Defence Expenditure

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Second Report from the Defence Committee of Session 2015-16, Shifting the goalposts? Defence expenditure and the 2% pledge, HC 494, and the Government response, HC 465.

It is a privilege to present the findings of our report entitled “Shifting the goalposts? Defence expenditure and the 2% pledge” to the public once again—it was published some time ago. I doubt whether anybody two or three years ago would have registered the significance of the term “2% of GDP” in connection with defence, because it was only relatively recently that the prospect of Britain’s falling below the NATO recommended minimum expenditure on defence for the first time came to the public’s attention. For many years, we spent a great deal of money on defence. The purpose of the report is to track the history of that expenditure to check the extent to which we are continuing to meet the NATO minimum and to see whether there has been any financial jiggery-pokery to enable us to do so.

In a nutshell, we found that no rules have been broken. The Government’s figures and methodology conform to the NATO guidelines. It is true that, on the basis of including such things as armed forces pensions, which were not previously included but are allowed to be included, the Government will reach the 2% minimum. I use the word “minimum” advisedly, because that is what it is. It is not a target, but the minimum expected of each NATO country to contribute as a proportion of their gross domestic product to their defence. One could argue that it remains a target for countries that have never managed to reach it, but for those of us who have always exceeded it, often by very large amounts, it remains a floor, not a target, let alone a ceiling.

I know it is frowned upon to use props in debates in any Chamber, but the sheet of paper I have is so vivid that, even at a considerable distance and through the lens of a television camera, it is easy to read. The bar graph shows a consistent and steady decline in the percentage of GDP spent on defence since the mid-1950s. In the mid-1950s, we spent more than 7% of GDP on defence. In about 1963-64, that downward-falling graph crossed the upward-rising graph of what we spent as a proportion of GDP on welfare. Far from spending more on defence than on welfare, as we did until about 1963, we spend six times on welfare what we spend on defence. In the mid-1980s, we were spending roughly the same amount on defence, education and health. Since then, the descending graphs for defence expenditure and the rising graph for education and health have similarly crossed over, and we have declined closer to the 2% minimum. We now spend almost four times on health and about two and a half times on education what we spend on defence.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I am interested in the chart that my right hon. Friend is describing, which appears as a corrigendum to our report. More interesting than the three Departments he mentions is the fact that, during that period, spending on overseas aid increased by a significant amount while spending on defence declined. Is that not a significant correlation?

[Dr Lewis]

It is significant, and it is indeed included on the chart. The only reason why I did not mention it is that, in comparison with the total spent on the other high-spending Departments, it is a relatively small proportion of our GDP. However, my hon. Friend is absolutely right because, such has been the decline in defence, our commitment to spend 0.7% on international development now amounts to one third of the total that we spend on defence, which comes in just above the 2% minimum.

When we called the report “Shifting the goalposts?”, we put a question mark at the end because we did not wish to prejudge it. There are two ways in which the Government could be said to have shifted the goalposts: first, by including things they are not allowed to include—we absolved them of that—and, secondly, by including things that they are allowed to include but never included in the past, which would mean that we are not comparing like with like in terms of our previous methods of calculating UK defence expenditure. The Defence Committee inquiry found that the NATO minimum would not have been fulfilled if UK accounting practices had not been modified, albeit in ways that are permitted by the NATO guidelines.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that some of the money that is counted in the 0.7% official development assistance is also counted towards the 2%? I might take issue with some of his line of argument, but it sounds like he is arguing that that double counting should not be double counted.

[Dr Lewis]

We did not find a hard and fast case of double counting, but we noticed in the past that there are items of expenditure that are highly relevant to defence and security that could fairly and usefully be catered for by the international development funds. Given that the 0.7% is protected, and given that one sometimes hears stories of the Department for International Development struggling to find creative ways of spending the money it has to dispose of, there is an opportunity, particularly in relation to soft power, to use elements of the international development money for measures that add to our security.

Of course, this is a rather crude measure, because gross domestic product can vary. If this country’s gross domestic product goes down but we spend the same amount on defence, it might appear that we are doing more when we are doing nothing of the sort. Similarly, when the value of the pound changes, as has happened in the short term following the Brexit decision, we see the effect on what we are able to buy for the money we have available for defence when we purchase big-ticket items such as the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft from the Americans, although a considerable amount of that purchase will find its way to the British defence industry. What I am driving at is that perhaps we ought to be talking not about shifting the goalposts, but trying to move the benchmark.

We should be reminding people that, in the 1980s—the last time we faced a significant threat from the east in Europe in the second and closing phase of the cold war—we regularly spent between 4.5% and 5.1% of GDP on defence. The similarity lies not only in the international situation. In the 1980s, we simultaneously faced a very significant terrorist threat in the form of Irish republican terrorism. We now face a similar threat in the form of fundamentalist Islamist terrorism.

It therefore seems appropriate to note that and, in the week that we were told that the first of the successor submarines for the nuclear deterrent will be named HMS Dreadnought, to remember a previous HMS Dreadnought, the battleship that changed the whole nature of sea power as far as capital ships were concerned in the years approaching the first world war. A famous naval arms race was going on between this country and Germany and, around 1909, there was a great deal of controversy that the German navy was drawing level with the grand fleet of the British Royal Navy in terms of dreadnought battleships. A public campaign was mounted, encapsulated by the phrase of the Unionist politician George Wyndham:

“We want eight and we won’t wait!”

My view, which I believe is shared by at least some other members of the Defence Committee, is that a new benchmark is perhaps needed for the percentage of GPD to be spent on defence: “We want three to keep us free!” In reality, if we go on at the 2% level, we are in danger of finding ourselves incapable of meeting the threats that face us today and will continue to face us in future.

[Mr James Gray]

We want four, or we’ll show the Government the door.

[Dr Lewis]

As always, I am delighted to be trumped by my hon. Friend in that direction. That is an absolutely splendid intervention and I thank him for it. I hope the Minister will go one better even and think of something to rhyme with five.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Yes, the threshold is important for a whole number of reasons, and we want to look at the overall level and get that focus of Government, but it is not the most important thing. The right hon. Gentleman might be about to come to this point, but we ought to be pressing the Government on what capability we are getting as a consequence in terms not only of materiel, but of manpower, and experienced manpower in particular.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely spot on, and of course that is what underlies my remarks about the fact that the figures are only, at best, the crudest guides. Nevertheless, they give us some sort of measure of comparison. Spending a certain amount of money on defence—or, should we say, investing it in defence—is not a sufficient condition for the reason that the vice-chairman of the Committee has just explained. It is, however, a necessary condition: if we do not spend enough, we cannot possibly have the potential. If we have enough to spend, we can consider how to ensure that we spend it in the most efficient and productive ways.

At this point, I pay tribute to the staff who help the Defence Committee to prepare our reports and, in particular, to one member of staff, Dr Megan Edwards, who did all the background research for the appendices to the report. They show, on as near as it is humanly possible to express the same terms, how much we have spent every year since 1955-56 up to the present day. That sort of original research work is of lasting value, because it sets into context the minuscule efforts that we make these days in comparison with the efforts that we had to make in the past. The reason that I single out Dr Edwards is that today is her last day working as a specialist member of the staff of the Defence Committee—our loss will be the Cabinet Office’s gain, and we wish her well in her new post and congratulate her on it.

Another aspect of the financial calculations that causes particular concern is the constant emphasis on efficiency savings. The most recent tranche of efficiency savings that the Government required from the Ministry of Defence was, I believe, some £0.5 billion, just before the 2015 strategic defence and security review. Some estimates put the aggregated total of efficiency saving requirements in recent years at something in excess of £1 billion, carried forward year on year. Theoretically, savings are ploughed back into the MOD. In practice, I understand from people who know about such things, it is hard to track that money, to apply those notional savings in concrete terms and to see where exactly the savings have gone in terms of new capacity.

A few days ago, on 18 October, that matter came up during a hearing on the Ministry of Defence’s annual report and accounts for 2015-16. The Defence Committee was interviewing Mr Stephen Lovegrove, the new permanent secretary at the MOD; Lieutenant General Mark Poffley, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff for military capability; and Ms Louise Tulett, director general of finance at the MOD. They made an impressive trio of witnesses.

At one point, it was put to the witnesses that, of the almost £26 billion of equipment commitments that came out of the SDSR, almost a quarter really was new money, nearly £11 billion was so-called headroom or contingency, which is understood to be used up at appropriate points in the programmes, but the rest of it was in fact efficiency savings. It is therefore understandable if we feel a bit worried that what seems on paper to be a substantial commitment to spending large sums of money is, in a significant respect, notional, because it is dependent on the redistribution of money that the MOD already has but is supposed to spend more efficiently in some way or another.

