Strategic Defence Review

Baroness Goldie Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for facilitating this debate. I know he is committed to a viable, lethal and effective defence capability to protect the UK and to contribute to global security. Equally, I am in no doubt that he wishes to benefit from a full spectrum of opinion to inform his review. With the experience in your Lordships’ House on defence issues across all Benches so impressively evident this afternoon, I hope this debate will be regarded as an authoritative source of ideas and suggestions: many excellent ones have been advanced. I echo the important point from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, about the extent, within this House, of consensus on defence matters.

My honourable colleague James Cartlidge, on behalf of the Official Opposition, has responded to the SDR in a manner which I hope the noble Lord has found constructive and helpful. I do not propose to read out that response ad longum, but rather to shape a perspective around it to explain why my party has focused on the particular issues which we have identified. For those interested, the response can be found online and I shall provide Hansard with the link.

My starting point is defence spend. Whatever the back office number crunchers may think, defence spend is not some financial fair-weather option, where you spend when you can and deliver biting financial cuts when you cannot. A defence capability of the magnitude of the United Kingdom’s requires core funding to ensure both maintenance of that capability and an ability to plan strategically. If the Government cannot guarantee that, they might as well walk away from having any meaningful capability at all. It will not have escaped the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, that resource has been a recurring feature of this afternoon’s debate, notably and powerfully from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and my noble friend Lord Trenchard.

The previous Government set out a clear and fully funded pathway to reach 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2030. This Government have said repeatedly that they are committed to 2.5%, but not when. So why am I and so many others concerned? There has been an implied understanding that we could anticipate clarification of the “when” in the imminent Budget Statement. Regrettably, just this week, the Prime Minister has created a new doubt. In response to a question from my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition in the other place, who, reminding the PM of his previous indication that a trajectory would be set out in the coming fiscal event, asked if he would commit to that timetable. He got the following answer:

“In relation to defence spending, let me recommit to increasing it to 2.5%. We will set out our plans in due course”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/10/24; col. 26.]


This ambiguity and uncertainty at this late stage is unacceptable and dangerous. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, himself acknowledged, this is a British effort. We are actually controlling this show, so my plea to the noble Lord is this: if he has any apprehension or doubt at all that, with a Budget Statement imminent, either No. 10, the Treasury or both have been nobbled by the number crunchers and the “when” is to remain hanging in the air then he needs to get on his Islay walking boots, get round to the Treasury, get round to No. 10 and deliver a kicking.

Why is this so important? It is because it begins and ends with threat. Threat is multifaceted, but the primary threat right now is pure adversary European warfare, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, cogently described. That demands a shift to an urgent and immediate preparedness disposition. That is why we must deliver certainty now on the resource that defence requires. The strategic defence review must be threat-based. The threat is there now: it is all around us, it is dynamic and our resource response has to match that. Of course I accept that the defence budget is not the noble Lord’s responsibility, but there can be no more powerful an advocate than him. I entreat him to use his influence with the Government, as I entreat the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, to use his, to ensure that this uncertainty is dispelled.

The 2.5% by 2030 set out by the previous Government would have enabled an initial mobilisation of the war-ready approach and ensured stability for major existing programmes, such as GCAP and nuclear, while providing funding to enhance the lethality and survivability of our existing and imminent forces. However, coming good on the 2.5% is not enough to achieve a greater war readiness without also urgent reform within the MoD to create a less risk-averse department, able to procure at pace.

Some may greet this observation with a yawn and say, “Oh, we have heard all that before. Successive Governments have all talked about reform and what changes?”. I credit the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, with much greater discernment and acuity, because he knows, as he said, that the MoD of 2024 is unrecognisable from the MoD of the 1990s, and he knows why. The changing face of threat has transformed dramatically, as my noble friend Lord Howell described. We have seen the advances in technology. With the war in Ukraine, we know what a land-based conflict looks like in the 21st century, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, described. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, it is because the MoD itself has begun that reform. On acquisition and procurement, the MoD had become subsumed in a stifling culture of risk aversion, and that atrophy feeds into strategic outlook and is inimical to a culture of war readiness—the noble Lord, Lord West, made that point well.

There needed to be a distinction between military risk and peacetime risks, which predominantly exist in the civil domain. That process had already begun under the last Government, and the noble Lord does not need me to tell him that there is an open door in the MoD for building on what has been achieved and rolling out that change in culture. If resource cannot deliver without reform, reform is limp without resource. Of course, I wish the noble Lord well with the review—he knows that—and I hope that what he has heard today will help him to shape it, but I urge him to put on these walking boots.