British Army: Troop Size

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord is well aware that we are not in a place that we would wish to be in, which is exactly why Future Soldier has defined the path over the next few years. The Army is designed to fight; it will remain that way, and we will ensure that it is equipped to do so.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Earl will be aware that our Armed Forces are essential to our national resilience as well as to national defence. Prior to the pandemic, requests to bring them in to assist civic authorities were already rising steadily, and they more than doubled during the pandemic: about 34,000 service personnel were deployed to support the pandemic response and, this year, the pre-pandemic increased tempo has been sustained. There is no mention of this trend in the integrated review, but surely, taking account of this increased demand and the increased national defence demand, this justifies a review of the size of the Army, if we are to become the most resilient nation in the world, which is the Government’s ambition.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, I emphasise that the programme that we have called Future Soldier is the most significant transformation of the British Army in more than 20 years. As I say, it will create an Army that is more integrated with itself and with the other branches of the Armed Forces, and one that is more agile. This means an Army that can turn its hand not simply to combat in the field, which we hope that it will not have to engage in, but also to the tasks at home that the noble Lord so rightly drew attention to.

Ukraine Update

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

We are working closely with partners to ensure that we can quickly provide emergency humanitarian assistance. We have also announced 1,000 more British troops will be put in readiness in the UK to support the humanitarian response in the region, should it be needed. I cannot go into huge specific details, but we are working with international partners because we recognise that there may be a need in the area.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, we can impose sanctions on the three people who have been identified in the Statement, but we cannot guarantee that we can freeze and seize their assets, because we will not know where they are. They will be hidden behind all sorts of complexities of shell companies and transactions. My right honourable friend Keir Starmer in the other place asked the right questions. He said:

“We need to draw a line under Companies House providing easy cover for shell companies. We need to ensure that our anti-money-laundering laws are enforced … and we have to ensure that money is not pouring into UK politics from abroad.”


When will we be able to say that we have that assurance?

Sue Gray Report

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, in paragraph 14 of this update, we learn why this is a minimalist report at the request of the Metropolitan Police so as not to prejudice their investigations. In paragraph 13, we learn that Sue Gray has been instructed and has undertaken to store and safekeep all the information gathered

“until such time as it may be required further”,

and to keep it “in confidence”. In answer to a question in the other place, the Prime Minister, in avoiding giving an undertaking to publish an unredacted version of the full report, clearly referred to—although I do not have the Hansard, so I may not get the words exactly right—legal considerations about one account that had been given to Sue Gray. There were legal considerations about it that prevented him giving that undertaking was the inference to be drawn from his answer. Who has been talking to the Prime Minister about accounts that witnesses have given and how does he know that?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

As I have said, I cannot comment on the ongoing Met investigation, but what I can say is that the Prime Minister has said—or the Government have now said—that at the end of the process, following the Met investigation, the Prime Minister will ask Sue Gray to update her work in the light of what is found and we will publish that update.

Coronavirus Grants: Fraud

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I think the answer has to be no. We had to move particularly quickly in very difficult circumstances. Of course, there is always a risk of fraud—all fraud is unacceptable, but there was a risk because we had to move quickly. As I say, there is a lot of work and, particularly from HMRC’s point of view, in the months and years ahead there is big scope to recover.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, fraud in government is rampant and is estimated at just under £30 billion—so writes the noble Lord in the Financial Times today. Why, in those circumstances, did the Government agree to drop the long-awaited economic crime Bill from next year’s legislatory list for Parliament to consider?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I do not have an answer to that; I will have to get an answer to the noble Lord. I say again that the schemes brought forward during those very difficult times were designed in response to a pronounced market failure, particularly with the UK’s smallest businesses struggling to access the finance that they needed to survive at the start of the pandemic. Voices from across the spectrum, including from the party opposite, were shouting at us to be sure that we acted quickly. We were already doing so, but we continued to do so.

Afghanistan

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, other Ministers and the Chief of the Defence Staff are all very fond of the phrase, “Even the Taliban were surprised at the speed of the Afghan collapse.” They do not use this because we are interested; they use it because it is supposed to support an inference that we therefore should not be surprised that they were caught out by it, and to assert that everyone was surprised by the speed of the collapse. This is not true.

