RAF: C-130J Hercules

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 8th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

As the noble Lord will be aware, we have taken delivery of the full cohort of flight, that being 22 of these aircraft. It is the case that there were some niche challenges and some availability issues to do with global supply, but I reassure your Lordships about two things: all critical operational commitments are met and all critical operational commitments continue to be met. The issues around niche capabilities boiled down to two things: a small range of niche airdrop capabilities and a small range of air dispatch capabilities. I cannot give further detail on those but they are now being accelerated in terms of being addressed. On availability, I am pleased to confirm that the improvement there has been manifest. We have seen a 25% to 30% improvement in availability compared with 18 months ago.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the reference to niche capabilities makes this sound like something minor but we are talking about Special Forces operations here. Can the Minister tell the House by what date the Atlas fleet will be capable of the full range of Special Forces missions? Can she also say, given the difficulties with the serviceability of the Atlas, what the target rate of availability is for that aircraft fleet and how it compares with its current availability?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

As the noble and gallant Lord will be aware, on availability, if we factor in planned maintenance for the whole fleet and retrofitting for some of the older A400Ms to bring them up to modern standards, there will always be an element of unavailability. On the matter of the Special Forces, the noble and gallant Lord will understand that I cannot comment specifically on their activities, but I refer him to the meeting on 17 May of the Defence Select Committee in the other place, when Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton—now Chief of the Air Staff—reassured the committee that he had spoken to Director Special Forces. He was clear that he was very impressed with the A400M and that it could achieve all potential courses of action.

UK Undersea Infrastructure: Hostile Activity

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think we all agree that the overall objective of increasing our usage of renewable energy is laudable and to be commended, but my noble friend is correct that the installation of infrastructure brings with it an obvious degree of risk. As I indicated to the noble Lord, Lord West, across government there are a range of departments with responsibilities in this field. As far as the MoD is concerned, we actively monitor threat. When it comes to looking at, for example, Russian activity in either the Baltic Sea or the North Sea, noble Lords will understand that we regularly assess by our maritime presence what is happening. The Russians know that we know they know what we are doing.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, protecting against threats is clearly important but there is no such thing as perfect defence. With what degree of urgency are the Government addressing our resilience in this area of our critical national infrastructure?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord will be aware that we have operational assets which we can deploy. For example, in the wake of Nord Stream we deployed HMS “Somerset” to monitor what was happening. We also have our MROS programme; one of those ships has been bought and is currently being readied for operational activity, and the other is to be built.

Ukraine: Arms Supplies

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. This is certainly something that has been on our radar screen, and for that matter on the radar screens of our allies, particularly within NATO. For example, we have not been replacing like with like; we have been looking holistically at what our need is once we have supplied support to Ukraine. I reassure my noble friend and the Chamber that we are indeed engaged in the very issue to which he quite rightly refers.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the anticipated offensive will be an extremely hazardous undertaking. It will be made all the more perilous for the Ukrainians without at least local control of the air. How confident is the Minister that the Ukrainians have been given the wherewithal to be able to achieve such control?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I say to the noble and gallant Lord that it is interesting if we just put a little context around this. Russia planned a major offensive effort through the winter and, quite simply, has not succeeded. This is a slow-moving conflict, and both sides have effectively neutralised each other’s air power. That is a remarkable achievement for a country the size of Ukraine responding to an air force capacity the size of Russia’s. It demonstrates that this is about a multi-faceted approach, both strategically and in specific support for Ukraine, in trying to ensure collective help; the real clout of what we are offering is the aggregate effect of what every other country is doing along with the UK. I reassure the noble and gallant Lord that we are in daily touch with Ukraine, and we seem to be closely attuned to what it looks for.

AUKUS Defence Partnership

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the AUKUS programme, if executed well, will be very good news for this country. If executed badly, it could be a disaster. The Minister has given us some comforting words on reforms to procurement processes and engagement with industry, but it must be said that the performance of BAE Systems Submarines has been pretty woeful in recent years. Of course, it is not for the Government to run private companies, but industrial performance in this programme will be of strategic importance to this country. What long-term mechanisms and processes are in place to monitor and audit industrial performance, and what leverage will the Government have over the industries concerned? Industrial underperformance in this programme will need to be dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly—something that has not happened before.

