Israel: DfID Secretary of State Meetings
Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Bates
The point the noble Lord raises is one of procedure, in terms of how these meetings take place. The noble Lord was a very senior Cabinet Minister for many years and has held many senior positions; he will know that one of the great benefits he gained from that time is personal contacts and friendships around the world that occasionally, even on unofficial visits, it is possible to have. That is for the good of the country. Therefore, using those contacts is something the Secretary of State has done; she has said that she is sorry for that, that she did not do it in the right way and that in future she, and all other Ministers, will behave differently as the changes to the ministerial code come into play.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I apologise to the House, but this is an Urgent Question on which questioning lasts 10 minutes. It is always open to noble Lords to put down debates on any subject in the future.
International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill
Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, I suspect I am in a minority on this side so I start by declaring an interest. I was involved in negotiations with nine departments of state as a Minister; none of them was the Treasury. Two, defence and health, were huge spending departments. Several others were also spending departments. I therefore bear the scars on my back from many discussions with the Treasury. Do I think that was a useful function? Yes, I do. It was necessary because there is an obligation on us all to ensure that, however well motivated a Minister, a Government or a policy is, it is subject to continual scrutiny. That is why there is merit in the amendment that has been moved.
I should make it absolutely plain that I fully support a 0.7% target and not only in politics. When I was chairman of a football club, we unilaterally adopted the same target for giving to charity. It is worthy, moral and has an element of leadership, as my noble friend Lord Davies said. However, for two reasons it would be quite wrong to have that target completely bereft of scrutiny by other departments, particularly the Treasury.
The first is to ensure that the 0.7% is spent not just with good intentions but with good outcomes. It is the objective effect of what we do, not just the morality of our intention, that will affect the lives of billions of people throughout the world. Each programme must be inspected to make sure that, however good the intent, it is not just making up numbers in a less effective way than might otherwise be the case.
Secondly, I have always believed that although each department has a degree of independence and autonomy, they should be part of an overall government strategy. Therefore, we must ensure not only that the individual programmes are beneficial but that the whole thrust of the aggregate of the programmes is complementary to our foreign policy, our defence policy and, indeed, our domestic policy. If not—if there is no scrutiny of a department and it is automatically given the right to spend money, unlike every other department—we could find an incompatibility between the two.
Therefore, I see no contradiction between a commitment to 0.7% being the aim and being enshrined in our policy for the future, and an insistence that that be spent to the best effect, not just for the good governance that has already been mentioned but for the benefit of the beneficiaries of that money—to ensure that it genuinely improves their lives in the best way possible.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I strongly support the point so powerfully made by my noble friend Lord Butler, for reasons very much connected with what the noble Lord, Lord Reid, has just said. The Committee on Soft Power, which was so admirably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, considered this matter because the contributions of all the other ministries to that 0.7% must be taken into account. It should not merely be a 0.7% DfID budget. Therefore, if in future, as I hope, the contributions of all the various ministries are included in the 0.7%, it is essential that DfID’s co-ordination of that contribution—if that is what it amounts to—should be subject to the discipline of making certain that it is properly spent in the national interest.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their amendment, which seeks to require the Secretary of State to report on circumstances where meeting the target would lead to excessive spending towards the end of the calendar year. Clearly, there should be no circumstance where the Secretary of State incurs excessive spending. I express my appreciation for my noble friend’s honesty that he does not support the 0.7% target. That is extremely clear and comes over loud and clear from his contributions.
