Defence Spending

Dai Havard Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

I would guess that many hon. Members will make contributions about the symbolism of the 2% target and its relationship with foreign policy and so on. I will try to restrict my remarks to its utility: the purpose for it, the benefits of having the process, and some predictions—guesses may be a better word—and advice on what we might do.

The 2% of GDP NATO target can be defined in all sorts of ways, and there have been many discussions on that recently. It is largely, but not totally arbitrary. It is largely the basis on which we currently spend our money, and so it informs our current decisions. I do not want to discuss what we have done in the past, however. I want to discuss what we are going to do in the future, and why it is important as a mechanism for the future. It should not necessarily be driven by NATO or US ambitions. It should be a matter of deliberate choice for particular strategic reasons, and there should be merit to it.

That is why I want to talk about this. We need certainty with which to plan against the uncertainty, and, in my opinion, the 2% mechanism would help and perhaps provide some structure and context. The truth is that we need a threat-based assessment. No doubt, there will be a new national security strategy, but we can no longer say, “We’ll have a long war over here, and then we’ll have a short war over there. Can you lot hold on until Christmas, and then we’ll come and fight you, because we haven’t quite finished this one yet?” That world is dead. We now have a series of threats and concurrent difficulties to deal with, and they will continue to be concurrent. The way we plan against that uncertainty has changed. Our methodologies are different—there was a great example in the Ebola statement earlier. We need an integrated process, not just within the military, but across the other Departments, if we are to deploy and do this properly. That is the big discussion. I have said to boys from my constituency in the military, “I’ll tell you two things, right—buy a thermal vest and a pair of shorts, because you’ll be in Estonia in the winter and no doubt somewhere warm a bit later. You’re going to be around the place, because there are going to be concurrent reasons to be deployed in different places at different times.”

I want to set out the benefits of the 2% mechanism. We now have five procurers in the MOD: we have the three chiefs—Army, Navy and Air Force; we now have this joint command; and we still have large projects done centrally. So there are five procurement organisations. I have been involved in the many discussions about how we buy equipment, but the real question is: how do we decide what to buy in the first place? We know where the inefficiencies have been, so the managerial structures have changed and we have a different set of relationships. We have chief executives now who are chiefs of services. These are the people who are going to buy this stuff. They told the Defence Committee, “Well, we have redone the structures in the original plans you gave us”, and I said to General Nick Carter when he redid the Army one, “Well done, Nick—you’ve provided a structure that protects you from me.” What do I mean by that? I mean we have this structure—adaptive and reactive forces—and it has some utility and it could be made to work, but it will work well only if we make the right decisions about how to fund and resource it and allow it to operate properly. Currently, the chiefs are telling us, “Unless we get 1% uplift on procurement and flat real, we cannot make those resources work. If you change that, we will have to change your plans or come back with advice on how you will change them.”

There are also questions about how we build this capability. The industrial agenda is really important, but it is not as well described as it could be. It needs to be better described. The defence growth partnership is a great thing, but it concerns applied research, not the whole business of how we deal with industry. Industry needs to plan. All the contractors—whether their function is to go to war or to provide support so that we can release other people to go to war—have to be factored in and they have to plan. This mechanism could produce some rigour, some tools, a language, an understanding and some certainty with which to plan. It might then allow us to plan strategically and even come together and find this magical thing—integration—that will give us the collaboration we need and which we talk about here and on the National Security Council.

The mechanism would test all sorts of things. It would test individual capabilities too. It could go up and down—because GDP increases and decreases—so some people might say, “Well, Trident—difficult question. It’s been set aside really—it’s a given; and therefore we’re arguing about the rest of it.” The mechanism would have to test itself against all others, and the military would have to decide its continued capability and utility. Everything would be in a process of iterative, continual assessment. In the future, these processes have to be iterative; they cannot be linear, they are not binary and they will not be spasmodic.

If we do that, this is what I think will happen: we will spend 2%, we have spent 2% and we will continue to spend more than 2%. But will we do it well? Will we do it in a strategic and planned fashion? Or will we do it just because we are responding to events? The “dogs of war”, as I call them, are a clear example—all these vehicles we now have: the Jackals, the Bulldogs, the Foxhounds. They are all individually important and useful, but they all came out of what? Urgent operational requirements—that is where they came from; they did not come from any proper strategic planning process. We now have to reintegrate this legacy equipment and fit it into the discussion about future planning. You could have avoided being in that position, if you had done some things differently—not you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am not blaming you personally. We could all have been in a better position if we had done those things.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

On urgent operational requirements, the key is in the wording. We do not necessarily have any idea of the threats or requirements in advance. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen will suddenly be in a situation where we have to find a piece of kit to protect them better. That is the key—

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[Mr Havard]

Obviously, yes, we will continue to need them. I am trying to make the point that this became the process, rather than the exception to the process—it should be the exception—and the money came out of the contingency fund, not the core budget.

The budget should be 2%. As hon. Members might remember, when Labour was in Government and people said, “You should give more money to defence”, I used to say, “Well, if I was Gordon Brown, I’d say, ‘When you can spend the money I’ve given you properly, come back and ask for some more.’” That is the same debate, and it is the debate for the future. How do we plan for it properly? I think that 2% might give us a way of structuring the discussion. Spent well, the 2% could give us ways of planning and the right language, tools and transparency.

I have something to say to us in Parliament. This is probably the last time I will speak in this Parliament, so I will say something to the next one. The next Parliament will have to debate this better than we have debated it up till now. As I have said several times, we do not have structures any more and we do not discuss defence properly. We can make all the criticisms we like of other people and how well they do things, but we would do well to look at ourselves and consider how well we do them. In my opinion, the 2% could give us, if not certainty, at least some process by which to start to plan against the uncertainty, and it could enable other people to plan for themselves. For me, this is iterative; it will have to deal with the concurrence issue; and it is more than just a declaratory or arbitrary figure—it has a purpose.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

That was a perfect example of taking up to 10 minutes. If we all stick to that, everybody will get in with the same amount of time.

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[Sir Menzies Campbell]

The hon. Gentleman is right about that. I know a bit about this because I was invited by the then Defence Secretary to be part of the group of politicians, of all parties, who participated in debates with officials as to what should be in the Green Paper.

A defence review is not a hugely impossible concept to understand. What one needs to do is set out one’s foreign policy objectives; decide what military resources are necessary to fulfil those objectives; and then allocate the financial resources necessary to provide the military capability. We have not had a defence review that fulfils those three principles in all the time I have been in the House of Commons.

The hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney made a sound point when he said that 2% cannot be described as a panacea for all the ills of defence. If 2% is to be spent, it must be spent wisely. We do not have to go far in Europe to see that several of our allies spend money, perhaps getting up towards 2%—there are not enough of those countries—which could much more readily be spent otherwise. For example, it could be spent on a greater amount of interoperability, force specialisation and such things. There is no point Mr Juncker talking about a European defence policy when European states have not yet properly fulfilled their responsibilities to NATO, of which almost all of them are members.

[Mr Havard]

May I take the right hon. and learned Gentleman back a little to the defence and security review? We can have a defence review and we can have a security review, or we can have an integrated process that looks at the whole business of future resilience, which I think is what he is suggesting we have not done and are not doing now. Does he think that when the new Parliament forms, the circumstances will be such that the current budgets for defence might be maintained in order to allow time for a proper, integrated assessment of defence and security, possibly in the next calendar year, if not this one?