The Minister said that the senior responsible owner would be in place for a “meaningful period”. What does she mean by a “meaningful period”? With regard to skills, which are a crucial area in this programme, she talked about what the Ministry of Defence is doing, but this is surely a nationwide issue requiring a nationwide effort. If this ambitious programme is to succeed, we will need all sorts of skills and all sorts of different people. Industries across the country are suffering from shortages—they cannot find sufficient welders—so is there not a case for a government-wide approach to ensure we have a sufficient skills base for such ambitious programmes as this?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord makes a number of important points; let me try to deal with them.

On the management of contracts and the willingness to have teeth and bite where that is necessary, I think the noble and gallant Lord would be encouraged to see the complete difference in approach in the MoD now compared with some years ago. That is partially because the MoD has woken up to the need to be much more effective in how it manages these enormous contracts with vast sums of taxpayers’ money. To be honest, it is also because we felt the bite from teeth—from your Lordships in this Chamber, from our friends in the other place, and from entities such as the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee. These were unpleasant experiences for the MoD but what they signalled was an absolute need to radically reform and revise what we were doing.

In addition to all that, the one word of comfort I can offer to the noble and gallant Lord is this: bear in mind that this is a trilateral arrangement and agreement. There is, therefore, a triumvirate interest in ensuring that nobody is slipping and everybody is keeping up to the mark. That will be an added enhancer to how we monitor and regulate the performance of the contract.

On the important matter of skills, industries are already engaged—I have seen it at first hand—in really imaginative programmes in their communities with young people. I have been hugely encouraged when I have seen how they operate in different parts of the country. They are engaging with both primary and secondary schools. They are making these critical connections with young people, many of whom then make the choice not only to follow a career in technology but to do it with a particular company. That is one very positive way of trying to increase the skills base available to our industry partners.

At government level, particularly in the Department for Education, there is a recognition of the unrelenting need to reappraise constantly how we seek to improve the provision of skills and ensure that education is aligned with what the economy and industry are asking for. I do not have at my fingertips the details of what we have done so far but I would be happy to write to the noble and gallant Lord about that.

Ukraine

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Soames. While it is his first in this Chamber, it is but his latest contribution to an already long and distinguished parliamentary career.

We are about to reach the ninth anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the first anniversary of the latest and most violent phase of the conflict, during which the total casualties have run into the hundreds of thousands—a butcher’s bill that will only grow, and grow rapidly, over the coming months. As this reality continues to unfold and the suffering of the Ukrainian people mounts, the question I hear most frequently is: how and when will it end? The answer, of course, is that nobody knows. Just about all wars begin and end in politics, and this one is no different. Eventually, there will have to be a political conclusion, but that appears to be a long way off and it does not imply, as some seem to believe, the appeasement of Russia.

In thinking about what it might imply for the near term, it is worth taking a step back and reflecting on broader strategic objectives. The Ukrainians are clear about theirs: the full restoration of their country’s pre-2014 borders, including the recovery of Crimea. The Russians’ position today is less certain. Their initial objective was undoubtedly the removal of the Ukrainian Government and their replacement by a regime friendly to, if not under the control of, the Kremlin. Whether events of the past year have changed this calculus is open to debate, but I doubt it.

Putin is certainly aware that making progress towards his original objective is a lot harder and taking far longer than he had imagined, but there is no reason to suppose that he has given up on it. To the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest that he is doubling down on his original intent.

As far as the UK is concerned, our strategic objective must be to ensure that Putin’s aggression is widely perceived to have failed; that such illegal assaults on the international order are seen as not just very costly but unlikely to succeed. But I believe we should go further. As I observed last week, in conjunction with the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, Russia’s war in Ukraine is being spearheaded by the Wagner organisation—a group that has at the heart of its activities terror, torture, murder, rape and all other forms of brutality. A supposedly civilised world should not countenance the existence of such a force, and we should seek to eliminate its presence from the wider international scene.

