Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, this is an important debate about the very serious international situation facing the UK in terms of its capacity to defend itself in collaboration with its allies. I declare an interest as a scientific consultant to a defence contractor working for the MoD. I am also a consultant with a university in Toulouse, working on new wings for Airbus, and some of these Airbus facilities are of course important for the UK now. When I was head of the Met Office, I also saw a bit of how the MoD works— some of which made your hair stand on end—and, during that period of focus, the ability of the Met Office to forecast the atmosphere and oceans greatly improved. I should also declare that, when I was a professor at Cambridge, one of my research students used our research techniques to provide high-tech shelters for all the women protesting at Greenham Common.

Since this is a debate on the politics of defence, I should begin by asking HMG whether they are satisfied with the understanding and support of the British people for the main aspects of UK defence strategy. The first point of controversy has been about the size of the Armed Forces, which is now smaller in total than for many years and significantly lower than is needed to confront the main opponents to the UK and its allies, in Asia and the Middle East especially. This is a technical and financial question, depending on the choice of strategic goals, but we should learn more about the arguments.

The second major controversy, which is much more political, concerns whether the UK armaments should continue to depend on nuclear weapons systems. I believe that this is essential. It is of course the official Labour policy, as my noble friend Lord Touhig mentioned earlier this afternoon. The Labour and the Lib Dem parties continue to be split about this, with many members inside and outside Parliament being opposed. Also, of course, many countries in the NATO alliance are opposed to the use of these weapons.

A lesser but more recent controversy about the UK’s defence is to what extent it should be used to support Governments in the Middle East and Africa where civil war is taking place, or where there are outbreaks of disease and civil emergencies such as the breakdown of government systems in Libya and elsewhere. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, in his introductory speech commented on how our defence forces are used for these civil issues—and very effectively too.

There is very little political controversy about the use of the UK’s world-class defensive capability in cyber and security services to protect the UK and our allies.

I should like to make a suggestion that the Government need to build up support of their defence policies among all parts of society, including schools, universities, industry, trade unions and so on, in order to have support for their defence forces and their infrastructure within government. There is also a need to build up understanding about the role of the private sector.

I believe new approaches are necessary. I came to this conclusion when visiting with my grandson the excellent Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, and I have told the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about this story. The technical and scientific aspects of the RAF over the past century were well displayed, and I assume that there will be some centennial celebrations at this museum in a year or two. But there needs to be more emphasis on current operational policies, as well as the developing technologies, and the existence of nuclear weapons in UK defence should not be ignored. It is also important, in museums and other places providing public information, to explain why the UK has defence forces in 2017—giving information about countries which are the UK’s allies and, controversially, which countries are not our allies.

In some schools, I am afraid to say, the governors prevent school visits to defence facilities. The RAF Museum, as an example, provides information about our former enemies. Surely there should now be considerable emphasis in all such information displays on how these former enemies are now our allies. There is a great misunderstanding by many young people on these issues. I look forward to the Minister’s response to this question.

Demonstrations, museums, and videos about modern defence forces and their infrastructure should also include displays and information about their use of technology and scientific developments, including systems collaborating with our allies. An example is the large Airbus transport plane I mentioned, one of which is used by the UK Prime Minister now, who, I am glad to say, no longer goes on a Boeing.

However, it is not realistic to pretend that our forces depend only upon UK industry and technical products. For example, the Met Office, which provides world-class meteorology and environmental data and forecasts for the UK forces, benefits from information provided through NATO from other forces, but it also provides its information to allied forces—such as weather forecasting, which is now used by the US Air Force. It is important that technical defence collaboration between NATO forces should not be impeded by the UK withdrawing from the current EU technological projects, which other noble Lords have mentioned. That may happen without considerable diplomacy. Perhaps the Minister could say how this issue is also being addressed.

Finally, there should be greater collaboration between UK defence scientists and those of our allies. When I was at the Met Office—perhaps it is not the case now— there were none on the Defence Scientific Advisory Committee, DSAC, and I hope that may have changed by now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl. He brings nautical experience to our discussions but I bring rather more of an Army bias. He is also a relative newcomer to this House. As a relative new boy myself, I note that your Lordships’ House has taken a bit of a kicking recently in the press but, having sat through most of this debate, I have been extraordinarily impressed by some of the excellent speeches, which have been interesting, well-informed and informative. It is of course invidious to mention names but I shall mention in particular the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, who I thought spoke particularly well. I am glad to see that the Secretary of State and indeed the chairman of the Select Committee from the House of Commons are both here listening. I hope that I can live up to that high standard, though I rather doubt it.

