Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Debate between Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston and Hugh Bayley

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

Perhaps I should start by looking at the Order Paper. We are being asked tonight to approve for the current year a reduction of defence expenditure—or, I should say, a further reduction of defence expenditure—of £618 million. I hope that, in his response, the Minister will say on which capabilities the Ministry of Defence was planning to spend at the start of the year have now been dropped. Looking at the second and third paragraphs of the motion, I hope he will also say what additional expenditure there has been this year for capital purposes, for which there is a considerable increase, and operations. How will those additional resources be spent?

The Defence Committee produced a good report before the NATO summit and any sane person would agree with many of the points that the Government made in their response. However, there was a lack of clear commitment and candour in the response on defence spending, which the Chairman of the Select Committee has just talked about.

It has become clear over the past year, if not longer, that we face new and challenging security threats from Russia, which the Chairman of the Select Committee also spoke about. There is not just the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in eastern Ukraine, but a new Russian foreign policy doctrine that reserves to Russia the right to intervene in other states where there are Russian-speaking minorities when the Kremlin believes it is in their interests to do so. There has been a continuity of policy going back to Georgia and, indeed, Transnistria. There are still Russian troops in northern Moldova. We have also, in the past year or so, seen new and complex threats in the middle east from ISIS or Daesh.

In the face of new and growing security threats, we clearly need new capabilities and strategies to deter our enemies and defend ourselves. We need as soon as possible a new NATO very high readiness joint taskforce and we need to be able to deploy it quickly. That will mean that this House must consider how political authority will be given for use of the first very high readiness brigade and the reinforcement brigades.

We need to discuss with our allies how other Parliaments, especially those that have a constitutional requirement for a vote in Parliament before forces are deployed, will ensure that a very high readiness force, to be deployed within 48 hours, can be deployed within that timescale if needed even though their Parliaments cannot meet within that timescale. We will need either some pre-authorisations, as we had in the old days of the cold war, under which SACEUR—Supreme Allied Commander Europe—could mobilise his assets, or acceptance that parts of NATO will move within 48 hours, even if some allies will take longer to make decisions.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

Given my hon. Friend’s extremely important work in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, does he think that the House probably has not of late taken sufficient note of the debates at the Parliamentary Assembly?

[Sir Hugh Bayley]

I would always like greater attention to be given to the Parliamentary Assembly’s work, but there is a good crossover of membership between our UK delegation to the Assembly and the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Select Committee on Defence and the Select Committee on International Development. As a result, there is a cross-fertilisation of ideas and I know that colleagues on the Defence and Foreign Affairs Committees who are alerted to particular information through the NATO Parliamentary Assembly meetings have been able to take that information to their Select Committees. There is, of course, movement of information in the other direction, which is a thoroughly good thing.

We need to consider not just how we deliver a very high readiness joint taskforce but how to improve our strategy for dealing with cyber-threats, our response to the propaganda war when it is waged against us and our response to the use of irregular personnel, whether that means little green men or jihadists in the middle east. We must be clear that if we and our allies are going to develop new capabilities and strategies, that will cost money. If we want to improve our defence, we must will the means to do so.

Before the NATO summit last September, the Prime Minister quite rightly called on the majority of our NATO allies who do not spend 2% of their GDP on defence to do so. At the summit, as one can read on page 10 of the Government’s response to the report:

“All Allies agreed to halt any decline in Defence spending, aim to increase it in real terms as GDP grows and to move towards 2% within a decade.”

Some of our allies have responded to that declaration since the summit. Poland agreed on 18 February to increase its defence spending to 2% of GDP by 2016. Romania, through a pact signed between the political parties on 13 January, pledged to reach 2% by 2017. The Czech Republic, while not making a pledge to reach 2%, has pledged to increase its spending from 1% to 1.4% by 2020. Lithuania has pledged to meet 2% by 2017 and Latvia by 2020. Estonia, which is already at 2%, has increased its defence spending slightly to 2.05% this year. Overall, however, western European allies are still cutting their defence expenditure, on average by 2% a year since 2009 according to Jane’s defence budgets global defence assessment. Last year, in 2014, Germany cut its defence spending by 3.9% and we in the UK cut ours by 2.3%. France cut its by 0.8%. Meanwhile, Russia has been increasing its defence spending by some 10% a year for the past five years, a 50% increase. We ought to question why we did not pick that up sooner. No one increases their defence spending by 50% unless they have some plan to use those assets.

We should also look closely at UK defence spending. According to the public expenditure statistical analysis produced by the Government in 2014, at table 4.2, in the year I entered the House, 1992-93, defence spending was £23.8 billion or 3.5% of our GDP. By 1997-98, when there was a change of Government, of course, defence spending had fallen in cash terms to £21.7 billion, and by more in real terms. At that point, it was down to 2.5% of GDP. Throughout the period of the previous Labour Government, defence spending remained at 2.5%. The Ministry of Defence’s statistical analysis shows an increase, but if we remove the increased spending on operations it remained at 2.5%.