for a right to try so that disabled people can take steps into work without fear of automatic reassessment and increasing the proportion of face to face assessments which collapsed under the previous government and in the medium term, the Tims Review of Personal Independence payments to ensure that it is fair and fit for the future, and the Milburn review into young people and work have both already produced their interim reports, ahead of publishing full reports later this year, which will absolutely provide the framework for further action in both of these crucial areas.

My Lords, from childhood through to adulthood, across the education, employment and welfare systems, we are ensuring that everybody gets the chance to succeed. Equipping people with the qualifications and skills they need, creating the opportunities they need, and changing the welfare system so that instead of trapping people, it helps people to change their lives rather than picking up the cost of failure. We are investing in success that is better for people's lives. It is better for the public finances, and it is the change that this Labour government is delivering.
14:07
14:09
None Portrait Short debate: Assessment made of the effectiveness of partnership working between prisons and local housing authorities in preventing homelessness and rough sleeping among prisoners released early
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My Lords, may I thank all noble Lords who are here today to debate an issue that could get lost amidst the penal populism. In forming much of the response to the next waves
14:09
None Portrait Short debate: Assessment made of the effectiveness of partnership working between prisons and local housing authorities in preventing homelessness and rough sleeping among prisoners released early Lord Farmer (Conservative)
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of early release following the Sentencing Act. 2026. Why do I refer to penal populism? Crime must be punished, and I completely understand the concerns of many victims about early release. However, the public vengefulness politicians court to achieve popularity, notably by demanding ever long custodial sentences, has led to ever longer sentences, clogged up our prisons and contributed to the need for these great swathes of early release. The inflation in custodial sentence length between 2010 and 2025 was 45%.

In their book, The Honest Politician's Guide to Prison and Probation, criminologists King and Willmott revealed just how many Ex-justice secretaries, both from both main parties, regret, quote, playing to the gallery as tough law and order figures. As Ken Clarke, Home Secretary following the 1992 general election, described his successors. This response was driven by the understandable outcry following the Jamie Bulger killing in early 1993 by two other children. Instead of acknowledging the need to challenge inadequate parenting and manage expectations about what a criminal justice system can do, the Home Secretary who followed Lord Clarke, kickstarted the still ongoing competition between the two main parties as to who could be toughest on crime.

My response to the arms race that penal populism generates and has filled our prisons is that, like the nuclear arms race, we simply cannot afford the price tag either in sheer cash terms of 60 to 65 K per prisoner per annum, or the squandering of human potential. Those sentenced for sexual offences over a fifth of prisoners are treated as Unreservedly Highness, despite considerable variability in seriousness and the hypersexuality sexualisation of society. We want to lock them up and throw away the key, but the vast majority will leave prison.

They. And we need their genuine rehabilitation. Many have lost their families, livelihoods and homes. Only about a third move into settled accommodation post release, compared to the average of around 45%. More generally, imprisonment itself renders offenders homeless. When tenancies lapse, mortgages aren't paid or family circumstances mean that they cannot return home despite a continuing care of duty. Duty of care. Far too many are released homeless. Also, rehabilitation without a proper roof is almost impossible and the statistics bear this out.

There are proven re-offending rate of 76% is more than double the 36.4% of those who re-offend after being released into settled accommodation. So may I begin by asking the Minister to confirm if the government have assessed how many of those released early are likely to return to prison, and whether, through recalls for breaching licence conditions or reoffending, it's a far more grisly question, but have they assessed also how many are likely to die? Leaving prison homeless is a major risk factor for death shortly after release.

Last month, a Guardian investigation reported record numbers of deaths within two weeks of release in 2025, a 28% rise since 2021. Similarly, the charity Nacro found more than one person dies every year, every day in the year after leaving prison. And last year, 1 in 1 in every 144 released died within that period. More than three times the rate in 2015 in 40 percent of cases. Drugs are a factor, and homelessness interacts fatally with that.

No structure, no support, no health care inside. Time. The prisoners newspaper, which I know the Minister reads and so do I, says an estimated 6000 prisoners will be released earlier than planned from English and Welsh jails in ten monthly tranches starting on the 2nd of September. So it is very concerning that H.M. Inspectorate of Prisons told the Commons Public Accounts Committee in November 2024 that at some prisons, the limited housing stock available for those released had been, quote, overwhelmed by early release schemes.

Although the government has responded to written questions that local authorities collaborate effectively with the Prison Service to reduce homelessness. Ministry of justice data says almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025, a 39% rise from the previous year. Similarly, the government's plan to end homelessness states that this quote could have been prevented, had better coordination and planning been in place, unquote. The duty to refer in the Homelessness Reduction Act to 207 was designed to facilitate this, and almost half of all duty to refer referrals are from the criminal justice system organisations.

Almost ten years on from that act, I welcome the implicit recognition by introducing a new duty to collaborate, that it is not working as it should for ex-prisoners. So may I ask the Minister to explain how the new duty to collaborate will achieve the level of change required, and if it will be introduced in time to meet September's heightened need for housing. What incentives, or even sanctions, where necessary, will be put in place to ensure better joint working, not least in the interests of rehabilitation? Prison capacity has been such an emergency issue, but the time has surely come for this to come into much sharper focus as a slower burn way of reducing our prison population and the criminal justice budget.

Reoffending costs us all £18 billion a year, releasing prisoners into homelessness and especially rough sleeping single handedly undermines any previous and future rehabilitation activity. Without accommodation, they cannot seek work and restructure their lives. So local housing authorities collaboration is essential for rehabilitation. Some are far more effective than others at finding ex-prisoners accommodation, even in areas of very pressured housing markets. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reports that many London boroughs compare badly with statistical neighbours where housing is concerned.

London Assembly Housing Committee in 2002 five flagged inconsistent practice across London boroughs, with weak co-ordination between prisons, probation and borough housing teams, prisons not consistently complying with the duty to refer, and late referrals from prison, contributing greatly to uncertainty. Returning to the plan to end homelessness. This government has committed, by the end of this Parliament to a 50% reduction in people being homeless on their first night out of prison, and an increase in prison leavers in settled accommodation, three months post release and thereafter.

So to conclude, may I ask the Minister to outline how prisons and probation will deliver their responsibilities under the plan to embed local partnerships, co-location and pre-release planning.
14:17
Baroness Gill Portrait Baroness Gill (Labour)
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I thank the noble Lord Farmer >> I thank the noble Lord Farmer for securing this very important debate for a thousand prison debate for a thousand prison leavers every single month. The first day of freedom is the first day of a new sentence. Rough sleeping on our streets. The cyclical link between homelessness and the justice system is not an abstract policy debate. It is an urgent humanitarian and a public safety emergency happening right outside our doors.

We must be honest about how we got here. This crisis is the structural inheritance of 14 years of systematic neglect by the previous governments under their watch, a staggering rise in rough sleeping, left behind, crumbling prison estate running dangerously close to absolute capacity because of failure to build secure social housing. Worse, they chose punishment over prevention by keeping the Archaic Vagrancy Act on the statute book. The state's default response to vulnerable prison leavers sleeping in a doorway was to criminalise them rather than support them.

It was a broken approach that practically guaranteed a fast track route back to custody. The result? 68% of prisoners released directly onto the streets re-offend within a single year. Thankfully, we are seeing a fundamental shift from crisis management to genuine prevention. Having worked at the front end of social housing for almost two decades, I welcome the present government recognises that stable housing is the foundation of public safety. Instead of papering over cracks, decisive action is now being taken.

Decriminalisation. The government has officially repealed the draconian Vagrancy Act, treating rough sleeping as a vulnerability requiring support, not a crime. A strategic blueprint guided by the National Plan to End Homelessness, introducing a landmark duty to collaborate legally, compelling prisons, probation services and local councils to co-ordinate before a prisoner is released. But breaking this cycle isn't about demanding more taxpayer money. There are powerful, resource neutral changes we can make tomorrow by replacing red tape with common sense.

First, we must permanently ban Friday releases which dump vulnerable people onto the pavement. Just as the council offices closed for the weekend, stranding them until Monday. Moving discharge dates to midweek cost nothing but saves lives. Second, we must ensure day one readiness. No prisoner should cross the threshold without a valid ID, an active bank account and pre-processed Universal Credit claim ready to go. Finally, we should scale peer led mentoring models, training serving inmates as housing advisers inside the estate to manage paperwork before release.

This isn't about funding, it is about rewriting a broken system, providing a roof to a prison leaver is the necessary cornerstone of justice and public safety. I welcome the government's progress. Good, but I have a couple of questions for my noble Lord. The Minister, could you clarify some critical challenges? Firstly, how will the government ensure that local councils are fully resourced to transition prison leavers from temporary 12 week emergency placements onto permanent, secure social housing, so that we can permanently close the revolving door? And secondly, will you rapidly implement a no cost structural reforms like ending Friday releases and mandating day one ID readiness to stop people from slipping through the bureaucratic cracks? My Lords, I congratulate Lord Farmer on securing this debate on a subject which I know is dear to his heart.

It is also important to me. Both of
14:22
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Portrait Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (Liberal Democrat)
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us spoke to amendments in the Social Housing Bill around the difficulties of housing difficulties of housing ex-offenders. Much depends on how long the offender has been in prison, whether they are still in prison, whether they are still in touch with their family, whether they are likely to secure employment and, not least their employment and, not least their mental health. The library has produced an extensive brief for this debate, and Lord Farmer has this debate, and Lord Farmer has provided startling statistics.

In 2425, approximately 1000 prisoners a month were released from prison without anywhere to stay, and went on to sleep rough. As has already been said, it would seem that the early release scheme, introduced in 2024 to reduce the prison overcrowding, has not always been implemented in a satisfactory fashion, but hurriedly, with little preparation made for accommodation provision. An ex-offender released from nowhere to go on their first night is likely to sleep rough. This means a shop doorway, a traditional bus shelter, not a modern one, an empty derelict property or even a park bench.

This might seem acceptable on a short term basis, with weather similar to that we are currently experiencing, but not if it is November or January raining and with temperatures well below those to which they have been acclimatised in prison. Those who have served long sentences may have become dependent on the prison routine. Feel anxious about being released and how to cope outside. It is no wonder that some on release engage in criminal activity in the hope of being rearrested and returned to environment which they both which will both house and feed them, and where there will be company of sorts.

If it were a choice of sleeping rough in the middle of winter or returning to prison, I feel I might choose the latter. The role of the local housing authority is absolutely key to ensuring that appropriate accommodation is provided to ex-offenders on the day of their release. They are, of course, there are, of course, probation hostels which, provided they have capacity, can cover up to 12 weeks. Young men and women on release will be wanting to rebuild their lives.

Offenders commit crimes and arrive in prisons for a variety of reasons. Not least might be their inability to communicate effectively, read or write or understand basic maths. If there is sufficient capacity within the allocated prison, these skills can be acquired alongside qualifications to help gain them gain employment on release. But accommodation will be the stepping stone to setting them on their way. The elderly may have served long sentences and not be equipped for life without support.

Can the Minister say how many prisoners who are released are over the age of 70? Turning now to those on remand, some, once they come to trial, may be found innocent and released from court. Does the Minister have figures for how long the average stay on remand is. There are also those who are found guilty, but their sentence is such that they have already served it on remand, and so they are released straight away. How many, once they come to court, are released without further imprisonment? These figures, I don't believe, are currently included in published figures.

Nevertheless, this is a group which will indeed which will need help with housing as well as other support to rebuild their lives. The duty to collaborate. As has already been mentioned with local authorities, is part of the National Plan to End Homelessness and support those who are in crisis. Local authorities themselves have strategies to house the homeless, but it is not easy. There are also charities and agencies whose aims are to support ex-prisoners on their release.

It is, however, vital that they are given sufficient notice to allow them to find the relevant accommodation required. It is extremely disappointing that the duty to collaborate has not yet been implemented. Can the noble Lord, the Minister, say when this is likely to happen? And please don't say shortly, because without this measure some ex-offenders will continue to have nothing but sleeping rough to look forward to. I look forward to the Minister's comments at the end of this important debate.
14:27
Lord Bishop of Manchester Portrait The Lord Bishop of Manchester (Bishops)
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My Lord, I too. >> My Lord, I too. >> Thank the noble Lord Farmer for securing this important debate, not least because it brings together two of my own long term concerns homelessness and the rehabilitation of offenders. I declare my interests as the Chair of Church interests as the Chair of Church Housing Association and as a trustee of the clink Charity, which works within and beyond prisons. Homelessness is both a cause and a consequence of offending. Breaking this cycle requires an understanding of individual vulnerabilities and a whole community approach to rehabilitation.

Without long term joined up thinking, that provides prison leavers with the tools to live independently, prisoners are trapped in a cycle of re-offending. This undermines their intrinsic human value. Indeed, from these benches I would add their God given value. Indeed, in Saint Matthew's Gospel, Jesus notably refers to concern for prisoners as being of one of just a handful of criteria determining a divine judgement. My Lords, at the risk of repeating a cliche, prisoner rehabilitation requires a person centred approach, but it is a cliche that needs repeating, because all too often what we offer those leaving prison is a service approach.

The convenience of service providers, their organisational separates a human being into a series of disjointed attributes the homeless, the unemployed, the unskilled, their unwell, their unable to receive benefits in a timely manner. Then different service providers seek to respond to these distinct aspects, often in a very ill connected way, and the person just falls between the cracks. At the same time, the services that are provided in prison are too often separated from those provided outside. My Lords, all major life transitions are challenging, even if they are as welcome as being released from prison.

If the transition into life on the out is not to lead to further offending, many of those released, especially those who have served sentences of more than minimal duration, will need accompanying and accompanying over a period of months, if not years, by a consistent human presence, trusted human presence within and without the walls. Turning specifically to homelessness, this is a deepening crisis. My Lord, I believe Nacro figures show that a recent 40% increase in the number of people being released from prison into homelessness, and of course, people who leave prison are twice as likely to reoffend in their homeless prisons often lose their homes because they're unable to continue paying rent.

Meanwhile, there's a noble Baroness Gill is powerfully reminded us, releases on Fridays or otherwise out of working hours, meaning support services are not immediately available. I'll tell you who is immediately available. The drugs dealers. Prison leavers are then left to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar world, housing associations and other providers must be empowered to facilitate housing assessments while prisoners are still in custody, and to identify those most at risk of falling through the cracks. They must be enabled to provide prison leavers with routes into stable accommodation, and should be given adequate notice of release to allow them to do it effectively.

And my Lords, housing provision is not much use if you can't pay for it. The inability of claimants to begin a Universal Credit application whilst in prison pushes prison leavers into poverty. Immediately they're released. But the DWP more closely integrated into pre-release planning, prison leavers might be given the financial means to find accommodation from the day of their release. Not only would this better enable them to settle. It would also leave them less tempted to reoffend in order to find the money to pay the rent.

And while such measures could go a long way towards preventing homelessness in the short term, it's not enough to tackle the symptoms without addressing. At the same time, the root causes. In order to achieve lasting housing security, prison leavers must be given the skills and other noble Lords have already referred to this. To find steady employment and to generate a reliable income. The clink charity, on which I serve as a trustee and with which the noble Lord, the Minister is very familiar, provides training and rehabilitation support to people in prison or at risk of offending informed by their clients histories of trauma, unstable housing, exclusion from education and poor mental health.