From looking at these strategic objectives, it is apparent that they differ markedly. That is unsurprising in the case of Russia and Ukraine, but it is also true with regard to the UK’s aims and, I suspect, those of many other countries that support Ukraine. This makes it very difficult to see what shape a long-term political solution might take. However, there is far less uncertainty about the near term. This is because, if Putin’s aggression is to be widely perceived as having failed, Russia must end up in no better a position than when it started the conflict and preferably in a worse one. That means Ukraine recovering its southern coastline and at least some of the Donbass.

Both those outcomes are, at best, some way off, so for the moment we need not concern ourselves about how much further the Ukrainian Government’s ambitions might stretch. That may become a pressing issue if Russian forces are driven back significantly, but there are a great many bridges to cross, both literally and figuratively, before we get anywhere near that point. For now, we should focus our minds and efforts on those bridges, and not worry unduly about what forks may lie along the road in the far distance.

Our immediate priority, like that of Ukraine, must therefore be further reversals of Russia’s territorial gains. But Ukraine’s continued success in this regard relies not just on the sustained valour of its people but on the willingness of western nations to maintain their high level of material support. That, in turn, depends to an extent on the perception of military progress—something of a chicken-and-egg situation.

My conclusion from all this is that the Ukrainian forces will need to make demonstrable gains over 2023. That, though, begs the question of the means required to achieve such an outcome, so I turn to some detailed points and questions for the Minister.

We have seen the very recent, welcome decisions, by Germany in particular, on the provision of tanks to go along with the other armoured fighting vehicles and artillery already delivered and promised. We should be in no doubt, though, that offensive action to retake and hold ground is a very different proposition from mounting a defence against the kind of unco-ordinated and poorly led attack that we saw from Russian forces last summer. Tanks in sufficient numbers will be very helpful in this regard, but the ability to manoeuvre sizeable units with concentrated firepower, to clear obstacles, both natural and man-made, and to co-ordinate different elements, both on the ground and in the air, is a significant challenge to any military. Of course, the offensive forces need extensive logistical support, technical capabilities and, crucially, sufficient weapon stocks. The important aid that we and other countries have given to Ukraine has resulted in a multiplicity of equipment types, each with its own logistic tail and often with different ammunition requirements.

Can the Minister therefore tell the House what assessment His Majesty’s Government have made of the scale of development of Ukraine’s offensive capabilities and, in particular, of its sustainability in the light of the requirements I have outlined above? Is there more that we should be doing to improve the coherence of Ukraine’s capabilities rather than focusing just on quantity?

I turn to the air. It is clear that the continued existence of capable ground-based air defences on both sides has led to something of a stalemate. What advice and aid is the Ministry of Defence giving the Ukrainians to help them break the impasse, particularly in light of the advantage that air superiority would give an attacking force? I note the Government’s announcement yesterday that the UK will provide fast-jet pilot training for Ukrainians. This may be an important contribution to Ukrainian capability, but training pilots, even advanced training, takes a long time and they need aircraft to fly once they are trained—not that we have much to offer in that regard. Our Typhoon force is already overstretched maintaining the air defence of these islands and flying combat air patrols over NATO nations bordering the conflict.

Can the Minister explain how this initiative will fit into Ukraine’s broader operational plans? Is it intended to bolster the military effort in the present conflict or is it part of the longer-term development of the Ukrainian armed forces? Can he also say what impact this new undertaking is likely to have on our military? Given the signal failure, over the past few years, of the military flying training system to deliver sufficient capacity to meet the RAF’s needs, only compounded by the recent problems with the engine on the Hawk T2 aircraft, how confident is he that it can now rise to such an additional demand? Is this not yet another example of the stripping out of our military capabilities, which has gone on for so many years, coming home to roost? Until now, the Ukraine war has largely focused attention on the paucity of our weapon stocks, but this latest initiative highlights a much deeper and wider problem of capacity. Will the revision of the defence Command Paper address this?