[Sir Menzies Campbell]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very sound point. I am sorry that I cannot give any commitments in relation to the next Parliament, as I shall not be here, but as a spectator outside I shall firmly cling to the view that a proper, full-scale defence review of the kind I have described, and with which he agrees, is necessary if we are to provide ourselves with the proper defences for the foreseeable future.

The situation is worse than I have described, in a way. Not only is the 2% a public commitment, but it was restated at Celtic Manor during the NATO summit and in the final communiqué from that summit. Of course, it is also one that the British Government have been at pains to emphasise to other allies. How are we going to explain away the fact that in recent months, even years, we have been complaining about the level of defence expenditure of other allies yet we are about to breach the very standard we signed up to and advocated only a few months ago? It is a bit worse than that, too, because we know that the possibility that we should fall below 2% has caused great anxiety, particularly in the United States, which is our closely military ally. Senior official after senior official has made exactly that point.

I have another source of embarrassment: in about 10 days’ time, the United Kingdom delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which I have the honour to lead, will be the hosts of the Standing Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. We have in the past 12 months, with the encouragement of Ministers, sought to persuade the other members of the Assembly of the importance of the 2% figure. We will look rather embarrassed in 10 days if the consequences of the actions that appear to be taken in this country are that we will fall below the very figure which we have been advocating and on which we have been seeking to hold the feet of others to the fire.

Let me finish by saying this: if we do not have sufficient defence—and 2% may not be enough—we will diminish our capability, we will reduce our influence and we will limit the options of government. We cannot afford any of those.

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[Sir Peter Luff (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

As for others who have spoken in this debate, it is likely that this will be my last debate in Parliament. I am glad that it is on defence—the defining purpose of the state and of Parliament. I will seek not to repeat what others have said, but I want to say this. We have no more important role than to keep those who elect us safe from our enemies. This view is not as popular as it was. Elections, we are told, are not won and lost on defence; there are no votes in defence. I am not so sure. If the political establishment is seen to be playing fast and loose with our security, we will all pay a heavy price in further disillusionment and alienation.

The 2% NATO floor or target, to which we are all politically and morally committed, is the minimum that we should spend, yet it is far from safe. I do not generally favour targets for spending of any kind, and I certainly do not favour writing them into law, but the unavoidable truth is that if we are to achieve our current objectives, spending of that order is needed. I understand the scope for increased efficiency in the area of human activity; indeed the increased sophistication of the technology behind military equipment enables us to do more with less, which means that fewer people are needed to deliver the same effect than even a decade ago.

A Type 45 destroyer is considerably more capable than the Type 42 that it replaces and needs a smaller crew. And there are opportunities to do more with less. That is one of the purposes of the UK-French defence relationship. The application of the whole force concept could increase the effect and efficiency of defence. So our debate about national security must not lapse into sentimentality. It is not sentimental to speak up for defence. I want to do so by addressing three things—the financial background, the fact that defence is a long-term game and the threat to essential investment in science and technology.

The Chancellor is right to say that strong defence depends on a strong economy. That is why as a Minister in 2010, I swallowed hard and accepted significant cuts to defence capabilities, even though they led to some very challenging gaps in capability. But for a trading nation like ours, the protection of the sea lanes and the maintenance of an open rules-based trading system are crucial. So a strong economy also depends on strong defence. Prosperity is built on peace. The urgent question to both Front-Bench teams today is this. The funding post-2015 that is needed just to achieve Future Force 2020 is based on a 1% per annum increase in the equipment budget and flat real for the non-equipment budget. That is what the chiefs of staff and Ministers were promised at the time. So will Ministers and shadow Ministers commit today to both the equipment and non-equipment figures that we were promised?

The commitment on the equipment budget made only by my party is welcome. There is a long list of very important capabilities, but it is not enough on its own. The significant cuts that appear to be pencilled in for current expenditure—RDEL, or resource departmental expenditure limit—are deeply worrying. I commend Professor Malcolm Chalmers excellent paper, “Mind the gap; the MOD’s emerging budgetary challenge.” It is an objective, factual assessment of the cost pressures facing defence. I doubt that the Minister can offer reasons to disagree with any of its deeply worrying conclusions, but even in the optimistic scenario that Professor Chalmers outlines, under which defence is given the same protection as health and education, those cost pressures would still force a total cut of 8.7% over the next 10 years—about £35 billion in total.

If further cuts are to be made, they would sadly have to be based on a refreshed and less ambitious strategic approach. The decisions in the 2015 review, then, could redefine Britain’s role in the world. There are other strategies, depending more on diplomacy, soft power and development assistance, for example. They are all vital components of our national security, but are they credible without strong defences too? No. Not when, for the first time since the cold war, Europe faces a real military threat on its borders. The world is more dangerous than it has been for decades.

In some ways, though, the 2015 SDSR will be easier than the last one. Crucially, a major programme of reform has rebuilt the MOD’s credibility, and its performance on equipment acquisition has been transformed. From both the industrial and security perspectives, the 2010 SDSR succeeded in protecting the very special US-UK defence relationship, but will this last? President Obama, the US Chief of Staff and the US ambassador to the UN have all warned us and are sending us a clear message about what they fear is the future of UK defence spending.

So to my second theme—the need to take long-term decisions to protect our operational advantage and our freedom of action. In layman’s terms, that means making sure that we have superior capabilities to our enemies and that we can use them and sustain them whenever we want to. At the heart of this for me is the alarming engineering skills shortage that we face as a nation, especially in defence. This is the area of the 2012 White Paper on defence acquisition, to which I put my name, with which I am least satisfied. The ingredients were all there, but the urgency of the issue was not properly articulated and opportunities were missed. Crucially, commentators did not understand what the White Paper said. It made it clear that

“We will take action to protect our operational advantages and freedom of action, but only where this is essential for national security.”

Here is the commitment to invest in what industry calls the body of knowledge essential to sustain capabilities in the long terms. We cannot protect all the skills and capabilities that we need and would like to on current budgets, but there are areas of capability that we simply must invest in to sustain our security. Short-term budget cuts make this White Paper promise, which is essential to our security, impossible to deliver, with serious long-term consequences.

My third theme is the priority that we must attach to sustaining investment in technology. The centrality of research investment to UK national security takes on greater significance in a new global security context—a context defined by state fragmentation, asymmetric threats and technology proliferation. Belligerent non-state actors are increasingly using technology to counter the traditional technological advantage of conventional military and security forces. Since the end of the cold war, we have seen widespread development of technology by commercial organisations and individuals driven by a consumer society and business sector hungry for tomorrow’s technology today. This has lowered the bar for entry to conflict, espionage, terrorism and serious and organised crime, meaning that there are far more threats out there now than there were. As a result “conflict” will be far less predictable than we have seen before. It simply will not conform to set-piece scenarios in the same way that the west planned for in the last century or in the last SDSR.

If we are not committing to investing a realistic amount in science and technology, I see several things happening. First, we will become less relevant to our key strategic allies—the United States and France. Secondly, we will miss the opportunities to build capability by adapting the best of the commercial and international technology sector because we simply will not know what the cutting edge looks like. Thirdly, we will cease to act as an intelligent client. How do you know what you are buying if you do not know what good looks like? Fourthly, we will be unable to evolve during a conflict. This is potentially the most serious if we cannot defeat the novel threats deployed against us.