I shall make two points. The first relates to the standing of the Armed Forces, which was partially covered by the noble Earl. The second is about the current international situation, which was mentioned in the Motion, and our preparedness for it.

It is a cliché to say—quite rightly—that our Armed Forces are highly regarded. When I was working in the MoD, they were probably more highly regarded than they ever had been in my lifetime, largely because of Afghanistan, Iraq and the tragedies there. To digress, a friend of mine in the United States army told me that, after Vietnam, he flew back into Los Angeles airport and, as he walked out in uniform, he was spat at. I am glad to say that we have never got to that stage here and I hope we never do. In the same vein, about a dozen years ago, when there were elections to the US Senate, it was said that there was no elected senator with a child who had served or was serving in the armed forces. Of course, there were people such as McCain who had served themselves. In contrast, on the Benches here and in the other place, there are people who not only have themselves served in the Armed Forces but who continue to have connections through children and relations who serve. This means that we are closer, in many ways, to our Armed Forces than is the case in some other places. I am glad to say that it remains a respected career and attracts a high quality of both officers and men. It remains a profession of which to be proud. Parents can be proud if their children join the Armed Forces.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

And women, indeed.

[Lord Robathan]

The noble Lord is, of course, an academic. It used to be “mankind” but now, apparently, one has to say “personkind”. When my son rang up and announced that he was thinking of joining the Armed Forces, his mother said, “Over my dead body”. She has changed her mind now, I am glad to say. It is not by chance that we have respected professionals in the Armed Forces. When I served, there used to be something called KAPE—keeping the Army in the public eye. This is very important. Unfortunately, with the reduction in the Armed Forces over a number of years, we have seen, for instance, good barracks being sold. I recall Chelsea. Hounslow, also in London, is on the market as, I understand, is Woolwich. Nobody quite knows what is going on with Hyde Park barracks. The point is that if you consign your Armed Forces personnel to the back of an industrial estate, the respect they are afforded is less. Messes have been contracted out. What used to be regarded as a home, particularly for officers, is no longer seen as such. Pay and conditions have continuously been eroded over many years.

We have heard about morale. Morale is a bit amorphous. If you listen to some people, it is always low. I used to think that if soldiers were not complaining about something, they probably were not happy. To put it mildly, recruitment and retention are not good at the moment. We have an Army that is not recruited to its 82,000 target. I urge the Government to look at this whole situation. It is not about people pitying poor soldiers who have seen awful things in Afghanistan and Iraq, as we sometimes hear. They do not want pity; they want to be respected. It is not about politically correct issues and diversity, nor about bad conditions in which people live, although these too are important. It is about feeling valued and respected by the society one serves. It is about being challenged by adventure and excitement, seeing a future career and lifestyle that can offer a decent life for oneself and one’s family, and doing a worthwhile job. This means the Government seeing the value of some things rather than just looking at the cost.

My second point, which has been covered much more in this debate, is our response to the current international situation. I was particularly impressed by the tour de force from the Minister about the strategic threats we face, which was backed up by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. I know that my noble friend the Minister is in a rather difficult position, but we all value his support for defence. I was part of the SDSR 2010, together with my noble friend Lord Astor and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, is absolutely right. It was driven by costs. Some people tried to deny it at the time, but it was about cutting costs. I say to the three Labour Ministers who have spoken so far today, that the situation we inherited in 2010 across the public finances was dire. There is no question about that, nor any point in arguing about it. Not only was it dire but, in defence, there were unfunded procurement programmes going forward which we estimated at some £30 billion to £60 billion. It was an estimate, since nobody could tell us what the funding was because it was so chaotic.

The last, coalition Government, and Philip Hammond in particular—for whom I worked—brought defence spending under proper control. They should be congratulated on that and on the SDSR as well. They had the assistance of the Liberal Democrats. I see the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in his place. He was also there with me. SDSR 2015 is a step in the right direction but we need to go a lot further. Other people have said so too.

My noble friend Lord Jopling, who is not now in his place, talked about Russia. I will not cover other strategic threats but let us home in on that. Nobody has been held to account for the murder of Litvinenko 10 years ago—not a mile from here—nor for the downing of a civilian airliner over Ukraine by Russian missiles. The Baltic states have a joke: “Visit Russia, before Russia visits you”. They are worried, and with good reason. The other threat, closely linked to Russia, is from cyberattacks. We have heard about whatever happened during the US election. We have heard about Montenegro. These attacks are non-stop, asymmetric and will grow.