The clink have now successfully trained over 5000 people. It's a prime example of the joined up working I'm talking about. It means prison leavers are treated as ends rather than means treated as those who are able to live lawful lives and make positive contributions to our communities. And if any noble Lords want to know more about us, please come along to our flagship restaurant in Brixton Prison. My Lords, this debate gives us an opportunity to begin to shape what a more integrated provision for those leaving prison, especially the many facing homelessness, might look like.

Another noble Lord, the Minister, has this very much on his own heart. I look forward to him responding to the debate in due course.
14:32
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton Portrait Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Labour)
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My Lords, I too want to thank the noble Lord Lord Farmer for tabling this debate and for his compassionate and evidence based work over many years in this space work over many years in this space to make our country safer and to improve things for the lives of all those impacted by the criminal those impacted by the criminal justice system. The topic of this debate is a subject close to my heart as well. Having spent part of my career working with people immediately prior to, on the day of and following release, known as Through the Gate Work in the sector.

And I will focus most of my remarks today around women because that's the bulk of where my professional experience lies. As has already been alluded to by the Right Reverend prelate, the transition from community from prison to community is a tough one. Some of the people I've worked with have told me it was a tougher transition than going from prison to the community. It's made harder by a lack of supportive relationships, by people not involved in crime, complicated applications for benefits, ensuring you have the correct medication, perhaps ensuring you have the correct support for abstinence programmes and when you might be met at the gates by your pimp or your dealer.

As well as the enormous social stigma that can last many years after your conviction and your licence has ended. And in the middle of all this, there's the question of where the person might sleep that night and in the subsequent nights, which is absolutely crucial to determining future positive outcomes. Noble Lords are well aware that the country is in a housing crisis and in a prison population and capacity crisis, and I'm proud of the labour benches, and I support all we are doing to address this, and not least the forthcoming Report stage on Monday of the Social Housing Bill.

Neither the prison crisis or the housing crisis can be solved overnight. But alongside the immediate actions this government has taken, noble Lords, I must urge noble Lords to continue to use the privilege of being long term incumbents to ensure that strategic and longer term plans are laid, so that we are able to both prevent and solve women's homelessness and criminal justice involvement. I want to tell you about Hayley, who I worked with, unsurprisingly, not her real name. I met her a few days before release, went to meet her from a prison located far from anywhere, as they often are.

It seemed to me on the day of her release, and we went on several bus journeys to save money rather than other forms of transport, to take her to probation, to the drug and alcohol services, and then to the Homeless Persons Unit. We sat there through a perfunctory questionnaire while I was rattled off, you know, do you have pets? Do you live? You know? What's your local connection? Are you the victim of domestic abuse? Are you the victim of sexual assault? Have you ever worked in prostitution? Like these were perfectly normal questions to ask in a public council office.

However, we spent several hours there, and through advocacy, we were able to secure her somewhere to sleep that night. But the part of the borough that she had been engaged in prostitution in was also the part of the borough where cheap air, kind of cheap B&B temporary accommodation was available and that is what the local authority could afford. So therefore, after a very long day, we were on our 10 or 11. By this point. We went with the keys to this address in the very streets that she had previously been living and working, using drugs and involved in prostitution.

I took her to the sparsely located room via Tesco to get a few bits, and left her for the night in this very basic room, with nothing more really than a magazine and a box of cereal to distract her. I was not optimistic about how this was going to go, and it felt deeply unsatisfactory to leave her there. And I'm still, a decade later, as I recount this to you, deeply unsatisfied with our failure to meet that woman's needs to keep her safe, even though it might have been regarded as a success because she did have a roof over her head for the night.

So I'm sure that well informed noble Lords across your Lordships' House are keen to take that strategic view on where marmot introduces the idea of the social determinants of health that noble Lords here can work on the social determinants of crime. In Hayley's case, it was childhood trauma contributed to by parental addiction, resulting in her own addiction, being groomed as a teenager into prostitution and living on the street when she wasn't living in a prison. However, there are many charities and local authorities doing good work in this space, and I urge my noble friend, the Minister, to keep digging into that evidence and drawing on the resource available from local authorities.

My former workplace, Islington Council, does amazing work finding solutions in this space. They have a Housing First officer employed by the council to meet prison leavers at the prison gate. They are co-located in the probation office to co-design their service. They have quarterly meetings with probation and at the last rough sleeping count, there was nobody in Islington found rough sleeping who had left prison. And I wonder if my noble friend the Minister has come across the Californian outfit, Impact Justice, who through their homecoming project, have helped house 600 000 people leaving prison for six months using an Airbnb style platform where hosts offer their spare room to the person being released.

A scheme like that would ensure another Hayley will not be left in a box room with a magazine and a box of cereal for company. With the whole system just crossing its fingers, it would work and we have to get this right. And I urge my noble friend, the Minister, to continue pursuing best practice from local authorities and internationally to meet this need.
14:37
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Portrait Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Conservative)
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I pay tribute to the many people >> I pay tribute to the many people who have spoken in the debate, and their direct and personal knowledge relationships, all breaks down, all their relationships, and they go to prison. And then the prospect of finding a home or work when they come out, of course, is all the less. I'm only saying the obvious, but it needs to be repeated. No one should complete a prison sentence. Step outside and find the pavement waiting.

We all agree that a prison sentence must never become a sentence to homelessness, but delivering that aspiration in practice is an intractable and complex problem. Partnership between prisons, probation and local housing authorities is essential, but it is not sufficient and the voluntary sector plays a vital role. So many of us are going to refer to different voluntary sector projects. The clink is quite remarkable and quickly declare my interest. I think my firm once found one of the chief executives, and I got to know them extremely well, because the voluntary sector can act flexibly, swiftly provide innovative solutions.

The voluntary sector can sometimes take steps which are rather unpopular with the public, which, if you're an elected body, you have, unfortunately, to satisfy the official figures, should disturb us profoundly. In the year to March, only 84% of prison leavers were housed. The night following their release, Nacro calculates over 12000 left prison homeless or rough sleeping more than 1000 people every month. And of course, they aren't just statistics, they're people leaving custody frequently with little money, addiction and medical vulnerabilities, fragile or non-existent family relationships and no place to go.

Now, I appreciate that the government have said much to suggest that they are signed up to this agenda. We are all realistic about the pressure on public funding, the difficulty of taking the public with us, and I'm sure nobody more than the Minister fights the corner in private. Whatever he can say to us in public. But I wonder when the Minister will feel able to publish specific accommodation and reoffending outcomes for prisoners released early. This, of course, is an extra complicating factor, and the comment about not releasing people on a Friday is so often said, but when will it be delivered? A form passed from one public body to another, I'm afraid doesn't keep somebody off the streets.

Practical steps have to follow now. The Prisons Inspectorate reports that many establishments still release 20 to 30% of prisoners without a settled address. The independent monitoring boards described the release preparation as alarmingly inadequate. What further steps are reassurance? Can the Minister give us that there's going to be improvement in this field? Well, homeless Link, another voluntary body working directly with people experiencing homelessness, offers practical answers. I always like them. One assume that every prisoner is at risk of homelessness until demonstrated.

Other two begin planning early. Three complete housing applications inside prisons. Four. Bring all the relevant agencies together before release, but more must be done. I want to commend to the Minister a particular charity, which I have come to know very well. The issue for many is that when they finished the 84 night statutory stay, there's a critical window. If the prison leaver can't overcome practical financial barriers, they may still leave temporary accommodation for the street. Small grants released quickly for deposits, identification documents, except essential furniture or travel can make all the difference now.

Greater chance. I wonder how many people in this house know about greater chance, anybody? Greater chance is a thrilling, pioneering charity started by Jonathan Tam ten years ago when he left Oxford. And what they do is they provide small grants to provided through the care workers to help prisoners and others at risk of homelessness, and they are obsessively evidence based. It is quite remarkable. When I first heard of them, I thought that is exactly what needs to be done because it reinforces the value of the trusted frontline worker who assesses whether or not the individual is worthy of the project or just can justify it, and then they raise the money to provide these grants.

So currently they're proposing a 10 million programme that would enable personalised budgets for small more than 5500 people leaving custody. It would evaluate housing stability progression from CAS3 into settled accommodation, engagement with probation, employment funding and savings across the criminal justice system. I really hope I don't want to trust the minister's patience because he was very kindly met the m m Mackay from philosophy in Prisons, but I really hope people find a chance to meet the the team from greater change.

They're as good as Emmaus. They're as good as the forward trust. We all need to work together to deliver this agenda.
14:43
Lord Bishop of Newcastle Portrait The Lord Bishop of Newcastle (Bishops)
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My Lords, I'm grateful to the noble Lord Lord Farmer for bringing this topic to our attention today this topic to our attention today and pay tribute to him for his tireless work in this area of concern. It's an honour to follow concern. It's an honour to follow the noble Lady Baroness Bottomley. The North East where I live offers The North East where I live offers both encouragement and challenge to the theme of our debate today. HMIP, Northumberland, Northumberland County Council, probation services and voluntary organisations that we've already heard quite a lot about have developed strong partnerships to improve resettlement.

Those partnerships deserve recognition, but they also raise the important question how are we assessing their effectiveness? Success should not simply be measured by whether a referral has been made or a duty fulfilled. It should be measured by outcomes. As other noble Lords have said. Did someone leave prison with suitable accommodation? Were they still housed weeks and months later? Did they avoid rough sleeping? Were they able to access health care treatment for substance misuse and, where appropriate, employment and training? Those outcomes are closely connected.

Homelessness rarely exists in isolation. It intersects with poor mental health, addiction, unemployment and social exclusion. Macro's recent report, Reducing deaths among prison leavers reminds us of the human consequences. It found that people released from prison in the north east are around six times more likely to die from a drug related cause within two weeks of release than those released in the East of England. While the report makes clear that this disparity cannot be explained by homelessness alone, it underlines the importance of viewing housing as part of a wider resettlement pathway, rather than as a standalone intervention.

There's also a strong economic case for getting this right, preventing homelessness at the point of release reduces pressure on emergency accommodation, health services, the criminal justice system and local authorities. Stable housing provides the foundation on which recovery, family relationships and employment can be rebuilt. Without that foundation, the risk of reoffending and repeated crisis raises significantly. Partnership working should therefore therefore be viewed not simply as good practice but as a sound investment in safer communities, better public services and better outcomes for individuals seeking to make a fresh start after prison.

Early release makes this even more challenging because it compresses the time available to co-ordinate housing, health care and community support, and that makes effective partnership working more important than ever. Organisations such as the Oswin Project in Northumberland, with their excellent cafe in Newcastle Cathedral, show what can be achieved when employment support, mentoring and rehabilitation are integrated with housing. But these initiatives depend on timely planning and sustained collaboration. Nacro has called for a clear plan to halve the proportion of people leaving prison who are homeless by 2029, and I hope the government will not only pursue that ambition, but also set out how success will be measured, what indicators will be used to assess whether partnership working is preventing homelessness and rough sleeping? How will outcomes be monitored for those released early, and how will examples of effective practice, such as those emerging in the North-East, be identified, evaluated and shared more widely? Ultimately, my Lord, the measure of success is not whether agencies work together, but whether people leaving prison are able to rebuild stable, healthy and productive lives.

So, in conclusion, can the noble Lord, the Minister, ensure that any measures around the effectiveness of partnership working include regional outcomes, so that we can understand both what is working in areas such as the North East and where further support might be needed.
14:48
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Portrait Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (Liberal Democrat)
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My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord Lord Farmer for securing this debate on a very serious issue that involves a very real tragedy. We've heard that about 1000 prisoners are released every month from prison directly into homelessness. Lord Farmer's question appears to start from the proposition that early release is an important contributor to the issue of homelessness. It may be, but I'm not sure we have the the evidence on that issue. We do know, however, that any release into homelessness has a very severe impact on released prisoners achieving reintegration.

Indeed, it is almost self-evident that they will not. And the stark evidence that there is calls into question. I suggest our whole strategy. As my noble friend Baroness Bakewell pointed out, the risks of release without a home to go to, away from the warmth and company such as it is in prison, are severe prisoners on release risk, mental health breakdown, relapse into alcohol or drug abuse and reoffending. The risks of reoffending being magnified. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester referred to the cycle of reoffending and Baroness Gill also reminded us of the cyclical issues that follow unplanned release.

Worse still, the risks of self-harm and early suicide are seriously increased by homelessness and rough sleeping. The right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Newcastle, emphasised the regional differences that there are in that. The article in the Guardian to which the library briefing for this debate and Lord Farmer referred by Jessica Murray on the 31st of May, told the stories of a young man released after serving a 19 month sentence for assault who was found in a house dead after taking prescription medicines, smoking crack cocaine because nowhere to Live to live could be found for him by the local authority.

Another man of 48 with known mental health problems couldn't be found, even emergency accommodation on release, and was found dead in a woodland after having to sleep in a tent. And another 49 year old died of a drug overdose five days after release from HMP Swansea. With nowhere to live, it is vital that accommodation be found and my noble friend Baroness Bakewell is right to a Memphis to emphasise the importance of local authorities in the improvement of release as part of the improvement of rehabilitation.

Baroness Hyde account of Hayley's experience shows how arrangements made by local authorities can fall far short of good practice. My Lords, I do not recite all these cases because they are dramatic. It is because they are or should be at least in part, avoidable. As we've heard under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, prison and probation officers have a duty to refer anyone to local authorities if they are likely to be made homeless within 56 days. And that means that preparing for prison release should happen early.

As has been stressed by several speakers, there is a requirement that the prisoners have to give permission for such an approach to a local authority. Can I ask the noble Lord, the Minister, what effect is that requiring having requirement having on the way in which the scheme is or is not working properly? Lord Farmer asked about the new duty to collaborate between prisons and local authorities. How will it work in practice? What planning has been done to ensure that the collaboration is real and effective, and will that collaboration be sufficiently resourced? And what are the steps being taken within the Prison Service and by probation officers to ensure that foreseeable homelessness can be avoided? How much is done before release to ensure that all prisoners have somewhere to go? My Lords, the Prison Reform Trust advises prisoners to seek advice from housing advisers or offender managers in good time before release.

Given the incapacity of some prisoners, their unwillingness or a misplaced optimism. Even when prisoners are soon to be released, what steps can we ensure? Can we take to ensure that that advice is tendered in time? Is enough advantage taken of the option for governors to help prisoners pre-release with payments made directly to accommodation providers for short term accommodation? When that is all that is available, my Lords, I add two points that have come out of this debate. First, there seems to be unanimity that Friday releases must end.

They are impractical, dangerous and cause a great many of these problems. Secondly, I know that the noble Lord is interested in and seeking to find arrangements whereby the location of prisoners is suitable for their release. It is no good being released in the northeast. If all your family contacts and prospects are in the southwest. Proximity to prisons of the last prisons to family contacts is of crucial importance.
14:53
Lord Ashcombe Portrait Lord Ashcombe (Conservative)
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My Lords. >> I am very grateful. >> To my noble. >> Friend, Lord. Farmer for securing. This important debate, and I thank him for continuing to draw attention to the vital link between successful rehabilitation and stable accommodation. This issue sits at the intersection of housing and criminal justice. If we are serious about reducing reoffending, protecting the public and ensuring that people have secured their sentence, served their sentence can rebuild their lives, we must recognise that a safe and stable home is often the foundation upon which all other progress depends.