If the 2015 SDSR correctly prioritises science and technology, logically the MOD must spend more on it.

[Mr Havard]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point. The Defence Committee in reports in this Parliament and the previous Parliament has talked about the MOD devoting 2% of the money that it has to S and T as well as R and D so that such spending is structured into budgets.

[Sir Peter Luff]

I could not agree with the hon. Gentleman more strongly. That is the precise figure that I have in mind for the level of resources from the defence budget that should be spent on S and T. It was 2.6% under the previous Government, but it declined under them to 1.2%. The White Paper on technology put a floor under it of 1.2%. It is far too low a floor, and what is more, as defence budgets have shrunk, the sum being spent has gone down too. It is only a third higher than what the Department for International Development now spends on research. Two per cent. is the bare minimum, of rising budgets as well. The trouble is that the Department sees S and T as the cash cow of the spending round. It is a resource that is easily cut because contracts are short term, but the consequences for our security are devastating.

If cuts to revenue spending happen, the science and technology budget will go straight back into the firing line of the Treasury and the bean counters of the MOD. We must not let that happen. Maintaining operational advantage is a race against time to take innovation from the lab and into the battle-space.

Our partners envy our ability to do more with less. Key to this is understanding the operational advantage of technology and moving it quickly into the hands of the military. As Bernard Gray, Chief of Defence Matériel, put it recently,

“The key question is, of all the desirable things in the world, which are the ones you can afford?”

But the country can afford more, as it should choose to do. In the end, this is not about votes, it is about leadership. We must all in this place do everything we can to sustain the national understanding that we maintain peace through strength, not weakness. That is why it is imperative that the next SDSR is well argued, persuasive and properly funded, and why all the political leaders of our nation must show their deep personal commitment to this outcome.

After every major conflict we have cut defence and regretted it. The Crimean war, the first world war, the second world war, the cold war—cut and regret, cut and regret, cut and regret, cut and regret. As Hegel said,

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

In 2015 we celebrate the 800th anniversary of the foundation of our freedoms, Magna Carta, and the 750th anniversary of the beginning of our representative democracy and Simon de Montfort. It would be depressingly ironic if in 2015 of all years a timid Parliament, an intellectually feeble SDSR and another round of austerity combined further to weaken our defences and threaten our freedoms at such a dangerous moment in world history.

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[Sir Richard Ottaway]

I used the figure of 20% for effect, rather than for any serious argument.

On the defence budget in the context of NATO, the same point applies. Russia is now spending heavily. I believe that nearly a third of its federal budget is being spent on defence, though no one is arguing that we are going to see Russian tanks rolling across the central European plain in the foreseeable future. With hindsight, Russia’s intentions have been flagged up for longer than we realise. We should have realised that when the intervention in Georgia started. Then Russia’s focus moved to Syria and later to Crimea. Russia’s human rights record is appalling. It is a country under authoritarian and unpredictable rule at the top and in the Kremlin.

[Mr Havard]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Richard Ottaway]

I give way, for the last time.

[Mr Havard]

The Defence Committee produced a report in 2009 after we visited Russia because of the Georgian conflict and we made recommendations then. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree, on the basis of reports from his own Committee and others, that as a Parliament we do not properly debate the recommendations that we advise it to discuss?

[Sir Richard Ottaway]

I hang on every word of the reports of the Defence Committee. They are authoritative, powerful and impressive. The Chairman of the Defence Committee was once a valued member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and might follow the Foreign Affairs Committee in instigating debates on our own reports, through the Backbench Business Committee.

The focus now may be on the Baltic states. We are right to deploy troops and aircraft there with the Spearhead brigade, and we should make it clear that if there is an intrusion which poses a threat, we shall not hesitate to use that force. But it is ultimately a political decision and one that will be very difficult to make when it comes because the intrusion will involve the use of militias, rather than an overt use of force.

But we are not going to defend Europe on our own. As has been said by many people, the rest of Europe needs to live up to expectations on its level of expenditure. It is ironic that NATO, which was formed in the aftermath of the second world war and of German re-armament, is now calling for Germany to re-arm. I wonder what will be the public reaction if Germany, the largest economy in Europe, said that it was going to double its defence budget. One thing is certain: that would mark the end of the post-war era.

Russia is spending heavily on equipment and so are we. The two new aircraft carriers soon to be launched are the most powerful weapons that this country has ever produced. As someone who served for several years on aircraft carriers in the 1960s, I am well aware of the projection of power that those bits of equipment bring. Where the mistake has been made is in the lack of support equipment to go with it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) said, the issue is not just the fruit and veg being transported behind the carrier, but the anti-submarine underneath it, the air defence aircraft above it and the air defence screen around it. That is the distortion that we will get. Most of the Royal Navy will be required to defend just that one ship, distorting the whole projection of Royal Navy power. If I had been in the Admiralty at the time, I would have preferred to have a dozen Type 45 frigates, which are equally formidable bits of equipment, than the two aircraft carriers.

We have to accept—again, this point was made in an excellent speech from the Chairman of the Defence Committee—that the nature of warfare is changing. As I said, we are not going to see tanks coming across the central European plain. The real battles of the future lie in cyber-warfare—attacks on both economic and military targets. It is the anoraks inside cyber-warehouses in eastern Russia or in Asia who are the current enemy. It is absolutely legitimate for us to increase our levels of expenditure on the security agencies, in particular on GCHQ, to address that. We can argue about whether that should become part of the budget, but the need to do it is beyond doubt.

Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [Lords]

Dai Havard Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and the Defence Committee for their work on the Bill. The Committee produced an excellent report covering some major concerns about the system of redress for members of our armed forces which, I have to say, have been raised for many years. The amendments tabled in Committee and on Report today show how effective a Select Committee can be when it does its job. We covered many of the amendments in Committee, and as the hon. Gentleman said, he is not going to press his to a vote, but some of these issues will need to be looked at in regulations. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) said that she would keep a close eye on the regulations, and I am sure that the Committee will as well.

The issue that amendments 24 to 28 deal with has followed me throughout my time in Parliament—I was on the Committee that discussed similar matters when we set up the Service Complaints Commissioner—so I am pleased today that we are moving to where we should have been back then, with an ombudsman with the powers and effectiveness that our armed forces require. On the commissioner’s length of service, the suggestion, which we supported in Committee, is between five and seven years, to give the person time to establish themselves and avoid the situation that we see with many public appointments where the person spends more time in the last few years trying to ensure their reappointment than doing an effective job. For that reason, we will have to consider the time limits for the ombudsman.

When we set up the commissioner, it was argued vociferously, especially by Conservative Back Benchers, that they had to have military experience, but I think the present commissioner has shown otherwise. She has done a very effective job without a service background and has earned the respect of the members of the armed forces she has worked with, and I look forward to the new armed forces ombudsman carrying on that tradition. It is important that the position be seen to be independent and that it gives complainants confidence that individuals cannot use the old boys’ network, as it was called in Committee, to influence the ombudsman or commissioner. Much strength has been gained from having someone, in Susan Atkins, who has done a forensic job and taken the trouble, time and effort to understand how our armed forces work and the cultural differences between them. As those who have dealt with them know, they are very different, have their individual cultures and in the past have differed in their implementation of various forms of discipline.