I say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that the situation has changed. When I joined the Army in 1974, we had a complement of 150,000 or so. Some 55,000 were in West Germany, with tanks, missiles, tactical nuclear weapons and aircraft facing the East. We spent about 5% of our GDP on defence throughout the 1980s. Now it is around 2%. I will not dwell on how this is accounted for. We have only a vestige of the BAOR left. We do not expect invasion forces crossing the Elbe or the Rhine, but we should expect asymmetric warfare, as it is called, be it by “little green men” such as we saw in Crimea and the Ukraine, or by undermining the Baltic states by winding up their Russian minorities. We should remember that the Baltic states are guaranteed by Article 5 and an attack on one is an attack on all.

As a country, we need a bigger stick, as does NATO. Much has been heard about how NATO’s spending should rise; of course it should. We need to up our spending as well. I pay tribute to the Government—although it might not seem like it—and especially to current Defence Ministers. I know what they think, but we need to go further. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had rather a bad week last week, but I believe he understands the need to spend more on defence.

We need to educate our public, our politicians and government Ministers that defence is the first duty of government. There is always the danger that old men—and there are quite a few in this place—look back through rose-tinted spectacles at the good old days. We need a balance and to understand history. We could draw analogies with the 1930s, to which the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord King, have referred. There is some validity in this—disarmament, isolationism, aggression and invasion of small parts of countries, such as the Sudetenland. I urge my Government to up defence spending so that the Armed Forces feel valued; so it becomes an attractive career for young men—and women; and, most of all, to ensure that British interests are safe in this deteriorating world situation. The first duty of government has always been the defence of the realm. We all need to remember that.

Brexit: Armed Forces and Diplomatic Service

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak about the challenges facing UK diplomacy and defence resulting from economic, natural and technological factors.

The UK Government deal with changes, risks as well as opportunities, through diplomatic collaboration with other countries and with companies, especially and to a growing extent with those in the EU and the rest of Europe—as we saw last week with the common European patent policy being introduced even into the UK.

I have experienced governmental collaboration through my work at the Met Office, where I was chief executive. We were involved in many meetings with UK diplomats as well as with other civil servants. I have also worked with the NGOs and companies listed in my declared interests.

Dealing with climate change and the global environment is now regarded as a primary overall role of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as it is for almost all national Governments, even in the United States, where it is a major concern for the Department of Defense—if not for the future occupant of the White House. The Foreign Secretary has a special climate adviser and a scientific adviser, who recently addressed the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. The FCO has an overall role in co-ordinating and stimulating the international roles of UK government departments and agencies, especially in the United Nations agencies and in the European Commission. It would help if the FCO were to report more regularly to Parliament on this aspect of its work. In the 16 years that I have been here, there have been two debates, which I organised.

Currently, the environmental and scientific European intergovernmental organisations play a key role in space, weather forecasting, fusion energy and biology. They are important for their function and for building up the international capacity of UK industries. As chief executive of a major UK government agency, where I experienced its interaction with several other government departments, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, I was the permanent representative at the World Meteorological Organization. This agency of the United Nations is based in Geneva, where the FCO has an office to assist the work of the UK delegations to all UN agencies. These agencies play an essential role in the modern world, from science, trade, health and labour relations to intellectual property. Increasingly—this is an important point—the European Commission sends delegations to those agencies, and these EC bodies are very effective in connecting their rather well-funded programmes to the less well-funded programmes of the UN agencies, notably in health, development and technology. In future, when the UK is no longer part of the European Union, a primary role of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office should be to maintain special links with the European Union, which doubtless will appreciate UK input.

I want to mention some aspects of defence, because the current defence strategy depends on our allies in NATO countries and significantly benefits from EU science, technology and intergovernmental organisations. Perhaps I may depart slightly from the story told by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. At about the same time, in 1910, the Admiralty made full use of the Italian Mr Marconi’s radio. However, as we commented in our report, the Germans were also using this and always put out their weather forecasts one hour earlier than the Brits. In terms of a new threat now, we will use all the technologies that we have on computing, satellites, weather forecasts and climate monitoring to consider the tracking of diseases associated with global warming—this is of great concern to the US Department of Defense.