[Mr Spellar]

May we forbear on the nomenclature of the civil service—the so-called efficiency savings? Efficiency, as I understand it, is when we are running a payroll office and using 100 people, but we bring in new equipment and only employ 50 as a result, while keeping outputs the same. Efficiency is when people find new and improved ways of undertaking their work. Everything else is cuts. We should be clear that many of the things we are discussing are not efficiency savings but cuts, and we should describe them as such.

[Dr Lewis]

The right hon. Gentleman perfectly exhibits the cross-party basis on which we try to find agreement on such matters in Committee, and the extent to which we succeed in doing so. He is of course absolutely right.

I do not intend to speak much longer, because it is excellent to see so many would-be contributors to this short debate, but I will first refer to the question that was put to Mr Lovegrove. We asked, basically, when the point will arrive at which an organisation can truthfully say, “We are just about as efficient as can be and, indeed, any further ‘savings’ that we make must amount to cutting into the bone, having already cut through the flesh.” The permanent secretary’s response was as follows:

“There may be a moment at which that happens. It is not on the horizon right now. There are certainly efficiency savings that we can get at in the Department, and our focus is on doing that and seeing whether or not we can go even further. It is only at that point that we would start engaging in the kinds of conversations that you suggest.”

With the greatest respect to the permanent secretary, who as I say made a good impression and was a credible witness in our examination of the annual report and accounts, we hear time and again from within the armed forces the same underlying fear: that we are in danger of creating a hollow force, which may have exquisite equipment—perhaps not enough so-called platforms, but exquisite nevertheless—but not enough people to man it.

The trouble is that short-term cuts—I beg your pardon; efficiency savings—can lead to long-term problems. That applies in particular to training. With the carriers coming on stream, the big frigate programme having to get under way and the new F-35 joint strike fighters taking over the maritime air role from the sadly missed Harriers, which will have filled too long a gap in our naval capabilities, now is the time when we should inject maximum effort into training. Yet we find ourselves in a position—perhaps for reasons of morale or under-investment, or perhaps because insufficient emphasis is being placed on defence in our national priorities—of struggling to recruit and retain the people we need even as we cut the size of the armed forces.

The Government have not broken any rules, but they have scraped over the line by the narrowest of margins. There is no guarantee that we will not dip below the 2% figure. People usually come up with the response, “Just remember that we are the second highest spender on defence in NATO.” I remember that sort of argument from back in the 1980s, when people who wanted us to spend less on defence—we were spending quite a lot in those days; between 4.5% and 5%—said, “Why should we spend this amount on defence when Germany and so many other European countries spend so much less than we do?” The answer, as the author of a short and pithy letter to The Times pointed out, was that the countries that we were being compared with were all on our side. We have to judge our defence expenditure by what our potential adversaries spend and what defence and attack capability they get for the money that they invest.

We do not want to engage in a race to the bottom. We do not want to preen ourselves on doing a good job because people on our own side are spending even less than we are. Our percentage expenditure on defence is lower than it has ever been—even on the new calculation, it is 0.1% lower than it was in the previous financial year. Something has gone wrong with our scale of national priorities, and the purpose of the Committee’s report is to draw attention to that, in the hope that the Government will renew their emphasis on their first duty: to keep our nation safe.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate. We have had an excellent turnout for a quiet Thursday afternoon. The fact that so many people have given up their afternoon to take part in this debate and made such strong contributions, both from the Back and from the Front Benches of the respective parties, is a matter for congratulations. I think we all agree that adequate funds are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for wise defence expenditure. The question that came up again and again was whether 2% is enough. We heard it from the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and from the Front-Bench spokesman for the Labour party, the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton).

I started off by referring to the “we want eight” crisis of 1909, of which Winston Churchill wryly noted:

“The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”

Perhaps in the context of this debate we might end up by saying that I want three to keep us free in terms of percentages. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) wants four or the Government should be shown the door. Maybe we can compromise and, like the Bee Gees, say, “We want five for stayin’ alive.”

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Second Report from the Defence Committee of Session 2015-16, Shifting the goalposts? Defence expenditure and the 2% pledge, HC 494, and the Government response, HC 465.

Liberation of Mosul

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I am particularly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding us of the overall purpose of this campaign, which is not simply to help defend the new democracy of Iraq, but to eradicate a threat to us all and to our way of life. He asked me a number of questions. The UK will continue to assist this campaign; the RAF will be closely involved in air support of ground operations. We have already been targeting key terrorist positions, and command and control buildings in and around Mosul. The specialist mentors who have been helping to train Iraqi forces will continue to provide that support, although away from the combat zones. The rules of engagement that I set at the beginning of this campaign two years ago are not changed by the operation in Mosul, although it will of course be more difficult to conduct this operation in a closely packed urban environment.

So far as the future is concerned, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that when Daesh is eventually driven out of Iraq, as I hope it will be, we will have to continue all our efforts to combat its ideology and look more deeply at what attracted people to join up in the first place. We will need to work with moderate Islam right across the world to ensure that that perversion does not increase. Above all, as he said at the end, we need to learn the lesson of this campaign, which is that we must ensure that the Sunni population of Iraq has sufficient security in future and that we do not have to be asked back to do this all over again.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

One lesson of the campaign in Iraq is clearly that if air power is to make a valid contribution, it must be in support of identifiable ground forces. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it has been much easier to identify ground forces that we can support from the air in Iraq than it has been, or will be, in Syria? Does he also agree that when Daesh is pushed out and ultimately defeated, there will be no shortage of other groups that adhere to the same poisonous totalitarian theology as Daesh, but that are not as vulnerable as Daesh because they do not propose to seize and hold territory?

[Sir Michael Fallon]

On the first point, my right hon. Friend is right. In Iraq, we have an operation that is being led by the Iraqi Government. These are Iraqi troops who are fighting for the freedom of their own country and to protect their own people. In Syria, we have some moderate ground forces—the Syrian democratic forces—who are ready and willing to take on Daesh. Although we see the liberation of Manbij and other towns and cities in the north of Syria, I accept that the situation in Syria is very much more complicated. If his final question was that we should despair and simply do nothing, I do not accept that. We must confront evil where we see it in this world, and, given the professionalism and power of our armed forces, I believe that where we are able to help those nascent democracies that ask for our help then we should do so.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

There will still be a large number of new frigates, but there will specifically be eight new anti-submarine warfare ships, designed to protect the deterrent that the Scottish National party voted against just a few months ago. I hope that the timetable will be set out shortly, when the design continues to mature and the negotiations with BAE Systems have been completed.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Is it not a fact that BAE Systems is ready to start cutting steel right now, and all that is holding things up is a lack of funds in the MOD’s budget? If we do not start building these ships on time, we will doubtless end up with the same old story: we will drop below the already inadequate total of 19 frigates and destroyers, or else we will have to pay a lot more money to keep old ships in service for longer than they should be kept in service.

[Michael Fallon]

Let me reassure my right hon. Friend. We have already invested more than £1.8 billion in the Type 26 ship, and I announced a further £183 million in July for the guns to go on the ship. Much of the design work has been completed, but I am not prepared to sign a contract with BAE Systems until I am absolutely persuaded that it is in the best interests of the taxpayer and, indeed, the Navy, giving value for money to both.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the good doctor, Dr Julian Lewis.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Thank you, good Speaker. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the service provided by BBC Monitoring to open-source intelligence is of vital interest to the MOD? Does he agree that it would be totally unacceptable if the BBC inflicted swingeing cuts in the Monitoring service, as is proposed, including the closure of Caversham Park?

[Michael Fallon]

It is always good to be able to find common ground with my right hon. Friend on a defence matter. I certainly confirm the first part of his question, and I will do what I can to convey the gist of the second part to the BBC, too.

Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Thank you very much for calling me, Mr Speaker. I shall endeavour to follow your injunction to be brief. There is a very good reason to be brief at this stage of consideration of the Chilcot report, and that is that we have had very little time to consider a very large mass of detailed information.

I generally find, when trying to unravel what has happened historically, that it is sensible to look back at some of the original sources. In the very short time available, I have picked out a few original documents that have been included in the mass of published material. One of them is the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment dated 29 January 2003 and entitled, “Iraq: the emerging view from Baghdad”. I shall refer to two quotations. At paragraph 10, the JIC says:

“We are unlikely to receive any advance warning of a pre-emptive attack on the Kurds. We judge that a pre-emptive limited artillery strike on Kuwait using CBW could be launched in as little as two hours.”

At another point in the report, a list of things that might be the result of an attack on Saddam Hussein is given. One of these possibilities is described in the following terms:

“to inflict high enough casualties on any coalition ground forces, perhaps in Kuwait, including through the use of CBW, to halt a coalition attack and to swing public opinion in the West against hostilities.”