In the previous amendment I addressed the issue of quality at the end of the calendar year, so I will just very briefly mention that the expenditure at the end of 2013 included the contribution to the EC. My noble friend Lord Forsyth said that DfID was otherwise engaged and not thinking about Father Christmas, which of course was extremely appropriate, and we were concentrating on what we could manage to contribute to the Global Fund, which I have discussed before, and the World Bank. I also mentioned that the National Audit Office and the OECD DAC recognised that this was all done in exactly the way it should have been. Obviously, it is critical for us to build up a strong enough pipeline that gives us a choice and the contingency to manage the budget that we have. We have such a good pipeline, and this means that we are able to choose between programmes that represent good value for money.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Lawson about trade, FDI and the other aspects that he mentioned, and with my noble friend Lord Lamont, who mentioned remittances. They all play their part in development. That is key. However, the economist Jim O’Neill, formerly of Goldman Sachs, who devised the terms BRIC and MINT for some of the emerging economies that I think they are talking about—I am sure my noble friends are acutely aware of how they have managed to develop—advised that Goldman Sachs’s investment should be partly guided by the Human Development Index. He says that it was when Turkey and Mexico reached a certain level of education that it was possible to drive industrial development and investment. That is why, for example, aid supporting education and health for the whole population may be key and complementary to those other aspects.
I note that my noble friend Lord Lawson said, perhaps inadvertently, the department for “industrial” development rather than international development. Looking forward, and bearing in mind our support for CDC and what I have just said in relation to the Human Development Index, perhaps that is a prescient description. Let us hope that it is sustainable industry in the future.
There are all sorts of other drivers of poverty reduction, and I fully appreciate that. They lie beyond aid, and include trade, tax, conflict, corruption and disease. That is why we also play our part in shaping the international system to work for poor countries. That underlies the UK’s approach, for example, to the post-2015 development framework. It is a false dichotomy to set “aid” and “beyond aid” as if they are competing, for the very reasons that Jim O’Neill stated.
We do not believe that it makes sense for this amendment to include a report on the relevant factors for the target not being met and speculation about future events, as it appears to require. In any event, Clause 2(4) already makes provision for the Secretary of State to describe what steps she or he has taken to meet the target in the coming year.
I hope that I addressed very thoroughly, when speaking on the previous amendment, our approach to spending over the year and the importance of a sustainable, long-term programme that does not commit us simply to spending in a particular year but looks at an overall strategy over a longer period. Therefore, let me make clear that we do not accept this amendment and hope that it will be withdrawn.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
Perhaps I may clarify one point, which bears upon what the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said, although not necessarily his amendment. It is the relationship between what the Minister called human development and economic development. I have great respect for Jim O’Neill. He is a very intelligent, very successful man and a great Manchester United supporter, so I have no reason to object to what he said, but I am sure that he would be the first to point out that, although education is of great importance in development, the production and maintenance of increasing levels of education are dependent on the production of a surplus domestically, which allows the development not only of education but of other social services. I understood the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, to be making the point that economic development, including capital investment, remittances and trade and so on, was the very basis on which future prosperity and a fair society are built. I do not think that the two are in dichotomy, as the Minister appeared to suggest.
Baroness Northover
The noble Lord has it absolutely right. I am saying that there is no dichotomy between them. It is clear that economic development is transformative; the issue is how you underpin it and take it forward. I was indicating that Jim O’Neill puts that emphasis on human development to have the economic transformation that the noble Lord and my noble friend seek. There is no dichotomy. That is why we approach it in terms of both human development and taking economic development further forward.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, I associate myself with the amendment and particularly with the remarks made by my noble friend Lord West. I do that for three reasons: first, because the primary duty of government is the security and welfare of our citizens and our sovereign nation in the world. I will not elaborate on that, as I think it is accepted by most of your Lordships’ House.
My second reason, however, is the commitment of honour that we have towards the men and women who serve this country—not just because charity starts at home but because of the unique contract that they have with the people of this country. It is a contract even until death and, tragically, many of them encounter that and lose their life in the service of this country. We have a debt of honour to illustrate that we are giving just as much attention to them as to others.
The third reason is because of the relationship between development overseas and our position as a nation which has a proud tradition of soldiering and contribution overseas. I am not one of those who believe that every problem has a military solution; they do not. Nor do I believe that you should develop military plans, strategy, operations or structures without regard to what used to be called “grand strategy”. Grand strategy, if we are to have it—I have to say that I do not see many signs of it in the Government—must encompass both hard and soft power: economic development, aid, diplomacy, military, Armed Forces and so on. That needs to be at both the strategic and the operational levels.