Leaving the EU makes it quite likely that the UK will no longer be at the centre of European decision-making, as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, emphasised. I understand that European air traffic control, which is currently an EC organisation, may operate with less UK influence after Brexit.

Another strategic challenge for the FCO and MoD is the changing environment of the Arctic regions, where the MoD is operational and the FCO is concerned with treaties and agencies affecting environmental activities and future commercial developments. These issues were discussed in the House of Lords report on the Arctic. By leaving the EU, the UK will no longer be part of the EU’s combined activities in the Arctic, but the FCO should still work with the EU on the strategic objective of Europe joining the Arctic Council. Hopefully, special arrangements will enable UK researchers to be part of the EC co-ordination network for polar research, which the EC has said it would welcome. The FCO polar office will continue to represent the UK as an observer in the Arctic network, which is to be welcomed.

I hope that the UK’s diplomacy and the Royal Navy’s hydrographic service will be of use to the noble Lord, Lord Sterling. They may be able to contribute their expertise to the sustainable development of the Arctic. Perhaps the noble Lord’s shipping companies will make use of the developing Arctic shipping routes and of the hydrographic survey—which reports at the moment that it is not quite sure what the depth of the bottom is.

Immigration Bill

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Tuesday 12th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to the position put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and other noble Lords. The Government were pleased to be able to provide further details about the immigration skills charge in the statement made at the Report stage by my noble friend Lord Bates. In addition, a Written Ministerial Statement covering reforms to the tier 2 visa route was laid in the other place on 24 March, but unfortunately it could not be laid in your Lordships’ House because we were not sitting on that day.

As promised at the Report stage, the Government have considered when Clause 87 will come into effect. The first point to make, which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, is that while the clause commences two months after Royal Assent, it is clear in the Bill that secondary legislation will be needed before the charge can be introduced, and that will be subject to the affirmative procedure. Secondly, as my noble friend Lord Bates said on Report, we will publish a draft of the regulations before they are laid, enabling noble Lords and other interested parties to comment; I would just emphasise that opportunity.

As regards the date of introduction, the Government have announced details about the rate and the scope of the charge, including the exemptions that will apply, a year before it is to be introduced. The Written Ministerial Statement confirmed that the charge will be introduced from April 2017 and not before. We consider that that gives employers, including those in the public sector, sufficient time to plan how best to manage the introduction of the charge without delaying until after April 2018, as suggested in this amendment—and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Green, for his comments on that point. I would argue strongly that there is no need for transitional provision to be made for institutions in the public sector, which is the other purpose of the amendment. I would just say that, on Report, my noble friend Lord Bates did not commit to consider a phased approach to implementation for the public sector. We made a commitment to consider when the clause comes into effect and, as I have indicated, we stated that we will not introduce the charge before April 2017.

As the independent Migration Advisory Committee stated, public sector organisations are employers, like any other, and should be incentivised to consider the UK labour market first before recruiting from outside Europe. On that particular point, it is worth noting that the MAC took evidence from a full range of stakeholders, including the public sector, before making its recommendations. From my time as a health Minister I recognise the important role that tier 2 plays in recruiting doctors to fill vacancies in hard-to-recruit medical specialties and areas, as the British Medical Association has flagged. I also understand its concern that the charge might take funds away from training in the health service.

Let me be clear about this. Staffing in the NHS is a government priority. That is why there are already more than 29,600 extra clinical staff, including more than 10,600 additional doctors and more than 11,500 additional nurses on our wards since May 2010. That is why Health Education England has increased nurse training places by 14% over the last two years and is forecasting that more than 40,000 additional nurses will be available by 2020. There are already 50,000 nurses currently in training.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked me what plans there were to incentivise individuals into nursing and to encourage retention. It would perhaps be helpful if I mentioned that the Come Back to Nursing campaign, launched by Health Education England in September 2014, reports that 2,188 nurses have registered on a return-to-practice programme, 927 have completed the programme and, of those, 700 have successfully completed their retraining and are now back on the front line providing care and support for patients. We have invested £40 million in leadership training to create a new generation of senior nurses and we are running a campaign to get experienced nurses who have left the profession back to work.

