Ukraine: Challenger 2 Tanks

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I know that the noble Lord takes a keen interest in this and has posed similar questions before. I can reassure the House that the Secretary of State is cognisant of this and indeed commented in his Statement in the other place on Monday that we are very closely engaged with industry, as are our allied partners, because we are not in a silo in respect of industry supply and security of the supply chain. We are having to work with partners to ensure that, holistically, industry is able to understand demand and plan accordingly to supply it. Certainly, we are confident that we have retained sufficient equipment and ammunition so that we are able to undertake our primary responsibility to the security of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, in pursuit of a more precise answer on this issue of funding, will the Minister answer two questions? First, does the aggregate of all our activities in support of Ukraine meet the formal title of a military operation? If that is the case, do the NACMO procedures apply; that is, that the net additional costs of military operations are met not from the defence budget but from the Treasury reserve?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My understanding in relation to the donation of munitions and equipment granted in kind to Ukraine out of our own stocks is that replenishment of granted assets is managed under a standing arrangement between the MoD and the Treasury, and funding is provided from HMT reserves.

Ukraine: NATO

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

As the noble Baroness will be aware, the best that we can do, along with our allies and partners, is to support Ukraine in the defence of its territory in trying to see off the barbaric and illegal attacks to which it has been subjected by Russia. The principal concern has probably been the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, for understandable reasons. We welcome the efforts of the IAEA and United Nations staff to be on site, and we hope that will enable a robust inspection to be concluded. We are cognisant of the risk, and we will do everything that we can to continue to help Ukraine to see off the threat.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, the interest of the House in the progress of the military situation in Ukraine is entirely understandable, but can the Minister reassure the House that the Government recognise the two very separate objectives of conflict termination and conflict resolution, and that it is not in policy formulation that we aspire to resolve the conflict through military means alone?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

It has been clear from the outset that our desire—or mission, if you like—was to support Ukraine in its attempts to defend itself against this illegal aggression and invasion of its sovereign territory. That is our role, as it is the role of NATO and other partners. As to the future, and whether the conflict can ever be resolved and negotiations embarked on, that is absolutely for Ukraine to determine.

Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble Baroness’s colleague posed the same question to me on Monday evening. I was able to pledge that I would take that matter back and have done so. I have referred it to officials; it will essentially be an FCDO responsibility. We have been very clear as a Government that we want to co-operate with all those who are sympathetic to supporting Ukraine.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, given the state of the ground conflict in Ukraine, I will ask a domestic question on reserves. In doing so, I declare an interest as the president of the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Associations. It is quite clear from the ground situation that both Russian and Ukrainian ground forces are sustained as combat effective only through the massive mobilisation of reserve forces. Compare that with our domestic situation, where the current policy, confirmed by a Minister in the other place earlier this year, is that the Army Reserve will be reduced over the next 10 years by 10%. Can the Minister confirm that this is still the policy and that there will be some urgent revisitation of it?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I cannot perhaps give the noble and gallant Lord the specific reassurance he seeks, but he will understand that, with a new Government and the constant presence of threats confronting us, we constantly review what we think our need will be and what we think will be our required capability. He will be aware that there is an exciting programme for the reservists to be much more of a united force with our regular service personnel. He raises an important point; I cannot answer him specifically but it is an area of opportunity.

Ukraine: Weapons

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I partially covered my noble friend’s question in my earlier response, because it is these multiple launch rocket systems that we have committed to provide. The training has already begun for these. The objective is that, along with the contribution of the United States and Germany, we will deploy these systems urgently and without delay.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

Can I press the Minister on the original Question? It is not a matter of what allies have, or what our stockpiles are and the degree to which they have been run down. What the House needs to be reassured of is whether the MoD is conducting a review of the contractual linkages between the MoD and the defence supply base to ensure that we have the agility to sustain our war-fighting resilience—because it is our war-fighting resilience that has historically been most run down and is potentially the most vulnerable part of our overall national military capability.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I say to the noble and gallant Lord that, as previously indicated, the department is fully engaged with industry, because we want to ensure that all equipment granted in kind to the Ukrainian armed forces is replaced as expeditiously as possible, but also that, by continually managing and reviewing our own UK stock of weapons and munitions, we ensure that while we meet that commitment to Ukraine, our UK Armed Forces’ stocks are sufficiently maintained.