A person leaving prison with nowhere to go is placed in an extremely difficult position. Without accommodation, it becomes harder to secure employment, maintain contact with probation services, access health care or establish a stable routine. These challenges affect not only the individual but also our communities and ultimately public safety. The noble the government's own figures demonstrate the scale of the challenge, as many other noble Lords have said in in 2022, 25, 24 to 25, around 1000 prisoners each month were released and found themselves sleeping rough on the night of release.

My Lords, that is deeply, deeply concerning outcome and raises serious questions about how effectively services are working together to support people as they transition back into the community. My Lords, this debate is not suggesting that the answer is simple simply to provide housing without expectation or responsibility. A conservative approach is always to balance compassion with accountability and believe in a fair, firm but fair system. Prison exists to protect the public and punish those who break the law. However, punishment and rehabilitation are not opposing objectives.

Successful rehabilitation is one of the strongest tools we have to prevent future crime victims of crime. That is why partnership matters. Prisons, probation services and local authorities all have responsibilities in helping prevent homelessness among prison leavers, the duty to refer, introduced through the Homeless Reduction Act, recognised that criminal justice agencies cannot operate in isolation from housing services. The question we must ask is whether those arrangements are working effectively enough in practice, too often, responsibility becomes fragmented.

One agency may identify a need, another may provide support, and a 3rd May have statutory responsibilities. Yet, unless those organisations are working to a shared plan, the individual leaving prison can fall through the gaps. That is particularly important when considering early release arrangements. If the state decides to release someone into the community earlier than anticipated, there must be a confidence that the basic foundations of resettlement are in place. There are three areas where greater focus would be beneficial.

First, intervention must begin. Earlier. Housing needs should not be considered only in the final days before release for prisoners. For many prisoners, accommodation planning should begin at the start of the sentence, giving time to address issues such as previous tenancies, family relationships and support needs. Secondly, there should be a stronger local accountability. We should be asking not only whether referrals are being made, but whether they are resulting in sustainable accommodation outcomes. And thirdly, we should continue to support employers charities as we which are important.

As we have heard from so many noble Lords and social enterprises that help prison leavers return to the productive lives, stable housing and stable employment employment often go hand in hand. My Lords communities rightly expect that those leaving prison are properly supervised and supported. Effective resettlement is therefore not just about helping

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offenders, it's about preventing Further crime and making our streets safer. In that regard, I streets safer. In that regard, I know that the noble Lord, the Minister, comes to this debate with significant background in this significant background in this field through his work employing former offenders and supporting rehabilitation. He has long argued rehabilitation. He has long argued that people leaving prison should be given a chance to turn their lives around. I think the highest greatly acknowledged this contribution he has made in that area.

I therefore ask the noble Lord, the Minister, what assessment has been made of the effectiveness of current partnership arrangements between prisons and local authorities? Does he believe existing duties are sufficient, or are further measures required to ensure that no prisoner leaves custody without a clear and realistic accommodation plan preventing homelessness among prison leavers is not a soft option. It is a practical measure to protect the public, reduce pressure on public services and ensure that rehabilitation has the best possible chance of success.

I look forward to the minister's response.
14:59
Lord Timpson Portrait Lord Timpson, The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Labour)
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My Lords, let me begin by thanking the noble Lord Lord Farmer for his question and for the for his question and for the opportunity to Heart. The noble Lord has long argued that if people are to leave crime behind, we must make sure support and stability are waiting for them beyond the prison gates, including a safe place to live. I couldn't agree more. That doesn't just mean a bed and a roof, although of course that's important. It's much more than that. It is somewhere they can call home, somewhere they can feel safe.

Somewhere they can keep their belongings. Somewhere they can receive a letter or register for a GP. Ultimately, somewhere they can start a new chapter in their lives. And as the noble Lord, Lord Ashcombe says, it's about dignity, stability, second chances and above all, hope. And the evidence is clear people released from prison without stable accommodation are more than twice as likely to re-offend as those who do. And on the question that a number of noble Lords mentioned about Friday releases, progress has been made.

It's a lot better than it used to be, but I think we still need to do more. And the more stable a prison the prison population is in the way we are doing our releases, the better that will become. But what shouldn't surprise us is that it is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild your life if you don't know where you will sleep each night. That's why accommodation is an essential foundation for rehabilitation. But it is out of reach for far too many, and there are no quick or simple fixes.

The first and most important thing we can do is to bring stability to the prison system. Too many offenders were trapped in a relentless cycle, locked up for short periods with little time to address their issues, released with no support and almost inevitably returning to prison. I am sure a number of noble Lords will have seen, as I have people standing outside the prison gates with a plastic bag with HMP written on, with a few pathetic possessions and nowhere to live at night.

It's not surprising they're going to go back. So we're taking a different approach, built around supporting rehabilitation and reducing reoffending. And we're already seeing results with 75% of prisons performing better and 90% of probation regions too. But there is a long way to go, and I'm clear we need to focus on what happens when somebody is inside prison and what happens when they leave. And as my noble friend Baroness Hyde clearly said through the gate, work is absolutely vital because preventing homelessness on release is not simply a housing issue.

It is about public protection, rehabilitation and rebuilding lives. And the example the noble Lady gave of Hayley just shows how complex it is, but also what a kind and generous person she is. My Lords, this is a challenge the Ministry of Justice cannot solve alone. It is a team game. So I'm working closely with the housing sector and colleagues across government as part of our National Plan to End Homelessness. We inherited not just a prisons crisis, but a homelessness crisis, both rough sleeping and households in temporary accommodation more than doubled under the last government.

And this homelessness only reflects the wider pressures on housing across the country. Our national plan commits to halving the proportion of prison leavers who become homeless on their first night after release. By the end of this parliament, while increasing the number in settled accommodation after three months. There's a lot to do, but that's an important target. All of this is supported by record investment of £3.6 billion in homelessness and rough sleeping services. And these are ambitious goals, but I am ambitious and I'm determined we will meet them.

As the noble Lord, Lord farmer has spent years helpfully reminding us, families can make an extraordinary difference too. For many people leaving prison, it is a parent, a partner, a grandparent, or a child who gives them the strength to keep going. Strong family relationships remain one of the most powerful protections against reoffending. We know that imprisonment has a profound impact on families too, especially children. So supporting families to maintain those relationships where safe and appropriate to do so is absolutely crucial.

That's why almost all public sector prisons offer specialist services to support prisoners and their families, and we're updating our policies to help prisons do even more to strengthen family relationships, and our incredible charities and voluntary organisations do an amazing job. Like housing first crisis, everyone plays a vital role in turning people's lives around. And I must thank the right Reverend prelate, the Bishop of Manchester, for mentioning the clink. It is a brilliant organisation. I was just sad when they closed the one we have near Manchester, HMP style.

But maybe at some point that can get going again. I also want to recognise the innovative approaches of residential, community and charity projects like Hope Street in Southampton and Willadeene, providing training, counselling, therapy and work opportunities all in one place and that's really important. I haven't heard of Impact Justice in California, offering a spare room for these people who really need it, and it reminds me of my childhood when people used to turn up at our house because my parents knew they didn't have anywhere to live, and they ended up staying with us, sometimes for years.

This is about stability, support and providing firm foundations for people to take their next steps. As the noble Baroness Bottomley said, you know, the greatest charity. I know a little bit about it, but I'm very happy to find out more about it. But giving small grants and and small donations to support people often it doesn't take much money can make a big difference. So we're making sure nobody leaves prison without the best possible chance of making a fresh start. And that begins with having somewhere safe to go and support from day one.

And as the noble Lord, Lord marks quite rightly emphasised, it is important that they get that support through the gate. And on day one it means identifying housing needs earlier, improving information sharing and bringing prisons, probation and local authorities together well before someone is released. So we're preventing homelessness, not responding to a person in crisis, and we're already seeing excellent partnership working. Let me give you one example. ID and banking administrators is something that's been running in prisons for about three years now to get everyone the right documents they need, and they work with the work coaches and DWP to get on Universal Credit.

So they're good to go when they leave. But too much still depends on where someone is released. A prison leavers chance of rebuilding their life should not depend on their postcode. I want people to receive the same high standard of support wherever they leave custody. They should be able to expect early engagement, a clear housing pathway and support that begins before they leave prison. So we're using performance data to work out which areas need to improve and which areas are getting it right so we can learn from them.

As part of this, we're working with MH CLG on new league tables, which will show by local authority how many prison leavers end up homeless or rough sleeping on release. This will drive accountability and transparency, and I'm pleased to announce they will be published by the end of the year and then annually from next July. We're also piloting strategic housing advisory boards along the same lines as the successful employment advisory boards I established a few years ago to address the big systematic barriers prison leavers face when trying to find housing.

As the Right Reverend, the Bishop of Newcastle said, it's about coordinating this partnership and the regional outcomes will help because we have regional employment councils and I'm hoping that they will help coordinate this work as well. And alongside this, we continue to invest in accommodation support. We recently added more than 200 beds to CAS three, the service that provides up to 84 nights of accommodation support following release. But we also recognise that some prison leavers face particular challenges in finding housing, especially those serving IPP sentences.

We're also investing in a new single accommodation service which brings together support delivered through commissioned rehabilitative services and duty to refer pathways into a single digital service. And now this is a big shift, the equivalent of moving from the Yellow Pages to booking.com. But if we get it right, this digital tool will improve information sharing and make sure we can match prison leavers to the right accommodations and support so no one reaches the prison gate, only to find they have nowhere to go.

The noble Baroness Bakewell asked me about the number of prisoners who were released over the age of 70. As of as of the 31st of March this year, 2180 individuals held in prison in England and Wales were aged over 70, which represents 2.5% of the total prison population. Published data is not currently available on prison releases by age band, and I was asked a question on the average stay on remand. We don't, unfortunately currently hold this data, but if there's any other questions that I haven't covered that noble Lords have raised, I will write.

And to finish off, the National Plan to End Homelessness also includes a commitment to introduce a duty to collaborate. And we will legislate for this as soon as possible. And the noble Baroness will, I'm afraid, be slightly disappointed, because it's when parliamentary time allows. But we all recognise how important this is and we want to get on with it. This duty will compel public services to work together to prevent homelessness by identifying need earlier, intervening sooner and supporting people at crisis point.

My Lords, as I said earlier, this is a team game. If we are to turn lives around and protect the British public, we need prisons, probation services, local authorities, housing providers, charities, families and communities all working together to make sure everyone leaving prison has the opportunity of a safe, secure and stable home. Because this is about more than a bed for the night, it is about changing and even saving lives because every prison gate should open not to homelessness, but to hope fullness, but on the possibility of fewer victims, safer communities and a better life.

I thank the noble Lord for bringing this important issue before the House, and I look forward to ongoing discussions.
15:09
None Portrait Debate: Future capability of the United Kingdom’s armed forces in the current international situation Lord Harlech (Conservative)
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My Lords, motion for debate. Future capability of the United Future capability of the United Kingdom's Armed Forces. Lord Harlech.

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Harlech. My Lord, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have signed up for this debate and grateful that your this debate and grateful that your Lordships are able to debate United Kingdom Armed Forces capability. Shortly after the publication of the Defence Investment Plan, I look forward to all noble Lords contributions, not least that of the noble Lord, the Minister, and the valedictory speech from the right Reverend prelate, the Bishop of Southwark. I also 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 and 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 actually 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, so I have no interest in a quarrel about who cut what a decade ago, or who's pledging what for 2035. Those are the two great alibis of defence policy 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 which we might actually have to fight? Those years? My Lords, are not theoretical.

Admiral Sir Keith Blount, who stepped down only this year as NATO's deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, warned a fortnight ago on the Times's general and journalist podcast that Britain now risks losing influence within the alliance itself 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. Let me give credit where the motion invites it on future capability. The Strategic Defence Review was serious work, and I support its direction of travel and 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 and 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 and not the last one. My concern is not the direction of travel. It is that 5 billion is not enough and that the wider plan around it. When you open it up, does not bear weight.

So consider the headline £298 billion over four years, a number designed to end an argument, but only around 15 billion of it, is new money over last year's settlement. And of that 15, the Defence Secretary himself has acknowledged that most 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.

And is even that money real? Because of the 15 billion, only around ten is actually 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 I owe you. The plan then leaves the years from 2030 to 2035. All but blank reaches 2.7% of GDP in 2027, and then flatlines and funds neither the 3% promised for the next Parliament, nor the 3.5% signed up to for 2035.

Set against the threat the government's own advisers placed 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%, and even then, only when financial conditions permit, is far too cautious. Currently, we feel just 30,000 trained reservists, compared to 137,000 regulars. Rendering rendering our reserve force 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 own 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 costed, cost effective way to restore the strategic depth this nation has neglected for far too long. Numbers, though, are the easy part, and I would not have the house think I'm merely asking for a longer list of names.

A reservist without equipment, without training days, and without a drill hall to train in is not a capability. And here our record is dismal. The Public Accounts Committee has found that the volunteer estate. The reserve centers on which. All of this depends to be in what the Department itself calls managed decline. The reserve estate optimization programme has all but stopped. Tranche one was delivered, the funding bid for tranche two failed and had to be rebuilt, and the Department has still not secured funding for the phases beyond.

And 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 noble Lord to Minister to break. When budgets tighten, the reserves are always the first to be raided because it is. It is dispersed because it is part time and because, sadly, too many decisions affecting it are taken by regulars.

But if the reserve is genuinely part of the first echelon, as the review implies, and because our regular forces are so small, then it. It cannot also be a balancing item. You cannot ask a formation to be ready to mobilise while treating its training, its equipment and its accommodation as discretionary spending. And this matters most for the mission closest to home homeland defense and the national 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, who would reinforce the response to a flood, a cyber attack and an act of sabotage, drawing on their skills and experience from their civilian life. Every reserve center 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. And I would add one further warning on the industrial base. It is small and medium firms who build the very drones. This plan celebrates, and they are the least able to survive a government that cannot make up its mind. Tech UK warns 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're gone and our allies see all of this again.

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 is good and is the right doctrine. I'm delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen in his place. NATO first is a good doctrine shared across this House, but a nation ranked 31st of 32 on NATO's own scorecard is practicing NATO first in the press release and NATO last in the plan.

So, my Lords, I put three questions to the noble Lord, 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? Second, will the government raise its ambition on the reserves well beyond 20%, and when it. Fund the volunteer estate and the training and equipment on which such growth depends? And third, given that the sharpest risk is placed before 2028, what capability will actually reach the front line inside that window? My Lords, I table this motion not not to embarrass the government.

I tabled it 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 here.
15:20
Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill Portrait Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill (Labour)
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The question is that this motion >> The question is that this motion be agreed to with apologies. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, for securing this important debate. He speaks with great authority, He speaks with great authority, particularly about the reserve forces, and I agree with everything he said about that subject, and I congratulate him on his own service. I speak to employers and employers organisations who are keen to support our reserves, and I take this opportunity once again to talk up the role of the voluntary reserve.

They give us a continually refreshing source of capability and long term resilience. They're 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. So I ask the government once again to continue to encourage more employers to take on reservists, and I look forward to progress reports on the medium term aim of seeing the active reserve expanded by 20%, and I acknowledge that Lord Hollick's ambitions go beyond that.