Another note, entitled, “Saddam: The Beginning of the End”, which was prepared by the assessment staff following a discussion at the JIC on 19 March 2003, states:

“We judge Iraq has a useable CBW capability, deliverable using artillery, missiles and possibly unmanned aerial vehicles. We judge Iraq possesses up to 20 al-Hussein missiles with a range of up to 650km and 100s of shorter range missiles, mostly with a range of 150km or less. These missiles may be able to deliver CBW, although intelligence suggests that Iraq may lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of such agents.”

The reason I quote those two documents is that they were top secret documents that were never intended for publication until the archives eventually came to be released many years later. They show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the advice received by the Labour Government at that time was that Saddam Hussein did possess, in the assessment of our intelligence agencies, chemical and biological weapons. We now know that that was wrong, but we also know, as a result of the release of those documents, that the Labour Government of the day did not lie to Parliament over the question of their belief that chemical and biological weapons were kept.

More contentious is the question of whether or not Tony Blair exaggerated. That is a matter of harder judgment, but I sometimes wonder what the reaction of Parliament would have been if he had come to us and said, “We really don’t know for certain whether Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons. We know he has had them in the past and used them. Because we can’t be certain that he hasn’t got them now, because of the events that happened only a matter of months earlier, which put al-Qaeda and its suicide brand of terrorism on the world stage, and because we cannot be sure that, for reasons of his own, he might not seek to supply such weapons to suicidal terrorist groups, we judge that we can’t take the chance.”

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s useful approach in going back to the primary sources. Does not the information to which he refers, though, highlight just how dangerous it is to go to war on the basis of intelligence alone, which is essentially what marked the Iraq war out from every other one? Does he agree that the process of making intelligence available for assessment by this House has to be improved, or we could risk doing it again?

[Dr Lewis]

That is very tricky, because there are two scenarios where we can go to war. One is quite straightforward: somebody attacks us and we get on with it, because we are given no choice. The other is a situation such as that under discussion, where we have reason to believe that something horrible could happen and the question arises of whether we should intervene.

One of the most problematic aspects of the Chilcot report is its statement that military action was “not a last resort” and that the peace process could have been given longer. The reality is that, unless an attack is launched on us, we can always go on talking for longer. I cannot think of any point at which it would be possible to say, “We have to launch an attack now because there is no prospect of continuing to try to find out without taking military action.”

The right hon. Gentleman talks about this House having to assess the intelligence, but I am not sure that that helps us too much. We can never be certain that what we are assessing is the whole picture, because sometimes, as those of us who have served on bodies such as the Intelligence and Security Committee will know, there are sources of intelligence that cannot be revealed. Therefore, to present raw intelligence to the House, without being able to say that there is other intelligence not being presented to the House, leaves the House in an anomalous position.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, in 2003, the House voted not just, or even mainly, on the intelligence? If you look at the debate, Mr Speaker, you will see that the House voted on Saddam Hussein’s repeated and unprecedented non-compliance with mandatory United Nations resolutions and on his record. Does the right hon. Gentleman think from his reading of the report that Saddam Hussein executed a massive bluff on the international community and his own people by pretending that he still had the weapons we know he had, or does he agree with the current Iraqi Government that Saddam sent them across the border to Syria?

[Dr Lewis]

I agree with a great deal of what the right hon. Gentleman has just said. Although it is not a matter of primary concern to us now, the fact is that Saddam Hussein was the author of his own misfortune. We must remember that, apart from being a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein had invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990. He chose to try to convince his own people that he had not given up these weapons, when either he had given them up or, as the right hon. Gentleman said and as rumours persist to this day, he had spirited them away, possibly to Syria. However, although I see a degree of agreement with me from those on the Labour Benches over this issue, they may find it a little harder to accept the next point that I wish to make.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I have great respect for my right hon. Friend, as he will know. However, I suggest that, on this issue, it was not just about intelligence sourcing from here. The United Nations inspectors at the time were pleading for more time because they could not find the WMDs upon which premise we were going to war. We should have listened to them as well. Ultimately, the reason they could not find the WMDs is that they did not exist.

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but the problem that the inspectors and we would always have faced was summed up by something that was said at the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. I was going to quote this later, but I shall do so now. On 21 August 2003, I attended the Hutton inquiry. In the course of giving evidence, Nicolas Rufford, a journalist, made a statement about a telephone conversation that he had had with Dr David Kelly in June 2003. Dr Kelly was, of course, a weapons expert, and knew all about the difficulties of detecting weapons stockpiles if they were hidden. In the course of that telephone conversation, Dr Kelly said to Mr Rufford that

“it was very easy to hide weapons of mass destruction because you simply had to dig a hole in the desert, put them inside, cover them with a tarpaulin, cover them with sand and then they would be almost impossible to discover”.

So the question that we come back to once again is: if Tony Blair had come to this House and more honestly highlighted the question marks against the reliability of the intelligence, would he be as excoriated today as he has been? Let me be counterfactual for a moment. Let us suppose that some stocks of anthrax had been discovered and there had been a secret cache. Would we still be saying that the people who took the decision in 2003, on the basis of what clearly was an honest belief that Saddam Hussein might have deadly stocks of anthrax, were wrong? I have no hesitation in saying that although the Government may have exaggerated—and probably did exaggerate—the strength of the evidence they had, I believe that they genuinely expected to find stocks of these weapons.

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but I am taking a lot of interventions, and I am keen not to abuse the fact that I do not have a time limit.

[George Kerevan]

Given the right hon. Gentleman’s wisdom and expertise, he is a focal point in this discussion. Does he accept that there are some on these Benches who think—and who feel that this is justified by the Chilcot findings—that the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction was an artificial casus belli that was used to effect regime change? If weapons of mass destruction were an issue, why wait 13 years to invade? Why not go in at the time of the first Iraq war?

[Dr Lewis]

The answer to the second question is easy. What happened during those 13 years was the appearance on the international stage, in September 2001, of a group that had been around for a long time but had not previously succeeded in killing 3,000 people in the heart of New York and Washington DC. [Interruption.] Therefore, the issue at question, as we often hear quite rightly said in debates about international terrorism, was that the traditional policy—the technique of containment, which is usually the best technique to deal with rogue regimes that have weapons stocks—could no longer apply under the circumstances. It was feared that if an international terrorist organisation was, for any reason, supplied with a substance such as anthrax, rational deterrence would be ineffective in preventing the organisation from using it, no matter how suicidally.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Tobias Ellwood)]

Given the role that my right hon. Friend plays as Chairman of the Defence Committee, I wonder whether he could qualify the statement that he has just made, which caused a reaction in the House. He suggested that somehow the events of 9/11 created a different scenario in Iraq. Does he not agree with me that in 2003, al-Qaeda was not present in Iraq, and therefore the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, cannot be made?

[Dr Lewis]

I do agree that al-Qaeda was not present in Iraq at the time, but that is not the point that I was making. The point that I was making was that the west was in a major stand-off with Saddam Hussein, and people use other groups and organisations for their own ends. The danger was—the then Prime Minister said this at the time, and it is what convinced me to support him—that Saddam Hussein might, for reasons of his own, decide to make some of these weapons available to certain groups, not because he was allied to such groups but because he and al-Qaeda shared a common enemy in the west.

I want to move on. Some Members will agree with what I have said, and others will not. Let me continue with the second branch of my remarks, and then it will be for other Members to put their own perspective on the matter. I hasten to add that although my chairmanship of the Defence Committee has been referred to a number of times, I am, of course, speaking entirely on my own behalf as someone who was here at the time and took part in the debate and the vote.

When I look back at those circumstances, I say to myself that the primary reason why I supported and spoke in favour of military action was that I believed what I was told by the then Labour Government about the possession of anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein. But here is where I have to make a major admission. At the back of my mind, and at the back, I believe, of many other hon. Members’ minds, was a second belief. It was the belief that if Saddam Hussein were removed, we might see the emergence of some form of democracy in Iraq. I was profoundly mistaken in that belief. From looking at the scenario as it developed, it is quite clear that what emerged was not any form of democracy; instead, there re-emerged the mutual hatreds between different branches of fundamentalist Islam that has led to bitter conflict for more than 1,000 years.

That was the lesson I drew from the Iraq war. It is also why, when it subsequently became clear that the same scenario would be played out in other theatres for the same sort of reasons—in particular, in relation to Syria in August 2013—I was determined not to make the same mistake again. Along with 29 other right hon. and hon. Members of the Conservative party and nine Liberal Democrats, I therefore voted not to take the same sort of action against President Assad as we had taken against Saddam Hussein. I remember hearing exactly the same sort of arguments in favour of removing Assad as everyone now accepts had been inadequate arguments for removing Saddam Hussein.