The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, referred to the pressure on schools, and I understand the points that he made. I hope that he will take some reassurance from the fact that many schools will benefit from the reduced rate of £364 by virtue of being either small businesses or charities. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked about ring-fencing the fund and whether the charge will just go, as it were, into general revenue. Let me be clear about that. The Prime Minister was emphatic that this measure will help train up the resident workforce to address skills shortages. I cannot, of course, tell him how much the skills charge will raise. The amount of funding generated will very much depend on employer demand. The Migration Advisory Committee estimated that the charge could raise as much as £250 million a year. The MAC’s estimates did not take account of the reductions and exemptions the Government have announced or the expected impact on behaviour. The Government are still finalising the policy detail, as will be obvious. We have not, therefore, produced a firm estimate. However, we estimate that once the exemptions and reductions are taken into account, the sums raised will be significantly lower than the MAC’s estimate.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

With respect to the remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and those of the Minister, the Science and Technology Committee had a special session here at the House of Lords in March, and we heard that the funding available for training teachers who are not advanced in mathematics or science to become better trained is actually decreasing. I wonder whether the Minister’s remarks are implying that there will be more money for this training, which is absolutely essential if we are to raise the skills and educational levels in science and technology.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, a great deal is being done to encourage students into science and technology, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware. What I cannot tell him is whether and to what extent the money raised by the skills charge will be directed into particular vocational areas. That is still being worked through. As regards teaching, it has been recognised that public sector pay restraint and specific recruitment challenges in certain occupations present problems for the National Health Service and the education sector in particular. On the new salary threshold, we announced that we will exempt nurses, paramedics and medical radiographers; and in the education sector we will exempt secondary-school teachers in mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science—

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Primary schools as well are a particular area.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I heard what the noble Lord said. Perhaps he will allow me to continue. We will exempt secondary-school teachers in mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and Mandarin from that new salary threshold. The point has been recognised by the MAC and we took its advice on that.

The exemption we have announced for students switching from tier 4 to tier 2 to take up a graduate-level position in the UK will benefit doctors following completion of their foundation training. I am pleased that the BMA has welcomed this exemption. However, if we are to meet our objective of reducing reliance on overseas workers, we simply must reverse the trend of increasing numbers of workers coming through tier 2, including in the public sector. In 2015, sponsored visa applications for skilled workers in the human health and social work activities sector alone, which includes a number of public sector occupations, increased by 13% to more than 3,500 places. For those reasons, we consider that delaying or phasing in the introduction of the charge, or indeed an exemption, for the NHS or wider public sector would overlook the key aim of the charge: to influence employer behaviour. The Migration Advisory Committee was clear that it did not believe the health sector should be exempt from the charge.

I note that the BMA said it is highly unlikely that the NHS would benefit from the proceeds of the charge because apprenticeships are not relevant to or will not benefit the NHS. With great respect to the BMA, there is currently no basis for saying that. Decisions on where the charge income will be spent are not yet finalised, as I said. The priority will be to spend the charge on training the resident workforce to address skills gaps in the UK. Apprenticeships are only one government-supported programme designed to address the long-running trend of underinvestment in skills by UK employers that might be supported. I can assure noble Lords that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is already engaging with stakeholders, including the Department of Health and the Department for Education, to ensure that their skills and workforce planning needs are fully considered. It cannot possibly do otherwise given the key importance of those sectors. I can also assure the House that the Home Office will continue to consult with stakeholders on how best to address skills gaps in advance of the introduction of the charge to inform decisions on how the income is spent.

I hope that noble Lords—in particular the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—will be reassured from what I have said today and from the totality of the announcements we have made about the skills charge, that the Government are committed to implement it in a balanced way, ensuring that the UK remains open for business and can continue to attract the best and brightest to our workforce. I hope, too, that noble Lords are reassured by our confirmation that we will not seek to impose the charge before April 2017, and only after we lay regulations.

In the light of those points, I very much hope that the noble Lord will agree to withdraw Amendment 9.

House of Lords: Questions

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Monday 9th November 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

To ask the Leader of the House what plans she has to change the arrangements for the tabling of parliamentary questions to give priority to those who ask few questions, so that more members of the House can ask questions.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

Parliamentary Questions are an essential and valuable part of parliamentary procedure. They probe the Government and hold them to account. However, what is not in the official version is that these Questions have a much broader role in this House and in the other place. They also enable the Government to respond by querying the possible policies of the Opposition, as we have been seeing recently, although this is generally done politely and discreetly. I have also found that parliamentary Questions enable Peers to learn about the concerns, experiences and knowledge of other noble Lords. It is not clear whether they can be asked about constitutional or procedural issues. I was not allowed to ask one for clarification on the Pepper v Hart rule, which is an arcane but important part of our procedure. However, Questions are part of the glue which binds our Chamber together.

