Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Lord Soames of Fletching

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

So far, this has been the best informed and best defence debate I have attended in this House. As the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) knows, I had a very high opinion of his tenure of office as Secretary of State for Defence, and it is a pleasure to follow him. He spoke with his habitual integrity and persuasiveness. I also wish to welcome the shadow Secretary of State for Defence to his position. As he knows, I also have a very high opinion of him, to the extent that I was a bit surprised that he did not stand for the leadership of his party. [Interruption.] I have ruined his chances now. I hope that, contrary to his own wishes, he will be in that position for rather longer than his predecessor was, because we should not have too many changes of position in these very important places.

The first and most important thing that the Ministry of Defence did was to start a strategic defence and security review, so the first and most important thing that the Select Committee on Defence did was to begin an interim report on that review. After we have done more work on our current inquiry into Afghanistan, we will be resuming our inquiry into that review. We have not yet done that, so what follows are my own views, rather than those of the Committee.

The 1997-98 review took place in a benign economic climate, whereas this year’s review happened against bank meltdown and the simply dreadful economic consequences. That is why the Government decided that the defence and security review had to coincide with the comprehensive spending review. As a result, it became primarily a spending review and, secondly, a defence and security review. Is that a bad thing? It is absolutely essential to get the country’s economy right. What won the second world war was the United States’ economy, and the same applies to the cold war. The greatest weapon that a country can have for its defence is a strong economy, and any business man knows that the key to having a sound business is keeping one’s costs under control. If the Government had done nothing, instead of paying £43 billion a year in debt interest alone, by the end of the Parliament we would have been paying nearer £50 billion a year. As the former Chief Secretary, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), said, there is no money left.

The Defence Committee recognised all that, but we also wanted to look at the process of the review and we concluded that it was, pretty much, rubbish. This review took five months, whereas the highly regarded 1997-98 review took 13 months. The haste of this review meant that an opportunity to consult the wider public, defence academics, the defence industry and Parliament was missed.

[Nicholas Soames]

I know my right hon. Friend’s views on this matter, but does he accept that the review was the first stage of a process that will require a great deal more work? Both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence have made that point. It is merely the architecture behind the transformation of defence that will take place, so an ongoing defence review will be needed all the time; indeed, there is to be one every five years.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I accept what my hon. Friend says and I listened with great admiration to his earlier comments. There is a lot of work to be done, as the Secretary of State has made plain, and I hope that my hon. Friend will play as valuable a part in it as he played before the election.

My greatest concern about defence is that the British, and perhaps the European, public believe that defence is a job done and that the end of the cold war meant the end of the need to spend serious amounts of money on defending our interests. They think we can rely on the Americans to protect us, but they are wrong: the Americans will protect us only for as long as it is in their interests to do so. Until our constituents demand that we spend more on defence, no Chancellor of the Exchequer will wish to do so, but that will not happen until the public are properly engaged in talking about defence or until they understand its importance and purpose. If one conducts a defence review behind closed doors, while everyone is away on holiday and at a pace that would startle Michael Schumacher, no such understanding will arise. Let us hope that the next one comes across better.

Given all my criticisms of the process, the result was far better than I expected. First, the Secretary of State for Defence did an absolutely valiant job of fighting his corner and I doubt that he alienated the Prime Minister or the Chancellor in the process—he was doing his job. Secondly, given that the Secretary of State started with a defence posture and budget that were both utterly incoherent and unsustainable there was a surprisingly strategic feel to the outcome, the thrust of which seems to be that we shall be gambling our security in the short term in exchange for its enhancement in the longer term. That is preferable to the reverse, provided that we always have at the front of our minds the need not to fail in Afghanistan.

Thirdly, despite the tightness of the settlement, there was a recognition of the changing and unpredictable nature of the threats we face. There was extra money for cyber-security and a recognition by the Secretary of State personally regarding the threat from electromagnetic pulses. I expect also that there will be extra money for space security. Those are some of the new threats.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Lord Soames of Fletching

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

That, of course, is also what the Committee thinks.

One of the Committee’s principal objections is that the lack of general consultation may create a greater sense of disconnection between the Government’s decisions and the understanding of the people at large on defence issues. With regard to the public view of defence, there is a gap between what politicians say and what the public believe. In relation to Iraq, the British people became, towards the end of our engagement there, broadly opposed, mostly because of the very poor planning on what to do after we had won the war. There is a great degree of scepticism about the purpose of our deployment in Afghanistan. In my view, our people would support our deployment to Afghanistan if they thought we had a good strategy for winning, but at the moment they do not think that.

That gap between the public view and the country’s policy is both very important and deeply worrying. The SDSR was an opportunity to narrow the gap, but because of the speed with which it is being carried out, that opportunity has been missed. We in the defence community must therefore do all we can, not only in the UK but across Europe, to explain defence policy and our defence needs to the public. Without such communication, notwithstanding the country’s general support for the armed forces, defence will suffer.

That contrasts with the 1997-98 defence review, which was announced during the Queen’s Speech in May 1997 and reported, later than originally expected, just over 13 months later in July 1998. There was a good deal of consultation during the preparation of that review. The Defence Committee of the day played its part in that, holding 12 evidence sessions while the review was in preparation and eight more afterwards. It also produced a weighty three-volume report on the review—I do not know whether anybody read it, but at least somebody had the time to write it. It was a good review, but I would make two points about it. First, it ended up being underfunded, because it was overtaken by events. Secondly, I would caution the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), the shadow Defence Secretary, because it was held at a time when the British economy was strong, the Labour Government having received one of the best economic legacies in the history of this country. Before the shadow Secretary of State makes too much of his suggestion that this one is a cost-cutting farce—

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will just make this one comment, while I am in full flow, to the shadow Secretary of State. Before he makes too much of his suggestion that this review is a cost-cutting farce, he should reflect with an appropriate amount of humility on who got us into our current economic mess and on why the defence budget is such a shambles.

[Nicholas Soames]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that not only was that review not funded, but there was clearly a determination that it should not be funded, given that when these matters were discussed in the House, those on both sides agreed that the review would work only if it was properly funded and they signed up to it on that basis?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend is entirely right; the problem was that the then Chancellor was not naturally enthusiastic about the issue of defence as a whole, and we saw the same thing when the defence industrial strategy was produced. Again, that was an extremely useful document, which was signed up to by the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He subsequently became the Secretary of State for Defence and discovered that he actually did not have the money to put that strategy into effect, any more than we had earlier had the money to put into proper effect an excellent 1998 defence review.

So now that I have antagonised absolutely everyone, I shall end by saying what I hope to see from the review. I hope and expect that its end result will be a changed Ministry of Defence, which is focused more on the threats of the present and the future than on the old cold war structures of the past. I hope to see an element of coherence, so that our future looks significantly better than our present. I hope and expect that the improvements that could be made to the way in which we buy our defence equipment will be far-reaching and helpful. I hope and believe that the result of the reductions in Government spending will be to strengthen the economy of the United Kingdom in such a way as to give us the chance to renew our defence industry. I hope, but fear I may not see it, that we can reverse, as we should, the reductions in our spending on research and technology. I also hope, although I am not at all confident, that enough of our defence structure will remain to take full advantage of the economic revival.