Members who feel strongly that it was the wrong thing to do in 2003 ought to check what the consequences have been of not taking the same sort of step in 2013. Since 2013 huge bloodletting has continued in Syria, but many of us still argue that if the choice is between an authoritarian dictatorship and totalitarian civil conflict engaged in by people who believe that suicide terrorism is the answer to the world’s problems and the fastest route to paradise, we should appreciate that very often there are no simple or easy answers in such dilemmas.

[Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)]

I have great respect for the Chairman of the Defence Committee—in fact, I believe I voted for him. Is he saying that if he had his time again he would vote against the Iraq war in 2003 and for the Syrian conflict in 2013?

[Dr Lewis]

I am saying that I was absolutely right not to vote to remove Assad in 2013 and absolutely wrong to vote as I did in 2003, but that I did so because I believed what I was told about weapons of mass destruction and also believed—wrongly—that there was a chance for Iraqi society to advance along more democratic lines. That was my terrible error.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Lewis]

I shall make a little more progress first.

My last point leads me to a second question. I hope that I have, in effect, shown that when the Labour Government of the day said to the House that they believed there were weapons of mass destruction they were not lying, and that there was a reasonable case to be made on those grounds for taking the action that was taken. However, the papers also show that the Prime Minister of the day, Tony Blair, was not unaware of the possible consequences of removing Saddam Hussein. In his public statement, Sir John Chilcot said:

“We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al Qaida activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.”

He added:

“Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.”

In a briefing note in January 2003 from Mr Blair to President Bush, the then Prime Minister wrote:

“The biggest risk we face is internecine fighting between all the rival groups, religions, tribes, etc, in Iraq, when the military strike destabilises the regime. They are perfectly capable, on previous form, of killing each other in large numbers.”

Let us remind ourselves that the vast total of deaths that have taken place in Iraq are not people who have been killed by westerners; they are Muslims who have been killed by other Muslims once the lid of authoritarian repression was removed.

[Philip Davies]

I am nervous about opening up a new front for my right hon. Friend, but some of the deaths in Iraq were clearly of our soldiers, and Chilcot said that there were some

“serious equipment shortfalls when conflict began”.

Two of my constituents died in action in Iraq—Sergeant Roberts died because he did not have the right body armour, and Flight Lieutenant Stead died because his Hercules did not have the proper suppressant foam fitted. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should never, ever, again send our armed forces into combat without properly equipping them for the task in hand?

[Dr Lewis]

Never, ever, again is a strong statement, and when a conflict arises, especially when it is the result of unforeseen events, it is seldom the case that the armed forces are fully equipped in every respect. The history of our engagement in many conflicts is of a disastrous start that is usually gradually rectified as the conflict goes on. The report clearly brings out that, for far too long while the conflict was going on, equipment deficiencies were not identified and remedied—I will leave it at that for the moment.

I have two points on which to conclude. First, we must now accept that societies are unready for western-style democracy while their politics remain indissolubly linked to totalitarian, religious supremacism. I am not saying anything racialist in making those remarks, because only a few hundred years ago, religious wars devastated Europe, and here in England heretics were treated just as barbarously as they are in the middle east today. If the democratic model is to work, it usually has to evolve. If it does not evolve, a country must be totally occupied for many years in order for such a model to be implanted and to take root.

Secondly, the then Foreign Secretary said yesterday that he believed that some of those decisions, which were mistaken at the time, would less likely be taken in future because of the creation and existence of the National Security Council, and that that council is a forum where such matters could be thrashed out more realistically. I am not sure that that forum is quite strong enough. In bygone years, the heads of each of the three services had a direct input into the policy debate. The Chiefs of Staff Committee was a body that had to be reckoned with, even by Prime Ministers as forceful as Winston Churchill. Our current arrangements, in which the Chiefs of Staff are supposed to funnel their views to politicians through the medium of just one person—the Chief of the Defence Staff—are entirely inadequate.

I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary is continuing in his post and I am pleased he is here to hear me say something that I hope he will be hearing more about from the Defence Committee, which is that there is too much of a disconnect between our top military advisers and the politicians. It is easier for a Prime Minister with a bee in his bonnet about overthrowing one regime or another to brush aside the words of one man, no matter how authoritative any given Chief of the Defence Staff may be, than it is to brush aside the contribution of the heads of the armed forces as a body.

The Defence Committee suggested, in one of its final reports under my predecessor as Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), that the Chiefs of Staff Committee needed to be constituted as the military sub-committee of the National Security Council. The recommendation was ignored in the reply to that report, but I reiterate it today. We must have authoritative and expert people who are in a position to stand up to a Prime Minister on a mission, whether to remove Saddam Hussein or to remove Gaddafi while telling this House that we are just going to implement a no-fly zone to protect the citizens of Benghazi. It is very important that the strategic calculus should be properly presented to politicians, so we do not ever again have a situation, as we are told happened over Libya, where a Chief of the Defence Staff is told to do the fighting while the politicians do the planning.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon). I commend her for her thoughtful and well-informed contribution to the debate. I did not agree with every point that she made—no one would expect me to—but I did agree with her about the tone that we should adopt in our approach to this debate: it right for us to approach it with a degree of humility and to be careful not to reinvent history.

I was here in 2003, and I remember those debates. As I listened to the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), I could hear her speaking from the Opposition Benches, but I kept looking over to the Government Benches, because that is where I remember her sitting when she made her speeches in the 2003 debates, and they were very powerful speeches.

I well remember the atmosphere described by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who recalled the way in which the votes were whipped and the way in which the Government really did make every effort to steamroller the motions through the House. He said that he felt vindicated. I know what he meant by that, but I do not sense anything quite as positive as vindication in this. If anything, I feel slightly depressed, because I think that there was an inevitability that was not addressed by the House at the time, and I fear that we would still not address it if we were placed in the same position today.

I will say a bit more about that later and about how I think the House should deal with it in the future, but I should first place on record our gratitude to Sir John Chilcot and his team for doing a thorough piece of work. Like others, I have been critical of the length of time that it has taken, but there is no denying the thoroughness of the work that has been done. What we see before us on the Table certainly clarifies one thing in my mind: we were absolutely right to set up an independent inquiry. We have been chivvying that man and his team for years, and now we see why it has taken him as long as it has.

The report fills in a lot of the background detail. It does not tell us anything that we did not already know or have cause to believe, in the broadest terms. However, Sir John has placed a number of dots on the page, and it is now for Parliament to join them up to produce a discernible picture. In particular, he says, quite clearly and quite fairly, that he will not express a view on the legality of the war, but he offers us evidence from which we can draw our own conclusions.

We are shown the already infamous memo from Tony Blair to George Bush in which he said:

“I will be with you, whatever.”

I think it important for the House to put that in the context of the time. As others have pointed out, Tony Blair was always meticulous in the House in making a case that was based on weapons of mass destruction. That was not true of George Bush. George Bush never pretended this was anything other than an exercise in regime change, so when Tony Blair wrote that memo to George Bush, he was saying, “I will support you even though I know what you are doing is something which is done on a quite different basis than that for which I am seeking authority from the House of Commons.” That is significant because, of course, a war entered into for the sole purpose of regime change would be an illegal war, whereas one for which the purpose was the removal of weapons of mass destruction was one for which there could have been a legal basis.

The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) posed a pertinent question. He asked, “How would the House have reacted if Tony Blair had been more balanced and even-handed in the presentation of the evidence?” That is where the detail of what Chilcot tells us is important, because in fact we see from that memo why Tony Blair was not more even-handed and balanced in the presentation of the evidence: he was working to an objective; he was working to an aim; he was supporting a commitment he had already made.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the Syria vote in 2013. I gently suggest that he might want to refresh his memory of the terms of the motion against which he and others voted, quite legitimately. I do not challenge his right or his reasons for doing so, but it was not a vote to remove Assad; it was a motion instructing the Government to obtain authority from the United Nations and then to come back to this House before any further military action was to be sanctioned. That was why I was prepared to support it.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I was not planning to intervene as I have made my speech, but—this is one of the knock-on effects of the matter we are discussing today—by the time we got to that vote we knew perfectly well that if we had passed that motion, the bombing would have started that weekend. All the planes were ready to go, and I am surprised that the right hon. Gentleman is, if I may gently say so, naive enough to believe anything else.