As the noble Lord, Lord West, pointed out, there are many cases—though not the majority, I accept—where aid can be supplied only under the umbrella of protection of the British Armed Forces. There are cases where the Armed Forces commit themselves, as in the Ebola crisis, to functions that are not necessarily directly related to defence, but where they are operating in difficult circumstances where they have particular attributes to defend themselves. In other words, you can no longer isolate military and Armed Forces action from soft power, whether diplomacy, aid or whatever. That is the essence of the strategy. In many cases you will not need the military and it would be better, as in some of our recent experience, to pay a little more attention to providing civilian attributes such as justice systems, but the two are meshed together.
The truth is that I believe we are now falling beneath the critical mass regarding our Armed Forces—certainly, though I will not rehearse all the details, with regard to our soldiers, surface fleet and aircraft, some of which has been pointed out already. We are also falling beneath critical mass in terms of our commitment. When I was a much younger lad, we were spending 5.4% of GDP on our Armed Forces. We are now spending less than 2%. If the nuclear deterrent is transferred from the central budget, out of which it has been paid for 50 years, into the defence budget, we will have an even greater deterioration, although that will be disguised because of that internal transfer.
I accept that we are among the highest spenders in NATO in this regard because other members of NATO are, frankly, not even getting to 2%. In some cases, when they are getting to 2% that is rather cloaked in euphemisms as well. I was talking to someone recently about the details of the Belgian defence budget. That country spends 2%, 90% of which is on salaries and pensions. As one official said, “We don’t so much have an Armed Forces as an extremely well guarded pension scheme”. So it is not the case that we are falling dramatically behind the rest but, given some of the things that are happening in Europe and the wider world, and the necessity to combine soft and hard power together, we can no longer allow the isolation and continued deterioration of defence; that is not something that can be put back quickly.
I understand that education, health and other domestic issues are extremely important to people in the country. I understand also the sincerity and motivations behind the discussions on the 0.7% target. Still, it would be better to be cautious about our future strategy as a country, for ourselves but also for the many people in the world who look to us not only for moral assistance and diplomatic and development aid but as partners who can be counted upon when the real hard times come, and they come in the form of threats. There is therefore nothing incompatible between arguing for a strong, robust and effective budget with regard to overseas development—particularly economic development, which is the basis of all human progress—and our commitment to adequate funds for defence.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, I suspect that it will not surprise the House to learn that I agree with everything that has been said so far on this amendment. Let me be clear: I support the 0.7% target, although I accept and acknowledge the importance of the much wider suite of tools that can and should be brought to bear on international development, as the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, has rightly pointed out.
I have been in the position to see personally some of the outstanding work that is done abroad by the Department for International Development. I have also been in a position personally to witness how much of this work has contributed not just to the betterment of humankind in general but to our own national security; it is important to us in a much wider sense. Equally, I have been in a position to see the importance of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, who is not in his place at the moment, referred to earlier as the comprehensive approach. In so many difficult areas of the world, development and military effort have gone hand in hand, as they need to do. Indeed, one of the great improvements we have made in this country over recent years is the breaking down of the barriers that used to exist between the different departments. Here I include the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence. Their joint working has improved immeasurably over the years, and as a consequence, the output, the effect that we have in the world, has improved immeasurably as well.
I have listened very carefully to the arguments that have been made in support of this legislation and for why the 0.7% target needs to be enshrined in legislation. I listened very carefully to the arguments the noble Baroness the Minister made in resisting a number of the amendments that have been put forward. Any one of her colleagues from any of the other spending departments could stand at the Dispatch Box and make the same case with the same force for their own department. Most of the arguments that have been advanced today have no particular significance in international development over any other task that the Government undertake in general public expenditure, except, perhaps, for one, and that one is that we have agreed to an international target for international development, but so we have for defence, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has pointed out. We have said that it is crucial that nations do not fall below spending 2% of their GDP on defence within NATO. Those nations that do not meet that target should work towards achieving it. We have taken the lead, at least in terms of words, in this regard. What we have not yet done is taken the lead in terms of action.
