Queen’s Speech

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)]

My Lords, in returning to the debate on the gracious Speech, I apologise to the House for my discourtesy in attempting to speak earlier. I have apologised to the Minister concerned—the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. I was not aware that the House would be going straight into the Statement but I feel that I should apologise.

The gracious Speech had one paragraph on defence. It came two-thirds of the way through the Speech and I am not sure that that creates a feeling of priority for what is a very important issue. This morning the Minister put some flesh on the bones of that paragraph and talked about areas that would be improved for Armed Forces personnel, as well as matters relating to compensation and other areas. While referring to that, I welcome the Minister back to his portfolio. We are delighted to see him there in the new but very insecure Government. I do not know how long he will be sitting in that seat but it is good to see him there.

That paragraph referred specifically to two points. One was the 2% contribution to NATO and the other was the Armed Forces covenant. As mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, the 2% contribution to NATO has honed in on the defence debate, and I agree with people who say that it can be a distraction. However, we need to remind ourselves that the contribution should be at least 2%, and from my point of view it should certainly remain at that level. Depending on what figures you look at, the Treasury said that in 2015-16 it spent 1.9%, but many of us would say that that includes war pensions and items that should not be included, which means that really the figure came nowhere near 1.9%. The 2% contribution is crucial.

In general terms, I think we all accept that we live in a very insecure world. If anything has proved that over the last few weeks, it has been the terrorist attacks. If we think that only our internal security services can protect us from that insecurity, we are misleading ourselves. The role of our Armed Forces and our defence overall are crucial. I suggest that defence lies not just in the capability contained in the hardware and computer software; crucially, it also lies in our service personnel. They are a crucial element in all this, and certainly the Armed Forces covenant is central to it.

I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, when he talked about personnel. I was delighted to hear what he had to say because I do not think that we spend sufficient time on personnel issues in the defence area. We talk more about the hardware, and that is important, but our service personnel are key. We have the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body, which a long time ago I was honoured to chair. Its recent reports, the last one in particular, talked about low morale. The Armed Forces have been limited to a 1% maximum pay increase over the past years, and yet the review body is supposed to be independent.

The Minister talked about recruitment and retention. On recruitment, we have been losing more people than we have been able to recruit in recent times. That is a danger. We need steady recruitment and we need to make sure that the money for young men and women is at the level that has been agreed. On retention, we were told last week that since the Brexit vote there has been something like a 96% drop in the number of nurses coming into our health service. If we continue with the austerity measures relating to personnel, recruitment and retention will become even more difficult.

It is difficult, too, for defence personnel because, unlike nurses in the health service, teachers, doctors and those in other professional services, they cannot demonstrate down Whitehall. They cannot say, “We want this 1% to go”. They do not have representation as other sectors do, other than the reports of the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body. It is incumbent on the Government to look at this and to accept that one possible reason for the outcome of the general election was that the public think austerity has gone too far where people are concerned. We need to review it.

In the short time I have, I should like to ask the Minister to comment on a number of matters. Will he agree that the Government will look at the 1% and give back independence to the role of the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body so it can carry out an independent review annually and make recommendations to the Government? Will the Minister comment on the view that is now generally held—not just by Members in this Chamber but by those outside, among our suppliers, our Armed Forces and their officers—that the defence capability we now have in this country is substantially weaker in conventional weapons than it was 10 years ago, and significantly less than at the time of the Robertson defence review in 1997?

Will the Minister also comment on a story that is going round? Is it correct that a capability expenditure initiative is being carried out by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the MoD and that, following its conclusion, the Secretary of State will hold a further 90-day review on defence spending? Against that background, will the Government confirm the Conservative manifesto commitment that 0.5% above inflation will be paid each year until 2022—assuming that this Government are still in power then—and that they will not use that confirmation to seek cuts elsewhere in defence spending?

Reference has been made in our debate to terrorist events—we have just heard a Statement from the Minister—and the response of our emergency services, which has been above and beyond the call of duty. That has rightly been expressed, time after time, by most people. Our young men and women in the role of defence face equal danger, day in and day out, albeit in a different way. They put their lives on the line, as we have seen time after time. If the Government were to review the issue of 1% of defence expenditure, they would find no opposition on these Benches. We support Trident and spending on defence, and we support the fact that defence needs more expenditure.

In the coming time, Brexit may occupy many hours of this Chamber and next door. However, we must not lose sight in those debates of the fact that defence is crucial for us and that we are, at the moment, probably not giving it the expenditure and support it deserves. If that continues, it will be to the cost of this country.