[Mr Carmichael]

With respect, I do not want to get taken down a side alley and into the question of Syria, compelling though that is, but the bombing could not have started on the authorisation of this House on the basis of the motion put to the House and against which the right hon. Gentleman voted. It is interesting to speculate, although not necessarily wholly germane to this debate, what would have happened had the House gone down the route urged on it in 2013—what might then have been the reaction of President Obama, how things might then have moved on, whether we would have been put in the position we were in relation to the vote we took last year on Syria. What I think is undeniable is that all these decisions and others—Libya is a good example—were taken under a cloud, which still hangs over our foreign policy and our role in the world, as a result of the experience of the debate on Iraq.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) pointed out, it is remarkable that if regime change was the agenda that sat behind the Americans’ intervention in Iraq, they did so little to prepare for its aftermath. The removal of the Ba’ath party from government must stand out as being one of the biggest strategic errors we have ever been party to. It completely failed to understand that many ordinary Iraqis who were engaged in Iraqi government and civic society did so as part of the Ba’ath party because it was the only party in town. To remove the infrastructure of government in the way that was done in 2003 has left a void in that infrastructure that remains a problem for Iraq to this day. The country has never recovered from that, and it provided fertile ground from which extremism flourished. That was all predicted by many of us who questioned the decision to go to war in 2003.

The House today is very different from the House that took that decision. Only 172 of the 659 Members who were here in 2003 remain Members today. I calculate that 141 of those 172 voted in favour of taking action, and 21 voted against it. I re-read the Hansard reports of the February and March debates before I came here today, and I was reminded that there was not a happy atmosphere in the House at the time. On that, I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire. It was tense and brutal, and deliberately so. It was the creation of that atmosphere that forced many people to vote for the enterprise against their better judgment.

It is important that we approach this matter with some humility. The amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) garnered some support. It said that the case for war had not been proven, and that was certainly the view that I took. I was not going to vote for a motion that said we would never go to war in any circumstances, because, like other Members, I knew that Saddam was a brutish dictator. We also knew that he had had weapons of mass destruction in the past. In fact, we had been quite happy to turn a blind eye to that fact because he had been using them against Iran, whose regime we were also quite happy to see removed.

It was that sort of double standard in our foreign policy that I hoped we might see the end of after the enterprise in Iraq. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case. In the speech that I made in the debate in 2003, I called for the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolution 242 on the question of Palestine. Sadly, we are no further ahead on that issue today than we were in 2003. If anything, we are further behind. That is why, should we ever find ourselves in this position again, the House must take its duties more seriously. We must ask questions. We cannot accept assertions when we should be given evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roger Mullin]

I thank my hon. Friend very much for that intervention. I am sure we all wish to pay tribute to the constituent she named.

People living with the consequences—those appalling injuries—need our support and care, but they also deserve justice and the truth. Over the past few days, I have heard one or two Members wonder whether it would be a waste of time to hold the former Prime Minister to account. I would answer that by asking, is justice ever a waste of time? I think not.

I was not a Member in 2003. Like some, I opposed the war at the time, but many people supported it. I have not had time to read the whole report—I have not been to a good enough speed-reading course to accomplish that—but I have attempted to focus on a few issues that I am particularly interested in, not least because I chair the all-party group on explosive weapons, and I am interested in some of the consequences of conflict and in issues such as reconstruction and preparedness for the aftermath of war.

We now know that, as UK troops poured into Iraq on 20 March 2003, the ill-conceived hope in Whitehall was of a quick victory over Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by a relatively benign security environment, which of course never existed. Victory in the immediate conflict unleashed a vicious insurgency that some have estimated claimed 250,000 lives or more. That should not have been a surprise. As Chilcot argues, UK hopes were exposed as hopelessly vague, under-resourced and compounded by a complete Government planning failure. Indeed, the report finds that the UK Government’s plans were “wholly inadequate”.

For that failing, Sir John Chilcot laid particular criticism at the door of Tony Blair, and stated:

“He did not ensure that there was a flexible, realistic and fully resourced plan that integrated UK military and civilian contributions, and addressed the known risks.”

Before the troops rolled in on February 2003, the Joint Intelligence Committee—the overarching body that brought together the work of agencies such as MI6 and GCHQ— concluded:

“The broader threat from Islamist terrorists will also increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

A little over two years later, London would become the target of the 7/7 attacks, yet there has been reluctance in some quarters to accept any link between that and the invasion of Iraq, despite the intelligence that was given years earlier.

Before becoming an MP, I worked in places that had suffered from earlier conflict, albeit not to the same extent as Iraq. There is absolutely no shortage of historical information to show that severe conflicts throw up not merely economic, infrastructure and security challenges, but cultural challenges, which are sometimes seen in the strengthening of sectarian attachments of many sorts. Sir John found that the UK Government had completely failed to appreciate the

“magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq.”

He commented:

“The scale of the UK effort in post-conflict Iraq never matched the scale of the challenge. Whitehall Departments and their Ministers failed to put collective weight behind the task.”

What may have begun as a failure of leadership by a few had become a collective failure of the entire Government. It has become clear that there was one central strand to UK strategy post-conflict, which was to leave Iraq as soon as possible. As Sir John put it,

“In practice, the UK’s most consistent strategic objective in relation to Iraq was to reduce the level of its deployed forces.”

The report found that the Government failed to protect their own troops with appropriate kit and vehicles, as my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara) explained a short time ago. Sir John stated that the Government failed to act against known dangers faced by our troops, such as the use of IEDs, and he castigated the MOD at the time for failing to apply appropriate armed vehicles with the appropriate haste. He argued that the troops

“did not have sufficient resources”

to conduct simultaneous long-term operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 onwards.

On Monday this week, I was in discussions with senior staff at Imperial College’s centre for blast injury studies. I was surprised to learn that as far back as the 1970s and the Rhodesian conflict, as it was known at the time, reports and studies demonstrated to the MOD what it needed to do to upgrade and provide better equipment for armed personnel in such conflicts. At that time, the lessons were ignored. This time, the lessons from Chilcot must not be ignored.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. Before he leaves his list of failures, may I remind him of a point I raised in July 2003? Another failure is that, 13 days after the fall of Baghdad, it was still possible for journalists to go into the gutted headquarters of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and intelligence services and pick up classified documents that were available for anyone to take away. One would have thought that if someone was determined to find out about the truth on WMDs and other matters, those ministries and agency headquarters should have been the first targets to be searched by intelligence teams.

[Roger Mullin]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a wonderfully telling point. I like his use of one word in particular: “if”. If they had been interested in finding out the truth about WMDs, these things would have been found much earlier and taken care of much earlier. The fact that there was no planning to do that tells its own tale, I fear.

Returning to my opening points about the people still alive today who suffered terrible injuries in the conflict, I would like to end, with your permission, Mr Speaker, with a quote from The BMJ only two days ago:

“No matter how good the short term care, nothing will remove the enduring effects of the deaths and the physical and psychological injuries. The true legacy of the conflict for individuals and wider society in both the UK and Iraq may not be evident for many years to come.”

That is why we need to learn all the lessons that have to be learned. We need to hold those to account who deserve to be held to account.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Fallon)]

This has indeed been a considered and moving debate, as befits such a serious subject. I believe that more than 50 Members have contributed over the last two days, and I join them in thanking Sir John and his colleagues, including the late Sir Martin Gilbert, for their immense efforts. They have produced a report that I think we all now agree is comprehensive, accurate, and an unvarnished record of the events, and they have been unremitting in their efforts to understand the causes and consequences of the Iraq war and its aftermath. We are all in their debt.

I hope that members of the armed forces and their families are able to find some measure of consolation in the report’s acknowledgement of their enormous service. Our thoughts remain with them. We should bear in mind what Sir John says about the efforts of the men and women of the armed forces: that the initial war-fighting phase was a military success. They did fight to help topple a tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, and the subsequent failures in the campaign, at whoever’s door they are laid, cannot and should not be laid at the door of those who did the fighting on our behalf.

However, Sir John also makes it clear that the United Kingdom did not achieve its overall strategy objectives in Iraq. There were too many challenges in too many different areas. There was a lack of leadership across Government, and there was too much group-think in our military, security and intelligence cultures, which stopped short of challenging key decisions. That point has been made many times over the last couple of days. There was flawed intelligence, which led to assertions—particularly in relation to WMD—that could not be justified. There was a fatal lack of post-war planning, and lessons from previous conflicts and exercises had not been properly learned. We also failed, as the campaign unravelled, to adapt to the changing situation on the ground, and there were significant equipment shortfalls for our troops, listed in some detail by the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald). There was much in that campaign that—whatever else we do—we must try to avoid in the future.

It will not, I think, be possible for me to refer to every single speech made over the last couple of days. The hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) picked out some of the more memorable. We have heard speeches of anger and speeches of remorse, and we have heard thought-provoking speeches about the overall effect of the Iraq war on our process and our political culture.