Surely two departments that have worked and will continue to work so closely together in future as defence and international development, two departments that rely upon each other so much for a synergistic approach in the world, two departments, perhaps the only two departments, which have an international commitment to a specific target, two departments that are linked so closely, should be treated the same in our legislation. I support the amendment.
Baroness Northover
I remind the noble Lord that we have a general election between now and then, and although we are not standing for election many of our colleagues are. The new Government will no doubt take a decision as to what they say their spending should be. However, I set that in the context of a continuity here, as regards defence spending, which you do not see in the DfID budget.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
I am grateful to the Minister but I have to come back on this. We understand that, tragically from her point of view, the present Government may not be in office after the general election, but if they are, will they maintain expenditure at 2% or above? Incidentally, I say that in the context of not accepting her figures on continuity. I do so for very good reasons. For instance, just after the Cold War, under Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, there was a 25% cut in real terms in defence expenditure over a six-year period.
Baroness Northover
I am very happy to share these figures with noble Lords but I am making a comparison with the aid budget, which is what we are addressing—perhaps I could bring noble Lords back to that. I do not dispute the value of the defence budget but we are trying to make sure that the aid budget is much more predictable. I hope that I may be allowed to carry on because I realise that noble Lords wish to get through some other elements.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
We can all take it from that that the Government are not prepared to say on the record, with all the risks and threats around us in the world, that they are committed to meeting that 2% target. That is extremely disappointing, especially when the Prime Minister is going around telling other countries that they ought to do so. Surely the whole basis of the debate has been about setting an example to the rest of the world.
A number of points have been made. I want to pick up on points made by my noble friend Lord Marlesford and by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, which are profoundly important. The noble and gallant Lord talked about the fantastic job being done by our troops around the world, in conflict zones and elsewhere, to help improve people’s quality of life. That is something of which we should be immensely proud. We should not be proud of the fact that only £5 million of Ministry of Defence spending counted as overseas development aid for the year 2013. The Government are obsessed with sticking to conditions set by other people—who do not actually meet the target—as to what can be included in the target.
I listened to my noble friend the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State, on the radio this morning, speaking from Sierra Leone. She was very good indeed. She said how committed she was to aid being about helping people economically. She spoke with great affection about the role being played there by our defence forces. But that is not allowed to come off her budget because it does not meet the target. Indeed, in one instance where we sent troops and people—I think to Haiti—the only thing that the MoD was allowed to claim was the fuel for the ships. That is an absurd position, which arises from being determined to meet a particular target determined by someone else, as opposed to thinking about how we can spend the money most effectively to help people in distress and need. In that latter example, humanitarian aid is less than 10% of the budget that we are discussing.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
I am grateful to the noble Lord for allowing me to intervene. This is an important point for recognition, I hope, by those who approach this not from the defence side but from the side of international development, whether economic development or aid. The point is simply this. We synergise the efforts, finances and resources of DfID and the Ministry of Defence when specific emergencies arise. We did so in relation to Ebola and the Pakistan earthquake and so on, as I think everyone would accept.
However, there is so much more that we could do on a more general scale to aid the development of countries throughout the world in two areas. One is post-conflict reconstruction, where a massive job could be done for the benefit of people, and I would go further by referring to the second area, pre-conflict reconstruction. Both those are part of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, mentioned today as developing areas for international development and aid, and they are relatively recent. If we could conscript a vast army not of soldiers but of civilians with expertise in human rights, law, prisons, policing and so on, pre and post-conflicts, there would be enormous benefits. This is not just a matter of the protection of our own country.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I am most grateful to the noble Lord, who speaks from experience, and I agree with everything he says. What we spend at the moment on overseas development aid accounts for about a third of the defence budget. All my amendment would do is say, “If you want to increase the overseas aid budget, you can do so, but we have to meet that other target as well”. That seems entirely reasonable and sensible, and I am afraid that the arguments put forward for not linking these two things were thoroughly inadequate. The advocates of the Bill have been hoist by their own petard.