Ukraine: UK Military Support

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

We routinely engage with Turkey on regional matters, at all levels. Recent engagements have included the Montreux convention and vessel movements through the Bosphorus strait during the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

Given the risks of escalation in the military elements of the conflict in Ukraine, it is quite clear that any further military aid will have to be less than decisive. In policy terms, therefore, is a prolonged and mutually self-hurting stalemate between Ukraine and Russia probably the best that can be achieved in the current circumstances?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My honourable friend in the other place used the adjective “attritional” to describe the conflict. That is probably pretty accurate. We are very clear about the magnitude of what the Ukrainian armed forces are contending with. Our role, along with that of other NATO partners and other global allies such as the United States and the EU, is to support the Ukrainian armed forces in their endeavour. I am afraid this will not be resolved in the near future. It is important that, as a country, we do everything with our allies to support what is right and to ensure that Ukraine is assisted in seeing off what is wrong.

Ukraine: Lethal Weapons

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Again, the noble Lord speaks for us all in the Chamber. This illegal war, with all its hideous and barbaric consequences, must fail. Certainly, we in the United Kingdom, with our allies and partners, are doing everything we can to ensure that Ukraine is robustly supported in its attempt to see off this evil.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, the question illuminates a difficult choice for the Government. The war in Ukraine, by military definition, remains limited. It is limited in strategic aim, in geography and means employed. Injecting greater lethal aid into that war is unlikely to be decisive. Indeed, far from it, it runs two very severe risks. One is the risk of prolongation and the other is the risk of escalation. The way to eliminate those risks can only be through dialogue. Can the Minister please update the House on what she believes to be the progress of that dialogue?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon answered a Question recently on this very issue. He was quite clear that, although normalisation of relations with Russia is not possible at the moment, robust diplomatic engagement is necessary. This is very much an FCDO responsibility. I can reassure the noble and gallant Lord that the MoD is regularly in dialogue, not just with our defence allies and partners—whether within NATO or outwith—but also, of course, with the armed forces of Ukraine.

Defence: Type 45 Destroyers

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I say to the noble Baroness that the programme is under way; it is scheduled, and the other Type 45s will be going in subject to their operational obligations and their availability for the refit. I think the noble Baroness should understand that the conversion is a complex engineering project. The noble Lord, Lord West, and I may disagree on many things, but I think we are both agreed on the technical complexity of this and it is being delivered against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic. There has been a significant challenge that has tested industry and it has impacted the schedule, but we continue to monitor and review the programme.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, as we have seen in Ukraine, the most important vector of attack in conflict below the threshold of formalised warfare is a form of politicised war based on an effective narrative. I am sure the problem of the Type 45’s power plant will be expensively resolved, but what steps are we taking to improve our speed and effectiveness in translating military activity into an effective political narrative?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am almost tempted to answer the question the other way around and say that, with the integrated review, the defence Command Paper and the allocation of budget to defence over the duration of this Parliament and exactly what that means for both equipment and shipbuilding, we have seen that there is a very manifest political resolve to support defence and ensure our capability is as good as it can be. As to the more strategic questions of how you relate what you are doing at the MoD end with what is required out on the front, as the noble and gallant Lord will understand, we are constantly assessing, identifying and recognising threat and addressing that with the multifaceted character of the capability we have.

Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information Agreement

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for the opportunity for this short debate. I reassure her that, although I am a landlubber, the importance of the nuclear enterprise transcends single service interests. Indeed, in common with most former defence chiefs, I maintain a close interest in the nation’s nuclear enterprise. This is not always easy since many of the Government’s formal publications and announcements on nuclear issues, such as last October’s annual update to Parliament, are, perhaps by design, somewhat opaque.

