Armed Forces: Foreign Language Speakers

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on securing this debate. I must declare various interests: I am co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages, president of the Speak to the Future campaign and vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

I want to put on record at the outset, before I go into a more critical tone, my huge admiration for the work being done by both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office language centre and the Defence Centre for Languages and Culture. As the British Academy’s report Lost for Words put it, these two establishments are,

“potential beacons of commitment to language learning across government”.

I hope this debate today will result in that commitment being strengthened even more.

There is a great deal of robust evidence about the need for, and the lack of, language skills in the Armed Forces and defence services. For the purposes of this debate we should include security and diplomacy within our terms of reference. Indeed, Sir Richard Ottaway MP, former chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place, said that the language skills issue had been highlighted in almost every inquiry his Committee had undertaken since 2010. Similarly, in your Lordships’ House, the issue has been raised in a number of important Select Committee inquiries. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, referred to the report on soft power in 2014. Evidence to the EU Committee’s inquiry, The UK and Russia: Before and Beyond the Crisis in Ukraine, on which I had the privilege to serve, included a remark from a former UK ambassador to Russia that UK diplomacy had,

“suffered because of a loss of language skills, particularly in the Foreign Office”.

This view was echoed last year by the report of the House of Commons spending review of the FCO, saying that,

“the FCO has lacked the expertise, analytical capability and language skills to manage the fallout from the Arab Spring and the crisis in Ukraine”.

Publications from highly respected non-parliamentary and non-governmental sources have reached similar conclusions. The British Academy’s Lost for Words report said:

“It is clear that the lack of language skills among British officials and armed forces is both embarrassing and risks putting the UK at a competitive disadvantage”.

The University of Cambridge’s report earlier this year, The Value of Languages, said that:

“The crucial role of language and cultural understanding in the work of the armed forces was brought home in recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

Our forces’ reliance on locally employed interpreters is well known, including some controversial issues to do with their treatment post-conflict. However, as Lost for Words points out, over-reliance on native translators carries significant risks for patrols as well as, in some cases, the locals themselves. Language needs can be highly specific and exacting. Getting the accent or dialect variation wrong can have significant consequences.

Nevertheless, the Army certainly seems to be ahead of the game compared to the other armed services. The Cambridge report that I quoted from earlier, for example, refers to the fact that the Army has a comprehensive languages policy which includes identifying personnel with language skills including so-called heritage language speakers. The Army is developing an effective examination system for identifying language competences that can then be called on and used at short notice whether for operations or urgent tasks. Languages are valued, literally, with an award scheme that pays out supplements on a scale depending on usage. The Army is now funding 2,500 soldiers a year to acquire a basic language skill, equivalent to the A2 level of the common European framework.

Will this commendable and comprehensive approach from policy to payment be adopted across the other armed services? Will the Minister commend the Army’s example of auditing personnel with language skills as an exercise that should also be conducted comprehensively across the Civil Service? This was one of the British Academy’s recommendations—as the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, mentioned. It has always struck me as a no-brainer, and a relatively cheap one at that, if we are serious about needing to find out what language skills we already have at our disposal. Quite apart from the ambit of today’s particular debate, this is a crucial resource to know about in the context of Brexit and post-Brexit negotiations.

Could the Minister also confirm that there will be no reduction in the budget allocated to the FCO for its language centre and that there will be more rigorous attempts to improve on the target level attainment for languages in key regions such as the Middle East and north Africa? The low targets achieved here seem to somewhat undermine the good work being done by the language centre and to fly in the face of the very positive launch given by the then Foreign Secretary—now the noble Lord, Lord Hague—when the centre was reopened in 2013. I also question whether the FCO is drawing in as many civil servants from other departments as originally envisaged, as I understand that the centre was meant to be a resource for the whole of government.

Finally, I would like to say something about the supply chain of language skills in the UK. It is all very well that the FCO and the Defence Academy are doing what they can to plug the immediate gaps that they face—and thank goodness that they are—but we also need to change the whole culture around learning foreign languages in this country and vastly to increase the number of school pupils and university students who are doing so. GCHQ, for example, suffers from the shortfall in our education system, which produces too few people competent in Mandarin, Arabic and Russian. Only six state schools currently teach Arabic on the timetable and only 16 universities out of 130 teach it. Only 1% to 2% of state schools currently offer Russian and only 14 universities offer Russian as a single honours degree, with none at all in either Wales or Northern Ireland and only three in Scotland.

The irony is that in the UK we have over 1 million school pupils who are bilingual, but all too often this is seen as a problem, not as the asset that it really is. Far more of these children should be encouraged to pursue academic qualifications in their other languages. I ask the Minister whether he will work with the Department for Education to look at ways in which the languages considered to be of particular importance to the armed services and defence and security needs more generally can be made more mainstream, so that more children study them to a higher level.

All the major studies that have looked into this issue have concluded that there needs to be government-wide co-operation on language skills. We should build on the existing cross-Whitehall language focus group, which already includes GCHQ, the Defence Centre and the MoD. Such a cross-cutting approach would also meet the call from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages, which last week published a checklist for Brexit negotiators, pointing to the language needs of business and research, as well as security, defence and diplomacy.

Language skills and cultural knowledge are now deemed essential not just in military operations but in peacekeeping, post-conflict and conflict prevention. Language skills are everybody’s and every department’s business and it would be doing the UK a great service if the leadership already shown by the Army could be the catalyst for a truly national strategy for all ages and stages of education and learning.