I would just like to pay a small tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for saying right at the start that he would be consistent, but I was a little disappointed that he suggested that if I divided the House he might not be able to vote for the amendment because of the drafting. That seems to be something that he should be able to overcome. If the House decides to accept the amendment, I shall be quite happy for the Government to come back with new drafting. I am very happy to work with the noble Lord to ensure that we reach agreement on the drafting, just as we have agreed on the principle of maintaining the support for our Armed Forces and ensuring the security of our country.
Agriculture and Food Industry
Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Plumb (Con)
My Lords, while I am sorry that my noble friend the Minister is not able to attend this debate, I am pleased to hear that it is because he is actively promoting the strengths of the UK food and farming sector today to an international audience in Glasgow during the Conservative games. He said that we have much to offer as a place for inward investment and as a trading partner. I hope therefore that, as we go forward, we are singing from the same hymn sheet.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
It may have been a slip of the tongue but I can assure the noble Lord that Glasgow has never been a welcoming host for Conservative games. I take it that he meant the Commonwealth Games.
Lord Plumb
I stand corrected, knowing my age, although I thought that I said the Commonwealth Games.
I welcome my noble friend Lady Northover, who takes the Minister’s place. This debate is to take note of the role of agriculture and the food industry in the economy of the UK. I think that it follows the debate that has just taken place well. I declare my interest as a farmer, as past president of the National Farmers’ Union, in European farm organisations as a whole, in the European Parliament and in an international policy group on food, farming and trade, which covers some 40 countries and different farming societies.
I have lived through some testing and challenging times. I speak with a passion for farming and the food industry. I have been encouraged by recent developments to work much more closely with the food industry in marketing British food, the display of which was second to none earlier this week at the Royal Welsh Show, as in other exhibits round the country. Those who see it have to realise that it just does not grow on trees. I sometimes despair when the talk about the growth of the economy—reducing the nation’s deficit to deal with debt and safeguarding our economy—means industrial growth, with agriculture not on the radar of many economic forecasts. I hope that today during this discussion we can put it on the radar.
Farming is certainly not a job for the faint-hearted. It is a risky business, dealing with a changing climate, disease and often loss—certainly with TB eradication still meaning a loss of up to 90 cows a day from our herds. Then there is the loss of land for so many other purposes, such as housing and roads. We have to live with price swings from imports related to currency values, which by nature means that the business is a long-term one.
What is the contribution to the economy from agriculture and food production, processing and retailing, which employs well over 3.5 million people? Farming’s contribution to the economy increased by a staggering 67% between 2007 and 2013 in gross value added terms, contributing an extra £10.4 billion to the UK economy than it did in the five years between 2004 and 2008. This is in stark contrast to the wider economy, even accounting for recent improvements in economic performance in the UK, which was 0.6% smaller in 2014 than its peak in 2008, mainly of course due to the banking crisis.
Whereas the UK in general has struggled for success—moving now, I submit, in the right direction—the agricultural output from the UK has increased by 59% in the last decade. Agriculture’s importance to the UK economy is emphasised by the fact that the United Kingdom has 142,000 businesses registered as farm businesses. That is more than the number of businesses involved in the motor trade, education, finance and insurance, and equates to 5.5% of the overall total. In more rural areas, of course, agriculture is obviously much more important to the local economy.
The self-sufficiency ratio is estimated to be 60% for all food produced in 2013 and 73% for indigenous-type foods. The first time I heard Winston Churchill speak, many years ago, he said:
“Thirty million people living on an island where we produce enough food for fifteen million is a spectacle of majesty and insecurity this country can ill afford”.
It makes you think. It is no different today. There is double the population but still 60% of the amount needed to feed our people. Imports exceed exports, as we well know, affecting the balance of trade. In the money terms of 2013, the deficit in 1990 was £10 billion. In 2013 it was £20 billion. Self-sufficiency at 60% must therefore be improved considerably to play an even greater part in the economy. This requires investment, management, skills and the taking of risks—risks that have to be taken, particularly in farming, for growth.