My Lords, the subject of this debate raises huge questions about national priorities in an era of new external threats and others. 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 Lord Hollick has already touched on. The future effectiveness of the UK's armed forces, depends on 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 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 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 and the evidence the committee has heard so far chimes with what I've been told separately by defence companies and also 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 can't provide predictability to smaller companies, and they're all too aware of Mod bureaucracy that stifles innovation and speed. And 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 industries 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, and I invite the Minister in response to tell the House today what progress is being made towards this goal. And in conclusion, I might note with great joy today's announcement of a new partnership with 35 universities to boost defence skills and research. And I would say to the Minister that I have met many graduates and apprentices in defence companies who tell me that their universities encourage them to try to seek careers in the defence industry, and I invite the Minister to take that back to colleagues.

Yes.
15:24
Lord Stirrup Portrait Lord Stirrup (Crossbench)
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My Lords, the most obvious and urgent thing to say about military capability is that we have nothing capability is that we have nothing like enough of it, either now or as currently planned for the future, and 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. The first is to warn against oversimplification when considering future force structures. A 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 frontline personnel, and we can certainly employ them to create more mass. So 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's crucial that we adopt transformational technologies, but we should not imagine that any one of them will solve all of our problems.

My second point is that 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's worth remembering that many of the capabilities the Ukrainians are employing so successfully against Russia today did not exist four years ago, so 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.

And 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. My final point is to warn against focusing solely on capital investment. Military capability requires not just the right equipment, but also people who can operate it effectively in the most demanding and dangerous conditions. That means they regular and reserves need regular and rigorous training. Without it, we'll be sending them into combat inadequately prepared for what they will face.

And this not only weakens our warfighting effectiveness, it exposes our people to unnecessarily high risk. This would be an act of criminal negligence. Now, training requires not just equipment, but also the fuel, the spares, and the other support necessary for its operation. And 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, and in year pressure on the defence budget means this will get worse.

Now, I understand that the Mod can do little about the problem in the current financial year, but I ask the noble Lord, the Minister, to assure the House that the position will be transformed in future years. The government simply cannot go on failing our people in the country more widely in this way. My Lords, most of what I've urged and I could have urged much more, comes down to funding the settlement in the Defence Investment Plan was inadequate and incoherent in light of the commitment the government has rightly made to NATO.

This failure endangers us all and it must be put right very quickly. Yes.
15:28
Lord Swire Portrait Lord Swire (Conservative)
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My Lord, it's a very great >> My Lord, it's a very great honour to follow the noble and gallant Lord. I find myself in the no man's land, squeezed between a no man's land, squeezed between a former chief of the Defence staff and a valedictory Bishop. So I shall try and navigate as best I can through what could be dangerous territory. I particularly want to welcome back my noble friend or noble friend, Lord Harlick. It's very good to see him.

He's been sent to the scrap heap. The re me have got hold of him, reconditioned him, polished him up, and he's come back to serve on these benches, and we'll get a lot of use from him over the coming years of that, I'm certain, my Lords, I want to draw attention to not only because I have to under the rules of the House, but also because I think it's appropriate to the deliberations this afternoon of my involvement with Boca, a company dedicated to security and defence, aerospace and space, sovereign resilience, AI and quantum.

And 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. My Lords, I listen carefully to what the noble and gallant Lord just said, and he is right, and I suspect many of the speeches this afternoon will dwell on similar topics to underscore and underline 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 assist in combating new threats, both conventional war fighting but also in the gray zone, such as the cyber domain. As such, defence procurement must be more focused on an annualized budgeting, with agile deployment and testing, it must rely more readily on partnering with private capital to not only share the burden of finance, but also 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 these are likely to fall in the number of items procured over the next decade. My Lords, 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 the unsustainable welfare budget must be his priority, without which the government will simply be unable to fund the necessary spending we need on defence in order to honour both our international commitments and ensure the safety of our own people here.
15:32
Lord Bishop of Southwark Portrait The Lord Bishop of Southwark (Bishops)
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I'm grateful to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Hollick, for gallant Lord, Lord Hollick, for bringing this debate. Let me begin my valedictory address by making clear that it is not my intention to advise His Majesty's Government on the number of dreadnought battleships that they should be laying down, or what should be the future of the Blue Streak missile programme. But I do wish to address some wider issues, which I believe are directly relevant to our future capability and arise out of our current situation.

My Lords, as the right Reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Norwich reminded the House recently during debate on the Armed Services Bill on the 6th of July from the Global Peace Index 2026, that the world has continued its long standing trajectory of deteriorating peacefulness. It has always been my contention that since the UK left the European Union, that the costs of our security, our diplomatic efforts and our cultural reach will need to rise since we no longer benefit from the partnership and pooled resources that the union provides.

Instead, my Lords, our defence spending has stagnated. NATO is in difficulties 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 my Lords, as we shall hear that a different trajectory is planned for UK defence a good deal, my Lords, will be said upon 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 situation should only be addressed by human presence, not an AI driven remote response. A II and drones are no substitute for physicality, presence and engagement. It may seem strange, my Lords, 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 are 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 the 7th of 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, my Lords, the other issues that I alluded to, such as the size and effectiveness of our diplomatic service matters and my 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, my Lords, 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 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 Lord charters, that the largest party in this house is the praying party. I give thanks for that and assure you all of my continued prayers.
15:37
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon Portrait Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Conservative)
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My Lords, it's 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. defence and security of the realm. In an era of unprecedented global volatility and conflict. But, my Lords, 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 dear friend, the Bishop of Southwark, and congratulate him on a poignant and reflective valedictory speech. I feel immense warmth with the right Reverend President. His neighborly affection for he is the person who is the spiritual guide for many of the good people of Wimbledon. He is the shepherd. Indeed, as many remind me, I've always maintained that trying to guide people spiritually, especially when they're quite diverse and including the highly opinionated, occasionally folk of South London, requires a level of tactical patience, strategic diplomacy and a level of sheer resilience that would be a challenge to any seasoned peacemaker around the world.

Indeed a commander. Yet the right reverend prelate has done so for over 15 years, with a quiet but effective level of diplomacy. And, as we've seen, seen today, again, boundless grace and deep humility. My Lords, in this House, the right reverend prelate, has been a reassuring and welcome presence. He has never been one, as we've heard again today, to shy away from what I would call difficult issues. Indeed, over many years, at the very place where the noble Lord 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. Incredibly close to my own heart. I live by a mantra that the greatest test of our own faith is when we stand by the faith, and for the faith and belief of others he's lived by that we have stood together on many platforms advocating for human rights, and I've always been struck, as I've already alluded, by his gentle yet effective moral clarity. Whilst the Ministry of Defence has frequently struggled with its logistics at times, the Diocese of Southwark has operated with enviable precision.

I would argue under his stewardship, it has proved, perhaps, that faith can not only move mountains but can also manage complex organisations. We work together. Where he 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, not just 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 the Archbishop of Jerusalem, Archbishop Hossam, a friend to us both, and I was proud to lead on the issue of Christian persecution, where the support of the right Reverend and others on the bench spiritual were vital.

My Lords, I'm sure I speak for all in this House. We will miss deeply his wisdom, his pastoral warmth, and his profound service to this House and to the nation. And we wish him every blessing for his well deserved retirement. And he does so with our sincere prayers. My Lords, turning back to earthly challenges in thanking my noble friend Lord Hollick for tabling this debate, and again joining the chorus of welcoming back, we'll hold the gallant for a moment or two.

I'm sure that's something in the future. When I look at the current international horizon, I'm reminded of my own time representing our nation and our interests globally. But as a foreign Minister, one learns very quickly the value of diplomatic time. But diplomacy itself, as any seasoned hand will tell you, is greatly assisted. When the person you are negotiating, negotiating with knows you have slightly something more formidable behind you than a beautifully drafted joint communique. In my case, of course, it was my noble friend Baroness Goldie.

We were a double act, often on the world stage. But, my Lords, on a serious note, we find ourselves surveying a world that is to put in our customary British way, highly complex to our east. State based threats are no longer looming. They are real. They are redrawing borders in maritime lanes around the world. We see state and non-state actors operating with technology that frankly, makes some of our procurement processes look positively glacial. Which 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've seen their work on the ground. I've witnessed what they did in places such as Afghanistan. The only issue, as has already been highlighted in this debate, that there's increasingly rather few of them. We have a navy of sublime sophistication, the noble Lord West in his place, though uncertain, Tuesday's one wonders if we have quite enough holes to actually cover the water we are legally obliged to protect.

And indeed, in fulfilling our duties to the treaties we are signed up to. Our defence procurement has historically operated on a philosophy that I only 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 it was intended for has resolved itself. The government's own SDR, so ably led by the noble Lord Robertson, who I'm delighted in this place, chairs the International Relations and Defence Committee, which I'm honoured to serve on, highlighted this very issue of procurement.

Yet I want to be fair, my Lords, the SDR and the welcome and final publication of the delayed Defence investment plans is a move forward and shows that we are walking, waking up to the reality rather of the challenges we face in 2026. We're investing heavily in cyber, in space, in 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 on 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 indeed defending the Falkland Islands. We are a nation that prides itself on punching above our weight. It's a marvellous face, but without that punch behind it, having the force of our forces, you eventually bruise your knuckles, our friends. But more importantly, our foes are looking at us very carefully. Therefore, my Lords, to conclude, as we've stood rightly together in unity on Ukraine, and I commend the Prime Minister's comments today in Ukraine and thank him for his service in that particular area.

Let us continue to work together, as my noble friend Lord Hollick said in supporting the government steps to modernise. But 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 deploy today, equip today and sustained for tomorrow. We need the Defence Readiness Bill, and I would ask the noble Lord, the Minister, when we may see that our adversaries, my Lords, are not waiting for the next strategic defence review to conclude they are acting.

And whilst the pen, when it comes to peace, may be seen as mightier than a sword, it's 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

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need to deploy. Yes, my Lord, I join my noble

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Yes, my Lord, I join my noble friend Lord Ahmed in congratulating the right Reverend Prelate, Bishop of Southwark, on his final speech. 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. congregations in our churches. He'll find that easier, I think, when he's no longer encumbered by
15:46
Lord Hamilton of Epsom Portrait Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Conservative)
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the necessary political compromises that have to be made in your Lordships House, my noble friends Lordships House, my noble friends have made the point that we haven't got enough money for the defence budget, but nobody's actually budget, but nobody's actually asking why we haven't got enough money. The fact is that there's a money. The fact is that there's a lot of money being spent by this government. Tremendous amount on welfare, which is actually not achieving what it's intending to do. It's supposed to be lifting people out of poverty.

And it's not. It's 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, I think, for our democracy, and I think I would be very worried if I was 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's ever worthy of forming a government again.

And I think if I was in the Labour Party, I'd be very worried about that. Indeed, this comes at a particularly unfortunate period in defence because we are looking. I think there have been a lot of false forecasts of peace in Ukraine. But I think as the Ukrainians develop technology in the amazing way that they have and develop with Western help, longer range missiles that can penetrate a central facilities in Russia, that we will bring this conflict eventually to an end.

And at that stage, NATO has got to ask itself, who is actually going to fess up and come to the plate and say that they're prepared to help in providing Ukraine with the essential security guarantees that it needs to ensure that Russia does not invade again in the future. And that's going to be a big test for NATO. And I look back to the Joint Expeditionary Force, which was established by NATO in South Wales in, I think, 2014.

And two years later, two countries joined the Joint Expeditionary Force that was Finland and Sweden. Neither were members of NATO at the time. And when you come to think of it, if we could expand the Joint Expeditionary Force, there's been a nucleus of the coalition of the willing. And I gather from a former colleague, I was on the NATO parliamentary Assembly, and I got slung off because the Conservatives did so badly in the election that actually Poland might join the Joint Expeditionary Force.

If that is the case, that is very significant indeed. And that forms the nucleus of a coalition of the willing that might actually be able to change the price of fish in European NATO. As we look to a future where I think the United States will be playing a growingly reduced role in terms of defending European interests. And indeed, you can have some sympathy with them when they remind us that Russia has an economy smaller than that of Italy.

And therefore, I think it's a great pity that we can't fund our armed forces at this moment properly, at this very critical moment, when we should be setting an example to all our allies and not be laggards in the business.
15:50
Baroness Antrobus Portrait Baroness Antrobus (Labour)
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My Lords, I appreciate that this debate has already focused, and I'm debate has already focused, and I'm sure will continue to, on the challenges facing our armed forces issues around funding the Defence issues around funding the Defence Investment Plan. And, of course, as Lord Harlow eloquently argued, the role of our reserves and I should declare an interest as my husband, as a reservist. However, in the context of the 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 National Security Strategy Joint Committee in this place this Monday and made an important point, which 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 its key investment commitments, which included to the UK nuclear deterrent.

It committed to over £20 billion more investment in the defence nuclear enterprise over the next four years when compared with the previous four. In order to modernise the UK's nuclear capabilities and the facilities that deliver them, including new submarines. This is a commitment which 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 F-35a combat aircraft returning to the airborne nuclear role, which 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 distill lessons from that era. While there were many differences, the weapon will not be a UK weapon. The technology has changed vastly. The likely readiness commitment will be significantly less. There is also much to learn from the past. I of course say this 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. The future. This future airborne capability. The theme, of course, of today's debate, future capability, will add an important rung to the escalation ladder.

As the noble and gallant 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, the stronger the deterrent effect. To conclude, there are many challenges facing our armed forces. But as my noble friend the Minister 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

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our NATO allies in the world. Yes. My Lord, I congratulate my noble

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My Lord, I congratulate my noble friend for introducing this debate, and I join other noble Lords in and I join other noble Lords in wishing the right Reverend prelate best for the future, and for thanking him for his work and for thanking him for his work and for his valedictory speech. I begin by commending the Lord speaker's lecture delivered by the noble Lord, lecture delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, last evening. I encourage all noble Lords to read it, if they haven't already.

He
15:54
Baroness Helic Portrait Baroness Helic (Conservative)
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posed the fundamental question Is Britain really safe? His answer was Britain really safe? His answer was very clear. The threats we face are real. They're growing, and meeting them will require urgency, resilience and sustained national resilience and sustained national resolve. My Lords, our armed forces, regular and reserve, remain among the finest anywhere. But the 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 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 would welcome the challenge remains, delivering them at the pace 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 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, and 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 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 expanded overnight. Skilled workers cannot be created in a crisis, and supply chains cannot be rebuilt.

Once conflict has begun, industry needs confidence that the government decisions will be timely, consistent and backed by long term commitment. As a noble Lord, Lord Robertson has warned, we are running out of years. If the threats are accelerating, our response must accelerate to national security is not solely a ministerial responsibility. It also depends on resilient energy supplies, secure communications, cyber resilience and the protection of critical national infrastructure. Defence is now hulk 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 our ability to deliver them. Britain's influence rests on credibility, demonstrating that when we identify a threat, we have both 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. May I therefore ask the noble Lord several questions. 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's doing to give the defence industry the confidence to invest in skills production and innovation, so that it can respond rapidly in a crisis? And finally, when will Parliament see a credible pathway to defence spending that matches today's security challenges and enable the ambitions of the review to be realised? My Lords, Britain retains exceptional armed forces, world class intelligence services and 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.
15:57
Lord Craig of Radley Portrait Lord Craig of Radley (Crossbench)
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Lord and said in recent months about the possibilities of a Russian conflict with NATO. Such a war will be deterred if we and our allies react to strengthen our weak 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 government for UK, a clear graph of intended progress to 3%, then 3.5% is required, not ring fenced in any with any fiscal conditions allow tight caveats of uncertainty.

