Royal Navy: Frigates

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the Navy has already reduced the number of senior officers across the piece, including its admirals. We believe we have an appropriate number of senior officers to take charge of the various responsibilities, not all of which directly relate to ships of the fleet.

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I am admonished that I should not ask a question which could cause a Minister to answer in a way that contains secret information. However, in view of the ambiguity of the noble Earl’s Answer to the Question, perhaps I may ask this: will the Royal Navy continue to control those 13 frigates in future, or are the Government subject to some private arrangement under which they intend to transfer the Army, the Navy and the Air Force to the control of a central European defence force as soon as we have reached a Brexit solution—a resolution or a remain?

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that I may be flying under false colours in this debate, because the title makes direct reference to international security and stability but all my concerns are with the lack of any direct reference to our domestic internal security and stability, which I think should have been closely addressed in the report, and the lack of which I think is shameful. We are not going to be able to play any role in the international sector unless we have made our own internal lines secure and our own internal security reliable. Where are the initiatives to deal with that in a changing world?

We have had the horrible example of what has gone on in France, and I think that we should stop and think about what that actually means. It is a new form of warfare for which we have no ready-made defence. It is also hugely geared towards being tele-sensational. We should therefore be putting everything in place that we can to limit anyone’s capability to harness the media against us by putting on a “television spectacular”, as they did in France. We should be seriously considering banning all television coverage of any terrorist incident that occurs, because that is the lifeblood off which they feed. The most that I would go along with would be having some embedded tele-journalist going with our own internal teams.

We really need to have some internal rapid response units, which have got to be created specially, with the particular capability of addressing the other great deficiency in the report, to which the noble Lord, Lord West, has made reference: where are the defences of our greatest border of all, the sea? There is nothing. I live on the south coast. We have 140 miles of coastline with two tiny coastguard vessels that would not look out of place on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. There is nothing else at all. How is anyone going to have a rapid response to any sea-borne attack coming in? That is our easiest and most vulnerable target of all.

The report ought to be addressing the possibility of creating two very intensive rapid response units; I suggest one at Northolt and one at Catterick, and dividing the country between them on those lines. They should be equipped with a minimum of seven or eight helicopters each to give them reach anywhere in the country where a situation could arise, and they should have a dedicated combination, accessing the police most emphatically and the fire brigade if necessary. The SAS should emphatically have a permanent always-on-duty presence in each of those camps, and there should be an ability to go wherever.

In the French episodes, the first news that we had came in at 9.22 pm on the Friday evening. By the next morning the television was permanently showing the subject. We have to ensure in our case that anything that occurs here is completely wiped out as an attack before the television cameras come on by the morning; otherwise, once it goes that far, there is no holding it. The report does not at all address an adequate rapid response unit, and that is shameful. I hope very much that the Minister and his team will look back at this to see what they can do. It is not going to be very cost intensive because, if we are not going to be making war abroad, our own resources can be reshaped and reallocated to create these response units. For God’s sake, though, please give them some viable craft to patrol our shorelines.

I wanted to address my final half-minute to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, but he has just left. The noble Lord was the other man in the ruination of the first great romance of my life, though he probably never knew it and never even met the lady concerned. She thought he was a combination of Jesus Christ and Trotsky. She got herself arrested every Sunday afternoon, and I had to appear in court on Monday morning and pay her fines for four years in a row. I was nearly bankrupted by it, so I am very glad to see the noble Lord here; he owes me an apology and quite a lot of money.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath]

I note that the noble Lord made that remark just before I speak, and I shall take the appropriate warning.

At the splendid ceremony that we had last week for the Armada canvases, I found myself standing next to a heavily uniformed naval officer who was looking at the canvas showing the fleet of Drake and Howard just on the tail and about to engage the Spanish. “God”, he said, “they had it so easy”. I said that it was the first time that I had ever heard anyone say that the British fleet had it easy in beating the Armada. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand me, sir. They had it easy because they were all teeth and no tail”. I asked him what he meant by that and he said that the present Royal Navy had no teeth left because all the money was spent on the huge tail of administrative burden that drags us back. If we could just have our teeth back, he said, we could have a much better and more effective force for a much smaller administrative tail that we have to drag around behind us.