The comparison with other countries is interesting. In the United States, self-sufficiency in food is 130%; in France, it is 120%; and in Germany it is 93%. Japan is deeply worried about its level of 40% and has set a target of 50% by 2020. Many crops, particularly in the United States, are also produced and processed for energy, particularly wheat: 40% of the wheat in America is produced solely for energy.
I congratulate the Government on the incentives that they have shown in the last few years to encourage technical and scientific research. That has helped to transform farming. Through incentives from the European Union, we have seen the diversification of concern for the environment, which shows a clear balance in welfare and caring for the countryside compared to what used to be.
Today, 70% of our modern agricultural equipment has some sort of precision component inside it. A state-of-the-art combine harvester has up to eight computers on board. Think of those going at this very moment: eight computers in one operating combine harvester. Satellite technology is used to avoid soil damage and is being picked up and used in various ways by the farming community. We now have robotics, which has entered the milking parlour. The cow decides when it is going to be milked, not the person, and that is an interesting change. I am told that the incidence of mastitis, for instance, is far less in robotic milking than hitherto. I find that interesting and difficult to believe, but that is nevertheless the situation as I read it.
The farming and food industries have therefore already shown how they can help with economic growth and collaboration, helping to pave the way for home consumption and increased export opportunities while maintaining a high-quality product and the welfare of both plants and animals. Both industries have demonstrated support for integrated farming practices, training and development opportunities for succession and sustaining supply chains. The business and trading culture is progressive and aggressive, embracing innovative technology, adapting to the ever changing complications of common agricultural policy reform—I could spend the next two hours talking about that—the environment, finance and business policy, and linking more closely to the food retailers through contracts.
These conditions call for a highly educated, skilled workforce with the ambition to embrace these revolutionised industries that provide a duality of technological progression and environmental respect. The revolution of these industries has at times been unforgiving, with winners and casualties, but it has also demonstrated the robust restructuring and adaptation needed for efficiency and success. Whether we are talking about a farming plc or a small farm business diversification project, there is no shortage of innovation from young entrepreneurs discovering and exploiting future markets. That is an exciting and well thought-out challenge—a well practised route to market with considerable future prospects. Growth and opportunity will need to be managed in an intelligent way that embraces new technology and new markets while respecting the limitations of resource and environment. We need a future workforce to satisfy a considerable and growing global population. Our food and farming industries can be criticised for hiding their light for future employment opportunities under a bushel. More must be done to attract the highest calibre of recruits to take up jobs that offer magnificent and challenging career prospects.
Considerable work has been achieved with the land-based and environmental sector skills council and Defra to create the industry-focused agriskills and agritech strategies. There is a plethora of industry initiatives, schemes and awards, which provide much needed support and attraction for new blood into the industry, with a strategy for consolidation shortly to be discussed and, I hope, implemented. British agriculture has embraced radical changes in both policy and its own PR over the last decade. It has demonstrated strength and resilience through the economic downturn, worked hard to understand shortfalls and has lobbied for a workable policy while highlighting its products, service and methods of production.
Agricultural colleges have embraced the challenge of becoming fit for purpose. They are now demonstrating the diversity of the two industries with a range of suitable and improved quality courses and are enjoying an increased number of applications. I was a governor at Cirencester for a number of years. It was a struggle to get 400 students into the college each year. Now there are 1,400, and many more are knocking on the door. Other colleges are finding exactly the same. The university milk-round of recruitment will now, I hope, be seeing a long-awaited change. Industries will be fighting to retain their supply of graduates as intelligent young men and women see the exciting opportunities offered by the food and farming industries.
There has been a self-regulating internal revolution in these two industries. They have risen to considerable challenges, ranging from market conditions to environmental conflict. These industries are renowned for adapting to change while ensuring an essential supply of food and sensible, realistic caretaking of our most precious resource. There can be no logical reason for these industries to be excluded from Britain’s plans for economic growth in a hungry world. There is nothing, but nothing, more important than food security. I beg to move.