But, my Lords, it takes two to tango. So the assessment by the potential aggressor on their own warlike capabilities and chances of strategic success matters. If Russia were that opponent, what's to learn from their fight with Ukraine? Far from being what was expected, namely a quick conquest of Ukraine that changed to a Russia subservient government in Kiev, Ukrainians, after great difficulty and challenge, are now able, with much greater help, to hold Russian advances and to operate far into Russia itself, to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as into Crimea and elsewhere.

Maybe Putin sacked some senior commanders for only bringing him bad news. Maybe their successes rely on holding their posts by only reporting good news from the front. Maybe Putin even feels that all adverse results reported reflect Western propaganda, and so cannot possibly be true. But my Lord, what he feels and believes is what will drive him on. While much of his available forces are fighting in Ukraine, there is much more uncommitted with advanced capabilities in missile and maritime offense, that conflict measures are already occurring and increasing in dangerous ways.

But faced by strong NATO alliance, would Russia believe it could wage and win a war of conquest, not just with arms, but to achieve political mastery as well? One judgment might be without the latter incentive to go further than some conflict measures may only exist if the NATO alliance appears to be weakening or even break me apart. But, my Lords, while there are differences between last century Soviet belief in the worldwide spread of communism and today's Russia, we learn from our spy Oleg Gordievsky of the Kremlin's abiding view that NATO is an aggressor.

From their perspective, since 1949, NATO has moved from the original transatlantic 12 country alliance. It's one of the 32 that has grown and reached eastwards to the very borders of Russia from their far north, all the way down to Turkey, far too close to Mother Russia for its own sense of security. Now NATO is 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 may not be possible to ease such confrontation in the military domain, but more might be done with arts, culture and sporting events to be to ease the existing tensions. And Putin is

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not immortal. Lord's. A week ago in the times, Andy Burnham said that increasing Andy Burnham said that increasing our national security will be my first priority. And it made me ask, first priority. And it made me ask, does he really mean this? Because this government has had loads of top priorities. The current Prime top priorities. The current Prime Minister has said that growth is the number one priority, the noble Baroness Hayman

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Baroness Hayman Told the House that the absolute priority for the government is to have a water bill. The noble Baroness Twycross disagreed. She told this House that making creative careers accessible was the government's key. I have a whole dossier of number one priorities
16:02
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Portrait Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Conservative)
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tossed out by government Ministers, all utterly meaningless. So I have all utterly meaningless. So I have to ask myself, does Andy Burnham mean what he says? Is he really 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 prepared to make the money available? Is he really prepared for domestic programs 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. And 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. So I hope Andy Burnham means what he says and will throw his weight in support of defence, but it will mean standing up to his backbenches, which the Prime Minister has failed to do, most notably on welfare reform.

But he needs to do this. We've had warning after warning from the noble Lord Robertson of Port Ellen about this. We're highly vulnerable to a Russia on the warpath, not just from potential military attack, but attacks on our domestic infrastructure, which could bring down our energy networks, our banking and financial systems, and the day to day life of the whole country. And finally, can I say this? Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister next week, and 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 the new in this House, in the new government, will still be the noble Lord.
16:05
Lord Empey Portrait Lord Empey (Ulster Unionist Party)
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My Lords, can I join with Lord Swire in welcoming the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, has been recycled, and the value of that is before us this afternoon. We have talked repeatedly about percentages of GDP to be spent on defence. My Lords, I don't 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 really doesn't make much sense. And I think that we need to re-evaluate that whole thing.

I was fortunate enough to be present when President Zelensky came into this building in March. I attended the meeting in Committee Room 14, and many noble Lords would have been there, and he had a big screen up and he had a laptop, and he was able to show us real time what was going on on his own battlefront, what was coming in, what was going out. And there were five, three, four other laptops that were in Ukraine that were doing the same thing.

And most of us went to that meeting on the understanding and accepting that he presumably wanted more more money, more ammunition. No, he was selling at that meeting. He was not begging because he has developed with his colleagues a wartime economy. He's been agile, innovative, not simply for commercial reasons, but out of sheer necessity to survive. At last night's lecture by Lord Robertson, he started by mentioning the fact that we're not really engaging in a meaningful conversation with the general public on what confronts us.

We have all. This is not a political thing, and Lord Hollick opened up the debate with that point. This goes back 40 years. This goes back to the end of the Cold War. And we were all very happy, whether we were Ministers or whatever, to spend the money on things that we felt were important. Non-Defense matters, whether it was education, whether it was welfare, whether it was health. We were all very happy to do that. We've all allowed it to happen.

So we're not throwing stones here, but we need to recycle in our own minds and in the minds of the general public, the the issues that are confronting us now. I don't believe Putin's tanks are going to roll up Whitehall or his submarines come up the Thames, although probably most of us would hardly notice if they did. The fact is that we haven't got our mindsets right. We need to engage with the public to educate people on what we're confronted with, the ending, the damage that can be done to our infrastructure, the undersea cables where so much of our wealth and commerce are dependent.

And we. There's hardly a day goes by when we don't have a photograph of some ship in the paper that's been decommissioned or is laid up in a port somewhere. It's not good enough. My Lords, and I think we've got to start a conversation, and I hope the new Prime Minister will do that, because we've got to get the people on side. And unfortunately, it 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 that is not driven by logic, but by ideology.

Yes.
16:09
Lord Risby Portrait Lord Risby (Conservative)
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My Lord, sir, perhaps this debate is particularly timely as the Farnborough International the Farnborough International Airshow begins on Monday. We do indeed live in a volatile and dangerous age, but there is no dangerous age, but there is no member of your Lordships House who cannot recognise that over time, our influence in the world on the world stage has been reducing, and at the heart of this has been an anaemic economy and also 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 narrow band 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.

And 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 and indeed, rapidly increasing congestion in space, means that there are now 16,000 satellites compared with 3005 years ago, and 100,000 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 warfighting 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, coordinating fast paced multi-domain operations and combined arms maneuver becomes very difficult. The recent Defence Investment Plan announced that the incoming Skynet six narrowband satellite system would not proceed.

Cancelling Skynet six will have a demonstrably adverse effect, so disappointing when many in the industry felt that for three years the significance of this had been understood clearly by government. Now, by contrast, overall, if we want a model of a country that has really understood the challenges, then we turn to Poland. They are investing 4.5% of their GDP into hardened, 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.

And recently I had the chance to learn all about this from talking with government officials who are in Poland. And what was spelled out was impressive, yet depressing because this had arisen, this great success from fiscal and pro-business policies, which had stimulated growth in the private sector. And for us, my Lords, the lessons are obvious.
16:13
Lord Forbes of Newcastle Portrait Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Labour)
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My Lords, I. >> On securing this essential debate for the future of our country. And can I also thank him for his service and for the service for his service and for the service of all our Armed Forces volunteers. And I would like to associate myself with many of the comments he made in his opening remarks. I begin, my Lords, 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, Singapore's multi Pillar Resilience Doctrine all demonstrate one lesson the defence of a 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. So 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, not 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 and real resources and real accountability. Second, we must fuse civilian expertise with military capabilities. Our armed forces need engineers, cyber specialists, medics, logistics 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 drawing on civilian expertise trained for crises both domestic and international, and integrated into defence planning.

That, my Lords, would not be conscription. It would be a national capability building exercise for every community and every nation in this country. And thirdly, we must redesign command and coordination for the hybrid age. Israel's Home front Command integrates civilian protection directly into military planning. Japan's Self-Defense forces train routinely with civilian disaster agencies. Norway's civil and military cooperation 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 mobilization in times of crisis.

It should sit alongside military 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, the undermining of trust in institutions is all happening now to our people, our economy, 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, my Lords, is the scale of ambition we need. And that, my Lords, is the future capabilities our times demand.
16:17
Baroness Eaton Portrait Baroness Eaton (Conservative)
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My Lords, I join with others in thanking my noble friend Lord thanking my noble friend Lord Hollick for initiating this debate today. My Lords, this House meets today. My Lords, 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 risking crossing the 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 cyberspace and beneath our sea. And the 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. My Lords, this is a moment not only for ambition, but for candour, because the hard truth is this our war fighting readiness has been degraded for years now. It didn't 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, published only recently, was meant to deliver the Strategic Defence Reviews 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 be need to be made about discretionary spending. Even after the dip, our defence spending will only reach 2.7% of GDP by 2020 728.

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 2535 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 as the smallest size since the start of the Napoleonic Wars.

Over two centuries ago, the Royal Navy is at its smallest size since the mid-seventeenth 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. My Lords, we rightly welcome new investments in drones and autonomous systems in the dreadnought programme in Aukus.

These are opportunities to modernise, to deter and protect those who serve. But let us be honest, the scale of the challenge ahead means we are beyond easy answers. Rebuilding war fighting readiness cannot happen overnight and requires a laser focus that has eluded us by choice or by net by neglect, but for generations. So as we today 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.

Hollick.
16:22
Lord Magan of Castletown Portrait Lord Magan of Castletown (Conservative)
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For. >> Initiating this debate. >> I declare my interest. My grandfather was a soldier. 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. 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 do, the traumas of uncertainty, apprehension and fear, hoping the telephone is not going to ring. That are part and parcel of such family involvement and commitment. One does not forget those days of such very considerable anxiety. Yet my Lords were now faced once again with an ever increasing prospect that our own forces will be finding themselves in a front line where technology is changing the character of warfare at the fastest rate in history.

My Lords, the UK is woefully inadequately prepared for the challenges now likely to be faced. Starmer's administration has comprehensively failed to meet its responsibilities for the very necessary, further rapid enhancement of the defence of the realm. It is all the more notable that Lord Coaker has presided with increasing exasperation over the extensive debates held in this House on the June 25th Strategic Defence Review, and subsequently on the long delayed Defence Investment Plan, which certainly has not, as was promised, delivered a vision of warfarin readiness and transformation over the next ten years and beyond.

In fact, the delayed publication of the Defence Investment Plan in June 2026 was so poorly received that it led to the immediate resignation of John Healey, Secretary of State for defence, and the Defence Minister, Ali Khan, who said that the Defence Investment plan was, quote, not built for the threat we face and that it was neither transformative nor sufficiently funded. A damning indictment of a wholly inadequate, much delayed priority policy requirement. Further, our council said 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. My Lords, we are on the brink of serious conflict where lives of our servicemen 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 had to be faced rigorously. There is no time to be lost by incoming Prime Minister Burnham.

First, the total funding package of 15 billion, a third of which is unfunded. He knows fiscal leisure domain 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. Second, under the current plan 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 we need a target date for 3% and a clear, credible funding plan to meet our NATO commitment of 3.5% by 2035.

Third, 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. Fourth, it is essential that the 10 billion munitions plan is reinstated necessary to rebuild our munitions stockpile, now much depleted, particularly after the war in Ukraine. So where are you, Mr. Burnham? Don't keep hiding. Come out and face the music show now.

You truly have the mettle defence.
16:27
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Portrait Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party)
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I'm sorry, I'm sorry. please. Could the noble Lord wind up, please? Thank you. >> My Lords. I thank the noble.

**** Possible New Speaker ****

My Lords. I thank the noble. Lord, Lord Harlech, for securing this debate. The level of engagement shows the interest in engagement shows the interest in your Lordships House on a Thursday afternoon. The debate has been particularly useful in that, unlike nearly all the discussion in the other place and in the media, it is not just focused on, as Lord Hollick framed it, what are we spending, but rather 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's 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. For if you descend on the escalators, you will be confronted by. Glared at by a shiny advert for BAE systems, future jet fighters Navy capabilities. The subject occasionally varies, but in coming up. For seven years that I've 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 not, I suggest spending that makes us any less safe. Now, I thank the right Reverend prelate, the Bishop of Southwark, for his valedictory speech. In introducing another point that I wanted to make that our security is about much more than defence. Soft power and the international service provided by the BBC World Service are crucial, and all of this together needs to be treated as a package.

Last week I put to the noble Lady, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, that the FCDO was in turmoil and the noble Lady denied it fervently. Well, this morning I was on the picket line in King Charles Street, Charles Street, with the 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's also a security issue for us all. Now, I do also want to pick up another point from the debate from a number of noble Lords on the conservative benches who've suggested that the welfare budget must be cut to allow more defence spending. Yet we have also heard occasionally from the conservative benches, but from all around the House, about the most basic defence resource 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 then to serve.

And if people have not been cared for by a society, have been left without the basic resources to live decently while they say see the few, they have yachts harvesting the resources that that might have been sustaining them, then that's not going to build the will to stand up to the threats we face, let alone the physical capability. Now, I want to take a little time to comment on defence procurement. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed said, we have huge problems in the tradition established over decades of commissioning works of art.

And, I would add, decisions made for economic reasons rather than military ones. We've often heard from the previous government, and some hints from the incoming one that they'll use defence spending as a form of economic development funding, but that risks doing two things badly rather than focusing on activity and what is supposed to be the spending's purpose.
16:32
Lord Mott Portrait Lord Mott (Conservative)
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It's a great pleasure to take >> It's a great pleasure to take part in this debate, which was not only secured but opened so powerfully by my noble friend, Lord powerfully by my noble friend, Lord Hollick. My Lords, I begin by referring the house to my Register of Members interests and in particular, 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, to adapt, despite fighting a war for its very survival. That resilience deserves not only our admiration but also 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 has highlighted earlier by the noble Lord, Lord MP. My Lords, 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 of Ukraine's allies should be studying carefully. I believe Britain has much to learn from Ukraine, and Ukraine has benefited benefited from our support.

My Lords, that is why I believe the next phase of our partnership should place greater emphasis on defence, industrial cooperation. 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 electric warfare, 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. My Lords, 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 cooperation 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 Ukraine is no longer simply receiving capability but helping to shape Europe's future defence industrial base. Our defence industry has much to contribute. So can I ask the noble Lord, the Minister, to 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.

My Lords. Ukraine continues to defend not only its own sovereignty but the security of Europe. It is also demonstrating remarkable ingenuity, resourcefulness and technological technological innovation under the most difficult imaginable circumstances. We should continue standing with Ukraine. We should continue learning from Ukraine, and we should build with Ukraine.
16:36
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Portrait Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (Crossbench)
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My Lords, I want to congratulate the noble Lord Haig for initiating the noble Lord Haig for initiating this debate and apologise for starting with something where you might feel I'm. He's left out because I'm inviting this House to remember 1968. Quite a number of us will remember 1968, but I'm not sure how many of the noble Lords will remember where they were on the 21st of August 1968 and how they felt on that day? I do. I lived in a small Bavarian village about 80 miles from the Czech border, and Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries started invading Czechoslovakia and the tanks started rolling.

We didn't know whether tanks would stop at the border, but we listened to the World Service as the one reliable source of information. But we didn't need to be. We didn't need to be persuaded. The defence was important. We didn't need to be persuaded that there were bad actors out there, and we didn't need to be persuaded that at some stage some people would have to give their lives in order to defend our values and what we stood for. Amid discussing today the future capability of the armed forces against the slightly different backdrop.

But what we should remember is that armed forces don't exist in a vacuum, is part of a whole society, and it needs the support of the whole society, because true resilience requires a complete approach of every sector. And it also means that if we're going to spend more money on defence, then we will forgo spending on other things. And military capability requires that underpinning of soldiers and the right equipment. And I'm sorry I would disappoint the noble Lord West, because I'm not asking for more ships in Ireland.