We have heard speeches from those who played significant roles at the time. The right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) spoke very illuminatingly of the need for humility, given that so many of those who were involved professionally were able to reach the same conclusions without properly challenging the existing culture, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) spoke of the drive to converge our views with those of the United States. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) underlined the importance of planning for reconstruction in any military action. The House also had the benefit of the military experience of my hon. Friends the Members for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer). I was particularly struck by the speech made by the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), who reminded the House that Islamic terrorism did not start in 2003; it was there long before that, and other countries were also engaged in trying to deal with it.

The question the House has to ask itself is this: given that we all want to avoid this happening again in the future, have there been sufficient, significant changes for the better? I suggest to the House that there have been some changes for the better. First, we in Government are better co-ordinated. We now have the National Security Council, which ensures that decision-making is dealt with in a joined-up way across Government. The NSC includes not only Ministers from the main Departments, but the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the heads of the intelligence services, relevant senior officials and the Attorney General.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

The Secretary of State has just listed the membership of the National Security Council. While it is revealing that all the intelligence services are individually represented, it is a fact that all the armed forces are represented only by the Chief of the Defence Staff. Will he give consideration to the Defence Committee’s suggestion that the Chiefs of Staff Committee could serve more usefully if it was constituted as the military sub-committee of the NSC?

[Michael Fallon]

I heard my right hon. Friend’s speech earlier today, in which he made that point at some length. I caution him against over-complicating the structure we have and setting up sub-committees of it. The armed forces are represented through the Chief of the Defence Staff, who attends not only the NSC, but the officials’ meeting that precedes it.

[Michael Fallon]

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend, particularly for his kind words. I am now serving my fourth Conservative Prime Minister; I do not think I have quite matched my right hon. and learned Friend’s record, but I am closing in on it. I will not be drawn on the possibility of serving yet another, given that my right hon. Friend the new Prime Minister has only been in office for a day. She and I did sit together on the NSC, as well as in Cabinet, and one can always look at these things again. It is not for me to instruct the new Prime Minister on how to run her Cabinet, but I will certainly ensure that my right hon. and learned Friend’s suggestion is passed on.

The NSC is a significant improvement on what went before it, in my right hon. and learned Friend’s time in government, and it is certainly an improvement on the kind of sofa government that the Chilcot report exposes. The NSC does not operate in a vacuum. The National Security Adviser, who attends it, is now a well-established position in Government, supported by a strong team, and the NSC and the adviser are supported by a structure of cross-government boards and sub-committees, to which the Ministry of Defence makes a full contribution. To answer the point raised by the Chairman of the Defence Committee, there is no shortage of ways in which the views of the chiefs are brought forward in that structure.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I see a slight contradiction in the Secretary of State saying that it would over-complicate the machinery of the National Security Council if the heads of the armed services were allowed to form one of its sub-committees, given that there is evidently no shortage of other sub-committees. The fact remains that it is easier for politicians with bees in their bonnets to sweep aside the views of the Chief of the Defence Staff as a single individual, which appears to have happened in the case of Libya, than it is for them to sweep aside the views of the heads of the armed forces collectively. I wish that the Secretary of State would not be so resistant on this point.

[Michael Fallon]

As I have said, the heads of the armed forces are represented on the National Security Council by the Chief of the Defence Staff, and the Chief of the Defence Staff who has been serving up to now is certainly not likely to be disregarded by the politicians who sit on the committee. Both he and his successor—I hope that the House will welcome the arrival of the new Chief of the Defence Staff today—are well able to hold their own against the politicians.

Select Committee on Defence

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am grateful for this opportunity to lay before the House the Defence Committee’s new report entitled, “Russia: Implications for UK defence and security”, which has been produced on the eve of the Warsaw NATO summit and which highlights the need for that major event to focus on defence and deterrence, but also on dialogue.

I am extremely grateful to all the members of the Defence Committee for their contributions to the genesis of this report. We held four oral evidence sessions and received 18 pieces of written evidence. A delegation from the Committee, ably led by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), visited Moscow, where they attempted to engage with the Russian authorities. Because of the current state of relations, Russian Government authorities were reluctant to engage, but the delegation acquired much other useful information on that visit.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine have undermined the post-cold war assumption of a stable Europe in which the military threat to NATO is low. The north Atlantic alliance must therefore restore its defences, review its deterrence and reopen its dialogue with the Russian authorities. The fact that NATO and the UK were taken by surprise by the interventions in Ukraine shows a failure to comprehend President Putin’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence beyond Russia’s own borders and to do so by force if necessary. His stance directly contradicts the rules-based international order that western democracies seek to promote.

Russia has become increasingly active not only in conventional warfare, but in unconventional methods, often deniable, which are designed to fall below the threshold that would trigger NATO’s article 5 guarantee—the undertaking to consider an armed attack against one NATO member state as an attack against them all. The creation of the very high readiness joint taskforce—VJTF—among NATO member states and the enhanced forward presence on NATO’s contested eastern flank are steps in the right direction, but our report warns that the VJTF was formed only recently and that its capacity to deploy the necessary forces within the required timeframe is as yet unproven.

The report’s recommendations include the following. First, the MOD should recognise the extent of Russian remilitarisation and respond to it robustly. Secondly, it should review the effectiveness of current deterrence policy against nuclear, conventional and hybrid or multidimensional warfare. Thirdly, NATO should determine whether the 1987 intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty is in need of repair or replacement in the light of allegations that Russia has breached its provisions. Fourthly, a timetable should be set out for the Trident Successor submarine debate and the decision in Parliament “without further delay”—indeed, that debate should be held before the summer recess. Fifthly, the renewal of EU-wide sanctions against Russia should be encouraged and possibly extended to a larger group among the Kremlin leadership. Sixthly, it should be accepted that

“it is perfectly possible to confront and constrain an adversary in a region where our interests clash, whilst cooperating with him, to some degree, in a region where they coincide.”

We regard the threat posed by Daesh, al-Qaeda and other international terrorists as a relevant example of the latter: the convergence, to a considerable extent, of NATO and Russian interests. I am glad to see the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), assenting to that proposition.

The Committee believes that Russian cyber-attacks across Europe and territorial seizures in Georgia and Ukraine may not be isolated actions and may be symptomatic of a wider ambition to restore Moscow’s global influence. However, because Russia is a global power, there remain opportunities for co-operation if we can but grasp them. Yet with relations at what the Russian ambassador to London has described as an “all time low”, our report concludes that the UK must urgently boost its cadre of Russian specialists. We must restore and maintain a high level of expertise for the foreseeable future. Given the current climate, the defence attaché’s office in Moscow, for example, must be properly staffed by the end of the year.

Since the end of the cold war, Russia has not been a UK priority and our expertise in this field has withered on the vine. The UK needs a vastly strengthened body of experts who can help provide an effective response to the challenges Russia now poses. We cannot hope to understand Russia without a forthright dialogue, and in the current conditions of mistrust we run the risk of blundering into conflicts that may be preventable through better communication. The cold war was characterised not only by military confrontation, but by the then Soviet Union’s promotion of Marxism-Leninism, with its formidable appeal to impressionable minds inside the Kremlin’s targeted countries. No such totalitarian doctrine applies to present-day Russia, which, for all its nationalist and expansionist tendencies, is itself under threat from revolutionary Islamism, the brutal successor to the equally brutal Nazi and communist creeds which blighted so much of the 20th century. Therein lies the basis for potential co-operation, provided that our dialogue with Russia is from a position of strength, based on sound defences and credible deterrence.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

May I say that it is a privilege to serve on the Defence Committee, which is so ably chaired by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis)? I hope he will agree that one thing that is clear from our report is a lack of dialogue and understanding between our colleagues in Russia and ourselves, in terms of not only language, but shared history. Does he agree that, in the light of the upcoming NATO summit, we need to review that as part of our wider engagement with Russia, including how it perceives the threat from NATO, too?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, indeed, and I thank the hon. Lady for that. She is a tremendously supportive member of the Committee; this is her first parliamentary term, but she has made a great start. I re-emphasise what I said about the importance of dialogue with Russia. The fact remains that different societies develop at different stages and go through different phases in their attitude to their relationships with the rest of the world. One mistake that the west clearly made after the downfall of communism was to evoke a degree of triumphalism at a time when magnanimity would have been more appropriate. Those in the west make a terrible mistake if they fail to recognise that Russia is and always has been a great power, and what we have to do is reach out the hand of friendship, while trying to discourage those aspects of the Russian tradition that seek to dominate lands beyond its own borders. Russia is a pretty large landmass and one would hope that the Russians could make a success of running their own country without feeling the need to impose their will on their neighbours.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

Potential Russian expansionism must be deterred by NATO with a fist of steel—there is no question about that, as we cannot let them do it—but one encased in a velvet glove. At the moment, we do not understand Russia and what it is doing. We must find better ways of understanding the Russians and talking to them about it. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one area where we simply do not know what they are doing is in the high north—in the Arctic? Russia is, without question, expanding its military capabilities up there and we do not quite know why. Does he agree that that was one area the report was not able to look into, and is there not room for further work on that?