Under the amendments, the Defence Council would consult the ombudsman before making regulations, which, again, I do not see as a threat; it could help the council and the MOD ensure that regulations have an independent eye cast over them. Just as the Defence Committee has played a role in developing the Bill, so I see a role for it in scrutinising regulations and how it is put into practice. It might be a good idea for it to look back, perhaps in a year or so, to see how it has worked in practice.

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend was a signatory to the 2003 report that followed the Deepcut barracks incidents, when the Committee started work on such a system. I pay tribute to him and other Committee members who have worked consistently to get to this situation, and I am sure that the next Committee will be equally diligent in ensuring we go further. Would he agree?

[Mr Jones]

What—praise myself? Surely not, so modest as I am! I wish to put on the record, however, my thanks to my hon. Friend, who is retiring at the election, for his service on the Committee. I think he has been a member for most of his time in Parliament. He has not only shown a keen interest in the subject, but cares about the issues.

I will develop the point further on Third Reading, but it is good to see this legislation coming into being. Should it have happened earlier? Yes. Do the inerrant conservatisms within the system work? Yes, I think they do. When the idea of having an armed forces Service Complaints Commissioner was brought forward, to hear some people talking about it one would have thought that the earth would stop spinning on its axis if such a person were created—but it has not: it has helped the chain of command and provided greater transparency over the tough decisions that we recognise have to be made. When this Bill comes into force, the same question will arise again—why did we not do this many years before?

Amendments 32 to 36 deal with the issue of whether the ombudsman will have teeth and whether the decisions she takes should be accepted and then enforced on the Defence Council. I said in Committee that we would support the amendments. Time will tell, but I think it would be a brave Defence Councillor or Minister who turned round and rejected a recommendation from the armed services ombudsman. What the Defence Committee wanted to achieve through these amendments will in practice become simply a part of the normal system and the Defence Council will accept the ombudsman’s recommendations.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend makes a good point in her amendment 23, and I pay tribute to her tenacity in pursuing this Bill and to her broader support for ensuring that when things go wrong in our armed forces, individuals get the justice they deserve. Her amendment refers to discrimination and harassment. She makes a good point that it is important for at least one of the individuals on the board to have full knowledge and training in relevant areas. The new ombudsman can look at the issues raised today and assist the armed forces by ensuring that the personnel on the panels have the necessary training and expertise.

We shall not press for a vote on the amendments, but many of the issues that have arisen from them today will be dealt with through regulations. It is important that, in drawing them up, the Ministry of Defence takes into account the clear concerns raised by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border, my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend and the Defence Committee. I would not want regulations somehow to limit or put a straitjacket on the operations of the new armed services ombudsman.

I said the same thing when the Service Complaints Commissioner was appointed, and I shall say it again. Our armed forces and the military generally have nothing to fear from this new appointment. It will enhance the transparency we expect and, if it is done properly, it will improve the problem identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend—that complaints are taking far too long to resolve. In any other walk of life, it would be unacceptable to allow such long delays. As I say, this will help the armed forces. Anyone who has ever dealt with a complaints system or disciplinary procedures knows that the quicker they are resolved the better. This helps to ensure that the system is fair and that, even if individuals do not like the outcome of the disciplinary procedures, they will at least know that their cases will be dealt with quickly and effectively.

I think that the Defence Committee has done a great job, and that the Bill has been vastly improved. I hope that some of the issues that have been raised here can be dealt with in regulations.

Defence and Cyber-security

Dai Havard Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

I would first like to say something about the debate. I agree that the Defence Committee is perhaps remiss in not applying for debates more regularly. This debate is taking place on an estimates day. It is a really serious debate that should be taking place in the Chamber in its own right. Our report is now more than 12 months old—it was published in January 2013—which says something about how quickly these things move. The Government published their response in March 2013 and then made a series of announcements last September, but here we are today with the first opportunity to talk about it. That is an issue we need to look at.

I will not repeat what my colleague who chairs the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), said about structure, but I would like to say something about structure, about investment—we are talking about money, after all—and about accountability. The statement made in September was very interesting from two points of view. First, it set out a structure for how the Ministry of Defence, along with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Cabinet Office and others—this cannot be done in isolation—can start to look at its relationship with industry and at protecting itself through its relationships with the rest of the British community. I think that is hugely important.

There is a lot of work being done on achieving proper standards. We took evidence from industry representatives on that, and they were all over the shop, frankly. For example, they did not want standards, or they wanted their own standards. The question of standards is absolutely at the guts of the whole issue of defining cyber, and not just for the Ministry of Defence. Industry must now have a compliance process with the Ministry of Defence, and I am sure that the Minister will say something about how that is to be done. That is hugely welcome, because it is vital. How we then do that in relation to our allies, NATO, the EU, the French—with our treaty—and others is a big issue that needs proper discussion. We need to have proper compliance and assurance mechanisms, as we do with our “Five Eyes” colleagues and many others, because we are all trying to understand the process.

Most people go to Wikipedia when they do not know much about something, as I did with cyber-warfare, because the announcement in September also mentioned having some sort of offensive capability. Wikipedia states:

“Not to be confused with Electronic warfare… Cyberwarfare refers to politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage. It is a form of information warfare sometimes seen as analogous to conventional warfare.”

Well, that is terribly helpful. What we know is that there is no clear definition, either domestically or internationally. We are all fishing for something to help us understand this properly, and we should have some humility in that. However, we recognise its interconnectivity.

Let me turn to the statement on having offensive capability. It was very brave of the UK Government to make that statement. We are the first country to come out and say that. I have spoken with some of our international allies about that, and they say, “Well, that’s a very interesting statement for the Brits to make.” How we actually do that will be a matter for discussion. I am not necessarily against the investment or the capability, but I think that we need to be very clear about what we are saying and how we are going to do things. There will need to be a doctrine and rules of engagement. If we are saying that this is a new domain, I do not think that we can run away from some of these questions. If we do and we keep it too secret, we will lose legitimacy for the activities that we wish to undertake. That is a difficult balancing act, but it is absolutely crucial.

If we are to weaponise the process, how will we do that? There is a lot of talk about countries using the Stuxnet virus in Iran. That was actually delivered physically on a memory stick. The programme then searched out the thing it wanted to destroy or debilitate. It was a hugely expensive exercise. I do not know how much it cost, because I am not supposed to know who did it. Well, we do not know who did it, or we all suspect that we know. Whoever did it, it was not a bunch of amateurs; it was someone who could put substantial investment into it. It turned out to be a one-shot weapon.

If we are to weaponise this area, we must be clear that it will cost money. This sort of activity cannot be done by a boy working in his bedroom to come up with a fancy programme. We will have to invest in the process of weaponisation alongside all the other things we are talking about. How will we procure, what will we do with regard to research and technology, and how will we keep a sovereign capability in these areas? I suspect that those are big questions that Parliament will be discussing for many years to come.

[Mr Brazier]

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting speech. Does he agree that the issue is about not only the technical side but the personal side? More medieval fortresses fell through the inside touch than through outside assault. In the high-tech area, as everywhere else, people can be bought or suborned.

[Mr Havard]

The short answer is yes. The other aspect is who can be engaged to help to do such things. As the hon. Gentleman, who is on the Defence Committee, will know, the structuring of things to ensure a reserve capability is hugely important. The way in which the process is being put together is correct; there will be no monopoly on understanding in the areas we are discussing. We need as good a collaboration as possible. The delivery of the processes will not always be remote. Intelligence and knowing what is happening, where and with whom will be crucial. I shall come to that later.

