HMS “Queen Elizabeth”

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. I am unable to comment in detail as to future deployments for the very same reasons that I am unable to comment in detail on the immediate deployment of HMS “Queen Elizabeth”. He identifies an important point. The south Atlantic is strategically significant and is becoming more so. That is an aspect of our global approach that we keep under constant review.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB) [V]]

The Minister will be aware that the proposed deployment of HMS “Queen Elizabeth” was conceived when there were many justified concerns about the overall size of the surface fleet and its ability to meet the Royal Navy’s standing maritime tasks at home and around the world. Can she therefore confirm what risks are likely to be taken against those standing tasks to provide adequate escorts for the deployment of HMS “Queen Elizabeth” next year?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord will be aware that, in contemplating any deployment, we make an extensive and robust assessment of risk in all respects. That is what we do at the moment and what we shall continue to do.

Armed Forces: Racism and Diversity

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie [V]]

I listened with great interest to the point raised by my noble friend. I have no specific information about the appointment of chaplains or the backgrounds from which they are appointed. I shall investigate and write further to him.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have never thought it entirely fair to hold the Armed Forces to account at an individual level for being a mirror image of the society from which they are drawn, with all the imperfections that implies. It is an inevitability. However, I absolutely agree that, in institutional terms, our Armed Forces should strive to be exemplars of the very best that can be achieved in values and standards. Can the Minister therefore inform the House what has been achieved since 2016 in policy terms in the areas of bullying, harassment, discrimination and opportunities for women?

[Baroness Goldie [V]]

I reassure the noble and gallant Lord that various initiatives and programmes have been deployed within the Armed Forces to cover these very areas of concern. If we want to prevent this unacceptable behaviour, we must create a culture within our civilian and military workforce that represents, includes and celebrates all elements of the society that we defend. Within the MoD, we need to institutionalise anti-racism.

Reserve Forces and Cadets’ Associations

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this short debate on the health of the nation’s Reserve Forces. I declare a specific interest in reserve matters, based on my leadership of the 2011 independent commission that reviewed the country’s Reserve Forces as follow-on work to the 2010 defence review.

It is worth recalling that the context of the review that I led in 2011 was a set of Reserve Forces in accelerating institutional decline. Our reserves at that stage were primarily being used as individual operational augmentees for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were failing to make an attractive offer to encourage reserve service more generally. The reserves still had very much of a Cold War feel about them; they were still structured for supporting major intervention operations. The potential utility of the reserves for modern homeland security, UK resilience, cyber defence and stabilisation was not at that stage remotely recognised. Perhaps more seriously, at that stage we were not exploiting either reservist talent or the nation’s volunteer ethos to the full. We were failing to create a more cost-effective regular/reserve manpower balance, and we were actively contributing to the erosion of the vital links between our Armed Forces and wider society.

Why did this situation come about? To an extent at least, because, at a time of scarce resources and high operational demand, what I might call central authority saw the reserves as assets not to be sustained but plundered. Some might recall that reservist pay was taken as a savings measure. Alone among developed nations at that time, we viewed reserves as a quaint, historical, inefficient luxury, not the vital expression of society’s voluntary contribution to national security.

So, although I know little about the detail of the review that has stimulated this short debate, like other noble Lords I am instantaneously made anxious by it. I understand that, as others mentioned, the review concludes that the current devolved mechanism for the governance of reserves and cadets—the RFCAs—offers excellent value for money. Moreover, as we have heard, defence has entrusted the RFCAs with additional roles to deliver wider engagement with society and the business and civic worlds.

However, somewhat remarkably, the review also wants to neuter the local autonomy of the RFCAs. It wants to supplant the benefits of a regionalised, delegated model with a centralised system, or so I am led to believe. Why? As far as I can ascertain, as has been pointed out, it is purely to satisfy the bureaucratic requirement for the senior governing body of reserves and cadets to be put on a statutory basis. That is fine, but why does this need a dramatic upheaval of the entire decentralised model?