[Dr Lewis]

I agree with every word my hon. Friend has said. Our report drops a very broad hint that the Arctic—the high north—deserves special attention, and I strongly suspect that if and when the Committee takes a decision to give it that special attention, my hon. Friend, who has led the way, with his all-party group for polar regions, in alerting the country to the significance of this area, will be playing a very prominent part indeed.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

First, let me thank the right hon. Gentleman and his fellow Committee members for a comprehensive and thorough report on this important area of the UK’s and Europe’s defence and security. I note that this inquiry did not have time to consider the implications of Brexit in full. However, given that the Putin regime’s tactics are often geared towards destabilising Europe as a whole, does he agree that it is vital for the UK to ensure, particularly at the upcoming Warsaw summit, that Brexit does not undermine the political cohesion of NATO? I am going to assume that the answer to that is yes. As such, has the Committee given any preliminary thoughts as to how this might come about?

[Dr Lewis]

I welcome the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) to his new responsibilities. May I say a personal message of appreciation for his past service in the Territorial Army, which included a spell of active service in Afghanistan? I hold the members of the armed forces, particularly those who have seen active service in dangerous parts of the world, in the highest respect. I am sure that we will all listen with very great attention to his contributions.

In relation to the implications of Brexit, I do not think that I am giving up any trade secrets when I say that that has been discussed as one of the major strands of the forthcoming work of the Committee. It is certainly the case that there should be no need for anyone to feel that security arrangements have been undermined in any way if only because of the almost complete overlap between the membership of the EU and the membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. I am quite certain that the structures of NATO will be perfectly capable of carrying forward the security relationships without any form of distortion by any other organisation that might have been tempted to duplicate them. NATO will indeed be one of the principal forums for ensuring that the communications that are so important between the United Kingdom and our friends and allies on the continent will be able to proceed absolutely uninterruptedly as a result of the change that will take place.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Julian Brazier)]

May I also welcome the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) to his new role, and say that we served in the same reserve infantry unit, although, unlike me, he saw active service during his time there?

I congratulate my right hon. Friend and his Committee on a heavyweight report. Clearly, we will be responding to it, and we will look carefully at each of the recommendations. It is above my pay grade to give a date for the Trident debate, but we will be looking carefully at it. May I congratulate the Committee on the very careful balance that it has struck between stressing the real and growing dangers from the Soviet Union—sorry, that was a Freudian slip; I meant from Russia—and stressing the political situation that exists now as compared with the old Soviet Union? I am talking about the lack of ideology now, and the fact that that may provide us with some constructive opportunities, particularly as we share a horrid threat from Daesh.

[Dr Lewis]

I am very grateful to the Minister for his encouraging remarks. He is spot on when he says that we must take a balanced view with regard to Russia. If we look back over the history of Anglo-Russian relations throughout the 20th century, we will see that they are terrible switchback rides of periods of great hostility and then close alliance and then great hostility once again. It is a pity—I will put it no more strongly than that—that we cannot order our affairs to see that, in reality, there are prospects for co-operation between developed powers that vastly outweigh any sectional advantage that might be sought by one of them trying to steal a march on the other. I understand the reasons why Russia feels affronted by its treatment after the end of the cold war, but that is no excuse for ripping up the international rule book and trampling on the rights of its neighbours.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

May I commend the Chairman and the members of his Committee for producing an excellent report in the run-up to the NATO summit later this week? I entirely agree with the need for more dialogue and co-operation through the NATO-Russia Council and by other means, and also with the Committee’s recommendation about recognising the Russian threat and the need to respond to it robustly. In that context, does the Chairman of the Committee share my concern about the recent remarks by the German Foreign Minister who described the recent 10-day NATO exercise in Poland as “warmongering” and “counterproductive” to regional security? Is there not a need for the member states of NATO to stand together and send a united clear message to Putin that we will not be divided? More work needs to be done by our own Government and other like-minded Governments to ensure that everybody recognises the need to stand united, otherwise Putin will exploit the differences.

[Dr Lewis]

I share the right hon. Gentleman’s concern. This is why some of us—I speak more personally in this respect—have been worried about the creation of a separate defence identity in Europe outside the NATO arena. What he says is entirely right: NATO is the forum in which our security concerns should be aired with our European friends, neighbours and allies. We should try to arrive at a unified perceptions of the situation and articulate them appropriately.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend and his Committee on producing an excellent and timely report? Does he agree that we have seen recently that President Putin has been able to exploit our weaknesses, that he does so ruthlessly and that he has been able to act with impunity? As chairman of the all-party Ukraine group, I am particularly conscious of his flouting of the Budapest memorandum of 1996, and he has done that with complete impunity. He respects strength, so it is absolutely right that NATO is reinforcing its position in the Baltic states. That is a demonstration of strength and resolve on the part of NATO. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is capabilities, not intentions, that count? Intentions can change overnight; capabilities cannot. Particularly today, given the complexity of modern defence technology, we cannot produce aircraft, tanks and ships overnight. Therefore, NATO’s upcoming meeting should focus on delivering the extra spending to deliver the capabilities.

I strongly applaud my right hon. Friend’s argument about dialogue. I had a meeting with the Russian ambassador here in London, and I said, “We have a common interest. Our common interest is that we are both facing Islamic fundamentalism, and that is where we need to co-operate.” Will my right hon. Friend therefore share with the House how he thinks we can not only show that we have absolute determination and resolve in resisting Putin’s advances but engage with him and his Government? Where else might we do so apart from on the mutual threat that we face from Islamic fundamentalism?

[Dr Lewis]

What a cornucopia of questions, but all of them typically sound and well directed, given my hon. Friend’s distinguished record in the field of defence and security. I believe that there is nothing new about the dilemma of how we gauge our relations with the Russians. I remember in my years as a researcher coming across a paper by the joint intelligence sub-committee—it was then a sub-committee of the chiefs of staff—called “Relations with the Russians”, which was written in 1945, and it said then exactly what we are saying today: “They respect you if you stand up to them, if you show you’re strong, but if you engage with them as well. They do not respect you if you give signs of weakness.”

I believe that there is a shared threat, but there are potential threats that Russia is beginning to show, once again, towards its most immediate neighbours, and that is why it is important that there is a NATO military presence in the most vulnerable front-line states, particularly the Baltic states and Poland. Russia must be left in no doubt that NATO membership means that article 5 applies, and article 5 means that there should be no question of Russia thinking that it can pick off any weaker or more exposed NATO member state and that the other NATO countries will not come to its aid. That is why, conversely, we must be careful not to extend NATO membership or article 5 guarantees to countries where it is simply not realistic to believe that NATO would go to war to defend them.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife) (SNP)]

We spent most of yesterday discussing the political and military miscalculation and misadventure in Iraq. We hope a debate on Trident looms large, but the report emphasises the need to consider the cost-effectiveness, desirability and affordability of the Successor programme. In the light of Brexit and the financial uncertainty it might bring, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there are many approaches and non-nuclear deterrents we could introduce to create stability with Russia, but that Trident skews every single defence budget to unacceptable levels? Its extension could lead to a financial miscalculation and to a military misadventure that would make Iraq look like a bit of a walk in the park.

[Dr Lewis]

Bearing in mind your instruction to be concise, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will just share with the House what the hon. Gentleman said to me when he first joined the Committee. He said, “Julian, you and I are never going to agree about the nuclear deterrent, but I am sure we can co-operate to mutual advantage on many other defence issues,” and he has been as good as his word. I respect his concerns and his doubts about the Trident Successor programme, and I am sure that the sooner we have the debate, the sooner we will be able to engage in the arguments.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman on his chairmanship and leadership of the Defence Committee. When I think of Russia, I think of the saying, “Speak softly, but carry a big stick”—in other words, we have to have dialogue, but we also have to be able to respond. One of the concerns I and the Committee have is about the National Guard, which comes under the direct control of the President—in other words, he can use it to combat terrorism and organised crime but also to control protests. Does the Chairman share the concern I and many others have that President Putin is no longer prepared to tolerate any opposition whatever? Do we also need to look at the ability of NATO and the British Army to respond quickly? Russia can respond within 24 hours or 48 hours, but we seem to take at least another three days. It is critical that we can engage with Russia on those two issues at every level to make sure we protect our people.