The other question that comes up is about the law—I mentioned legitimacy earlier. I am helping to lead a sub-study in the Defence Committee of the military and the law. That is coloured, obviously, by Supreme Court decisions, individual cases and all the rest of it. The issue raises questions about international law, humanitarian law, extra-territorial jurisdiction and other things. An argument is being put that says, “We don’t need anything to be separate. This is a different domain, but all the current legal constructs are good enough and we do not need anything different.” I come back to my earlier point. We need to be clear about doctrine. In large part, our doctrine is public. Some, however, may not be as public as we would like, but we need to be clear about how we do things.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

We seem to accept that cyber can be not just defensive, but offensive—we can use it offensively. Does my hon. Friend think that our domestic legal structure is sufficient to deal with cyber as an offensive weapon and to contain the power of the Executive to apply that weapon?

[Mr Havard]

I do not know, but in the sense that I think I do know, I think that our legal structure is not sufficient and needs revision. I may be wrong, but that debate has to take place and people more qualified than I am need to comment.

It is interesting to note where our allies are. The United States has and has not made all sorts of declarations. If we believe The New York Times, there was a secret legal review that concluded:

“US military forces could legally launch an attack on digital infrastructure located in a foreign country if it found evidence of a threat against its own systems”.

A rules of engagement debate then starts. That is the other difficult bit—we will have to have rules of engagement for such activity. The more we discuss legitimacy in law for these things, the better. If we do not have such a discussion, the issue will be forced on us. That is what we are seeing now in a lot of other areas, so we should structure how we wish to have the debate rather than having a structure imposed on us.

Proportionality is at the guts of the whole business of international law, human rights and legitimacy. We have to show that proportionality is there and that we have mechanisms and systems to ensure that it is. Simply claiming that it is there will not be good enough.

We are not on our own. We need to be joined up not only internally within the United Kingdom, but internationally. We do not have time to go fully into this now, but it is interesting to see Russia’s current adventures in Ukraine. In September 2011, Russia and China said to a UN group that they wanted a code of conduct for cyberspace that would include requirements for co-operation in

“curbing dissemination of information which incites terrorism, secessionism, extremism or undermines other countries’ political, economic and social stability, as well as their spiritual and cultural environment”.

Well, there we are—now we know. Translating that into current events will tell us a lot. That proposed code of conduct was about closing things down and giving legitimacy to the avoidance of dissent and to having systems that are less rather than more open. How we collaborate in this area will be important.

When he was Secretary of Defence in America, Bob Gates said that he could protect .mil, .gov, .org or .com, but that as the protection systems were put in, the public might not like what they saw on .com. That debate is not only to do with defence, but defence has a place in it. Whether there should be a code of conduct and the international arrangements are problematic issues, but there is a growing urgency around them.

At the end of the day, the issue can be about the collection of raw information and the sending of viruses to blow up particular equipment. That is the geeky stuff—the weaponisation and the sexy stuff that the press love. However, at the end of the day, those and other actions are only as good as the intelligence that exists to put them into effect. One area of investment that must not be lost in the question of cyber-issues is defence intelligence. In my opinion, we have the best intelligence analysts and they need to be developed.

We can collect the raw information, but if we do not understand it we will go nowhere with it and make the wrong decision. Investment discussions should please not just be about technical toys, GCHQ and all the stuff about weapons; they should also be about intelligence analysts. Let us protect the capability. The issue is about a whole force, but also about a whole community. Those people are vital in that community and investment also needs to go to them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Francois]

This is a wonderful opportunity to recruit IT specialists from the civilian world to the reserves, but we have learned that this is a specialised area of work and we are looking at ways of extending the careers of people who work in cyber. For example, in the military, people might normally do a tour of two or three years and then move to a different position. We are looking at options for allowing people who work in this field to do longer tours of duty so that we can fully exploit the detailed expertise that they develop. We are looking at the matter carefully.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) asked about NATO co-operation. The UK is proud to be part of the NATO co-operative cyber defence centre of excellence in Tallinn, and the MOD has already seconded a member of our cyber team to work there. I should tell the Chairman of the Select Committee that the Committee cannot take all the credit for that, but it can certainly take part of it. Furthermore, we have increased our co-operation with the NATO computer incident response capability based in Brussels by joining the malware information-sharing platform and the multinational cyber-defence education and training project.

I assure the House that we are taking cyber very seriously in our defence planning. We are integrating cyber scenarios into our cross-defence exercise programme and combining it with the other domains of operations as part of full-spectrum planning, alongside land, air and sea. The cyber piece is becoming integral across the spectrum of military activity.

[Mr Havard]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Francois]

I think I should conclude because we have another debate to come.

Cyber remains a relatively young domain. Many advances will continue to come online and change the way we live our lives. While this brings new opportunities for better understanding, collaboration and innovation, we must be alert to the risks and threats as they emerge. We are striving to do both within the Ministry of Defence. It is not a task for the fainthearted, but one we must undertake none the less. The Select Committee urged us to take these threats seriously. I hope I have been able to demonstrate to the House that we do take them very seriously, in defence of the realm.

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).

Department for Communities and Local Government

Defence Reform Bill

Dai Havard Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend.

I want to bring my remarks to an end as many other Members wish to speak. A number of noteworthy people have come through the Territorials and the other reserves—I have said nothing yet about the RAF and naval reserves. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), was recently commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve and the Air Force Reserves heritage goes back to two of the three highest scoring fighter squadrons in the battle of Britain. The reserves have produced a number of distinguished individuals, including the grandfather of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex, Sir Winston Churchill, and our greatest general in the last war, Bill Slim. People fondly imagine he was a regular officer who went to Sandhurst. He was not; he was a Territorial who sneaked in through the back door of the Birmingham officer training corps because his brother was a student there and nobody realised he was not a student too. There is also David Stirling, who founded the SAS. Again, people think of him as a Scots Guards officer. Yes, he was; he was a Scots Guards reservist. He had done his officer training at Ampleforth combined cadet force and then, through mountaineering, he had developed the qualities of character and team leadership that were so vital for setting up the SAS.

There are three reasons why we need reservists. First, because we can keep far more capability if we keep some of it at much lower cost—about a fifth of the cost—at lower readiness. Secondly, because they bring the energies, extra skills and imaginations of the wider civilian community into the armed forces. Thirdly, because that keeps the link with the local communities, which just after Remembrance Sunday we should all remember.

New clause 1 will give a strong independent voice back to the reserves. I am very grateful to the Government for accepting it and I must ask the House once more not to be persuaded by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay on new clause 3, because that will send a devastating message to the Reserve forces.

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

I am a signatory to new clause 1, and I want to make a simple statement about its power. It will provide an independent element to the scrutiny of the whole process that comes back to Parliament. The debates that we will now have about new clause 3 and other things must be based on the truth on the ground; they must be based on the reality and an understanding so as to inform the decision making properly. This amendment is about doing that and also about cementing consent from the public and involvement of the public in building the consensus that we require to develop the quality of reserve recruitment into the Army, RAF and Navy and to make a whole force that is properly integrated. If we do not have that consent, we will not achieve that. If the amendment helps to provide that, it will be valuable and important. I am glad some Damascene conversion has taken place and the Government have now recognised the sense in accepting the amendment.