My fear is that a bureaucratic nicety involving a minor issue of governance is being used as a vehicle to centralise the governance of reserves and cadets. In doing so, it risks adopting a system devoid of localised sensitivity and insight, in turn risking a return to a mindset that, as I well remember, nearly brought about the collapse of reserve service 10 years ago. I therefore join other noble Lords in asking the Minister whether she can reassure the House that such a risk is not being contemplated.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, it is already well-covered ground, but I want to offer a few words on the interconnected issues of defence and security. During the election campaign the Prime Minister pledged the most profound review of Britain’s defence and security needs since the Cold War, and I welcome such an undertaking. As vice-chief in 2010 and as Chief of the Defence Staff in 2015, I experienced both of the last two reviews at close quarters. Both were very much creations of their time.The former was a response to the strategic shock of austerity. The latter was a far more hubristic affair, linking security to prosperity but, in respect of military capability, without ever closing the gap between ambition and resource reality.My honest view of both reviews is that they were exercises in prioritising the affordability of military platforms, garnished with a veneer of strategic insight. They were not that strong on intellectual analysis of a changing strategic context, nor on a redefinition of the UK’s place in the world. I sense most contributors thus far agree.

Permit me a few relevant observations. Contrary to the view currently peddled by some, we do not live in the most dangerous of times. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that there has never been a better time to be alive; that societies have become more peaceful; and that we are experiencing historic and sustained low levels of personal and interstate violence.

However, the raw statistics do not necessarily translate into how we perceive our own sense of security. This is partly because we now enjoy a media that is addicted to the sensationalisation of human anxiety but, more significantly, it is because the traditional format of war has been replaced by more insidious forms of interstate rivalry. New vectors of attack, as they are called, have supplanted formal warfare: such things as proxy terrorism, cyberwar, political assassination, disinformation and hybrid warfare, to name the most obvious. When combined with some of the mega-trends of our dynamic planet—climate change, urbanisation, increasing maldistribution of wealth and opportunity, the pace of technical change, the change in demography —we are left feeling very vulnerable at a personal and even at a collective, national level.

I am not so sure about whether this strategic shift from interstate warfare to interstate security malevolence is permanent. What I fear is that we may have started to forget that the relative peace we have enjoyed for the last 70 years or so is not naturally occurring. It is brought about only by the willingness of nations collectively to secure that peace.

The starting point for any profound review of the UK’s defence and security posture is to answer two questions. First, if we want to retain, by and large, the rules by which the world is currently organised, we need to decide how big a role we intend to play in the collective defence of those rules. Secondly, having recognised that, in the new security context, even a relatively peaceful world remains a dangerous one, how much national resource should we devote to ameliorating the new security threats to our people to an acceptable level of risk or societal tolerance?

The first question undoubtedly offers us some strategic choices, which will go a long way towards defining “global Britain” and may offer the opportunity to resolve some of the most serious incoherences of our current defence capability. The second question offers us far less discretion for inaction, and we are already well behind where we need to be in terms of organisation and capability.

Either way, I hope that this House does more to inform the debate than simply deploying nostalgia in support of military interest or supporting the view that some form of procurement alchemy will suddenly make all things affordable. I say this because the Armed Forces consist of sensible people. Institutionalised underfunding is not good for recruiting, retention or morale.

D-day: 75th Anniversary

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, the opportunity to make a short contribution to it, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, getting the energy back into it. I am still getting used to the customs of the House, but I think it is a shame the debate was subject to an interruption; I am sure it was for a good reason, but it is lost on me.

As the debate so far demonstrates, many want to recall the historic importance of D-day, the scale of the endeavour, the context of the time and particularly, as we have just heard, the bravery and fortitude of those who took part. I come from an old and proud regiment, the Green Howards—now part of the Yorkshire Regiment—and we featured significantly in the D-day story. The 6th Battalion that landed on Gold beach early on D-day itself made the most progress of any unit of any nation on that day, reaching the small village of Crépon. We have a fine regimental memorial in the middle of Crépon: a statue of a soldier sitting down, looking exhausted, having a smoke. It is a great place to go. En route to Crépon, the sergeant major of B Company, Stanley Hollis, earned the only Victoria Cross awarded on the day for repeated acts of bravery. He is still remembered as probably our greatest regimental hero, as much for his humility and quiet demeanour as for his remarkable example. He is also remembered because D-day does not feel so very long ago, particularly to the officers and men I grew up with, many of whom were, or served under, Normandy veterans and could tell first-hand tales.

