Ukraine

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, obviously, like the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, I too think that the NHS matters, but when the geopolitical facts change our defence posture needs to respond accordingly. Inevitably, I am afraid that will mean a far higher priority for defence spending than we have seen over the past several decades. At this stage of the debate, in an effort to be non-duplicative, I will try to focus a few remarks on the defence industrial lessons that we have seen from Ukraine over the more than two and a half years since the full Russian invasion began.

Parliament often legitimately criticises the Ministry of Defence for its procurement, but I suggest that today it would be fair to congratulate the Ministry of Defence on the speed and effectiveness of its mobilisation and on its material support for Ukraine, particularly under Op Scorpius. I think 34 countries have provided military support, but the UK’s is the third-largest contribution after the US and Germany. Indeed, there have been disproportionate contributions from countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands. We have committed over £7.8 billion of support from the reserves and, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said right at the beginning, there is the very welcome commitment to at least £3 billion of funding support a year, stretching out to 2030 as required.

As the National Audit Office pointed out in September in one of its more favourable reports—I say this as a connoisseur of National Audit Office reports, not all of which have had quite that flavour—there has been tremendous innovation and good practice in defence procurement, including at Defence Equipment and Support in Abbey Wood, in shortening procurement timescales, in getting anti-aircraft equipment in six weeks that would normally have taken one to two years, in getting small contracts out the door in 115 days, and in using a degree of creativity in reverse engineering Soviet-era T72 tank tracks using old blueprints at the Tank Museum in Bovington. All this is to be welcomed.

Reading between the lines, there might have been one government department that did not quite get the memo. The NAO says that the formal approval process from HM Treasury

“can take place months after the funding total has been publicly announced”.

It goes on to say that after the then Prime Minister had committed the Government to

“£2.3 billion funding for Ukraine”

in the year just gone, it took the Treasury until 10 months after the First Lord of the Treasury made that announcement to formally agree that that funding should be released. I can imagine the accounting officers of the departments have been arguing over those sentences before they saw the light of day.

Let us not let that detract from the broader point, which is that HMG has a great deal to be proud of. That, however, should not blind us to three uncomfortable revelations on the defence industrial side of the equation from the last several years. The equipment that the UK had donated to Ukraine up until March 2024 had a current value of £172 million; the cost of replacing it is estimated at £2.7 billion. That underlines just how atrophied and time-expired much of the equipment and munitions available to our Armed Forces are. It forcefully illustrates former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s point about the “hollowing out” of the Armed Forces and, indeed, comments that the current Defence Secretary, John Healey, has again made this week. The two years of donations we have made will, according to the NAO, take us until 2031 to replace, which underlines the lack of depth and resilience in our defence industrial base. As we have all been well aware, delays in supplying Ukraine with critical-use permissions for major pieces of equipment—the Storm Shadow debate and others—arise partly because of export permit approvals being not forthcoming from other countries, which underlines the importance of sovereign defence capability.

In short, congratulations are due to the Ministry of Defence for what it has done with the hand it has been dealt. Nevertheless, the experience of the last two and a half years has shown some profound weaknesses in the defence industrial base, which the forthcoming strategic defence review and the subsequent spending review must confront head on.