[Mr Baron]

New clause 3 and consequential amendments tabled in my name and those of other hon. Members will, if successful, postpone the implementation of the Government’s reservist plans until their viability and cost-effectiveness have been scrutinised and accepted by Parliament. I should clarify what these amendments are not about, because a number of Aunt Sallys have been proposed by various interested parties. Contrary to some claims and implications, these are not wrecking amendments; they are not designed to scupper, reverse or tear up the Army reserve plans, and they are certainly not an attempt to recreate, or go back to, Victorian-style and size armies. These arguments are Aunt Sallys that do not do the Government’s cause any good.

I also want to make it clear that if these amendments are passed the delay to the Army reserve plans could be kept to an absolute minimum if the Government allowed prompt scrutiny of the report. There is no intention to drag this out or turn it into a campaign that goes on for months and months. The report could be produced the day after the Bill becomes an Act and we could have a debate in this place within weeks. I have to say that the stories that this is scuppering the Army reserve plans or reversing them are very wide of the mark.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vernon Coaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her valuable and important point. The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay made the point that new clause 3 is not about trying to wreck the reforms, although that is one of the things that has been said about it. It is not about trying to stop the reform; it is about asking whether it is sensible for the House to demand of the Defence Secretary, “Are these reforms working? Are they delivering what they are supposed to deliver?” When the Defence Secretary comes forward again with viable plans, is it not the purpose and responsibility of this House to judge whether those plans are accurate and make sense?

[Mr Havard]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the central question under discussion is about what the military call integration, not only of reserves and regulars, but of contractors, people outside in society, and the businesses that are prepared to participate? We have a new commitment to an annual report, but that report would be 15 months from now. All that we are saying is: let us have that annual report debate now, in advance of things being done badly, so that we do those things well.

[Vernon Coaker]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comment, and agree absolutely with him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty]

The Secretary of State shakes his head, but the £180 million that was allocated to the reserves in the first year was spent on upgrading the regulars. The generals told the Defence Committee that that was what they did. The threat of a pause if they do not get things sorted might compel the generals to make greater progress.

[Mr Havard]

Does my hon. Friend agree that a pause, rather than creating confusion or demoralising reservists, businesses and others, might have the opposite effect of showing people that there is a proper re-examination of a plan that they do not yet have the confidence fully to join? It might give them that confidence, rather than destroy it.

[Thomas Docherty]

I agree with my hon. Friend, whom the House will recognise is one of the experts on the Defence Committee on the issue of morale.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I think this is the first time that I have had the pleasure of addressing the House while you are in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I offer you my congratulations.

I congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken this afternoon. This has been a good debate, during which many passionately held views have been expressed and much deep knowledge displayed. I thank those who served on the Public Bill Committee and scrutinised the Bill very effectively.

Most of all, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who led the debate so ably on this group of new clauses and amendments. He speaks with an authority on this subject that is unquestioned throughout the House, and when he speaks on this subject, we listen. By “we”, I mean not only Members of the House, but the Government.

What my hon. Friend has said to me and the House today about the crucial importance of protecting the distinctive ethos of the reserve movement, even as we move to an integrated armed forces, is compelling. He is absolutely right that we must get right the balance between integration and protecting that distinct ethos if we are to achieve our goals.

I am happy to have made a commitment to my hon. Friend to introduce in the other place an amendment that reflects his new clause 1, which I have to say is technically imperfect, to ensure that this House has an annual opportunity to consider an independent report, produced under statute by the RFCA, not only once, as is proposed in new clause 3, but every year—not just as we roll out the programme, but thereafter—so that we can monitor not just the expansion of our reserves, but the maintenance of them in future.

[Mr Havard]

How will that consideration be undertaken? Will there be a proper, full debate on the report in the House in Government time, as several hon. Members have mentioned, or will there be some other mechanism?

[Mr Hammond]

That will be for the House to determine, and the hon. Gentleman knows the mechanisms available. However, I expect to be held to account for our delivery of this agenda. I am confident that the Chairman of the Defence Committee will give me no quarter in holding me to account for the delivery of this immensely complex agenda.

Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme

Dai Havard Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Walker, to serve under your chairmanship. Members of the Panel of Chairs do not often serve under one another’s chairmanship. I was not expecting to be called so early, but I want to echo some of what has already been said, particularly about Sir Neil Thorne, his wife Sheila and the dog—I have forgotten its name, so I must apologise to Sir Neil. They have been a feature of my life for more than the last decade while I have been involved in the armed forces parliamentary scheme.

Becoming a Member of the House of Commons is a bizarre experience because it involves setting up a small business and accommodating the magical mystery tour that is the legislative process. We are given the key to a locker and a sack of mail, and told to get on with it. We wonder why we are here, what we are trying to do, and what our responsibilities are. We have obvious responsibilities to our constituents and, on a broader front, to the state as well, which is important. Reference has been made to defence of the realm and that looms large in our thinking, especially for those who, like me, were elected in June 2001 when people said we did not have a real job to do and everything was fine with devolution in Wales, so we could sit back and have a long holiday. However, something happened that September that changed the world and defined it for the immediate future and probably the next 50 years.

Telling people how they can help to resolve the problems, and committing them to armed conflict, has become a big issue that one must participate in. We can step back and decide to find out something about it if we do not understand it and want to understand it better. The one thing that helps with that is the armed forces parliamentary scheme, to which I pay tribute because it has done a lot for people. In my experience, it provides an insight into what people are really being asked to do and who must do the job from day to day.

When one puts on desert boots, finds that they melt and are not fit for purpose, and discusses what should be available, one gets some understanding of the matter. When living in a tent for a few days with the boys and girls, sharing the communal showers and other excitements such as dodging spiders and the real snakes, as well as the two-legged ones, one begins to understand exactly what pressures the armed forces experience as ordinary individuals in one’s own community or another hon. Member’s constituency. They take on a burden and provide a value for their community that people cannot understand until they participate with them and get an idea of what it means to be in dislocated places and to suffer some of their day-to-day experiences. I thank not just Sir Neil and those who have dealt with the scheme at a higher level, but those who have supported it throughout.

I now have friends in the military whom I would never have had before—I have had life experiences with them over the years—and I also know people in the Ministry of Defence and civil servants. All those various people are not immediately seen—and we are a pain to them. We are a burden. When we rock up to these things, we are not exactly helpful, because they have enough to do anyway. However, they put themselves out to accommodate us, so that we can begin to understand some of their experiences. We are educated in the process in the proper sense.

I make no apologies for the fact that the scheme is political, but it is not, in any shape or form, party political. It is said to be non-political, and in that sense it is non-political, but at another level it is highly political, because it gives us a political education and also helps others to understand the political process. Sometimes when we go along to such things we have to sing for our supper. All of a sudden, a major is giving us 200 troops, saying, “Go on, there they are. Tell them why they are here. You have a go, because I have been trying to explain it to them—you have a go.” It is educative in that sense, but people also understand us, because they can quiz us. We are a resource. If we participate, we have to make ourselves available as a resource, because it is not a one-way street. We should be not only drawing from the process but contributing to it, because that is what makes it worth while.