My thoughts today are more about the lessons that D-day holds for us—particularly, why did so many countries have to pay so much in human terms to re-establish peace, stability and freedom? Do we take peace, stability and freedom too much for granted today? My strongly held view is that the United Kingdom has become somewhat complacent about its defence—not about its security; the two are different. Indeed, as a society, if anything we have become far more sensitive to the so-called novel threats of the age, which are, in truth, largely a reflection of the relative weakness of our enemies. These novel forms of conflict—so-called—such as cyberattack, disinformation, proxy-terrorism, hybrid war, political assassination and fake news are the asymmetric tactics of the weak; they do not represent existential threats. They are not the true wars of our time; they are security challenges which breed a wholly understandable societal anxiety.

To me, the lesson of D-day is that we should guard against complacency about our national defence—a complacency borne of the forgetfulness that peace and stability are not naturally occurring. They have to be earned, paid for and, occasionally, fought for. People need to remember that, to a large extent, armed forces are built on an expensive paradox: the better they are at fighting wars, the less likely it is they will have to. Most importantly, as many have said, the more like-minded friends you have, the safer you are far more likely to be. Security challenges, I fear, are the natural symptoms of a restless and dynamic planet. Strong and collective defence is what keeps them in that perspective. D-day should remind us of that.

Royal Navy: Type 31e Frigates

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The right reverend Prelate’s bid will not be lost on those of my colleagues who are responsible for decisions of this kind. However, I am afraid I can tell him that no decision has been taken as yet.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in defence procurement issues, as reflected in the register. I wholly support the noble Lord’s aspiration to increase the size of the surface fleet—it must be expanded. The Minister will, however, recognise that the three principal trade-offs in a great military procurement exercise are performance, cost and time. Cost is fixed. Time is fixed. Performance must be traded down. Does the Minister agree that the best way to trade on performance is in some way to compromise on the exquisite nature of the platform to ensure that the combat and command systems on board are state of the art?

[Earl Howe]

The noble and gallant Lord speaks with great experience and he is right: we are consciously prescribing an adaptable but general-purpose specification for the Type 31e, as opposed to the more exquisite high-end specification of, for example, the Type 26. That is not to say—as I emphasised before—that the Type 31e will be in any way an inferior warship—quite the contrary, in terms of the capability that we will require of it.

Veterans Strategy

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 15th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I fear that my sandwiches are eaten, but my fox is only wounded so I will continue to make my points in my own way.

In my early 20s, as a young officer in the Army, I had the enormous good fortune to be sent up to Oxford to study history. To repay the MoD for its kindness, I felt it only appropriate to choose as my special subject military history and the theory of war. That special subject took me to All Souls College, where I attended tutorials by that great military historian Sir Michael Howard. The theory of war involved studying two set texts. The first was Sir Julian Corbett’s work on the principles of maritime strategy. I have to say that this did not prove of huge use in my subsequent career, other than giving me the ability, occasionally, to embarrass naval officers who had no idea that, in the age of sail, the art of a successful blockade wholly rested on an ability to create the illusion of dispersal, while maintaining the ability to concentrate at any given time.

The second text was Carl von Clausewitz’s classic work, On War. What I most remember from the many revelations that Sir Michael made from this work related to his explanation of the Clausewitzian trinity. That trinity identified that war was the realm of three separate things or ingredients. The first was the ingredient of probability, chance and friction. This was the domain of the Army at war. The second ingredient was that of reason. This was the domain of the Government, whose duty it is to give logic, purpose or sense to war. The third ingredient was that of passion. This is the domain of the people, for it is the people who supply the national motivating spirit that supports both the Government and the Armed Forces. According to the Clausewitzian theory, war most closely approaches its apogee when all three of these elements are mutually supporting and reinforcing. In historical terms, Clausewitz saw this as the situation enjoyed by Napoleon at his height.

In my more recent service life over the past 10 years or so, I have often reflected about the degree to which the Clausewitzian trinity has, to some extent, been fractured in our country. The last decade or so has been typified by government Ministers who occasionally suspect the motivation of their generals, admirals or air marshals; a society that is deeply concerned by the reasoning of their Government when it comes to committing Armed Forces to war; and generals who sense that the passion of the people manifests itself primarily in sympathy for, rather than informed support of, the Armed Forces.

