Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Albert Owen and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, because one of the major advantages our country has is the number of alliances in which we play such an effective part. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and an extraordinarily prominent member of the Commonwealth, and we are also a member of the G20 and all the other Gs. We seem to be able to reinforce that by our strong defence posture, which is itself hugely based on the training and quality of the men and women who make up our armed forces. We must remain proud of that, and we must do whatever we can to ensure that we keep that influence and that strength. While I would not go along with the way my hon. Friend illustrates his point, I do think we need to bear in mind where we want to end up as a country and work out the best way of getting there.

In the Select Committee report, we express strong criticisms of the process the Government are now pursuing. We welcome the creation of the National Security Council and the expansion of the review to include security issues because it is increasingly impossible and unwise to try to draw the distinctions between defence and security that might have been appropriate in previous times. The world has become smaller. The threats we face are trans-national and the solutions must be comprehensive and cross-governmental. However, we now have a review that is being conducted by a body—the National Security Council—that until a few months ago did not exist, and at extraordinary speed. Our major concern, therefore, is lack of time. In practice, the timetable has been about five months.

[Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his measured comments yesterday on his report, which he is rehearsing again today. He says the world is a smaller place. That is because there is greater mobility. In order for us to contribute fully to the international forces, we too need to have greater mobility. At the core of that are aircraft carriers and the RAF. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the RAF plays a vital role not only in our combat operations but in our strategic role around the world, and that the RAF as an institution should be preserved?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

It would be quite wrong of me to fail to pay tribute to the RAF. It achieves extraordinary things with a very small force—they are few in number. The same can, of course, be said of our Royal Navy and Army. I certainly share in the hon. Gentleman’s tribute to the RAF; it is well deserved.

As I said, the timetable for this review has been about five months. Most of the work has already been completed, about six weeks before the issue of the review. Even as I stand here, it is being finalised by the Treasury and the NSC. That means that the review has taken much less than half the time of the defence review of 1997-98, even though it is arguably even more important than that earlier review. Also, the current review should be based on an identification of the UK’s defence and security needs and what the threats are to us as a country and our interests, but it appears that it will end up being driven by the need for financial cuts and by little else.

The haste with which the review is being pursued has had some obvious consequences. Some 40 or so work streams fed into it, which is too few, and their analyses and costings cannot be as robust as they otherwise might have been, which threatens to weaken the review’s conclusions, possibly seriously.