Honorary captain in the Royal Navy. But maritime resilience is also important. I'm glad if I if the papers are to be believed, that we are starting a national resilience campaign, and later this year, the government will hold the largest national home defence exercise since the Cold War. There will be new guidance to schools and colleges to teach children about how to stay safe in emergencies. Just as a little sideline. After we knew that the tanks had stopped rolling at the Czech border in those days after you finished your A-level exams between waiting for the.

For the results, you do training on what to do in the case of nuclear attack, or to how to administer first aid and general resilience training. But what that taught me is that this doesn't just require a single conversation. We've been promised a national conversation. This can't be a one off. This can't be a one off exercise because the public conversation has to be one that is ongoing. And I would also urge that we stop assessing risk based on what we think we can afford.

It has to start with what the real risk is. And unless we have defined our national values and can actually protect them, we cannot defend or protect our national interests and values. We need to ask, where does our food come from? Where does our energy come from? Whether the medicines come from? And I'm really taken by Lord Forbes's suggestion of pulling all this together. The threats are real. They're not imaginary, but they're here now. We we said, we've got to be ready by 2029.

But what we haven't done is actually explain to the public in a way which they can fully engage in, why we need to be ready by 2029. And therefore, I'm asking the Minister for a long term strategic plan on how an on going basis we will engage with the public because we are an island. That kind of threat sometimes seem remote. We seem to think that bad things only happen to other people, and somehow it will pass us by. We haven't got that guarantee, but we need the public support to support the armed forces and be prepared to forgo spending on some things which we value, but we need to value defence even more.
16:40
Lord Altrincham Portrait Lord Altrincham (Conservative)
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I thank my noble friend Lord >> I thank my noble friend Lord Harlick of the Coldstream Guards. >> For securing. >> This debate, and also thank the Minister for hosting us with such courtesy as he always does, and would 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 in fact, fatefully just made a reference to an ambition for 3% of GDP as being a kind of soft target.

And notwithstanding all the other recommendations, the government at the time, as we remember, accepted all the recommendations of the Strategic Defence Review. Notwithstanding all their acceptance, it turned out that expenditure and the position of the public finances was central to the problem and became central, alas, to the last Prime Minister's fate. And so we might ask how that came to be, and rather possibly a rather unhelpfully for the government, the OBR put out their financial sustainability report in July, and it explains quite clearly that the public finances are on a unsustainable trajectory.

And that's because, as we know and we often talk about in this in this House, we are deficit financing the government at the moment. And the gap between the amount we raise in taxation and what we spend is very wide. And it's very 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, much more than we spend on defence just in the current deficit.

So we're quite a risky, delicate moment. And this need for defence arises just at the moment when the OBR points out that we're in no position to meet economic shocks or any other shocks to public finances, and we are. It's a risky moment because the government obviously is funding all the time in the government debt markets. It's risky because of inflation, because of the foreign exchange, because of growth. All of these factors lie well beyond this debate, but they actually place fundamental risk on us, just as the defence challenge does.

So it is very hard to know how we are going to fund defence in in the next few years. Now, the government has a promise out at the moment to consolidate the public finances by 2031 or so, and that probably marks the limit of where deficit financing is going. So it probably marks the limit for the next administration of what they can do. They can't go much further than this promise of debt consolidation, which, by the way, still means we're deficit financing in the 2030s, but just to a more modest level.

But it let's let's assume it's the limit. And against that backdrop, the OBR took a look at what would happen in the coming years. And their approach is to say, well, why don't we just keep all the variables, all the expectations of public expenditure, just where they are? So let's not change anything, which of course is not realistic. If you think about it, they accept all the promises made in public expenditure just as they are. They. They expect all the spending, for example, on net zero to be unchanged.

So let's just leave everything as out the one variable the OBR does change, showing they themselves are part of this national conversation that Barrett Stewart spoke about is they talk about the need for defence. And they themselves say that defence spending is likely to pass 3.5% of GDP in the early 2030s and may go to 5% and at 5%. Defence spending in the UK would be similar to where it is in Germany today. All of which is to say, it is completely unsustainable and completely unknown, and a degree of change will have to come.

And the clue for that change is in this national conversation. And I would just end by saying that this is a moment of opportunity for the government, a moment where we could restart a conversation on public finances and defence at the same time.
16:44
Lord Bruce of Bennachie Portrait Lord Bruce of Bennachie (Liberal Democrat)
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Everybody in. this debate. And indeed, the way he did so in a non-political way and across the whole debate, what we've seen from everywhere is that we recognise the threat is real and our preparedness is inadequate. That is actually the message we're getting across in in the fourth century A.D. Vegetius said, if you want peace, prepare for war. He actually said it in Latin. See this patch in Parabellum? And that is precisely the point of deterrence. Our armed forces, as everybody has said, are highly professional and a credit to our nation.

But the peace dividend has left us seriously depleted in numbers and capability. And the government has talked of and a number of members have expressed this view of talk of starting a national conversation, as did the Strategic Defence Review. But where is it? What is it? Denmark, for example, has established a ministry for resilience and preparedness, and other countries have engaged, as has also been contributed by. By the noble Lord opposite in preparing this. We've talked about it, but we're not doing it.

So will the Minister give us an indication of exactly when this is going to happen? And I think preparing the public does require engagement. There has been a YouGov poll that says recent polling shows that three quarters of Britons consider it important to strengthen both the UK's hard and soft power in including approximately 4 in 10 who rate it. Very important, but only a minority favour tax increases or spending cuts to fund greater spending in the British armed forces.

That's what we need to engage and I want. I'm very grateful to the the right Reverend Perrett for his very excellent speech. And we shall certainly miss him. But for raising the issues of soft power, which are absolutely relevant, and the International Relations Defence Committee, which I remember as miss Lord Ahmad, chaired by Lord Robertson, had an evidence session yesterday. And I raised the issue of not just the cuts in soft power, but the cuts in our diplomatic presence in the wake of our aid cuts, and suggested that this is not a way to protect our interests.

If we remove our diplomatic presence from across the world, which is what we're actually doing. And Sir Matthew Rycroft, who is one of our witnesses, former UN and British UN ambassador, former permanent secretary, said, and I quote, diplomacy is more cost effective than development. Development is more cost effective than defence. That is why aid cuts are so shortsighted, and it will end up costing us more in the long run. Other witnesses echoed that and said we've got emerging powers around the world.

We need to engage. This is one way to reduce our defence risk and to engage support. The other thing I think we need to address as the very helpful briefing from the library has indicated, the problem we have of strengthening our armed forces, and this was actually a very important point, in my view, that Lord Hollick raised, and the Baltic states and the Scandinavian countries have got the balance right in a way that we haven't, which is to strengthen our reserves.

And a point has been made to me, which I'm not a technical expert, but say, ironically, the greatest sophistication of modern defence technology makes it very much easier to operate. There's 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, many more people as reservists in ways that would be effective. And it seems to me that is a real priority. As well as building civilian capacity for other sort of crises, because Russia will target our our infrastructure, probably already doing so.

And we need to have people across the country that know how to respond to that. So that, I think, is a very important point we need to address. If you actually take the the hard core 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 the Global Combat Air programme. Now, all of those things are important, but they're very expensive and it's squeezing out money for other sectors.

We do need more warships, we need drone capacity, we need ammunition, we need missiles, and we need ballistic missile defence. And the question really is to what extent can we actually deliver all of those things? And I did ask the question, I think yesterday that if we're going to phase out our warships, our battleships or destroyers, what is our line of missile defence against ballistic missiles? Because that is the only defence we have at the moment. And I have to say, we'll think of something is not quite as good enough.

Response. I think we need to know, and the British public assume we have such a defence. But the reality is we won't if we don't replace the destroyers or find some other way of doing it. And of course, I want to be positive, and I know that the Minister in his reply, will say what we are doing, and I'm not going to dispute that. We're building frigates. We are building these drone support ships. We are building amphibious vessels, all of which is good and all of which is essential.

And I don't want to suggest to the government that we don't recognise that they are doing things, but we do need nevertheless to deliver in space, in, in, at speed, a lot of things very fast. We cannot assume we will not come under direct attack, as Russia actually does regard the UK as probably their number one enemy, and they will exploit their perceived vulnerability in a debate like. This is a clear advert that we are vulnerable. So where everybody is saying we could we could defend, face an attack within three years, is anything we're doing now equipping us to be able to counter such an attack? And I think at the moment the House feels fairly insecure that that is the case.

And the outcome of the Ukraine war is absolutely crucial. But how that will affect the UK needs to be assessed and counted. And what are the key developments of home defence that we need to develop, as well as supporting NATO? Because as long as NATO, as long as Ukraine rather is, is holding out, it's holding Russia back from other adventures, which I think they would like to do. A few weeks ago, I took part in an IPU visit to Lithuania. We were left in no doubt to the determination of the people of Lithuania and all the Baltic and Scandinavian states to defend their freedom.

They took us to the former KGB prison in Vilnius to show the horrors they suffered under Soviet occupation for 50 years, 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 to. We went to the Belarusian border and we saw the fence erected not for defence, but to counter Belarus actions to force immigrants that they're recruiting from Central Asia and from Africa, taking to the border and forcing them across the border in order to disrupt society in democratic states.

It's a it's a ploy. They're advertising cheap flights from wherever you are to come to Russia or Belarus. Have a good life. The good life consists in being put at gunpoint in a truck and forced over the border into the EU, where they had again to be deported. So this is a pretty shocking situation and effectively is a state of war. So what I think we need to do is knowing what we do, a Russian activity around our shores and their hybrid and other interventions in our territory.

It's clear our deterrent and effective strength needs to be increased. So the question to the Minister is how fast can we. It's not to the Minister, actually, it's to the government. How how fast can we move? How do we engage the public in a way that enables us to take the decisions and take the public with us? And will the government consider. Can I may say this point because I think it's it's it's come from the Liberal Democrats, but it actually has gone wider than that.

Now, defence bonds as one way, perhaps, of raising short term funding. I completely accept that bonds are still borrowing, but if they're ring fenced and targeted, it might be done in a way that the markets will find acceptable and which might release money that might not otherwise have come into the public sector. So it does seem to me it is a legitimate matter for consideration. So the government changes. On Monday, the new Prime Minister will have a whole raft of stuff on his doorstep.

I was also at a meeting which I ignored with Middle Eastern ambassadors, who expressed their concern that our new Prime Minister seemed to be highly focused on domestic issues and not terribly engaged in international issues. Well, we don't know is the honest truth, but they were concerned that this was an indication of an inward turning UK, which the diplomatic retreat reinforces and which are soft power cuts reinforce, and which Brexit reinforces. All of these things are giving an impression that the UK is not serious about our international relations.

I am not suggesting the Minister is not serious. I'm not suggesting that Ministers who engage in are not serious. But when you actually look at what we're actually doing, it doesn't stack up as a credible strategy for a country of our standing. We have had respect in the world, we have influence in the world, but we're not using it very well. We're not playing very well to it. And there's a lot more we could do. NATO is the pivot of our alliance, but we need also to explain to people not only that we're here to respond to an attack on NATO, but we have the capacity for defending ourselves, with or without NATO, from the attacks that we are told we will face in 2 or 3 years time, I think, in the minister's response needs to give us an indication, not now, how the government is going to address this, how are they going to take the public with us, and how they're going to ensure that we do get where we need to do as fast as we need to do?
16:55
Baroness Goldie Portrait Baroness Goldie (Conservative)
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My Lords, this has been a really excellent debate, fascinating with, excellent debate, fascinating with, I think, hugely perceptive contributions. And I want to thank my noble friend Lord Harlech for my noble friend Lord Harlech for not only securing the debate, but for his own insightful and powerful contribution. Made in a characteristically elegant and gracious manner, which I do not promise to emulate. My Lord, the defence. The government's defence policy can be summed up in four words too little, too late, too little money, too little equipment, all delivered too late.

And I make that claim because the plans of government has laid out are for the future. They do not meet the threats we face right now. The Secretary general of NATO has warned we may face war with Russia within the next five years, and if that happens, we need to be ready to fight a major war by 2030, not after 2030. And I may say to the noble Lady, Baroness Bennett, that, unlike her, I know the advertisement to which she refers from British Aerospace.

Above the escalator in the tube station. And my view is what an advert for British skills. What a. What a formidable capability this terrific British company is capable of delivering. May I see it translated into our defence capability? Not before. Not too long, but on the Secretary Generals memo, the. The government seems to have missed that point. And indeed, the noble Baroness Short reminded me poignantly, because I do remember where I was in August 1968 that the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It caused shock. It did cause shock. And she rightly pointed out, you can't 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. So where are we? Well, 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 and Space Missile Defense Operations Centre announced in 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 that the government can offer is from the early 2030s. There is a pattern emerging, my Lords, 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 does not get the urgency, 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 and his concerns, I think, were emphatically endorsed by the noble Lord, Lord stirrup, and reflected upon gently and philosophically by the right Reverend prelate, the Bishop of Suffolk, to whom I also extend my best wishes for a happy and fulfilling retirement, and I extend my thanks to him for his reassuring presence in this chamber.

On these benches, to which I offer an often direct. A glance at moments of tension. My Lords, the Defence Investment Plan was supposed to do two things prepare our armed forces for major combat operations within the next five years, and in the uncertainty and unease dogging our defence industry over the past two years. Indeed, the noble Baroness eloquently described the challenge. But 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.

Now take the Royal Navy, for example. The Dip confirmed that the government will scrap the type 83. That is the replacement for the type 45 destroyers and scrap the new light class of frigate, the type 32. Now. Yesterday, my noble friend, the Earl of Minto, mentioned the common Combat vessel, and this is the proposed new 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, and now it has been scrapped without a successor.

So 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, literally a ghost ship. I have to ask, the mod doing during the past year while they were preparing their plan? One would have thought if they were planning to replace the type 83 and type 32 with these CSVs. They would have done much more preliminary work so that when they published the date, they could actually tell us what a common combat vessel would look like.

This is, my Lords, that the Mod had not decided they wanted to scrap that type 83 until very recently. And indeed in September, in response to a written question from my hon. Friend Ben, the Minister, Luke Pollard, said the type 83 is planned to enter service from the mid 2030s and is assumed to have a 2025 year service life. So just last September, the Mod were committed to the type 83 and now they have changed their minds and I think it is frightening.

My Lords, 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. But Ukraine is not the same as the North Atlantic providing a carrier strike, escorting supply ships, fighting piracy and defending a naval task force from air attack has no parallel with the Ukraine conflict.

And what of hard defence diplomacy, which the government have said they are championing, and to which my noble friend Lord Ahmed astutely referred. My Lords, an uncrewed missile barge does not have quite the same clout as a large, highly capable destroyer. Now I completely understand the benefits of uncrewed vessels and aircraft. The absolutely have their place, and we do have to learn from the use in Ukraine, but they should be an additional, not an alternative capability. They should complement destroyers and fighters, not replace them.

We will need conventional warships for years to come. And yet under these plans, Britain will have no destroyers at all. By 2040. I hope the noble Lord, the Minister, will understand that my unrelenting and unapologetic focus is on the threat we face now, and the urgent response we need to address it. And 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, so we need more F-35s, we need more modern typhoons. We need 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, in delivering a large speakers lecture last night to which many of us were privileged to listen, quoted Warren Buffett, who said predicting rain doesn't count. Building an ark does. A wise man quoting a wise man.

