Astute-class Submarines

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, could my noble friend give a word of description of how the naming of warships occurs in the Royal Navy? Contingent on his answer, would HMS “Adaptable” be a possibility?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I wish I could answer that question. For the benefit of the House, I have mentioned the first three submarines: HMS “Astute”, HMS “Ambush” and HMS “Artful”. The fourth is called “Audacious”, the fifth is “Anson” and the sixth is “Agamemnon”. For the seventh, we are still waiting to decide on the name.

Ministry of Defence: IT Systems

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point, but, as I said, the Army will not lose control of this whole process and there will be soldiers helping with recruiting. This concept was designed not only to cut costs but to enable soldiers to go back to the front line. The initial gateway business case was accepted back in July 2008 by the previous Government.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, in addition to what my noble friend referred to in 1998, does he also recall that there was a massive reduction in the Territorial Army during that period? Some of us who were then sitting in the other place had to defend not one but two Territorial Army bases in our constituencies in order to prevent them from being closed. The situation that we are now dealing with would not be so acute if the Territorial Army had had a more stable period.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a very good point. When the previous Administration took office in 1997, the Territorial Army was more than 50,000 strong; by the time it left office in 2010, that figure had halved. That pattern of decline has now been arrested and the strength has been stabilised.

Ministry of Defence: Dogs

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, that is a very interesting question and I will consider it closely.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, if I may shift the emphasis from the Government to dogs, is my noble friend aware that Greek vases demonstrate a considerable use of dogs two-and-a-half millennia ago? That tradition has been maintained for a very long time—to the enormous credit of the dogs.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am learning a lot today.

Territorial Army

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am not at all surprised that the noble Lord was in the Territorial Army. He has that military demeanour, and cut a fine dash when he came into the Ministry of Defence the other day. We need to expand the Army Reserve to reflect the future liability of 30,000 trained reservists. To deliver that, the supporting structure needs to be changed. We are confident that the Army Reserve will continue to demonstrate its ability to adapt to new requirements.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, how many of the 35 sites that will no longer be used are in Scotland?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, there are seven sites in Scotland where there is no longer a requirement for Army Reserve basing as a result of structural change. These are Wick, Bothwell House in Dunfermline, Sandbank, Keith, Kirkcaldy, Carmunnock Road in Glasgow and McDonald Road in Edinburgh. One site, Redford cavalry barracks in Edinburgh, will be reopened.

ETA: Ceasefire

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a very good point. The situation is very fluid at the moment, with a new Government about to take power in Spain next month. We should wait and see how things turn out and then decide what to do. But it is essentially a sovereign matter for Spain.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister share my view that help is always defined better by the receiver than by the giver? Does he also recall the observation of CS Lewis, that if you hear about someone going around doing good to others, you can generally tell the others by their hunted look?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I shall certainly make a visit to the Library afterwards and have a look at that.

Libya

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, the answer to the noble Lord’s last question is yes: they are exactly the same. We want a genuinely Libyan solution. This is about upholding UNSCR 1973 and its remit to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas. That is what the French want and that is what we want.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, in the context of the press comment alluded to, and referring back to a previous Anglo-French alliance, does my noble friend recall the episode in The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman leading up to taxis of the Marne, where the French chief of staff was having dinner in the Champs-Elysées with a friend and they heard the couple at the next table say one to another, “The situation is so serious that the chief of staff is leaving for the front tomorrow”? As the chief of staff’s friend smiled and raised an eyebrow, the chief of staff said, “That, my friend, is how history is written”.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I am afraid to say that my noble friend is better read than I am, but I shall have a word with him afterwards and find out the source of his comments.

Armed Forces: Redundancy

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, the noble Lord and the noble and gallant Lord raise a very important point. I am happy to put this in writing to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce. I will certainly deposit copies of those letters in the Library to clarify this issue.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, given the perennial difficulty of deciding whether fair is better than very fair or vice versa, I have the gravest possible sympathy for my noble friend.

Armed Forces: Redundancies

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I share 100 per cent the noble Lord’s views on fast jet pilots. Last week, I was fortunate enough to go to RAF Coningsby to see the hugely impressive work of the Typhoons. But, due to the reduction of the RAF’s aircraft fleet, the number of student pilots in the flying training pipeline will unfortunately be reduced by about 170 personnel. We will endeavour to find alternative positions, where available, within our branches, such as personnel support, engineers or logistics. However, I must make clear that there will be the need for redundancies. As these pilots are under training, it will not impact on operations.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, in the context of morale, will my noble friend share with the House how he thinks that the silent majority, to which some in your Lordships’ House like me belong, can do more than is being done to help improve morale in the field?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, that is a very interesting question. I cannot think of an instant bright answer, but I will cogitate on it and come back to my noble friend.

