Strategic Defence Review 2025

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord McCabe on his excellent maiden speech today, and I welcome my noble friend Lord Hennessy here. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Robertson on his leadership of the strategic defence review, arguably the most consequential reassessment of our national security in a generation.

It is a document of ambition and urgency. It defines the threats we face and it sets out a bold rearmament plan: 76,000 regular troops, AUKUS submarines, drone warfare capabilities, a digital targeting web, and even a new command for cyber-electronic operations.

But, amid all this ambition, I must ask: where are the women? Where is the commitment to the Women, Peace and Security agenda—an agenda that this country proudly helped to shape? We have seen time and again that the exclusion of women from peace processes does not lead to stability; it leads to relapse. Yet, the review is silent on the role of women in preventing conflict, building peace and securing human dignity. In 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, reaffirming the crucial role of women in conflict prevention, resolution, and peacebuilding. It emphasised the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts to maintain and promote peace and security.

As the international community increasingly recognises the value of elevating women’s participation in these processes, I recall that the United Kingdom was among the first to reaffirm this commitment. Under Foreign Secretary William Hague, alongside the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Britain took a leading role in placing this issue firmly on the global agenda. We were leading, and I would very much like to see an undertaking today that Britain will continue to lead and to advise other Governments on this front. That is why it is so important that women are at every table, in every room, and every place where peace and security are being discussed.

Yet this review does not mention gender at all. There is not a single reference to sexual violence in conflict. Britain was, and should remain, a global leader in stamping this out. I refer colleagues to the House of Lords Select Committee report, Sexual Violence in Conflict: A War Crime, published in 2016, which remains highly relevant today. There is no mention of the UK’s national action plan on Women, Peace and Security, which we launched with great confidence and momentum only two years. This stands in contrast to previous reviews, the 2015 SDSR and the 2021 integrated review, both of which acknowledged human security, gender-based violence and the inclusion of women in peacekeeping.

We know from UN data that, when women are involved in peace processes, agreements are 35% more likely to last at least 15 years. Yet women still make up fewer than 13% of negotiators in major peace processes worldwide. We know that when women participate in peacekeeping forces, there is greater trust between peacekeepers and local communities, reduced incidences of abuse and improved intelligence-gathering outcomes, which enhance not just human security but operational effectiveness.

In Liberia, Northern Ireland and Colombia, the involvement of women not only helped secure fragile ceasefires but also shaped post-conflict recovery policies on land rights, justice and education, which directly addressed the root causes of instability. We know from our Armed Forces, thanks to the work of Rachel Grimes and the development of Joint Service Publication 985, there will be greater security.

I am running out of time, but I will just say that, in meeting the threats of the 21st century, we must be not only armed, but wise. A wise defence is one that draws on the full strength of our society, women and men, equally, working together at home and abroad.