Armed Forces Bill

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I am very happy to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, because I too have been trying to understand defence, both personally and professionally, over the last year. I declare three interests that have helped me. Like her, I am taking part in the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who is in his place, but as part of the Navy. In parallel, I have become the proud sponsor of HMS “Achilles”, the last of the new Astute class nuclear submarines being built in Barrow. Finally, I am an adviser to the Lakestar resilience fund, which invests in defence and societal resilience technologies.

Therefore, I am lucky enough to have spent time on bases and in ships, in classrooms and in boats, and in service accommodation. I feel as though I have met hundreds of servicepeople, but I have also been thinking about the technologies that sit beside our national resilience. The two experiences are different, but they reinforce the same thought: when we talk about defence, we often talk about platforms, procurement and capability, yet much of our resilience depends on more practical questions. Can we recruit and retain talented people? Can they build a stable family life? Are they learning quickly enough to keep pace with technology? What happens when they take the uniform off?

Until recently, perhaps like many people in this country, my understanding of what our Armed Forces actually do was embarrassingly shallow. I could not have explained what we ask a submariner to endure on a nuclear deterrent patrol or what it means for a Royal Marine to operate in the High North, where a minor mistake can become life threatening. That has changed through my time with the Royal Navy: it has put faces and human cost behind phrases that I once skimmed over. It is with these perspectives that I approach the Bill. I will focus on two areas—housing and skills.

The contrast in housing between what is often expected at entry and what some individuals still experience is striking. I have seen good accommodation, but I have also seen damp, broken heating and long waits for basic repairs—and heaven forbid there should ever be any wifi. The creation of the defence housing service is one of the Bill’s biggest changes. The real test is simple: will life improve for the families living in those homes? I would like to understand how Parliament will know whether these arrangements have worked three or five years from now. What standards will the new service meet? How quickly will repairs be fixed? Will performance be published? How will servicepeople influence the system if it is not delivering? Poor housing affects morale, retention and families. If we ask people to serve their country, we must ensure that they have a decent place to live.

The second area is the Armed Forces covenant. As we have heard, every five years, it allows us to ask whether we are keeping our side of the bargain with our armed services. I welcome the Bill’s decision to strengthen the covenant and extend the statutory duty more widely, but it raises a wider question: what does “no disadvantage” really mean in 2026? The world of work has changed irrevocably. AI technology is reshaping recruitment, jobs and skills. Every year, thousands leave the Armed Forces and enter the labour market. The Armed Forces are exceptionally good at teaching people how to learn under pressure. In a world of constant technological change, that ability may be one of the most valuable things that our servicepeople leave with. Judgment, teamwork, adaptability and leadership are becoming more valuable, not less, and are qualities that the Armed Forces develop every day. Perhaps the Minister could say how the Government see the covenant evolving alongside these changes. If the labour market is shifting, should “no disadvantage” include helping people to develop their skills more during service, making it easier for employers to recognise them?

The Bill also updates arrangements for reserves and recall, recognising that the skills of former personnel remain valuable long after full-time service. If we value those skills enough to maintain that relationship, are we also doing enough to help people keep them up to date—especially as we face the hybrid world which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about earlier? To me, that is part of what conditions of service now means. They still include pay, housing and family support, but they could also include the chance to keep learning and moving confidently into civilian life. I do not suggest that the Bill should become a workforce strategy, but it is reasonable to ask whether the covenant, transition support and reserve policy reflect the world that people who leave the Armed Forces now go into, including the impact of AI and automation. One of the privileges of spending time with serving personnel has been seeing the skill and determination across the forces. We invest heavily in developing those qualities while people are in uniform; we should be just as determined to ensure they continue to benefit after they leave.

We should all welcome and support the Bill, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, said, make sure it is widely supported outside this House and part of a national conversation. If, in a few years’ time, we can look servicepeople in the eye and say that they are living in better homes, that veterans are finding it easier to build good civilian careers and that people feel better supported to keep learning throughout their careers and beyond, the Bill will have done something significant alongside its constitutional importance.