Finally, I turn to an issue already raised by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and very ably highlighted yesterday by the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, in the briefing on Ukraine that the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, kindly arranged for us. Outside of the NATO area, Russia seems to be having considerable success in the battle of the narratives. This has important implications for the longer term. In the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the danger posed by Russia and the plight of Ukraine are widely misunderstood. There is indeed sympathy for Russia, which is supposedly facing encirclement by a hostile and aggressive NATO. I know that the Minister understands the importance of countering this narrative, but can he reassure the House that the Government are working hard with allies to develop a co-ordinated and sustained response? We may not be able to win over everybody, but at the moment we are winning over far too few.

The conflict in Ukraine continues to throw up many complex and difficult questions, but this is a time for clarity. We should not expect the war to be decided this year, but it will be a decisive period in determining whether both we and Ukraine are able to achieve our objectives. With that in mind, we should bend every sinew to promote Ukrainian military success over these crucial months.

Integrated Review: Update

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The 2021 integrated review and defence Command Paper highlighted that we must focus on capabilities rather than troop numbers per se. Through Future Soldier, the Army will have a whole focus of over 100,000, comprising 73,000 regular service personnel and 30,100 Army Reserve. However, the noble Lord made an important point about hollowness. Over time and under successive Governments, there has been underinvestment in our land capability requirements. We have recognised that and set out a plan. Future Soldier is part of that. We have published an equipment plan of £242 billion over 10 years, and the Army’s proportion of that is £41 billion, covering, for example, Challenger 3, Boxer and Ajax.

I remind the noble Lord that this Government were responsible for a record-breaking finance settlement for defence—the biggest since the Cold War—and it should be acknowledged that we have made a serious attempt to try to redress the hollowing-out process over many years.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, whatever the fresh defence Command Paper has to say, it will be of value only if the Government strike an appropriate balance between ambition and resource. The Minister keeps referring to the largest spending increase on defence since the Cold War. Since virtually all spending reviews since the Cold War have meant a reduction in defence expenditure, that is not a very high bar to clear. Will the forthcoming spending review support the defence Command Paper or undermine it?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord may consider that it is not a very high bar, but it is higher than any of the other bars that have been set, and the facts speak for themselves. He will be aware that the challenge for defence is that we have to balance the operational and remote resource demands of today with the overarching vision to modernise to meet the demands of tomorrow. In the MoD, we are confident that we can reconcile these conflicting tensions.

Armed Forces: Resilience

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, for securing this important debate at such a crucial time for the defence of our country. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hintze, on an excellent maiden speech, and I greatly look forward to the contribution of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Peach, who has much wisdom and experience to contribute on this subject and to the House’s wider deliberations.

Resilience is a crucial issue for any military organisation, but for ours more than most—and for ours in particular. It is not our policy, on the whole, to start wars; we are usually on the receiving end of them, which means that we are generally at a disadvantage at the beginning of any conflict. An aggressor has the advantage of choosing the time, place and manner of military action, and will very often seek to take advantage of an opponent’s weaknesses. There will be weaknesses, since no nation’s military can be strong everywhere, at all times. That means that we need the capacity to absorb the first blow, to roll with it, recover our balance, adapt to the circumstances and demands of the particular conflict, and then to seize and exploit the initiative. Even the briefest study of military history will serve to illustrate the point.

What gives us the necessary resilience, and what are the particular capabilities and characteristics that enable us to overcome disadvantage and get on to the front foot? The most commonly heard answer to this question and one that we have certainly heard today is the size of our Armed Forces—the numbers of ships, troops and aircraft. Indeed, size does matter. Losses are often highest in the early stages of a conflict. Start with too little, and there may be insufficient capability left on which to base a recovery. The noble Lord, Lord West, may have a view on that from his own experience.

One argument sometimes put forward in defence of reduced numbers is that we do not intend to fight in high-intensity conflict on our own, and that it is our membership of alliances such as NATO that creates the necessary scale. To an extent that is true, but only to an extent. The argument itself can pose dangers. If too many members of an alliance continue to reduce force levels on the basis that contributions of others will create the necessary mass, that mass will never be achieved. That has certainly been the situation in NATO for many years now.