This is now a topical issue: with the House expanding as rapidly as it is, we need to think about PQs. If we accept this broader point of view, we could look at the procedures of the House for selecting Questions. We should review our procedures to encourage more noble Lords to ask Oral and Written Questions. I am grateful to the House of Lords Library research services for some statistics. During 2014-15, the 444 lead oral Questions were asked by only 181 noble Lords, who asked at least one each. Given that there are 760 to 790 eligible Members, nearly 600 therefore did not ask a Question. However, about 314 asked Written Questions, so some 100 asked Written Questions but not oral ones. The media criticism of the House of Lords, which is justified only to a limited extent, is that many Members are not sufficiently visible. Since it is a great honour to be in this House, the view from the outside is that people should be seen. When I joined this House, some people said they looked forward to watching television and seeing a person they knew perform. Even my colleagues in the United States asked what I was doing and why I was not performing more often. That is a slightly trivial remark but it is part of what is being discussed.

The procedure for Oral Questions is that they are tabled up to four weeks before they are asked. They have to be accepted by the Table Office and improved. I do not make any criticism of the Table Office—it is helpful and often makes good suggestions about how Questions should be written—but we need to find a way in which more Questions can be asked by the non-askers. One way, perhaps, is that the non-askers and the people who ask very seldom, should be given priority. That is not the case at the moment.

Members, of course, can ask one Oral PQ and a Topical Question if chosen. The staff of the Opposition and the Government offices help their Members to promote questions. This facility is not as available to Peers from other parts of the House. The maximum number of questions is up to seven Oral Questions/PQs per year. It is a theoretical maximum because few people get up to that level. When Questions are asked, priority is given to Members who apply in person, which is reasonable, but they can also be asked by phone and email. That needs to be well understood.

Topical Questions are an important part of our procedures and are normally the fourth Question asked on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. From my experience, the Table Office operates some selectivity in suggesting what constitutes a Topical Question. There is a tendency to see Topical Questions as the kind liked by the more popular parts of the media—questions not necessarily about boring, serious events such as critical meetings of international bodies, which may well be rather more important.

What is the result of the procedure that we have? I will not go through the whole list, but 85 Peers asked one question per year; 21 asked three questions; and five asked seven questions.

It is interesting to note whether there is any correlation with the number of years that someone has been in the House. The total number of lead Parliamentary Questions from people who have been here from nought to 10 years, and 10 to 20 years, is about the same, so there is no dropping off. That is rather encouraging. However, beyond 20 years and up to 50 years, the statistics, not surprisingly, show some falling away. Nevertheless, there are finite numbers even after so many years.

The few points I have made need to be considered. I suggest that the arrangements be reviewed in order to enable greater involvement of Peers and more issues to be covered. One way to perhaps do that is to have a survey of Peers, something I have not seen since I have been here.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, as this is last business, each Back-Bench Peer has up to 10 minutes to speak rather than seven—except for the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who is speaking in the gap, who has only four minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe]

I am quite sure that that is a very good general point to make. I am not at all sure that new Members of the House receive enough guidance when they arrive—on a variety of issues, this being one of them.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne favoured introducing a slot for a fifth Oral Question. As other noble Lords pointed out, that was trialled in the past—I think it was in 2002 to 2004—but not taken forward after that. It was also not supported in the Procedure Committee when its revival was proposed in the last Parliament. I agree with my noble friend Lord Attlee that, rather than adding to our proceedings, the perception was that a fifth Question tended to switch people off, and that the energy and momentum of Question Time, which I think we all appreciate, rather dwindled as a result.

Another point to be made here is that we now often have Urgent Question repeats taken in the slot immediately after Questions. I would be surprised if the House wanted effectively to take six Questions before starting on the day’s business. For similar reasons—and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, on this—I would not support extending Question Time to 40 minutes.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne raised some issues about Private Notice Questions. As my noble friend knows, the system for PNQs has been considered several times without any changes being agreed. I certainly believe that there is a case for bringing forward the deadline by which decisions about PNQs are made. However, I am not sure that there is wide-ranging support for changing the decision-making approach as such, although I know that my noble friend is trying to put this forward for the Procedure Committee’s consideration. The key point here is that the decision on whether to grant a PNQ is one for the Lord Speaker. The Government provide the policy background to assist the Lord Speaker but do not have a say as to whether the PNQ is allowed—and that presupposes that the PNQ relates to a matter of government responsibility. The Companion states:

“The decision … rests with the Lord Speaker, after consultation”.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne also raised the possibility of having Oral Questions on a Friday. We sit for only around five hours on a Friday if we are to rise at 3 pm, which is generally the time when noble Lords are keen to make tracks homeward. Fridays are a particularly valuable time for noble Lords to discuss Private Members’ Bills and, although it is worth a discussion, I am not convinced that people would want the time to be taken up by Oral Questions.