UK Defence Forces

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for initiating the debate, especially as I have just had the honour of joining the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. As part of that, I have been invited to dinner this evening on HMS “Victory” in Portsmouth, to hear more about the Navy’s capacity. In preparation, I have been reading about Nelson. This quote struck me as very significant:

“Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made”.


How would Nelson think about our world now, when decisions about what constitutes neutrality are so much more complex?

The internet is the most complex of places. It would be absurd to talk about our defence resources without recognising the role of the internet in global peace. It is an enormous challenge. When it comes to resourcing and defending the UK, and maintaining our role in global peace, we must recognise that threats have changed forever. Our resourcing must reflect that. I believe that we in the UK do not yet understand the full power of the internet.

We must look at that issue through the lens of countries that, arguably, understand the internet’s power. I agree with the thesis of the academic John Naughton that those countries are Russia, China and, to a lesser degree, North Korea. Surprising choices—but consider their strategies.

Russia was quick to refine its military doctrine to incorporate information operations, which lays out a new theory of modern warfare—one that, according to Naughton, looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. As the news site, Politico, wrote:

“The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and tools … hackers, media, businessmen, leaks … fake news … conventional and asymmetric military means”.


I am sure I do not need to remind colleagues of the role that played in the US elections. I am equally sure that this is the tip of the iceberg. As has been admitted, we were caught off-guard.

China is clearly very different but as threatening. It is highly technocratic but has decided to have the internet without its liberal tendencies. As Naughton writes,

“China now has a very large and vibrant Internet, huge online industries and formidable technical and hacking capabilities. They have invented what the scholar Rebecca Mackinnon calls networked authoritarianism”.

I call it a parallel internet.

North Korean prowess in cyber operations is steadily mounting. In 2016, North Korean hackers stole nearly $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve. They were stopped only by a spelling mistake: a bogus misspelled “fandation”, rather than “foundation”. They still got away with over $80 million. Two years earlier, they led the devastating attack on Sony Pictures. Kim Jong-un’s regime understands how digital technology can overcome its industrial and economic weakness and turn it into a strength.

So, we have three regimes using the internet in different, but terrifying, ways—ways which I believe we are neither resourced nor, equally importantly, structured to fight. However, that is not my only concern. We will never make the right decisions about how to have a sufficient level of resources if politicians and policymakers fail to understand the internet and, worse than that, make it a kind of scapegoat.

As I have said here before, after the hideous attacks in the UK over the past year, politicians and commentators used inflammatory language that was knee-jerk and unhelpful, leading the public to believe that if the internet could be shut down, we would all be safe. As RUSI recently wrote,

“Scapegoating tech companies for online radicalisation is not only misguided – it detracts attention away from the crucial responsibility that society must bear in fighting the spread of violent extremism where it matters most: in the real world”.


As a director of Twitter, I declare an interest; I have seen first-hand how it wrestles with these issues. However, as RUSI argues,

“how would social media companies go about designing a tool that could automatically detect and block ‘extremist content’? What constitutes ‘evil material’? And who determines what these are? As Brian Lord, former deputy director for Intelligence and Cyber Operations at GCHQ, pointed out … content that is seen to be ‘free speech’ in one country might be seen as incitement to violence in another”.

Welcome initiatives, such as the National Cyber Security Centre, are building our cyber resilience, but they are a drop in the ocean and relatively insignificant. We do not have time to waste. This is one of the gravest moments in my lifetime. We need a dramatic rethink, not only about overall levels of funding, but, crucially, about how we structure ourselves to collaborate across disciplines and deploy diverse skills.

What boldness in long-term thinking can the Minister reassure us that the Government are working on? To end again with Nelson:

“Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat”.


Imagine: that was in 1800. Thank goodness the world has slowed down.