We now know that multiple US intelligence reports in spring and summer warned of the fragility of the Afghan army and the Afghan Government. If that were not sufficient—and it should have been—here in the United Kingdom the visiting professor of war studies at King’s College, a man called Tim Willasey-Wilsey, who spent 27 years in the Foreign Office on these issues, was freely writing blogs on the Cipher Brief, an open-source DC-based website, explaining all the factors in the inept deployment of the Afghan army and the behaviour of the Afghan Government that supported this fragility. The question for the Government is this: why did that information, which was in the public domain and being discussed, not ring alarm bells in the intelligence community and in the UK MoD? If that cannot be answered, why should anyone trust that the Government are being honest about the situation in Afghanistan?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I have to say to the noble Lord that we were working on preparations. The preparations for Operation Pitting, for instance, involved intensive work by many government departments over recent months. It was the huge effort, bravery and commitment of our Armed Forces personnel, diplomats and civil servants in Kabul that enabled us to evacuate more people than any other country, other than the United States. The specific evacuation plan for Afghanistan was revised in January 2021 and kept under review until it was enacted. So we were making preparations as the situation unfolded.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

Yes, I can assure my noble friend that that is exactly what we will be doing. We will also want to be pragmatic and through organisations and some form of dialogue see whether we can talk to the Taliban and encourage them to do the things that we are talking about, such as providing safe passage. We have a number of levers at our disposal and will use all of them to try to make sure that we can achieve safe passage for those who want to leave Afghanistan and to make sure that many of the gains in civil society and within the country for women and girls and for minorities are not lost in the coming months.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for engaging with the question that I asked earlier, but she did so without dealing with the germane point of the evidence: did the Government have the ability in any form to come to the conclusions reached by other people who were not in the intelligence community? Why did the fact that they were doing that not ring alarm bells with Ministers who had responsibility, with their officials and with the intelligence community?

The noble Baroness tells us anyway that the Government were planning. Dominic Raab told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that, back in July, the Government were planning for the possibility of an evacuation of British citizens and those who were quite rightly entitled to think that we had a moral obligation to secure their lives. Will the Government share this planning? Did it include the explicit possibility that, unlike with any other evacuation I know of, those conducting it would remove the military before they had removed the civilians? If so, did we discuss this with the United States of America and with our NATO partners and say, “We have to face the possibility that history will look back on us as having removed the source of these people’s security before we could take them out of the place of danger”? Did we do that?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I am afraid that all I can do is once again reiterate the point that the specific evacuation plan for Afghanistan was revised in January 2021 and kept under review until it was enacted. Plans within it included options to support and evacuate our diplomatic team, British nationals and their families, the continuation of the evacuation of those eligible under the ARAP scheme and the withdrawing of remaining military personnel.

G7 and NATO Summits

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)]

The next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, this has been an extraordinary week of summits. Two questions on the ambitions of the integrated review arise from the concluding statements. First, the US and the EU at their summit committed to co-ordinate policies and actions and to establish a US-EU high-level dialogue on and with Russia. With whom does the UK plan to pursue its interests vis-à-vis Russia? Will it be along with the US-EU framework or bilaterally with Russia? Secondly, Presidents Biden and Putin reaffirmed the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Does the UK support that principle, and will it say so?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I do not think that any of us want a nuclear war—I certainly do not —so I am certainly happy to put that on the record. We will work with partners globally, internationally and through all fora, including NATO, in relation to Russia.

Attorney-General’s Legal Advice

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My right honourable and learned friend has said, in terms, that he accepts the court’s judgment—the Government got it wrong. He has been clear that it is now right that we ensure that any future decisions of this nature conform to the judgment of the Supreme Court. If my noble friend is requiring my right honourable and learned friend to make an apology for the legal view that he took during the course of the case, I do not think that is appropriate. The Supreme Court has disagreed with the Government’s legal view, but that is not the same as saying that the Government’s position was not tenable in the first place.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, with respect, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, did not answer the question that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, asked. The fact is that nobody believes that the Government sought the Prorogation of Parliament to prepare a Queen’s Speech—not even the government Ministers or other people who are peddling this. The evidence that was not the reason was found in the papers presented to the Scottish court, which revealed the real thinking of the Government. The question the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, asked was: why, in the context of the litigation, was no ministerial statement, far less a prime ministerial statement, put before the court to explain in their own words—not through their lawyers— why the Government sought a Prorogation? Why did the Government not have the courage to put that into a statement? Was it fear that government Ministers would perjure themselves if they did this and swore an oath in that statement?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I have already given the reason why that did not happen: any advice that was given to the Prime Minister would have been covered by legal privilege, and it was judged inappropriate to disclose anything of that nature to the court. The Government have been clear about why we need a Queen’s Speech—we want to deliver what the public want and we urgently need to consider how to advance that work in advance of a Queen’s Speech. It was against this background that the Prorogation of Parliament was sought.