A consistent set of features of the nuclear enterprise is, however, clearly discernible. The enterprise is vital, expensive, fragile and, wholly understandably, beset with various risks. One area of that risk is the future propulsion system of our nuclear submarines, and one category of that fragility is the quality and future availability of suitably qualified nuclear personnel. The fragility is fully recognised, though it is, to be honest, far less obvious that it is being successfully ameliorated.

The recently announced AUKUS agreement is in many respects hugely welcome, as we have heard. It aligns the interests of three like-minded Governments in an increasingly important part of the world and against a commonly agreed threat. The genesis of agreement, however, is less obvious. It appears, anecdotally, to have been the opportunistic exploitation of a military-to-military inquiry about the challenges of adopting nuclear propulsion in a submarine enterprise. It certainly does not seem to be an initiative that spent years of cautious marinading in policy consideration. Rather, it was an opportunity to give substance to rhetoric. There may well be nothing wrong in that at all, but my concern is that a major foreign policy initiative that necessitates any dilution of the UK national effort, any diversion of our nuclear expertise or anything that has the potential to add fragility or risk to our own nuclear enterprise must be contemplated and embarked upon with extreme caution. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that this risk is fully recognised and will be properly ameliorated.

Army Restructuring: Future Soldier

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I thank the noble and right reverend Lord very much indeed. He raises two important points. On recruitment, he is correct that challenges with recruitment were identified, and the approach to recruitment changed—and, actually, the position has turned around and is very encouraging. Part of what we are doing is to try to ensure that the Army represents an attractive career with an attractive future. Therefore, we are optimistic that recruitment will not be an issue and there will continue to be a good rate of applications to join the Army. We have no reason to think that that will not materialise.

On reservists and skills, one consequence of this reconfiguration, as I said earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is to make this a much more attractive prospect for reservists, for two reasons. It gives them a sense that they are valued, acknowledged and regarded as part of the scene, as it were; whereas I think before that they may have felt that they were on the periphery, additional when needed but not at the centre of activity. This turns that around and makes sure that they are part of a whole-force approach.

The other interesting thing is, with the changes that have been introduced and some of the innovations that have been implemented in very recent times, we are now offering greater flexibility to reservists so they can choose, along with their employers, what is a suitable period of commitment for them. It used to be much more rigid: it was a short period away and then back to the full-time job. We are trying to make sure that that is much more flexible. We think that that will also appeal to a lot of people, depending on where they are in their career in the outside world, and that should facilitate heightened interest in the reserves, and, I hope, encourage more people to sign up to be reservists, in the knowledge that we are tailoring a system that is designed to suit them and their employers, as well as benefiting our whole-force approach.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

There is much to be excited about in this announcement—there is quite a lot of novelty—and, if I turned the clock back, I think it is an Army that I would want to join. I congratulate the architects. My worry is that, despite some presentational sleight of hand, it is an Army that will be some 9,000 fewer—and with that smaller Army the delivery will depend on a number of challenging things. Regardless of what the Minister has just said, it needs a perfect recruiting system. In respect of the reserves, it needs the willingness of employers to release reserves not as a last resort but as an integral part of what the Army needs to function on a daily basis. It also demands the adoption of some robotic and autonomous systems, which currently do not even have a legal framework within which to operate.

More widely, however, I want to turn to MACA—military aid to the civil authorities—which involves such things as assistance with foot and mouth, floods, Nightingale hospitals, post-Brexit supply chains and Covid vaccinations; all those things. Historically, those come out of what is called the Armed Forces’ irreducible capacity, but where within this structure is the irreducible spare capacity to meet the exponential rise in the tasks that relate to the resilience of the nation and which featured in the integrated review as among the principal future threats to the country? You cannot have reserves released by their employers to do MACA tasks in the UK when they form an essential part of making the regular force resilient. I think this House should be worried, despite many of the attractive novelties contained in this announcement.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

First, I thank the noble and gallant Lord very much indeed for his initial reaction and for his very helpful observation that this is an Army that he would like to join, as I understood him to say. I think that says a lot.