It is educative, and any education is of no value unless it is slightly subversive. The scheme is good, therefore, because we experience people at different levels who say, “They are a pain and now, maybe they know a bit too much. They are going to places, finding out things and coming back with”—what were described earlier as—“pesky, awkward questions.” Some people have a slightly ambivalent view of the scheme, but that is all about the friction that makes for the value of the process. It will be interesting to hear about other people’s experiences. What we find is that the military themselves are only too happy to help. Others, who perhaps do not fully understand the scheme, think that we will be doing something that we will not be. It has been useful to find that people from the Ministry are involved in the scheme, and people from the staff of the House of Commons. It is useful that people who are writing papers about defence can participate. The current Serjeant at Arms was a member of it. The scheme offers things not only to Members of Parliament, and it seems to me that that has been its value during its time.

On this business about sponsorship, and all the rest of it, over this period of time I have also become a member of the Select Committee on Defence, so I bump up against this stuff all the time in different ways. No one has ever asked me for anything in relation to the scheme—ever. That includes people from the Ministry and from any of the sponsors that have been involved. Perhaps they think, “Well, we won’t ask him anyway”, but I have never been approached for anything. All I have seen is them give their support through the proper administration—through Sir Neil and the scheme. I have never experienced anything other than that. Equally, I am pleased that we are making all that more transparent and more obvious, and that more people and more sponsors are getting involved. There is a huge benefit to them, both in our ability to understand and in their ability to get the advantage of having an educated electorate in the House of Commons, when it comes to making decisions on defence matters in future.

Let me say something about the future. People will want to make all sorts of comments about their individual experiences. Having played rugby, I think of the old saying, “What goes on tour stays on tour.” There are some things that people will want to know about, but I will not tell them, because they are particular experiences. I say that because if we get involved with a body like the military, stuff happens. With such experiences, we have to be accommodating.

We begin to understand things immediately. When I first started on the scheme, I went to the training college and spent a week doing basic training. It was fantastic—very, very interesting. I came away with a little card that all soldiers were given at that time—I was doing it with the Army. The card was about what they were trained to do. It was about their loyalty and their sacrifice, about them putting themselves in a particular position, and therefore about how the Government should support them. I have it in my wallet, but I am not allowed to use visual aids in the Chamber.

When we came to discuss the covenant, it was interesting. We have been discussing it, in my experience, right the way through the scheme, and that discussion has taken on a particular form. Out of such things, we begin to have a better understanding of why we are discussing codifying some things better, politically, than we were doing in the first place.

That discussion is just one experience. There have been other, more exciting experiences, such as dropping into the Borneo jungle and being cooked a snake curry by Gurkhas who tried to sell it as chicken. I could talk about all sorts of little experiences such as that, but what we get out of the scheme is an understanding that it is about people. It is about high politics, but it is also about people. They are what makes it work.

I have been lucky enough that in the past year, I have been at the Royal College of Defence Studies. Sir Neil would probably chide me because I took a bit too long to do the course, but it is very interesting. I now have friends in various militaries across the world. Some are now commanding militaries in countries that are potentially, and actually, in conflict with one another. I now know some of the commanders of the business that is going on. Knowing each other gives a different context to trying to understand how one can incentivise a change. If someone has an idea of how the Chinese think, and they are sitting next to a Chinese general on one side, a Pakistani general on the other, a German and an awkward Norwegian, and having a debate, it becomes very interesting. We are able to have tea with people who normally, in another context, we would never get together.

More generally, I would argue that investment in that defence diplomacy is something we all ought to understand and do more of. The armed forces parliamentary scheme gives us that, sometimes by accident. We participate with the military, and they are in coalitions all the time. They are in the context of the places in which they work. All of a sudden, we can be somewhere or another, and someone announces, “There are some Chilean soldiers”, and we have to deal with them. One thinks, “Chile? What do I know about Chile?” It is an education in that respect, and, again, if someone goes through the scheme in all of its different manifestations, it provides a breadth of experience that could not be bought anywhere else. It is a life experience, but more importantly, it is an education in the ability to understand not only immediate political questions but the context in which they operate.

In future, there will be a debate about whether uniforms should be worn. Perhaps others will raise that issue today. I think it is really important to wear them—I made a point earlier about boots melting. It allows us to begin to understand what other people are doing, and we should not abandon that idea. Sometimes we should mix in, because otherwise, people say, “Which one shall we shoot?” “The one without the uniform on”. That is not terribly helpful, because it means we are not part of the group. People say, “What you on, sir?”, “What are you doing, sir?”, “Who’s he?”, “Is that the armed forces pension scheme, sir?” I say, “I’m on the armed forces parliamentary scheme —what are you on?”—They ask because I am ancient, I suppose. We can then have a debate, because in a sense we are not different; we are just another dimension of them. Therefore, we can discuss things with them in a different way.

We also begin to understand which way is up. It is interesting to watch Members of Parliament learn how to iron—it is like basic training for some of them—how to put a beret on and all the rest of it. That is good entertainment, but it is more than that, because we can understand some of the things that we are giving people, how they work, and what it is all about. It is also about their ethos and what they invest in all that. We can begin to understand why that is important to them.

I finish by saying that we are having a debate about changing the mixture of regulars and reserves. One thing that is interesting to me about the scheme is that we would do 22 days before, but we are now talking about 15 days. A decade ago, people would say, “You are just signing up like the regulars”. The scheme provides another way of beginning to understand better what we are asking people to do—to dislocate themselves from their community for short periods of time. For those who have not done it before, it gives a limited insight into what that might mean and what we might be asking people to do.

The people who enter the scheme must make a commitment, but I would urge any Member of Parliament to join up and do it, because it is not just about defence. It is about the whole context of the political process and the decision-making process. The ability to see the strategic view is what hon. Members will get from the scheme and what will be of value to them.

Defence Reform Bill

Dai Havard Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

Obviously, I have spent some time on the Defence Committee, along with the Chairman and others. We have spent a number of years studying some of these things, from Governments who have come and gone. Clearly the Bill is central to our discussion about how we make our MOD efficient, so I do not approach it from the point of view of opposing change and reform. This is a debate about how we get the correct reform. On the question of GoCo or no-GoCo—or “NoCo” or whatever it is or is likely to be—or “NDPB-plus”, I am not going to go into great detail, because the previous speech raised many of the concerns. As for the freedoms required in the individual terms and conditions given to a chief executive of an organisation, who can pick and choose people and so on, I am a little worried that we should build structures around individuals, as they also come and go. That cannot be the only reason for reform, however; there must be broader reasons for making such a change.

Let me deal with the organisation in the context of the rest of the Ministry of Defence, because the remainder of the Levene reforms must be considered. The heads of individual services and joint services will be procurers. They will not sit on the central board, but they will buy things from various parts of the organisation, as there will be single contracts in addition to DE&S requirements. We can make DE&S as efficient as we like, but we must consider the broader context of whether changing DE&S will make the whole process more efficient, so a lot more work needs to be done on that.

My personal prejudice—I was glad that the Secretary of State spoke about where risk will be retained—is that if we are not careful, a further risk is created by moving things too far away from the political organisation. It will never abdicate responsibility, so if anything goes wrong, it might lack the strategic capacity to direct in such a way as to change the process. Care needs to be taken about the extent to which things are pushed out into a private contracting organisation.

Let me turn to the organisation of the reserves. It is a shame that the Secretary of State has left the Chamber, because I have written to him about this and received something of a reply. I was concerned by the weekend’s events because my constituents were involved, in the sense that my local mountain rescue and search team—Central Beacons mountain rescue team—effectively became the initial primary support for the rescue activity. I do not want to get this wrong, because there will be police and coroner inquiries, but if the Secretary of State were in the Chamber, I would ask him at least to thank the team publicly and to acknowledge its activities on that day.