When I was listening to the comment from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, about the four Type 22s that have to come out of commission in five months’ time, I thought how close to the mark that was. Those four Type 22s have at present a total crew of 768. Although those vessels might not be state of the art, if naval officers and men are no longer sailing on them, how many pirates will be captured by 768 clerks and civil servants? How many tonnes of narcotics will they be able to capture in the Caribbean? How many miles of Britain’s storm-driven shores will they be able to patrol of a cold winter’s night to the exclusion of any alien influences who want to come ashore? I suggest the answer is that there will not be one hostage released, not one pirate captured and not one tonne of narcotics captured. Those ships should continue to sail with blue-water sailors on board. The clerks and the staff at the back should be the casualty, not the ships.

The British Navy has had a long record of making do very well with assets which would appear to be coming to the end of their sell-by date. The 54 year-old HMS “Victory” led a fleet with an average age of 26 into Trafalgar. At Jutland, if Beatty’s seven battle cruisers are taken out, the average age of our fleet was 18 and, although we are not quite sure whether we won that battle, at least the German fleet never dared to come out of port again—so we did to some extent. The extent to which the frigates are a problem is that even if the Type 22s are getting near the obsolescence level, they can still do a lot of very useful work which will release the burden on the Type 23s—the jewels of the frigate fleet that we have, and the vessels which we need to look to.

That point came home very loud and clear to me when recently I had the privilege of a trip to Portsmouth to visit one of the new Type 45s. It is a magnificent ship but it is wrong to describe it as the finished article. It is work in progress; notably, it is lacking in the full sufficiency of its anti-submarine protection at the moment, while it has absolutely no decoy equipment on board; there is just a blank hole on the deck. It also needs the permanent presence of a Type 23 to protect its rear against submarines in any deployment where it has a risk. The Type 22s might not be able to do that job adequately at present, but the Type 23 would. If the Type 22s were being kept and used to do the patrol work off Somalia and in the Caribbean, that would at least remove the burden on the Type 23s.

We also need to consider other issues with the Type 45s. At the moment, they are armed with a wonderful system for anti-air resistance and can knock out 48 successive incoming missiles with a high level of accuracy and reliability. One then has to ask: what happens to the 49th missile when it comes in, if that utilises the entire capacity? The answer to that is very strange: “Ah well, we can override the weapons system of another Type 45, access their weapons and fire those as well”. The question then comes: “Does that not mean that when you have used those 48 up and still have not got rid of the invader, you are both sitting ducks in the water to be eliminated and so is the ship you are supposed to be protecting”? That means in turn that you have to have a hunter-killer behind them the whole time to take out the point of attack. The only viable and reliable flotilla in which you can send those ships out is to send the Type 45 with a Type 23 behind it, then a hunter-killer behind them to do the job for them.

If we look back at the history of the Royal Navy, it has, to take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, a wonderful record of adapting to cope with the thing that nobody could foresee coming. After Trafalgar, the Royal Navy was engaged in one of the longest, most bitter and, in terms of men and equipment, most ruinously expensive engagements because it had the responsibility of implementing the suppression of the slave traders. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, referred to the criticism of their impact on trade this morning. In fact, the Royal Navy suffered the most horrendous losses of any engagement that it has ever been involved in. It lost 32,000 men in suppressing the slave trade—the highest percentage of loss in any engagement in the history of the Royal Navy. It lost them principally because it adapted to the use of very small boats, which is what was necessary. It relied on sloops, brigs and cutters to do the job. It was cold steel and hand-to-hand, but it did the job.

One hundred and thirty years later, the Royal Navy did a very similar adaptation when it had to cope with the not wholly-expected dominance of the U-boat in the north Atlantic. It did that by developing a Yarmouth fishing trawler into what eventually became the Flower class, of which it built 678 at a total cost of £22 million. That sounds like a bargain today, considering what it did for us. The Flower class was a wonderful ship. Today we have a ship called the River class, which has gone into the water as a minesweeper. It has already been spoken of very favourably this morning. I suggest that the Royal Navy is missing a trick here. If it is seeking to hold on to its Type 22s, which it should—the same arguments apply to the “Ark Royal” and the Harriers as applied to the Type 22s; we should not get rid of something which is still useful—it should be looking at an upgrade of the River class to become a fully fledged gunboat with improved kill capability and speed, which would then be able to play a very effective role in anti-piracy and patrol work. You can get two of those for the cost of a frigate, minimum, fully upgraded. You could put on board an effective GPS positioning and reconnaissance system as well and it would not be an expensive product. You could include some anti-submarine capability as well. There is real value in doing a serious redesign of the River class and producing prototypes to see what they could do for us. They might be a very cheap and effective alternative to give us the teeth we need, as that officer was saying.

The Navy has had a wonderful history of delivering against the record and at above value. Let it get back to doing some creative thinking by looking back at its history at what it has done previously and doing it again.