Rural Communities

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on securing this debate and on initiating it so comprehensively and engagingly. In the spirit of the coalition, I say that long gone is that joke of yesteryear when torrents of Liberal oratory were said to pour down from Welsh hills and leave deposits on the English plains. I also congratulate him on his serendipity in attracting speakers from all corners of the realm, except Northern Ireland. I cannot personally fill that gap, but Ulster also has its remote uplands in the mountains of Mourne, the Sperrins and the north Antrim hills in the constituency of the noble Lord, Lord Bannside. I am, however, conscious that the Commission for Rural Communities’ paper on England’s upland communities, helpfully provided today in the Printed Paper Office, is, by the laws of devolution, confined to England. I hope that my noble friend the Minister in his reply will indicate how upland experience is compared throughout the United Kingdom, especially as the Northern Ireland economy is so concentrated on agriculture.

I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on having attracted the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester to the speakers list. One of the great practical arguments for retaining the Lords spiritual in your Lordships’ House is that they are by definition regional voices for their dioceses. The canvas that the noble Lord offered us is very wide, but I always think that community shops are a particularly vivid index of the communities referred to in the Motion—doubly so, because they serve the community and derive that service from the community itself.

I shall not dwell with latitude on any particular one of the many standard rural issues—housing, jobs, energy costs or communications in all senses. However, I want to reiterate from earlier debates in your Lordships’ House on planning and housing that the present habit of urban and suburban incomers to seek immediately to marry more than one dwelling into a single one, or to seek planning permission for extensions, is not the most sensitive way of entering their new community, not least when they reduce the supply of apposite and/or affordable housing among their neighbours. If the coalition were to contemplate changing the right of housing association tenants to acquire their properties, I hope that it would think long and hard first about rural communities and the protection that will be needed for such housing in them.

On jobs, the Minister responded to the debate on the economic aspects of the Queen’s Speech and I shall not weary him by repeating what I said then about broadband, which is important to rural areas for multiple direct and indirect reasons. However, it is noticeable how social entrepreneurs in remote areas can enhance social capital there. Alston in Cumbria is far from where I live in south-west Wiltshire, but I am struck by the way in which it not only has embraced and exploited broadband in its community, but also, until recently, provided national publicity for homes “in the sticks”—the title of its magazine—all over the nation to increase the ubiquity of such entrepreneurs all over the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who will follow me, will speak more eloquently and comprehensively about the particular issues of the south-west than I can, but I am struck by how the scale of the heritage, measured by scheduled monuments, listed buildings, parks, public gardens and conservation areas, enlarges the further west you go. It is noticeable that the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, which are more remote, have a significantly larger part of the heritage than those counties directly to the east. This has a powerful effect in encouraging and providing jobs in the heritage skills industries, when agricultural labouring, with all its historical richness in country lore, is dying out so fast. I declare an interest as president of COTAC, an acronym that conceals the Conference on Training in Architectural Conservation. We are doubly blessed in the heritage by what it does for tourism and thus the economy.

I vicariously congratulate the right reverend Prelate who is to speak later and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who is proving to be so dynamic and imaginative a chair of English Heritage, for the emphasis that they place on the health of rural churches, both in fabric and in their communities. Anyone who expresses anxiety about the Church of England and other traditions in rural areas should unblind themselves to how much rural life is built around our churches and chapels, which also provide the setting for much extracurricular culture.

I close with a scattergun of unrelated questions for the Minister and shall of course be content if he answers only one of them today. I should first declare an interest—or, more precisely, a responsibility—as the former government Whip on the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Bill, which featured in the recent case brought by the Badger Trust on the legality of the Welsh Assembly’s badger cull. My question is of a supplementary nature. Can my noble friend tell us how much of the massive anxiety about the health of our bee population is caused by the liking of badgers, like the liking of Winnie the Pooh, for treating bees’ nests as a direct source of honey and how far that weighs in any consideration of the badger population? Secondly, given the coalition’s announcement on building in gardens, how satisfied are the Government about the clarity of the present definition of brownfield sites? Thirdly—I join the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in this—given that my understanding is that the Commission for Rural Communities is itself threatened by a cull, is it intended to substitute some alternative form of rural advocacy to fill the gap? If I may hark back to my references to churches and chapels, let me remark on the fact that the mode of address of the chairman of the commission, Dr Stuart Burgess, conceals that he is a clergyman by background—how apposite that has been to his pastoral role within a national community that still feels a little beleaguered. I am delighted that his contribution on our behalf has so rightly and recently been honoured.