But let me conclude, my Lords, by quoting a third wise man, Shakespeare. Defer. No time delays have dangerous ends. And that is my response. And that is my message to the noble Lord. The Minister and I shall look forward to his response here.
17:05
Lord Coaker Portrait Lord Coaker, The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Labour)
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My Lord, sir, it's a great privilege and I thank everyone for taking part in this debate, and taking part in this debate, and it's great privilege to respond to it. And I'll try and respond to many of the points that have been made. Can I start by also declaring an interest? My son in law is mobilised as a reserve at the current time, so I just need to make sure that they're aware of that. But can I start and congratulate Lord Hollick for introducing this debate, but also for the way he did it and for his own service? And we all recognise that as being very.

Can I say also that I think the point he made about the fact that the armed forces and the defence of our country and the work with our allies and friends, as Lord Bruce and Baroness Goldie demonstrate, is not a party political matter. It is about how we challenge each other to deliver the best defence that we need for our country, and I think that's an extremely important point for all of us, and I'm very grateful for that attitude to be across across this this chamber.

I think it's extremely important. Can

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I can I just start by Saying, and I'll come to answer some of the specific points from some of the specific points from Lord Hollick and also some of the other specific points from Baroness Goldie and Lord Bruce, and then Goldie and Lord Bruce, and then move to some of the other things. Just to say, I do think that and I'm going to start with this, that I'm going to start with this, that it's really important for us to say that much of the debate has been that much of the debate has been about the future capabilities laid out in the defence investment plan.

You can have a debate and a discussion as to whether it has all of the right measures in it to to develop the future capabilities that we need, the spending that we need for that. But the concern expressed by many in the debate is what about now? What about the capabilities that we need, we have now, and we need to develop over the future. And I think that is an interesting debate. Let me just say this, but I'm going to do I'm going to commission the Ministry of Defence to actually produce a paper which demonstrates what we are doing now and what we intend to do over the next 2 or 3 years, and I'll put a copy of that in the library.

And I think that will help, because I do think it's important for us to have concrete examples of the sorts of things that are being done now, and the sorts of capabilities the Mod and the department and the government would say are going to happen in the next year, in the next two years, and so on, not only with respect to capabilities, but with respect to some of the changes and some of the things we need to do. And so I think that will then shows that this debate makes a positive contribution to the sorts of things that we would all seek to to do, because I point to many of the things that are taking place, and for those who watch and listen to our debates this country undertakes, a number of people have said, what are we doing about Russia at the moment? We have an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic with F-35s all over it, other things around it, deterring the Russians with our NATO friends and allies in the North Atlantic.

What are we doing in the Middle East? We have RFA Lyme Bay there with a type 45 destroyer in getting preparing itself, hopefully for the reopening of the Straits of Hormuz, one of the noble Lords I'll come to in a minute mentioned about the Baltic states. We have troops in Estonia, at the current at the current time, and as others have mentioned, we have a nuclear deterrent, which is costing billions of pounds. Quite rightly at the present time to be modernised, deterring not only in Europe but across the world and contributing to peace.

So all of those things are actually going on at the current time. We have typhoons on quick reaction alerts in case of incursions or threats to incursions into our airspace. So it's quite right to challenge what needs to be done now and what should happen in the future. All I say defensively, and this is the only time I'm defensive about it, is that alongside that, we also ought to say to our adversaries, we have capabilities that we are using at the present time to to deter and to defend our people.

And I know that's accepted, and there's a belief that we should do more and need to do more. And that's the challenge for the government, both now and in the future. Let me just also say, so I hope that paper that I'm going to get commission will, will actually help with respect to putting a copy of that in the library. So going specifically to a to 2 or 3 of the questions that Lord harlot posed for me. He asked about the 4.7 billion gap, I think, as he described it, and as I say, the confirmation to the Treasury, to me, in preparing for this debate, the Treasury has been clear that a further £4.7 billion will be confirmed in the budget in 2026, in a fair and balanced way.

So that's the information I've had from them. In terms of the question about the ambition, about the reserves, he he knows what's in the armed Forces Bill, going through your Lordships House at the current time. But we also recognise that the moment there is investment going into the infrastructure, training and equipment that's needed to support reserves and the importance of that, and I've answered the point about what we're going to do to around priorities now. And I think the paper would be of interest not only to Lord harlot, but to a more general sort of thing for for all of us.

Baroness Goldie and Lord Bruce, the front bench, spokespeople for their respective parties, and obviously Baroness Goldie as the leader of His Majesty's Opposition with respect to defence, I think she'll find that very helpful. Can I say I very much agree with Lord Bruce's point you prevent war by preparing for it. I absolutely, fundamentally agree with that point. I don't like thinking that, but I think that is an absolutely crucial point. I think the national conversation is important. A number of noble Lords and have made the point, as we've gone through this debate.

And soft power is crucial. I actually wrote a defence with the department, a defence diplomacy strategy, shared it with Baroness Goldie just before publication, which is in the Defence Investment Plan, which talks about the importance of soft power, the importance of developing those relationships with other countries as well, of course, as hard power. The idea it's a choice you have one or the other is nonsense. You have to have both of

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them alongside each other. And of course, I appreciate that. And he and other Ministers say

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And he and other Ministers say that frequently, but the reality is that the British Council is nearly that the British Council is nearly bankrupt, BBC is struggling, our diplomatic forces are being reduced. And on that particular point, can And on that particular point, can he perhaps just feed back to the government that if we do not have diplomats on the ground, we are not

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diplomats on the ground, we are not actually able to influence the world. Listening to the Parliament? But all I'm saying is there's a much more coordinated, effective diplomatic strategy now, which links both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence together to deliver the objectives that that he wants. The noble Baroness, Baroness Goldie, made the point about the immediate threats, and I. I hope that in putting a paper together and putting that in the library will answer the particular points that she makes about what.

What are we doing about the immediate threats as well as the the the future threats? Can I just say to to her that there are difficult decisions? The noble Baroness made difficult decisions when she was in government, and the government made the really difficult decision to say in terms of the the replacing the type 83 and the type 32 with the common combat vessel that helps develop the hybrid navy that we will need, rather than continuing with something that that we're advised by the military advisors will not actually meet the threat in 10 or 15 years time, but to have a ship, a warship, which actually is a, is, is a ship which can deliver drone capability above on the surface and below actually increases the the mass available to you to tackle the threats that that you face.

And that's the hybrid Navy concept. And I and we had the debate and we said, we're going to get criticized, you know, because they're going to say, there you go. You're cutting ships. You're going to you've taken away this capability. You've taken away that capability. All I would say is if that means if I have to have some criticism by doing that with others, because we believe that that opens the opportunity up to create the Navy that we do need, then I'm willing to take that particular criticism.

I absolutely, however, fundamentally agree with the point the noble Baroness made about the drones are not the only answer. I absolutely, fundamentally agree with that. Of course you need warships. Of course you need fighter planes. Of course you need land, vehicles. All of those sorts of things are fundamental as well. But alongside that, you need the, you know, the increased capacity with respect to drones in terms of being optimistic. And I know a number of noble Lords and Baronesses were at the retirement of Pedro Serrano, the brilliant.

EU ambassador to the UK, who said, just to be. 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 just thought I'd just read that in the as I normally do when I read the Financial Times in the morning, that there I spotted it. So I thought, I'm going to use that. So. But I think the important point was. And the Lord Mort made the point.

And if you read that, I'm not being sarcastic. Now, if you read that article. He points out to the fact that the UK has joined the 60 billion EU defence loan scheme for Ukraine, which will open up the opportunities that. Lord Mort was asking me, what is the government doing to open up the opportunities with respect to Ukraine? And there's one for him there, which I hope specifically answers the question. Lord Motte raised. Can I thank my noble friend Baron Carbery for her points about the importance of the defence industry, Rolls Royce, the importance of SMEs.

Absolutely right, Lord Stirrup, can I say to him as well, he makes a crucial point about Adele Siedel. He's made this point to me before and we made this point within the Defence Investment plan. He will have seen that the Adele I've got the figures here in 2627 was increased by 2.1 billion. This is this year 2627. Obviously the citadel was increased by 1.7, sorry, by 0.7. So a significant uplifter Adele rather than siedel next year 1.6 billion compared to 1.2 billion.

So I, I just say to him, we absolutely accept the point about Adele and Siedel and the necessity, the necessity not just to focus on capital projects and the importance of the resource allocation on Lord soils point, of course, about partnering more with private capital to try and do that. The defence bond argument, the alternative financial mechanisms to use to support what we do is crucial. The Bishop of Southwark, in his valedictory. Can I just wish him well for the future? And can I remind.

This is the importance of international humanitarian law, and that's one of the importance of our country and our democracy. We understand the need sometimes to use force, but we question ourselves about whether we have the legal basis to do it. And I think we should commend ourselves for for that to try and act in a way, sometimes with force, but in a way which is legal. And I wish him well for the future. And we all struggle with moral dilemmas. So look forward to, to, to him struggling with that and trying to help others with respect to that.

When he preaches. Can I thank Lord Ahmed the importance again, of soft and hard power? He and I have talked long and hard and discussed that soft power is absolutely crucial, but it's not, as I said before, a choice, as he agrees with about between soft and hard power. I totally agree with him about the speed of procurement, of procurement, and actually trying to deliver things much more quickly. And again, I hope the paper that I'm going to ask to be put in the library will help answer some of the points to that.

He asked about the Defence Readiness Bill. It will be in this Parliament and being worked on as we speak. Lord Hamilton, I agree about the the the complementary groups under NATO. No toe is obviously the crucial umbrella. But. But underneath that you can have other organisations like Jeff or whatever to combat. But as long as it complements NATO and it starts to think is particularly important, the role of the US remains crucial. That's the only point I would say to them.

We have to remain retain the strategic alliance with with the US. Yeah.

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Interesting that Jeff. Does he agree that if the neutral countries like Finland and Sweden can join,

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like Finland and Sweden can join, then so could Ukraine? That's a matter for discussion as to between between all of us. So the relationship with Ukraine remains crucial. How that's taken remains crucial. How that's taken forward will have to be discussed. Can I thank my noble friend Baroness Antrobus? We are committed to the nuclear deterrent. She was no I I, I think we sometimes we should talk more about it. When people say, what is the UK's commitment to Europe? I mean, it's not a bad start to say the UK is committed to the nuclear deterrent to the defence of Europe for decades.

I think it's a pretty proud thing for us to actually state, and I. I know the points she makes about the ladder of escalation and the involvement of tactical nuclear weapons in the future through the F-35, a bonus, which again, made the point. I think the spending review of 2027 will answer some of the points about the spending that she she made, and she will recognise the point made about defence being 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 to think about some of the other things that the noble and gallant Lord mentioned in dealing with that Lord Sherborne, the Prime Minister in waiting, clearly means what he says defending our nation.

But. And I thank him for his kind words about me. But as I say, I think the Prime Minister in waiting is clearly means what he says. Lord MP mentions about the national conversation absolutely fundamental and crucial to us and the priorities for the public. Particularly important, as you mentioned, about the gray zone cables, underwater cables, cyber attack, those sorts of things. Particularly crucial. Lord Risby, about the space. I take the point about Skynet five being extended rather than a new Skynet six, but if you.

I know you will have done. It's quite interesting, me looking at the Defence investment plan while I was. While he was speaking, I was just on pages 48 and 49. Some quite interesting investments into space, but I, I, I understand the importance of the space and technology, space technology and satellites, if we're going to fight the wars of the future, he's absolutely right to remind us of the importance of all that. Can I thank my noble friend Lord Forbes for his points about the whole of society approach, and about how I think by raising the age of reserves to 65, we may be able to recruit more of the engineers, the doctors, the cyber specialists, and so on through the reserves that he was he was talking about Baroness Eaton.

I, I just say to where we are accelerating our war readiness plans and spending debate will continue. But it's going up. It's just the debate about how fast it goes up and how much it should be. Can I thank Lord, Megan? Megan, Megan, Megan, I beg your pardon. Megan, thank you for reminding us of the service of his own family, because it reminds us of the service of so many families across this country, family and family members. And again, the spending point will come to a debate and discussion around, particularly in and around the 27 Spending Review.

Baroness Bennett, I made the point about the soft power. So I, I it's not it's a terrible name for it in many ways, but it's crucial to the delivery of that. The one thing I would say, and I'll just make this point here about soft power and defence diplomacy. Everywhere I go across the world, irrespective of what the view is of the UK, countries are queuing up for the UK to stand with them. They don't necessarily want a warship or 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 in their regions. And I'm proud of that. And I think it's been hard earned by our servicemen and women. And I think it's something that we don't appreciate as much and we should speak much more of, because they are a huge numbers of countries across the world and make a huge difference.

Lord Martin mentioned the point about the article that that may wish to look at Baroness Stewart. I agree again about the national conversation and the importance of that. And the plan is developing. And again, Lord Altrincham made the point about the importance of a national conversation. Let me just say, say this to a few concluding remarks, and I, I know that these debates are watched. I know that these debates are read. So I want to say this clearly to Russia, to China, or to anybody else who believes that this country is weak, who believes that we will not stand up for democracy, for freedom, and for the values that we cherish, that we will and we do.

Do not miss. Understand that in a democracy, people such as Baroness Goldie can challenge me and actually think I'm wrong. I think the government is wrong and challenge the government to do more. That is not a sign of weakness. That is a sign of strength. Yeah, and that is how a democracy works. That is what we have struggled and fought for through many decades, through many centuries. So if anybody is watching this, let them not mistake, honest, open, frank exchange of views to be anything else than all of us being proud of what our country stands for, and we will continue to stand for.

Yeah.
17:25
Lord Harlech Portrait Lord Harlech (Conservative)
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I'm truly grateful to all noble, noble and gallant and the right noble and gallant and the right Reverend Prelate for taking part, and I wish him Godspeed on his future endeavors. And I'm extremely grateful to the noble Lord, the Minister, for answering my questions, others questions, and his powerful, impassioned reply at the end there, which we all fully support. And I add my voice to those. Whatever comes in a reshuffle, we hope very much that the noble Lord, the Minister, stays in post.

I think this has been a fascinating strength, weakness, opportunity, threat analysis because it's been from all sides of the House, cross-party. And again, I'm truly grateful for everyone who who signed up and it's been cross interest. So yes, we've had the the defence voices, but we also heard diplomatic, economic, political voice as well, which has added to the richness of this debate. And I would truly want the media to play their part in stimulating the national conversation. And I wish they would give a bit more column inches to this debate and debates like this, rather than the Punch and Judy stuff that happens in the other place.

I think it's rare that there is such unanimity of opinion. But we have heard that today, as the noble Lord, the Minister has said, the direction of travel is right, but we must go further and faster. To govern is to choose. Yes, 3.5%. 5% is more, but it's a sight cheaper than the alternative of fighting a war with a peer adversary. And I'll just I'll just finish with this. My Lords, I know there's no business to come, but the right hon.

Member for Makerfield, the incoming Prime Minister, his campaign slogan was Vote Andy, vote hope. Well, those of us who've had a military career, and there are some who've had a lot longer military career than me, you learn pretty early on that hope is not a planning tool. And he must understand that the defence of the

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realm can and must only be a government's top priority. Yes.