This situation is a direct legacy of having to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan—unpopular wars. It is a situation that forms a potentially distorting context for a policy on veterans, and it has created the most unfortunate context for successful recruiting. It does so because service life is seen by too many ill-informed people to be a brutalising experience; and too many charities in pursuit of funding contribute to the distorted illusion that service men and women are victims who, particularly in their post-service life, need to enjoy some form of permanent charitable status.

The truth is so very different. For the vast majority of service men and women, a career in the Armed Forces is both a life-changing and a life-enhancing experience. If you doubt me, let me offer you some of the MoD’s most recent statistics. How many people—not in this House but in wider society—recognise that the Armed Forces are the nation’s single biggest provider of apprenticeships, with 19,000 currently on apprenticeship schemes and a total of over 46,000 apprentice start-ups since 2015?

The most recent evidence on the employment of service leavers, mentioned earlier, shows that 82% of those exiting through the career transition workshop were in full-time employment within six months—that is higher than the 75% employment rate of the UK population in the round. The occupational groups that service leavers join are impressive: 22% into skilled trades; 20% into associate professional and technical trades; 14% as process plant and machine operatives; 11% into professional occupations such as teaching, health, media and public service; 8% as managers, directors and senior officials. What about the missing 18%? Forty per cent of those went back into education or the voluntary sector; 6% have retired; 12% are travelling abroad; 9% have medical problems; 8% are looking after their families; and we have lost track of the rest.

All the evidence suggests that employers hugely appreciate the transferable skills of leadership, problem solving, team working, communication skills and self-discipline that service leavers offer. Employers respect the vocational skills of service leavers in areas such as electronics, engineering and project management, and recognise their ability to conform to their companies’ rules, values, ethos and standards. Ex-service leavers are a unique pool of talent that offers many benefits to both society and the economy and they undoubtedly strengthen the workforce of all kinds of different civilian organisations.

Why do I say all this? I do so in an attempt to balance an ill-informed but popular view that service life inevitably leads to a situation that somehow presents a national social crisis. It most definitely does not. But I am hugely aware that a small percentage of service leavers, particularly the wounded, undoubtedly deserve some special consideration. We need a strategy for our veterans that ensures that that special consideration is afforded to a small number who at the end of service life need and deserve some specific help. I wholly applaud the Government’s strategy which recognises this, but I do not want that strategy to distort the reality that service life offers the vast majority of service men and women a life of betterment and advancement. I do not want the wholly justifiable interests of service charities to undermine that simple fact.

I want the passion of society and the reason of Government to support the needs of our veterans, but I also want that reason and passion to support the Armed Forces in being. We need to actively recalibrate society’s understanding of the remarkable benefits of service life. Those benefits are not just for the individuals but for wider society as well.

Trident

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I am happy to confirm to the noble and gallant Lord that that is the Government’s policy. We reaffirmed the continuous at-sea deterrent posture in the 2015 strategic defence and security review and, as he rightly says, we have had a nuclear armed submarine on patrol for every minute of every day for nearly 50 years, including during the transition between the Resolution and Vanguard classes.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I would never publicly question the utility to our defence of the nuclear deterrent, nor the carrier programme, nor the F-35 programme. But it is eminently clear to me that for several years now, the balance of the conventional forces has been used as the financial regulator in order to afford these programmes. Does the noble Earl not agree that, unless the whole of the defence programme is made affordable, we will be presented with decisions that so hollow out our conventional forces that the sense of affording the nuclear deterrent will be seriously questioned?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I understand the noble and gallant Lord’s point. There is a £31 billion budget for the Dreadnought programme and we are currently confident that that estimate is robust. It is quite separate and distinct from other procurement budgets. We do not consider that it impacts upon them adversely—but we are conscious of the risks that he articulates.