Syria: Aid
Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Northover
I am aware that the noble Lord thinks that this is extremely important. It is important to engage with everybody in this conflict, both within Syria and in the countries around, and those countries which appear to have an interest in its continuing instability. It is extremely important that the United Kingdom is involved in widespread engagement.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, given the wise decision not to intervene militarily in Syria, will the Minister accept that there is therefore an even stronger obligation on us to attend to the desperate needs of these refugees? If we are not dealing directly with Assad or the Syrian regime, and in view of the importance of Iran in the region and the tentative but significant steps that have been taken on engagement with Iran on other issues, can the Minister tell the House to what extent we have engaged with the Iranian regime as regards what should be, objectively and neutrally, the priority for all of us, which is dealing with the humanitarian refugee crisis?
Baroness Northover
It is in nobody’s interest to have instability increasing in this region, which is exactly what is happening at the moment. That is why it was incredibly good news when relations were improved with Iran. As I did before, I pay tribute to our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, for the work she did on that. Iran is indeed an interested party in the area.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, I begin by paying tribute to the young men and women of our Armed Forces who, day in and day out, protect us and our families, our country and our national interests, often risking life and limb and sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice. We owe all of them a deep debt of gratitude for what they do.
When I ask myself what is the chief characteristic of the modern world, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said earlier, its networked nature. What also strikes me is that it is the predominance of this country in global networks that has led to the United Kingdom becoming known as a great power. It came about originally through exploration, then through the domination of our naval networks around the world, and then through the domination of the financial sector because of the networked nature of international finance. I want to spend a few moments talking about something that receives little attention, but I think it should because it is the central characteristic of today’s networked world, and that is cyberspace. I do this in the full belief that it is essential not only for our growth and our pre-eminence, but for our national security and our defence. I declare my registered interests in the academic and private sectors in this subject.
Cyberspace is an environment characterised by its breadth—it is transnational, across over 192 countries. It is deep, because it diffuses power downwards, now to nearly 4 billion people who have never been able to gain information, to influence or to communicate before. It is ubiquitous and now runs through politics, economics, finance and our social networks, as well as many other aspects of life. It is truly the first environment made by men and women. It is not just an amalgam of technologies anymore or a means of communication, it is an environment like the land, sea, air and space. That has enormous consequences for us in terms of our national security. It means that we now have a fifth domain of warfare potential as well as a source of great opportunity. That makes us very vulnerable if we are not alert to it, both in concept and in practice. Of course, cyberspace has been an amazing gateway of opportunity for billions in the world, but it has also seen an equal growth in virus and malware development; from the first malware inserted by floppy disk back in 1981 to the myriad threats we now see. I will not rehearse them to this House but they are extremely sophisticated.
Suffice it to say that three years ago, when I chose to raise the subject in my maiden speech, the pursuit of the study of cyberspace was regarded as a rather iconoclastic occupation of mine. We now hear of malware attacks every day, on big names such as Microsoft, Apple, Lockheed Martin, ThyssenKrupp and so on. It might astonish your Lordships to know that it is much more widespread than just those headline names. Last year, 93% of companies in the United Kingdom with more than 250 staff suffered a cyberattack on their systems. It is not just the quantity—we now face an increasingly sophisticated array of persistent attacks, sometimes lasting months or years. They are targeted, adaptive and dynamic attacks that can change as they hit the defences that have been installed for them. They can involve compromise of the supply chain and the storage of vulnerabilities—reconnaissance, if you like—in order to probe weaknesses for future use. All this is going on at the moment and that vulnerability will increase as we move to consumer technology in our workplaces: smartphones and so on, the movement to the cloud, and the “Internet of Things”, from road charging to pacemakers. All that will become more and more vulnerable.
Why does all this vulnerability from the network world matter to defence and national security? It is because our critical national infrastructure is now more vulnerable than ever before. Software systems and industrial operating systems will protect our water supplies, supply our energy distribution and generation, land our planes, run our trains, heat our homes and underpin our hospitals. They will become the infrastructure on which our lives, livelihood and morale depends. Why use an expensive platform such as a nuclear submarine to launch an expensive weapon such as an intercontinental ballistic missile when we have that platform in all our pockets and in an iPad in most of our bags?