The noble and gallant Lord raises important issues. He first of all mentioned the reduction in the number of personnel. I think he will be aware of this, but in the past we tended to have numbers in boxes and on pieces of paper, which was very comforting, but actually they did not reflect the number of people whom we could call on if the chips were down. For various reasons, the numbers were perhaps inaccurate, or people were unavailable, and they were not a regular or reliable indicator of who we had to hand. The intention behind all this is that, when we talk about these figures, they represent men and women who are on hand, ready to serve and can be called upon.

The noble and gallant Lord mentioned recruitment. I repeat what I said to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, that recruitment has had fairly positive progress in the past two or three years, and we hope that can continue. On the reservists, again, as I indicated, we have always had an interest in the reserve side of our Armed Forces. There is nothing to suggest that that is diminishing. The whole point about the new structures and flexibilities is that that will be increasingly attractive to them. He made the important point that that is only as good as the willingness of the reservists to be more involved and the willingness of their employers to release them. Attempts have been made to ensure that that is a more flexible territory, whereby reservists benefit from getting long periods off. On the whole, employers have a very positive attitude to reservists, so we hope that that attitude of co-operation will continue.

On AI, the noble and gallant Lord is quite right: it continues, as we discussed during the passage of the Armed Forces Bill, to be an intricate, complex and challenging environment. He is aware that, as far as the MoD is concerned, there is a defence strategy coming out fairly imminently, so I cannot say any more about that, other than to reiterate what I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that we are very clear that we must recruit to the Army people with skills that we need—and we will need the skills of people conversant with those areas of activity. The noble and gallant Lord makes an important point that we want to be sure that we have personnel who are of a calibre to cope with that new environment.

In relation to overall resilience and the Army’s ability to respond to the MACA requests, we have seen that very vividly and impressively articulated in the response to Covid—it is an important point. Bringing in recognition of the reserves and the appointment of the new company in York acknowledges that we need a way of steadily addressing that resilience issue so that we have a core of people poised to respond to these situations. We do not then necessarily take other forces away from what may be important deployed activity. I wish to reassure the noble Lord that implicit in the new structure is this essential component of flexibility and fluidity, so that there is much more movement and much more of a focus on having people available—maybe in smaller units; I accept that—to go to the job when the job needs to be done, wherever that job arises.

Armed Forces Bill

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

I sometimes get the feeling that the Minister believes that, if only we read our briefs from the MoD diligently enough and listened hard enough, we would accept what she is telling us about the Government’s position on lethal autonomous weapons. But there are fundamental questions at stake here which remain as yet unanswered. A review of the kind suggested in this amendment would be instrumental in answering them.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I am sorry that my name has not found its way on to the Order Paper; I had Covid last week and I failed the IT test of getting it properly registered.

I come at this from perhaps a different angle. I have spent perhaps rather too much of my latter career in the Ministry of Defence and understand the way it functions. It spends the vast majority of its time—and I think this is understandable—managing the crisis of the moment. It spends very little time, in truth, on strategic foresight, and therefore it spends quite a bit of the other part of its time on making good that lack of strategic foresight—and much of what this whole Armed Forces Bill is about is making good that lack of foresight. The thing that I support so much about this amendment is that it is an attempt to get ahead of the game.

The MoD properly stops and looks to the future in the times of its periodic reviews, and there was much to commend the last integrated review. There are two things I would pluck from it that are relevant to this amendment. First, the review was littered with the idea that the country was making a strategic bet on the future by way of investment in technology: technology would be the source of our new prosperity; it would be the source of our technological edge; we would become a superpower; it was the reason that we could reduce the size of our Armed Forces; it was through the exploitation of novel technology that we could hold our heads up high and not fear for our safety.