European Council

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

A press release has indeed been put out about the EU completing preparations for a possible no-deal scenario, but it states:

“The EU will be required to immediately apply its rules and tariffs at its borders with the UK. This includes checks and controls”.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has now told us more than once in the context of the Statement that the Government’s priority has been the delivery of a deal. Is it not the case that in yesterday’s Sunday Times the political editor revealed, with the help of one of the noble Baroness’s Cabinet colleagues, the content of a Cabinet minute that showed that the discussion in the Cabinet was about the preservation of the unity of the Conservative Party? This is recorded in a Cabinet minute. Was not something else exercising the mind of the Prime Minister and her Cabinet when they were discussing what to do about Brexit?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

No, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet have been entirely clear: we want to deliver what is best for the country. That is why we have been working so hard to get a deal that does.

EU Council

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We are working hard to ensure that we do get this deal through. Should the House of Commons choose to reject it, however, there is a process set out in legislation. We will follow that.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, in the seventh sentence of this Statement, the Prime Minister said that her,

“Brexit deal includes the deepest security partnership that has ever been agreed with the EU”.

This seems a very odd choice of words, since no such security partnership exists. The political declaration, in paragraphs 80 and following, sets out an ambition to have a broad, deep and comprehensive partnership with the European Union, but that is for negotiation. These paragraphs also make it clear that it will not be as good a partnership as we presently have with the other members of the European Union. Will the Leader of the House confirm that no such partnership exists; that the one we eventually have will be worse than we presently have; and that nobody who voted for Brexit voted for less security?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. The political declaration is a declaration of our intentions for our future relationship. It certainly sets out the intention to have the strongest and broadest security relationship between the UK and the EU. Our partnership and strength in these matters was shown in particular, for instance, in the strong language of the Council conclusions on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, which was very much led by the Prime Minister. We will continue to work very closely on our security relationship. Both sides are absolutely determined to make sure that it is the deepest relationship that exists between the EU and another country.

NATO Brussels Summit 2018

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As the Statement made clear, there was and is a sense of urgency and renewed commitment to move towards spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2024. It is only fair to say that our European allies and Canada, for instance, added $41 billion to their defence spending in 2017 alone. That is a commitment and we are confident that countries have a sense of urgency. We will continue to meet our commitment and will encourage our allies to do the same.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. The Brussels declaration makes it clear that NATO’s posture on Russia continues to be defence and deterrence, on the one hand, and dialogue on the other. When the secretary-general was recently in London, he drew heavily on his own experience as Prime Minister of Norway and said something with which many of us agreed: namely, that defence and deterrence are insufficient alone and that dialogue is necessary. Indeed, the more difficult the relationship, the more dialogue there needs to be. So why do our Government seem content with their policy of having no high-level meetings with Russia? This leaves our NATO allies to conduct bilateral relations with Russia that involve, for example, Hungary, Italy, Greece or Turkey, where the Kremlin can count on a sympathetic ear and not, it appears, a robust voice, while the President of the United States said only today, quite clearly, that in his view the deterioration of US-Russia relations is a result of,

“many years of US foolishness and stupidity”.

All this undermines the integrity of the alliance and moves away from unity. Why do we not step up to the plate and engage in robust dialogue?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As the noble Lord knows, NATO’s practical co-operation with Russia remains suspended but channels such as the NATO-Russia Council are an important means to keep dialogue open. He is right that we have suspended all planned high-level bilateral contacts with Russia, but we continue to engage with it multilaterally when it is in our interests to do so. It is in our mutual interests to reduce the risk of misunderstanding, miscalculation and unintended escalation. The Prime Minister has always been clear that our approach to Russia is “Engage, but beware”.