All of them now allow the possibility of enormous damage, as can be seen through the operation of the Stuxnet virus, which, unknown to the Iranian authorities, was effectively running—or mis-running—the centrifuges that were meant to produce their enriched uranium. All that, every passing day, should alert us. I have just learnt today that there has been another wave of attacks on major US corporations, specifically aimed at energy supplies. That is the critical national infrastructure vulnerability that we face. Of course, there has been some response from the Government, for which I give them credit: £650 million has been allocated to cyber, admittedly over three years; there is now a national cybersecurity strategy; research continues at GCHQ; there is improved assistance to the private sector and sharing; and the CPNI, which protects our national infrastructure, has been trying to influence standards. The MoD has played its part: it has set up the Cyber Security Operations Centre and enhanced co-operation with GCHQ.
I welcome all of this but huge challenges and questions remain, especially in the working out of concepts, capabilities, understanding and operations. The idea of active defence is very popular. One anonymous American general, who must be very glad he remains anonymous, said that if the US was hit with a cyberattack, “We will stick a nuke down their smokestack”. That illustrates the absolute ignorance of the nature of cyber. Attribution is a major problem. It is difficult to know the culprits. There is no missile heading for you where you can retrace the route that it has taken. There are legal prohibitions on accessing computer networks without authorisation. There is a patchwork of international laws. There are normative, legal and diplomatic obstacles. There are “what ifs”. What if you pursued an attacker and encountered behind that attacker a foreign Government? What if an obscure digital trail leads to an unrelated system or it has been disguised within a hospital, as some artillery pieces have been in asymmetric warfare in the past?
Our concepts really need to be thought through. In defence, I am afraid that our experience has not helped us because the wars and conflicts in which we have been engaged have been bloody and dangerous, but they have been asymmetric. Our conventional systems on sea, in the air and on land, all of which are now based on software, have never really been tested. I warn against complacency in this area.
As I reach my conclusion, there is one point where I would criticise the Government. Historically, our intelligence services and police have depended for counterterrorism and anti-crime activity in defending the people of this country on the ability to match the technology of our enemies, particularly in communications. This capability desperately needs updating. For the third year running, the Government have equivocated and postponed. Their fear of the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Clegg, appears to be greater than their fear of the consequences of not acting in updating our intelligence-gathering capacity to include Skype, the internet and texts. God forbid that a terrorist attack should be launched that would have been prevented if we had updated it. God help the Government if that should happen because I know from experience just how dependent we were on that capacity to save the lives of 2,500 people only six years ago in the liquid bomb plot.
I congratulate the Government on what they have done. I hope that they will go further in a number of areas. Above all, I hope that they will remember where I started: the pre-eminence of the United Kingdom over the past few centuries has depended on our dominance of a network world, whether it was exploration, the naval lanes or the financial networks of the world. If we do not capture such a pre-eminence and domination in cyber as a trusted centre of it, I am afraid that we will continue on a very long road of gradual—and perhaps not so gradual—decline.
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Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Verma
The noble Lord has raised a number of detailed questions and I suspect that I will not be able to answer them today. I would like to take them away, write to him and place a copy in the Library, because it would be unwise of me to respond to him about outcomes without details of how those outcomes would be delivered.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, perhaps I can assist on this. While not agreeing with everything that has been proposed, on the matter of choice there are difficulties in getting information, in travelling away from your local hospital, in transferring records, but that has never stopped the rich exercising their choice. They have always been able to overcome these difficulties. Therefore, if there are obstacles in the way of consumer choice for patients, the answer should not be to remove that choice; it should be to increase facilities for the provision of information. On outcomes, I would simply say that, since the introduction of choice in the National Health Service, hundreds of thousands of people have been taken off the waiting list and the maximum waiting time has been reduced from two years to six weeks from diagnosis to operation. That was due to the element of competition and patient empowerment which was introduced into the National Health Service through choice.
Baroness Verma
I thank the noble Lord for coming in and assisting me, but I will still follow it through with some letters.