Defence: Helicopters

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I shall do exactly that. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his suggestion. We are on track to share headline conclusions from the modernising defence programme by the NATO summit in July. At that stage we expect to describe what the changed strategic context means for defence policy and planning, including the area in which the noble Lord is interested; how our overall approach needs to evolve, as surely it must; and how we intend to pursue improved capability in the new domains of warfare.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, does the noble Earl not agree that, given both the size of our defence budget and the multiple challenges of affordability it faces, the idea that we can for all time sustain a whole range of sovereign defence capability is simply untenable?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I do not think that this Government or any preceding recent Government have pretended that we can maintain sovereign capability in every area of our defence requirements. We certainly consider maintaining sovereign capability where that is in the national interest but, in general, competition ensures best value for money, best capability and innovation.

National Security Situation

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to contribute to this debate. Some of what I intended to say survives the crime of repetition, but I will dine selectively from my thoughts. I want to make two contributions to this debate: one operational and one perhaps more reflective and strategic in nature.

The operational point relates to the allied air action over Syria last weekend and the surrounding debate about the need for prior parliamentary approval. This has been well covered today. I want to emphasise the extreme complexity of co-ordinating an allied response against what are inevitably time-sensitive targets, through hostile air space, when the retention of speed, security and surprise are prerequisites to both mission success and personnel security. In circumstances where the Government are confident of the moral, legal and intelligence case for action, my firm belief—and I think that this is now widely shared—is that they should retain the ability to act without parliamentary consent, thereby enhancing the chances of a safe and successful mission. They can answer to Parliament subsequently.

However, I would be the first to counsel that, when different factors prevail—when Armed Forces might be committed at scale, when operations are likely to be enduring and at cost, both in lives and national treasure, and when strategic surprise is not an issue—the Armed Forces are far happier when they know that they have the support of Parliament and wider society. I fear that, in the company of many friends, I have spent too much of my recent life fighting unpopular wars. The Armed Forces want to enjoy the support, not the sympathy, of their nation.

My second contribution is more reflective and concerns the wider character of the global security situation that we currently live in. My reflections are not just those of an ex-Chief of the Defence Staff; I also stake my claim as the 160th Constable of the Tower of London—a place which has borne witness to nigh on 1,000 years of our national story and the conflict that sadly litters it.

My first reflection is that the sources of conflict over time bear remarkable similarities of origin. The three most obvious are the violent pursuit and abuse of political power; the continued maldistribution of wealth and opportunity, both within societies and between countries; and the frequent and often brutal misrepresentation of the morality of great religion. My second reflection would be to lay bare the false notion of the teleological certainty of human betterment, of greater mutual harmony, of enduring and peaceful co-existence and of universal submission to a single set of rules by which the peoples of the world should live. My third reflection is on the remarkably intoxicating power of history’s legacy, a legacy we are connected to both rationally and emotionally, and a legacy which is key to understanding the actions and ambitions of both nations and their leaders.

What conclusions do I draw from these reflections? First, inevitable change, often accompanied by violence, is a far better description of mankind’s likely future than some idealised and predetermined journey to a state of universal human harmony. Secondly, I think that many countries do not buy into the current rules-based order; indeed, they feel very emotionally that it denies them their sense of historic entitlement. I would certainly include both Russia and Iran in that. Thirdly, the grand strategic challenge of this age is how we accommodate the change which is inevitable while maintaining the stability on which the continued betterment of the human condition absolutely depends.

Finally, having established that peaceful coexistence and a rules-based order are not naturally occurring, we may conclude that they need to be imposed, primarily consensually through alliances of interested parties and occasionally through the willingness of those parties to threaten or use force, but always in the context of thoughtful leadership, wise policy and strong capability. As a nation, we need to decide how prominent a role we wish to play in all this, and in making that decision we need to be mindful of, but not seduced by, the intoxicating power of our own historic legacy. If this last point is a touch esoteric, let me make it more specific and clear.

As a nation, we dangerously congratulate ourselves on spending 2% of GDP on our nation’s defence. But, at the same time, we cling to the retention of the totemic military capability of a great power: a gold-standard nuclear deterrent and the two largest carriers we have ever built, soon to be populated by the latest fifth-generation stealth aircraft. Of course I want these things, but I fear that the balance of our military capability has become the financial regulator which makes such programmes affordable. In being such, that conventional force is both reduced and hollowed out. In the context of the current global security situation, as a nation we need to do much better than that.