We need larger Armed Forces. Numbers have been progressively reduced by successive Governments on the basis of cost saving, with no underpinning strategic rationale. In the early 1990s, for example, the Government insisted on defence cuts as a post-Cold War peace dividend, despite the fact that we had just been involved in a conflict that had stretched our resources to the utmost and had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. It is worth remembering that the only way that we were able to field a division in the first Gulf War was by cannibalising just about the whole of the British Army of the Rhine—and all three services are much smaller now.

Inadequate force levels are not just a problem in high-intensity conflict, though. The Government’s appetite for the employment of the military instrument frequently exceeds their willingness to sustain appropriate capacity. At the moment, for example, Typhoon squadrons are spending long periods deployed on operational duty in response to the dangerous situation in Ukraine. Of course, it is absolutely right that they should do so, but the relatively small size of the force means that people are frequently away from their families, they are unable to train effectively when they are at home base, and morale is suffering as a consequence. Poor morale leads to poor retention, which simply exacerbates the problem.

Numbers of troops and of platforms are by no means the whole story. Soldiers in battalions, sailors in ships and air crew in aircraft are of little use if they do not have the systems that allow them to succeed in modern combat or the weapons with which to fight. The Defence Secretary has confirmed what we have all known for a long time: that the Army cannot field a fighting division. But this shortcoming is not a consequence of too few soldiers; it is because they do not have the necessary communications, logistics support, armoured mobility, weapons systems or munitions. The same is true of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Both services can field some remarkable capabilities, but not in the number required or with the necessary sustainability. One of the earliest lessons of the war in Ukraine was the reminder—for those who needed it—of the appalling rate of consumption of weapons in such conflict.

I will not give comfort to potential adversaries by detailing the UK’s specific weaknesses here. The noble Baroness the Minister knows full well what they are. I will simply note that, in evidence to your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee at the end of last year, the Defence Secretary confirmed that the UK had for far too long “hollowed out”—his words—our stocks of weapons and munitions. He has publicly repeated this statement in just the past few days. So, while we certainly need to expand the size of our Armed Forces, our immediate and urgent priority is to ensure that our current force structure can fight effectively and enduringly in high-intensity conflict. At the moment, it cannot.

This brings me to another dimension of the problem. Additional defence expenditure is of course required to bring weapons stocks not just to where they before we—rightly—donated a significant portion of them to Ukraine, but to where they should have been in the first place. We need suppliers, however, with whom we can contract for such purchases. The kinds of complex weapons that have been so successful in Ukraine cannot be produced overnight, and particularly not in the numbers that we and our allies need. That will require industrial capacity that does not exist at the moment.

We must expand our idea of resilience beyond the military community to encompass the industrial base that supports it. Such industrial capacity depends on private sector investment in the appropriate plant and personnel. But this will be forthcoming only if the investors see a reasonable prospect of a sustained return, which will in turn depend upon a fairly steady drumbeat of orders from our and other Governments. All too often, however, the procurement tap is turned on and off erratically in the face of short-term budgetary pressures. This is not the way to encourage long-term investment in industrial capacity. There is a need for a much more strategic approach to defence procurement if we are to sustain the industrial base necessary to national resilience.

Such an approach needs to address issues of culture as well as quantity. May I recommend the recently published report from your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee into the extent—or otherwise—that defence policy has moved from aspiration to reality? One of the report’s more concerning findings is that high-technology companies consider the Ministry of Defence to be one of the world’s worst customers. They say that its institutional resistance to innovative ideas, its low appetite for risk, its unwillingness to invest in experimentation and the subsequent commercialisation of novel approaches all conspire to deter high-tech companies from working with the MoD. But we have seen in Ukraine how an imaginative fusion of civilian and military approaches and technology can produce startling battlefield successes.

War and the threat of defeat can of course force co-operation between apparently strange bedfellows, but we cannot afford to wait until we are embroiled in an actual conflict before we face up to this challenge. We need a change of culture in our day-to-day processes, but the Ministry of Defence cannot do this alone. The Treasury, too, needs to adopt a much more entrepreneurial and co-operative approach to innovation, risk and long-term investment.