My noble friend Lord Sherbourne came up with the interesting idea of a countdown approach, with eight minutes per Question. Maybe it should be seven and a half minutes, if we are not to exceed the 30 minutes in total. I was very struck by that idea. The Clock already indicates the time taken during Oral Questions and the current system allows some flexibility in the lengths of those Questions, some of which run short of eight minutes as well as running over the seven minutes. My personal view is that there are some merit in the existing system over the one that my noble friend suggested, because it has flexibility built into it. We have to allow some measure of flexibility. It is always difficult for the Clerk of the Parliaments to judge this but in general he does it very well indeed.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, proposed a general review. I am not personally averse to that idea, although we have reviewed the whole system of Oral Questions in a series of forums, including the Leader’s Group at the start of the last Parliament and in the Procedure Committee on repeated occasions in the course of that Parliament. We have also had several votes on aspects of Questions: for example the issue around reading out Questions in full. I would very much welcome a general conversation about this. I am not sure we need to go as far as having a formal, full review. We have had a number of good ideas put forward this evening and we could encapsulate those in a general conversation of the kind that I am proposing.

My noble friend Lord Trefgarne, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, with whose points I very much agreed on this subject, bemoaned the tendency for supplementary questions to be over-lengthy. The Companion is very clear about this, stating:

“Supplementary questions … should be short and confined to not more than two points”,

and where they are not, the House should make its views heard. Again, I received with sympathy the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that the Leader and Deputy Leader should perhaps be more proactive in the way that we guide the House on this issue. We can only urge noble Lords to respect the guidance in the Companion but, again, there may well be greater scope for new Peers to have this point impressed more firmly upon them. For that matter, Ministers’ replies to supplementaries should also be short and crisp.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Does the Minister not think that some survey of all the many tens of new Peers who have come would be a good idea? How else is he going to find out this information? There is a small group of people here. People may write in or read Hansard, but some signal needs to be given that we really want to hear what all the new people joining the House of Lords think about this.

[Earl Howe]

Yes, I am sure that that idea deserves full consideration. I think we would all agree that it is getting to a stage where we must impress on all Members of the House, not just the new arrivals, that we have rules which are here for a purpose and have been carefully thought through over the years—and that it is in all our interests to adhere to them.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord King, who was a distinguished Secretary of State for Defence in an equally difficult period of readjustment in the early 1990s. The story in the MoD was that he rather expressed surprise about choosing a socialist to run the Met Office when he was there. The Government’s strategic defence review gives Parliament an opportunity to consider many fundamental questions about defence and security, which I welcome.

I want to clarify the brief remarks on page 28 on scientific and technical issues, particularly in relation to other countries and to the threats that we face. I declare an interest as an occasional consultant to the MoD and former chief executive of the Met Office, which indeed is part of the MoD. I also worked with defence colleagues in the United States. Some of the policies that were developed in the Met Office over 150 years, in what was described by the Government’s chief scientist in the 1990s as a world-class research and development organisation, could, I shall argue, be applied to other aspects of the MoD’s R&D, which, I am afraid, have become somewhat less than world-class. Indeed, some parts of the MoD regarded this as actual policy. That is questionable, though, since we are a country that still has a nuclear deterrent, and a nuclear deterrent is viable only if you are in a world-class technological position as well.

There are three approaches for gaining world-class technological capability. The first option is to develop it ourselves, which requires for a moderate-sized country such as the UK, as has been emphasised by other noble Lords, choosing niche areas of excellence and then exploiting and marketing them. In the United States, when they have marketed and developed a capability, they jolly well publish it. In this country, the publication and dissemination of our capabilities are rather weak. However, that is not the case in meteorology, which proudly broadcasts its great abilities.

