Defence Funding
Debate between Lord Beamish and Lord Pitt-Watson(1 week, 2 days ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
My Lords, that is exactly the sort of false choice that we need to guard against. We want to be clear that we spend the welfare budget well. That is why we have the Timms review on PIPs and why we have the Milburn review on NEETs and getting a system for getting people back to work.
Since it was quite a long question, I would like to tell noble Lords about fraud. By the end of this Parliament, the Government will be saving £4.3 billion on fraud in the welfare system that they inherited. I think they learned from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, a Conservative Peer and one of my predecessors, who stood at this Dispatch Box and said that it was arrogance, indolence and ignorance that was stopping us bearing down on it and that he hoped his resignation would make someone do something about it. We are and we will.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, first, I apologise to the House for sounding like a broken record, but does my noble friend agree with me that the Benches opposite should have a bit of humility? When they were in government, from 2010 to 2016, they cut the defence budget by 16%, made members of our Armed Forces compulsorily redundant, leading to the smallest standing Army since Napoleonic times, and, in collusion with their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, delayed the implementation of the replacement of the nuclear deterrent, adding billions to the cost. Does my noble friend also agree that the choice they are putting forward between defence and welfare is a false one and that they need to explain how they would get money out of the welfare budget, not in the future but today, to reinforce the defence budget?
Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)
I completely agree with those statements. Let us recognise that in 2025 this Government committed to the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War, after years, as my noble friend pointed out, of decline. I hope I will have an opportunity to come back and talk about the welfare budget and the Conservative proposals for it later on in Questions; I should allow time for that.