I have tried this afternoon to demonstrate that defence resilience is a complex issue and not just a question of numbers, important though they are. But underpinning all this is the inescapable question of money; 2% of GDP is simply inadequate to fund the aspirations set out in last year’s independent review and defence Command Paper. Both of those documents are being reviewed, but the reviews are taking place in the face of an even more dangerous world, so the equation will only have become worse. It is well past time that the Government faced up to their responsibilities in this regard. Fine words butter no parsnips—particularly when we cannot afford the parsnips in the first place.

Defence: Type 45 Destroyers

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Well, I do not completely recognise the figures that the noble Lord uses and he will know the constraint I am under in referring to specific operational activity. However, what I would say is that, as he will be aware, we always keep an eye on operational requirement, which is why we plan scheduled maintenance to make sure that we are always able to maintain the essential task that we require of the Navy.

I know that the noble Lord sometimes wears a mournful demeanour when asking me Questions at the Dispatch Box, but I think he will agree that the shipbuilding programme for the Royal Navy is very exciting. For the first time in 30 years, we are building two types of frigate simultaneously at UK yards.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the Type 45 is a crucial air defence platform for the protection of surface task forces, but ships are no use whatever without weapons. So how long would the Type 45s’ current stock of surface-to-air missiles be expected to last in a high-intensity conflict?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I would be reluctant to speculate on a specific answer to the noble and gallant Lord at the Dispatch Box; I need to go away and make some inquiries and I will endeavour to respond to him as best as I can.

Royal Navy: F35B

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

On the HMS “Prince of Wales”, that has of course been a regrettable development. I can confirm that the “Prince of Wales” is alongside in Portsmouth and will proceed to Rosyth dry dock in due course. In the meantime, HMS “Queen Elizabeth” has departed to carry out duties with the United States. On the broader question of the fleet, the noble Baroness will be aware that the fleet has been a very important supporter of the carrier project. Many of our ships were in attendance discharging duties. Most recently, there have been ships in the Mediterranean escorting Russian ships. I therefore reassure your Lordships that the fleet is in a good state. What is exciting is the planned development of the fleet, not just with Type 26 and Type 31 but now with Type 32 and Type 83 coming into scope.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness’s previous answer focused on the size of one carrier air group on one carrier. Even when Lightning numbers have been increased, the UK will still have only one air group for two carriers—an average of half an air group per carrier. The United States has an average of over one-and-a-half air groups per carrier, because it recognises that only this will enable it to maintain operational tempo. The Government have shown great ambition for deployments of the carrier and carrier air groups; will they recognise that if they are to sustain this ambition into the future, they need to provide the necessary resources to back it up?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

There are various situations where the United States and the United Kingdom approach differently configurations of capability. The noble and gallant Lord will be aware of the planned increase of the F35B flight support in 2025, when it will go from 26 at the moment up to 48. The ultimate plan is to increase it to 74. That is exciting and should reassure noble Lords that there is very robust capability.

Afghanistan: British Special Forces

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think we all understand that journalism has a role in a democratic society, and journalists have a job to do and documentary producers seek to discharge that role. What I think is reprehensible is—in discharging that role without producing substantive evidence or explaining why that evidence has never been investigated before—to proceed to traduce reputations and, as I say, tarnish an honourable military force of which we are extremely proud, the British Army, in which the overwhelming majority of soldiers are upstanding, competent and professional individuals who abide by the law.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that there are two issues involved here, legal and reputational? In law, people are innocent until they are proved guilty, but reputations can be besmirched by programmes such as “Panorama” even if there is insufficient evidence to bring a legal case. If there is evidence then quite clearly it needs to be pursued vigorously, but, if there is not, does the Minister accept that it would be insufficient for the MoD simply to say, “There is insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case”? It will have to adopt a more proactive approach to demonstrate to the British public that their confidence in the Special Forces is not misplaced and that proper procedures were followed.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think we all understand the noble and gallant Lord’s interests in this with great sympathy. He will understand why I have to be generic in my references. We are actively seeking that new evidence. If it can be produced, action will be taken. There may then be the broader issue, if no new evidence can be produced, of what constitutes responsible journalism and what are the unacceptable consequences of irresponsible journalism.