At the same time, elsewhere in the review—this is my formulation, not the review’s—two forms of warfare were identified. There is the one we do not want to fight—the reversion to formalised war at a scale above the threshold of kinetic conflict—and then there is this grey area of hybrid war; the war that we are currently engaged in, where our malevolent and malicious enemies seek to exploit every trick in the book and the rules of warfare in order to exploit new vectors of attack to effectively defeat us during peacetime in mendacious ways.

You can read as much as you want into the second thing, but this idea of a permanent competition for relative survival and advantage is undoubtedly a feature of the current global security situation. Therefore, in those moments of strategic foresight in the integrated review, we have in some ways identified the fact that the advantage given by novel technologies will be decisive and that we have enemies who will be mendacious in ways that we cannot quite comprehend.

I worry that, in the months to come, this Chamber might revert to its defence arguments being about counting the number of ships, air squadrons or tanks. The amendment will hold the Ministry of Defence and its generals to account by parliamentarians for the ways in which these weapons evolve—they will evolve at pace—and the rules that are to be employed by not just us but our adversaries and what is and is not their proper exploitation.

Having paused in that integrated review and discerned the future, however darkly, it would be gross negligence if we did not wish upon ourselves an instrument by which the evolution of these weapons and the rules involved in their employment were not the closest interest of parliamentarians and this House. The Ministry of Defence should be held to account over the coming months and years to see how it all plays out. This amendment would do so, and it has my unreserved support.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise again for not speaking in Committee due to being at COP. I offer support and regret that I did not attach my name to this amendment. What the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said about public consultation in this process is really important, as is what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, said about parliamentary scrutiny. Those two things very much fit together.

I am very aware that the Minister started this day, many hours ago now, promising to read a book, so I will refer to a book but not ask her to read it. It is entitled Exponential: How Accelerating Technology is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, and it is by Azeem Azhar. The thesis is that there is an exponential gap: technologies are taking off at an exponential rate, but society is only evolving incrementally. In terms of society, we can of course look at institutions like politics and the military.

Another book is very interesting in this area. Its co-author, Kai-Fu Lee, has described it as a scientific fiction book, and it posits the possibility of, within the next couple of decades, large quantities of drones learning to form swarms, with teamwork and redundancy. A swarm of 10,000 drones could wipe out half a city and theoretically cost as little as $10 million.

It is worth quoting the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, who said:

“The prospect of machines with the discretion and power to take human life is morally repugnant.”


That relates to some of the words in the podcast that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, referred to; I have not listened to it, but I will.

Fittingly, given what the Secretary-General said, the United Nations Association of the UK has very much been working on this issue, and communicating with the Government on it. In February, the Government told it that UK weapons systems

“will always be under human control”.

What we have heard from other noble Lords in this debate about how that language seems to have gone backwards is very concerning.

This is very pressing because the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons will hold an expert meeting on 2 December, I believe, which will look at controls on lethal autonomous weapons systems—LAWS, as they are known. It would be very encouraging to hear from the Minister, now or at some future point, what the Government plan to do if there are no positive outcomes from that—or, indeed, whatever the outcomes are. While the Government have ruled out an independent process, both the mine ban convention and the Convention on Cluster Munitions were ultimately negotiated outside the CCW.

Finally and very briefly, I will address proposed new subsection (2)(d) and how individual members of the Armed Forces might be held responsible. There is an interesting parallel here with the question on deploying autonomous vehicles—the issue of insurance and who will be held responsible if something goes wrong. Of course, the same issues of personal responsibility and how it is laid will face military personnel. This may sound like a distant thing, talking about decades, but I note that a report from Drone Wars UK notes that Protector, the new weaponised drone, is “autonomy enabled”. I think Drone Wars UK says it has been unable to establish what that means and what the Government intend to do with that autonomy-enabled capability, but the first of an initial batch of 16 Protectors is scheduled to arrive between 2021 and 2024, and the Protector is scheduled to enter service with the RAF in mid-2024.

So I think this is an urgent amendment, and I commend the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and the others on this, and I would hope to continue to work with them on the issue.