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Yes. The question is that this motion be agreed to, as many of that be agreed to, as many of that opinion say, content. The contrary not content. The contents have it. not content. The contents have it. I'm going to allow a couple of moments for peers to leave the

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Sorry.

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Sorry. National Security Act 2023 Designated Bodies Regulations 2026.

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Designated Bodies Regulations 2026. Lord Hanson of Flint. My Lords, I beg to move that the National Security Act 2023 Designated Bodies Regulations 26, which were laid before the House on
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None Portrait Orders and regulations: National Security Act 2023 (Designated Bodies) Regulations 2026 - motion to approve Lord Hanson of Flint, The Minister of State, Home Department (Labour)
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which were laid before the House on the 13th of July, be approved. My Lords, I am grateful to the House for its consideration of this draft instrument, which will see three bodies the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic Movement of Companions of the right and the GRU Volunteer Corps designated. I know there's been significant interest in the House on this matter from both opposition and Liberal Democrat benches, and I hope they will welcome this order today. My Lords, threats from foreign powers and their proxies have grown in scale and complexity.

Designation is a powerful tool for disrupting state bodies and those acting in concert with them, and it sends a strong message of the UK's commitment to tackling foreign power threat activity globally. The Home Secretary has determined that these three bodies are involved in foreign power threat activity and as such, we propose to designate them under this new power, as indeed I suggested we may. When the Bill went through Parliament as an act recently. My Lords, before I give more detail of the bodies in question, it's worth setting out the legislative basis for this decision.

For a body to be designated, the Home Secretary must reasonably believe that it is involved in foreign power threat activity, as defined in the National Security Act of 2023. The definition of foreign power threat activity covers the most serious offences in the act, including espionage, sabotage and foreign interference. It also covers broader activity which constitutes a serious threat to life or public safety when carried out for on behalf or with the intention to benefit a foreign power. If that test is met, the Home Secretary must then consider whether the designation is necessary to protect the safety or interests of the United Kingdom, and she will take account considerations of foreign policy and the impact on human rights as part of that decision making process.

Once a group is designated, it will be a criminal offence within the UK's jurisdiction to support a designated body, assist the designated body or obtain materials benefits from a designated body, and the penalties for these offences are imprisonment for up to 14 years and or a fine. Where an individual commits certain espionage, conduct or sabotage for a designated body, this can attract sentences up to life imprisonment. Designation therefore, enables law enforcement and intelligence agencies to disrupt designated bodies much more effectively.

And given its wide ranging impact, the Home Secretary will only exercise this power after thoroughly reviewing available evidence, including intelligence, material and cross-government advice. A decision to designate is only taken after great care and consideration, and as noble Lords will know, it must be approved by both houses and indeed was approved by the other place, the House of Commons, last evening. Now the bodies in question. I want to just give some explanation for noble Lords benefit. Firstly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps IRGC, a group which has been commented on significantly in this House over many months, both before the gracious speech and since there is a long standing threat posed by Iran and their proxies.

And that is no secret, we know that the Iranian intelligence services have established a pattern of targeting dissidents. Persian, Persian language media organisations and journalists, as well as Jewish and Israeli communities globally. The IRGC, Quds Force and IRGC intelligence organisation, together with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, form the Iranian intelligence apparatus as a key component of the Iranian state's security apparatus. The IRGC is answerable directly to Iran's supreme leader. Its role extends beyond conventional military operations and includes intelligence activity, the use of proxy actors and influence operations designed to advance Iranian state objectives.

Activity linked to the IRGC has included threats to life intimidation on UK soil, including credible plots to target individuals in the United Kingdom. The IRGC also supports militant actors overseas and has been associated with cyber and other state threats. Activity aligned with Iranian state objectives. And I know that noble Lords have great concerns about that body across all parts of this House. The Islamic movement and companions of the right, otherwise known as Ashab Al Amin Al-islamiyya.

The I am see have publicly claimed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish Israeli communities and Persian language media, including an anti-Semitic attack on four Hatzolah ambulances in Golders Green on the 23rd of March. A well known arson attack that members will be aware of. Sitting behind the IMC are were members of the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, who almost certainly directed IMC attacks across Europe. These incidents, including acts of arson and intimidation, have caused real fear and distress and have had a profound effect and impact on those communities.

It is clear that this sustained activity directly threatens the safety and interests of the United Kingdom. The Jew Volunteer Corps are Russia's threat to the United Kingdom in a form that extends far beyond conventional military action to include state threats. Moreover, the Kremlin increasingly relies on proxy organizations to pursue its objectives, seeking to undermine our security while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The so-called GRU Volunteer Corps is a clear example of that approach. It is not an independent force, nor a loose collection of volunteers.

It is a proxy organization operating under the direct control of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence services. These formations are directed, supported and sustained by the GRU, and they're already operating across conflict zones, most notably in Ukraine in support of Russia's illegal invasion. What we are seeing is a conscious attempt by the Russian state to blur the lines between military action and intelligence activity and criminality, using deniable forces to carry out sabotage, destabilisation and violence beyond its borders.

This, my Lords, is not conjecture. It reflects a pattern of behaviour that underpins Russia's aggression in Ukraine and which has been seen repeatedly across the Europe and including here in the United Kingdom. Indeed, in 2024, two men organised an arson attack on a Ukrainian owned business in east London on behalf of the Wagner Group, another proxy body that acts on behalf of the Russian state and which is prescribed as a terrorist organisation. It's notable that large parts of the Wagner Group have also been absorbed into this so-called volunteer corps, which demonstrates the threat to the United Kingdom by this group.

Now, with my Lord's consent, these bodies will be designated. Having carefully considered all of the evidence, the Home Secretary has decided there is sufficient evidence for her to reasonably believe that each body is involved in foreign power threat activity, and that designation is necessary to protect the United Kingdom. Designation will strengthen our ability to disrupt these bodies and those who support and facilitate them more broadly. It sends a powerful message to any foreign power or proxy intent that the United Kingdom will not allow harm to ourselves or our interests, and that we will do whatever it takes to prevent such activity on our soil.

My Lords, in conclusion, these bodies operate in a different way, but they are united by their role of endangering the safety and interests of the United Kingdom through violence, intimidation and destabilisation. Designation is something I know this House has called for. It is a proportionate and necessary response, and this government will continue to use every available tool to confront states wherever they arise. And I

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commend this order to the House. The question is that this motion

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be agreed to. My Lords, on these benches. We fully support these designations. We supported the proscription of the IRGC consistently through the the IRGC consistently through the passage of the Crime and Policing Act, to which the noble Lord, the Act, to which the noble Lord, the Minister has referred, and it had been our party policy for some years, as indeed it had been the policy of the Labour Party before the last general election. Nevertheless, the government preferred to pursue the course they have, as recommended by Jonathan Hall KC, of passing the National Security State Threats Act.

So we have passed a fast track legislation through this Parliament extremely quickly, not without amendment, but with careful
17:37
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Portrait Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (Liberal Democrat)
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consideration, though fast consideration, but with our improving it in a number of ways now and with an eye to future now and with an eye to future promised security legislation. So we on these benches regarded the act and the amendments negotiated act and the amendments negotiated to it when it was before the House as a good example of what can be as a good example of what can be achieved by cross-party cooperation. My Lords, these designations respond to no less than seven attacks publicly claimed by the IMC, the Islamic Movement of Companions of the right.

As the noble Lord has explained, the body, also known as Harakat, one of the bodies to be designated under these regulations. My Lords, these were attacks within the United Kingdom linked to Jewish and Israeli communities, including setting fire to the four Hatzolah ambulances in Golders Green on the 23rd of March and attacks on some Persian language, language, media and their journalists. My Lords, the designation of the IRGC also fulfills the promise made to the Jewish community by the Prime Minister in April, when he visited Kenton United Synagogue following the appalling arson attack there.

That promise was. That action would be taken this July to legislate to give powers akin to prescription, to outlaw foreign state actors, including to respond to threats posed by the IRGC. And this designation amply responds to and fulfills that promise. My Lords, this designation of the IRGC by the United Kingdom also follows the designation of the IRGC by the European Union in February of this year, in the aftermath of the violent repression of unarmed protesters in Iran over the turn of the year, which saw mass arrests, executions, internet shutdowns and the open use of lethal force against many thousands of demonstrators, as well as more international activity.

The designation of the Russian Federation Volunteer Corps Directorate recognizes the threat. The government has concluded that the Russian state and security apparatus, of which this body is part as the noble Lord. The Minister has explained the threat that that poses to United Kingdom's national security. My Lords, we are entirely clear that the government is rightly satisfied that these three bodies have met the requirements set out in the act for designation, and for that reason, we fully support these designations.
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Baroness Williams of Trafford Portrait Baroness Williams of Trafford (Conservative)
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My Lords, I'm very happy to thank the noble Lord, the Minister, for bringing this order forward today after ongoing calls to do so. As he said, we welcome that the As he said, we welcome that the government are taking action to designate the three bodies after Parliament recently passed the National Security State Threats Act. We all know the risks that the groups like the IRGC pose towards the United Kingdom, and it is right that the new powers have been brought forward and used to prevent the support and assistance of state linked bodies that pose such threats.

The noble Lord, the Minister, will know that, my noble friends, Lord Davies of Gower and Lord Cameron of Lochiel welcomed the State Threats Bill when it was before your Lordships House. However, they did raise a number of concerns as to what we considered to be gaps in the Bill and which we still think remain gaps now. It was disappointing to see the Liberal Democrats side with the government in opposing our amendment to that bill, to criminalise the display of insignia and the wearing of uniforms associated with a designated body, as recommended by Jonathan Hall.

It is unfortunate that despite this order designating the IRGC the flag of the IRGC, with its menacing fist holding aloft an assault rifle, will still be able to be prominently displayed on our streets. The government have said that this is about diplomatic relations, but my Lords, there are no diplomatic relationships, not with Russia and not with Iran, which of course are the mother countries for these organised H designated in the order is also concerning. The government appears to have tackled the true nature of the threat.

Sorry appears not to have tackled the through nature true nature of the threat presented by the IRGC. They're not just a conventional state actor, and the noble Lord is actually. The Minister has outlined some of that. They constitute a unique hybrid threat terror threat. So whilst they are state actor, they're also an ideological group that adheres to a specific form, to a specific form of Islam, of extreme Islamism. It combines both conventional hostile state activity with a sort of asymmetric warfare and the dissemination of terrorist material.

They incite, they promote, they instigate, and they inspire and carry out threats of ideologically motivated violence and terrorism. And, as he said, including on British soil, these are the threats we were trying to tackle in our amendments to the State Threats Bill. So, my Lords, while it's welcome that the government has at least tried to tackle the threat from the IRGC, the G through Volunteer Corps and the Islamic Movement of Companions of the right, I do still worry that they've not created legislation with the teeth to tackle these threats.

So my question really to the noble Lord, in conclusion, would be that I'd be grateful if he could reconfirm, as he said during the passage of the bill, that these issues that I've outlined today will be addressed in a future national security bill.

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Thank you. Can I first of all, welcome the

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Can I first of all, welcome the noble Lady back to the Home Office, even if it's a temporary glitch in even if it's a temporary glitch in the discussions, and can I, through her, pass on my thanks to the noble Lord Davies and the noble Lord Lord Davies and the noble Lord Cameron of Lochiel for their broad support for the Bill that has allowed us, as it now is an act to allowed us, as it now is an act to affect the designation requirements before the House today.

Can I thank also the noble Lord Marks of Henley for the broad support that he's given to the proposals before the House today, as the noble Lord Marks of Henley mentioned, this has been a. Proposal that has come out of, first of all, a manifesto commitment to have a review, and therefore. Secondly, for Jonathan Hall KC to bring forward proposals on how we deal with state threats and the State Threats Act as it now is. I'm grateful to both His Majesty's official opposition and to the Liberal Democrats for their support in helping get that act through Parliament.

There were some challenges. There were some amendments, which we did accept from the Liberal Democrats, and there were some amendments that I tried to explain from His Majesty's loyal opposition. And. But we have got to a position whereby the passing of that act only a couple of weeks ago, and the Royal Assent for that act only in the last ten days or so, has allowed us to bring forward this order for the reasons that I outlined. And I think there's general consensus from the noble Lord marks and from the noble Baroness Williams of Trafford, that this is required for these groups.

For the reasons I outlined in my opening speech. So I don't intend to delay the House too long on those matters, because I think there is general consensus that we need to do this. And if I may say so, I try to, in discussions that we had with both opposition front benches in the run up to the State Threats Act Bill, before it became an act, indicate that the act was being proposed for a purpose, and today is the first use of that power for a definitive purpose.

And we wanted to have the speed of that act. And I did press both front benches very hard to get that act through speedily because we needed to, in my view, and in the view of the Home Secretary, get this legislation passed both in the House of Commons, which rises today, and for those of us in the House of Lords who face another week ahead of us in Parliament, we still wanted to get this done as quickly as possible. And that is now means that this designation, once I sign that order, if it is agreed by this house, can be put into effect with swift action fairly soon.

So in all of that, for all of those reasons, I welcome the support of both from benches, and I welcome the support for further action. As the noble Lady has asked for in the gracious speech, we have promised a state Security Bill later in the parliamentary session, and it will cover a number of issues which, again, the House will not expect me to go into because the bill hasn't yet been published at Second Reading. But we did discuss issues such as passports at the State threats Bill stage, Committee stage.

I did give indications that we want to do some action on that. The issues to do with the display of a Palestinian flag, but not an IRGC flag, and the illegality of that.
17:47
Lord Hanson of Flint Portrait Lord Hanson of Flint, The Minister of State, Home Department (Labour)
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If a person expresses support in any way, and if their reasons for doing so are prejudicial to the safety of the United Kingdom, they safety of the United Kingdom, they will commit an offence. And I hope that gives the noble Lady some reassurance that is different from reassurance that is different from the provisions in the Terrorism Act, and reflects the reality of dealing with bodies that benefit from protection under international law. Individual decisions to arrest or charge will be for the police and charge will be for the police and prosecutors, but people who glorify that Terrorism Act will potentially face action in future.

And the noble Lady asked me particularly about the specific offence of not criminalising the display of wearing of articles of clothing. And I did say this during the course of the amendments that were put to the State Threats Act, but we consider the supporting of a designated body offence is wide enough to capture the display of or wearing of articles when it is done for a prohibited purpose. And it was therefore, again, in our view, deemed unnecessary to create a specific offence whilst also avoiding potential enforceability.

Challenges against foreign state officials who are protected by international law. Whether we like that or not, that is the situation now. I gave an explanation to the noble Lord Davis and the noble Lord Cameron, and to now the noble Baroness Williams of Trafford, about that matter. But again, I hope that she will recognise that there will be further action downstream. Has a former Minister in the Home Office. She knows. I can't say what, I can't say when, and I can't give detail.

But as ever, if she remembers. And the noble Lord Max will concur with this, I couldn't say when or what or give detail about the orders that I brought forward today, but those orders are here, and for the reasons that I've mentioned and for the grateful support of both frontbench and Liberal Democrats, I condemn, commend or condemn. It's been it's been it's been a long day waiting for the order. I commend those orders to the House and hope

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Hansard will treat me kindly. The question is that this motion

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The question is that this motion be agreed to, as many are of the opinion will say, content. The

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opinion will say, content. The contrary, not content. The contents have it. My Lords.

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I beg to move the House. Do now adjourn.
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