[Dr Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman makes an enormous and extremely valuable contribution to the work of the Committee, and I agree with him: the announcement of the creation of this new National Guard, which can muster hundreds of thousands of troops, according to some reports, but which, interestingly enough, also includes special forces, is a cause for concern. As it is directly responsible to the President, one can only wonder whether it has something to do with shoring up his position domestically, as well as with exerting power beyond Russia’s borders. The report says—I mentioned this in my statement—that the creation of the very high readiness joint taskforce is a step in the right direction, but the numbers that can be generated at short notice by the Russian armed forces seem to be substantially in excess of what NATO could generate now or in the immediate future, and we need to be able to do better in the medium and long terms.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I welcome the report, but I do get concerned when I hear Russia being spoken of in a certain fashion in the House and, critically, when we do not speak of the communities in Russia, who have to live with the daily experience of the Russian state.

It is now clear that the Russian Federation views the United Kingdom’s global strength as profoundly weakened not only by the issues raised in the Committee’s report, but by Brexit. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the lack of investigation by the Committee into the consequences of Brexit was an oversight and only gives succour to the idea in the Kremlin that the United Kingdom does not have a Scooby what it is doing when it comes to working with like-minded European nations to deal with the profound threats posed by the Russian Federation?

[Dr Lewis]

What a pleasure it is, after all those very supportive questions, to be able to say that I utterly disagree with the question that has just been asked. When did Brexit occur? It was a matter of days ago, but the Committee is to be coruscated and condemned because it has not already carried out a full-scale investigation of the consequences of something that the hon. Gentleman was hoping would never happen. Some of us hoped that it would happen, although I must say that a majority on the Committee hoped that it would not. The hon. Gentleman can be perfectly sure that the consequences of Brexit feature high up on our future programme of work. Indeed, I am surprised only that he thinks we should have carried out the research into the consequences of Brexit before we even knew that it was going to take place.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dunne]

We have already invested £1.6 billion in Type 26, including £472 million this March. I say to the hon. Lady as gently as I can that that commitment could not have been made if her friends had had their way and become independent, because shipbuilding would have ceased two months ago.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Minister will remember that previous shipbuilding projects, in particular the carriers and the Type 45 destroyers, ended up being much more expensive because of delays. Does he accept that BAE Systems is ready to start cutting steel on the Type 26 programme relatively soon and that delays will cause our total number of warships to dip and the ones we eventually get to be more expensive?

[Mr Dunne]

I say to my right hon. Friend, who is knowledgeable about these matters, that this will be one of the largest defence programmes that this Government will enter. I am sure that he will agree that it is absolutely right to enter into a contract once we are confident of the delivery schedule and the ability of the contractors to meet that schedule on a cost-effective basis. Once we are in that position, we will be ready to contract.

Shipbuilding on the Clyde

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dunne]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for your advice at the end of my opening remarks. I will keep my response brief.

The hon. Lady is seeking to make party political capital out of a routine meeting between BAE Systems and the trade unions that took place last week and that happened to come nearly two weeks ahead of the election for the Scottish Parliament. As I said in my opening remarks, the commitment of this Government to the Royal Navy is crystal clear. We have a 10-year forward equipment plan, in which we will be investing more than £8 billion in surface ships. Where is her party’s commitment to the Royal Navy? What percentage of GDP will her party commit to spend on defence in this country? We hear nothing about that.

Let me turn to the hon. Lady’s specific questions. She asked whether construction will begin this year. As I said earlier, we placed a contract last month for a further £472 million, which takes our contract on this programme up to some £1.6 billion. That is paying for equipment sets for the first three vessels; long lead items; and shore-testing facilities. The programme therefore remains on track. We have confirmed before, and I have done so again today, that there will be eight Type 26 frigates built on the Clyde. As I have said, this is a multi-year programme that extends beyond the equipment plan. The Type 23s will be replaced by a combination of the Type 26s and the new GPFF.

The hon. Lady asked when the national shipbuilding strategy will be published. We have invited the independent chairman to ensure that his work is completed before the end of the year, and I fully expect that it will be. She asked when the timeframe for the general purpose frigates will be determined. As that is a principal part of the national shipbuilding strategy, the answer will be apparent once that strategy is published.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Since 1997, the total number of frigates and destroyers has declined from 35 to only 19. Does the Minister recognise that the lighter general purpose frigates could offer a great opportunity to reverse that decline in numbers and to create not only more platforms for the Royal Navy, but more work for the shipyards and possibly even export opportunities if the frigate is designed in the right way, which should be modular, adaptable and capable of being upgraded in service, rather than having all the accoutrements put on it from day one?

[Mr Dunne]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. He is very knowledgeable about matters naval. He is right to draw attention to the fact that the introduction of a new and lighter class of frigate raises the prospect not only of more surface platforms for the Royal Navy, but of more exports. As far as I am aware, there has not been a complex warship exported from Clyde yards to other navies around the world for some decades. This provides us with the opportunity, through the general purpose frigate and the additional offshore patrol vessels, to give the Royal Navy, in due course, a larger physical presence and therefore to reverse the decades of decline.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 18th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

I will of course make available what figures I can to the hon. Gentleman, but let me be clear that the overall cost of the Successor programme was set out in the strategic defence and security review that we published in November. It is £31 billion, which should be seen in the context of a deterrent that will serve us for over 30 years.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is an open secret that the Ministry of Defence wanted this debate to take place in the spring, so I do not blame the Secretary of State for the fact that it has not happened. However, he is on record as saying that people are worried about the wavering position of the Labour Opposition on this matter. Would it not assist us to restore bipartisanship to the issue if the debate were to be brought forward, at least to before the Labour party’s conference, or do the Government—by which I mean No. 10—prefer dissension at a Labour party conference to bipartisanship on a particularly important issue?

[Michael Fallon]

Well, no. The position is that in November we announced our commitment to replacing the existing four Vanguard submarines, and we would like that principle to be endorsed by a vote in this House. I would obviously like that vote to take place as soon as possible, respecting of course the periods of purdah that will exist this spring and summer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Fallon]

I hope we will have an early debate and vote on the principle of supporting the replacement of our four existing submarines. I should explain to the hon. Lady that it will not be on the maingate decision, because there is not one maingate decision. We are obviously negotiating with our suppliers for four separate submarines.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

T8. The Secretary of State is a suave and polished parliamentary performer, which is why the Defence Committee would like to see a little more of him and why it is doubly disappointing that, despite trying since the beginning of March to agree with his private office to two two-hour slots before the end of May, so far we have achieved only one and the offer of a second on what happens to be local government election day, which is far from ideal. Will he kindly have a word with his private office, ask them to extract their proverbial digit, and thus avoid our two quite important inquiries on the middle east and Russia being either delayed or written without his valuable input?

[Michael Fallon]

I always enjoy my appearances before my right hon. Friend and his colleagues on the Select Committee. It is not always easy to reconcile the dates he offers with some of my international travel commitments but I will certainly have another look at the diary today.

Charities: Veterans Care Sector

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Johnny Mercer]

Of course. I cannot highlight enough what those volunteers have done, with no financial or selfish reward, but from a sense of duty to the country and to our servicemen and women. We must look after that. If we do not cultivate and protect it, I fear that over the years it will die out.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Before my hon. and gallant Friend resumes his main narrative, may I thank him for the vigour that he brings to these issues on the Defence Committee and to other issues that we examine as well? What is his view on the sheer numbers of service charities and the difficulties of co-ordinating their efforts? I am thinking of the huge variety, from post-first world war charities such as Veterans Aid in Victoria to very modern ones such as the adventurous Pilgrim Bandits in Hampshire, where special forces take grievously injured service personnel on adventure treks to the mountains and rivers of Canada, for example? How do we bring all this effort together when there are so many actors in the field?

[Johnny Mercer]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I will address precisely that point in about two or three minutes’ time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me an opportunity to send that clear message about a matter that obviously causes huge stress to individual service personnel. It corrupts their operations, and it undermines human rights by undermining international humanitarian law. I fully understand why someone who wanted to join the armed forces would be concerned about all three of those issues, and we shall be introducing a number of measures to address them.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Minister and, indeed, the Secretary of State have been very vocal about the importance of introducing a Bill to protect service personnel from spurious, costly and stressful legal actions. However, there have been apparently well-informed reports that the Bill is ready to proceed, but is being held up in Downing Street for fear that it might somehow impinge on the forthcoming European Union referendum debates. Can the Minister confirm that her Department will do as much as possible to ensure that the Bill is introduced at the earliest opportunity, and is not delayed for spurious external political reasons?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I can give my right hon. Friend those reassurances. I think that, in all respects, the information on which he based his question is not correct. A number of measures will be introduced, some of which may be attached to pieces of legislation, and we hope to be able to make announcements before local government purdah kicks in.