The second option is to collaborate, either within the United Kingdom with other organisations, including in the private sector, with allies or even, most importantly, with competitor nations—in the Cold War, there was probably more collaboration with Russia than there is now. This requires focusing on fundamental issues, as happened then, such as underwater acoustics and fusion technology, and then ensuring that the UK applies the results more effectively than its competitors. Collaboration also enables UK scientists to calibrate those of our competitors.

Playing this rather high-stakes game in technology requires a sophisticated organisation in MoD: those pen-pushing bureaucrats criticised by some Members of the House. It requires an extremely sophisticated approach. I believe that MoD has had that capability in the past. It also requires a considerably greater effort of collaboration with the other scientific communities in our competitor nations—your Lordships can imagine whom I mean. Where the science and technology has been developed in MoD, it should also have an international framework. Whereas the Met Office had an international advisory scientific committee, the Defence Scientific Advisory Council when I was on it did not. Other countries take a different view.

Recent years have seen a tremendous development of collaboration in defence technology in Europe, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was encouraging. There is now collaboration in aeronautical engineering, as one has seen with Eurofighter and Airbus projects and in other areas. This collaboration in Europe has not been problematic for our collaboration with the United States, as was suggested by one noble Lord. I believe that where we have collaborated strongly with Europe and developed a strong European capability, the United States has wanted to collaborate even more strongly.

The third option is to copy, purchase or obtain by other means—which we do not need to go into—the world-class technology of other countries that might not be developed here. I was in China last weekend. To develop its famous new 350-kilometres-per-hour train, it bought one train from Germany and one from Japan, put them together and got a better train. This is the economical approach which some noble Lords have advocated. The right mix of these approaches is essential for effective policy.

The review emphasises particular aspects of defence science and technology. Probably the greatest qualitative change in defence science and technology in the past 40 years has been information and systems technology. In World War II, this was developed exclusively for activities of defence forces. The breaking of the computer codes at Bletchley Park is a supreme early example of information science having huge strategic importance. Then there was the applying of such systems, analysis and operational research to tactics. The noble Lord, Lord James, is no longer in his seat, but I point out that it was operational research conducted in Edinburgh that led Nelson to know what to do at Trafalgar by changing the tactics.

Some noble Lords have referred tangentially to research into the causes of war, the areas of war, and the probabilities of war. It has been implied that all war is wholly unpredictable. That is not the view of many students of war and it is not the view of the Pentagon. I have a particular interest in Lewis Richardson, who invented numerical weather forecasting. He studied the way in which armaments developed for the First World War; he made a prediction about the Second World War in Nature; and in 1953 he even suggested how the Cold War would end—it was an extraordinarily accurate prediction about one side’s armaments overwhelming the other side’s. Research on these questions is an important part of developing a defence strategy. It is particularly important, as indeed Richardson again implied, if the countries break up into many smaller countries. You have more frontiers and more problems with wars. That is exactly what has been happening. As world conflict becomes more fragmented and the causes of conflict become more varied, research within the MoD, the academic community and internationally is needed to study that question. As the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, asked, will there be more Afghanistans and Somalias in the future?

Information technology can lead to nations moving out of poverty through increased productivity. But it also provides the wherewithal for cyberattacks on that high productivity. Cyberattacks are essentially a high productivity method of creating damage with devastating economic and social components. The point I want to make to the Minister, which I discussed with the noble Lord, Lord Reid, is that this review skirts the coalition problem of the dichotomy between information protection and personal anonymity. Many of us on this side of the House and in the intelligence services believe that we should err more on the side of ID cards and using the information that is available to protect ourselves rather than a slightly quixotic view of discarding some of the technology that enables us to protect ourselves from dangerous attacks, not to mention pollution and other things.

The review rightly identifies climate and environment, which has been mentioned before. The new National Security Committee will enable the issues of defence and national security to be combined. Ice in the polar regions melting in the summer presents a new oceanographic domain for defence issues, and research and technology in the UK on this will be very important. Similarly, in other parts of the world where there will be floods and droughts, there may be mass movements of population with considerable problems of instability. A mobile global force, as mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, is important in such situations.

Finally, I commend the review and join others in calling for intelligent help for service men and women as they retire or are invalided out. As a former school governor, I heard from the head teacher that ex-service people with teaching qualifications are highly valued. They can demonstrate the practical value of education. I wonder whether that should not be part of the government programme. School parents and teacher organisations should be encouraged to visit military establishments. There is a good deal of feeling in some that they do not want to do that, but it is an important part of understanding the military and something that we should think about this weekend.