King’s Speech

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

I declare my interest as chair of the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency. Like many other noble Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, to their new positions—I know they will be absolutely superb Ministers. I join in the welcome for the launch of the strategic defence review by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. But, as the saying goes, life is what happens while you are making plans, so I will use this opportunity to raise three sets of decisions relating to the defence sector that will confront the Government in the meantime.

The first, obviously, is the people in defence. We learn that, next week, the Government will in all likelihood respond to the pay review bodies for nurses and teachers. Given the pressures on retention in the Armed Forces, it would be highly welcome if the Minister can assure us that, at the same time, the Government will bring a positive response forward for the Armed Forces review body, meeting those recommendations in full and supplementing the MoD’s revenue budget for the extra costs, which were quite clearly not budgeted at the start of this financial year. We look forward to his explicit responses on those points later.

Secondly, without prejudice to the SDR, a number of no-regrets moves are already in train across the defence sector, including rebuilding artillery stockpiles, commissioning further heavy artillery, doing further work on the huge capability gap around UK anti-missile air defence and, as the noble Lord, Lord West, said, continuing with the welcome shipbuilding order book, including the six amphibious support vessels for the Royal Marines. Another move is dealing with the physical infrastructure, which has decayed such that, for example, a nuclear-powered submarine, HMS “Audacious”, has waited for over a year at Devonport for a dry dock to become available. All of these do not require a strategic defence review; they just require continued progress, and I am sure the signals that the Minister can send on that front will be welcomed.

However, there are some bigger capital investment choices before defence. One of the great joys on these occasions is hearing noble and gallant former service chiefs engaging in a little camouflaged blue-on-blue friendly fire as they try to strike out their rivals’ programmes. I have a degree of sympathy for the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lancaster, made about how the Army has to some extent been used as a balancing item on these occasions in the past, precisely because it is less capital intensive than other branches of the Armed Forces. The NAO’s review of the MoD equipment budget pointed out the consequences of that. Nevertheless, I do not think that is a good reason in itself for trying to whack GCAP in order to secure what would otherwise be a pre-emption of the defence budget.

I also do not think it is a good reason to use this as an occasion to make an ex cathedra pivot away from the tilt to the Indo-Pacific, which has been mischaracterised as, in some sense, a folie de grandeur in the suggestion that the Royal Navy can counterbalance or make a major contribution over and above what the US Pacific fleet will do given the rise of the Chinese. My understanding is that that is not what the Indo-Pacific tilt is about: it is a recognition that, as far as Euro-Atlantic threats are concerned, there is increasing connectivity with what China and the North Koreans are doing. It is also a recognition that we need freedom of navigation in order to sustain our maritime trade, and it is a recognition that there are strong industrial partnership opportunities with not just Japan but the Philippines and other countries as well. For all those reasons, I hope we will not come to premature conclusions about the so-called Indo-Pacific tilt.

The reason that all these trade-offs are so acute is, as a number of noble Lords have said, precisely because we have come up with this arbitrary and indefensible proposition that magic happens if we get to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. A 0.2% increase in GDP is about £5 billion. As my noble friend Lord Walney pointed out, in the great scale of public expenditure, that is a trivial sum. The idea that that is the difference between success and failure in defending this nation is for the birds. To put it in context, we spend more than that in this country on speciality coffee and crisps. If we as a nation can afford our lattes, we can afford our defence.