The team was subsequently supported by Rescue 169 from Chivenor and various other highly professional people to help with the co-ordination of the activity, and they did their best in the circumstances. I thank the rescue team publicly, and my local community expresses its sympathy to those affected during the exercise and the families and friends of those who died. There are lessons to be learned from the weekend, so when that happens, I hope that the exercise will include those people involved. I saw volunteers rescuing volunteers. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if the support process is going to work, those volunteers should participate properly in that lessons-learned exercise, because they have much to contribute.

I am not a shrinking violet who wishes to downgrade the rigorous nature of training, but an exercise such as the Fan dance must be managed well, and monitored and supported correctly, or it should not be done. The sun had not been out in Wales for about nine months, but local people were expected to run around in the heat at the weekend. Perhaps certain exercises should be graded and there is something to be said for considering how a number are conducted, but the weekend’s activity was a selection exercise, not a training exercise. While many lessons could be learned from what happened, we must be careful, because there is a constituency that will want to downgrade the exercise. There is no need to do so, however, because with proper management, monitoring and support, such a downgrade can be avoided, and the legitimacy of the process will be unaffected.

Wales provides something like 7% to 8% of armed forces personnel, yet our population represents 3% of the UK. Hon. Members may draw their own conclusions about why that is the case, but it is due to many things, such as commitment and history. However, people will look at the proposals and say, “What is this new reserve force we’re being offered? How will we relate to the regular forces? Do I want to play this game and get involved or not?” Others will ask, “Do I want my son, daughter or godson to go into this?” It is not just about money. There are important changes, giving people extra rights, but it will not be possible to make the numbers unless the legitimacy of joining is recognised within the community where recruitment is to take place.

[Mrs Moon]

I recognise my hon. Friend’s expertise in this area. The exercise has been carried out in the beacons over many years, yet two people died and a third person is seriously ill. That is sending shock waves of concern throughout the families and friends of those seeking to join the reserves. Is it not crucial that, if mistakes are found to have occurred, the Ministry of Defence is clear about what those mistakes were and how they will be rectified, so that people may volunteer without anxiety, and families can feel confident that the reserves is a safe and credible option for their family members?

[Mr Havard]

I agree entirely. There is also the question of what people are required to do. There is some description in the White Paper about what reserves will and will not be required to do and how those are linked, but there is a broader question about the type of organisation and the support provided.

I shall come on to the duty of care, which is related to that. The call-out of reservists will be the same as that of regulars. That suggests that they are the same, but they are not necessarily going to do the same things. There may be legal issues involved that we need to explore. I understand why the present narrative is the way it is. It is trying to make things clearer, but at some point we may not be achieving that, and we may need to look to the White Paper to help us do so. The title includes the words “valuable and valued”. The reserves are both; that is absolutely correct, but they will be called out on the same legal basis as regulars. The training is to be the same, but it is not really the same. A lot more work needs to be done.

The Defence Committee is undertaking some work on one aspect. As in the case of the accident at the weekend, about which I will not go into detail, there is a duty of care to people when they are put in certain circumstances. We all know that and we see the latest decisions by the Supreme Court and so on. There is the potential for lawfare, when people might seek to use domestic legislation as a weapons system, all the way through to the development of universal jurisdiction. That is the background to the way that people might operate, and in the Defence Committee we are going to look at these things. We have an inquiry offer out now and people should put evidence to us to try to clarify how the system will work.

Regulars may not be the same as reservists in certain circumstances. The law will not necessarily provide the architectural background to some of the decisions that people think they have made. We are concerned about that and we need to inquire into the position and make sure that the law does that. Money is supremely important, as we all know. For some years we have been trying to drive more efficiency into the Ministry of Defence, yes, but it is not just about the money. The MOD should not degrade the quality of the response that it will get, by talking only in those terms.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), who speaks with a great deal of personal experience from her commitment to her reserve career.

My thoughts and prayers are also with the families and friends of the two service personnel, including Lance Corporal Craig Roberts, who perished in the Brecon Beacons at the weekend, as well as with the soldier who remains seriously ill in hospital. Although our service personnel—regulars and reserves—are aware of the risks and challenges inherent in their service selection and training, and while we must all accept the necessity of gruelling and challenging assessment procedures, especially for our special forces, such processes should never be exempt from appropriate scrutiny by the MOD and external authorities. I hope that there will be a full and thorough investigation of the tragic events as a matter of urgency, especially in the light of the equally tragic death of Captain Robert Carnegie in the Brecon Beacons some months ago, also during a selection process. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard), I pay tribute to the work of the mountain rescue services and other rescue services in the Brecon Beacons that had to deal this weekend with not only the events I mentioned, but two tragic drownings in reservoirs in my hon. Friend’s constituency and in Brecon and Radnorshire.

Those tragic events occurred at a time when the Government are about to make some of the most significant changes in a generation to the make-up of our armed forces, especially with regard to the crucial relationships between the regulars, ex-regulars and reservists who make up our armed forces. The increasing demands that will be made on our reservists in operations, training and levels of recruitment will have a series of wide-ranging consequences that we may not be able to foresee in their entirety at this stage. I hope the Government will keep those under continuous assessment and ensure that if any further changes are needed in future, those are made.

I associate myself with the comments of the hon. and gallant Lady. I have no doubts whatever about the capability and commitment of individual reservists. I have seen that for myself in Helmand, where I saw reservists fully integrated into our operations there and doing incredible work. I met a senior civil servant who was a reservist contributing to our operations at Camp Bastion. I have also seen the work of our reservists at home. I have seen that in Wales in my constituency and in the region, where they play crucial roles, from preparing for civil emergencies to liaising with merchant shipping and to protecting the Olympics, which Cardiff was delighted to play its part in hosting last summer.

I was delighted a few weeks ago to be able to watch veterans, regulars, ex-regulars, reserves and cadets all march down the street together in Penarth in my constituency in recognition of Armed Forces day, and a few days later to see a similar gathering of regulars, reserves and others to celebrate Armed Forces day in Cardiff and, in particular, to learn about the work of the Royal Naval Reserve from the commander of HMS Cambria in Sully on the border of my constituency—work which draws on many of my constituents. I am well aware of the excellent work done by the other three facilities—the newly named Army Reserve in Cardiff at Morgan street, again on the borders of my constituency, Maindy barracks, which brought my father to Cardiff many years ago with the Army youth team, and in Gabalfa avenue.

The image that I saw of our regulars and our reserves marching together united down the street in a coherent and seamless fashion is clearly the Government’s intention in the reserve forces changes set out in the Bill, but I hope the Government show more coherence in the execution of that strategy than they did in the confusion surrounding announcements in the House recently.

I shall make a few brief remarks about the recruitment of reservists and in particular the move to a 70:30 split, which is a significant change predicated on a successful available uplift of the reserve capacity, while the regular Army, as we have heard from many hon. Members, faces a loss of 20,000 troops. The uplift is planned regardless of the timing and the coherence of the two changes and one being contingent on the other. We should be careful that no gaps in capacity or capability occur as a result. The Secretary of State admitted in a statement the other week in the House that many current reserve units remain heavily under-recruited, which is the justification for closing or rationalising a number of them.

From the details of the strategy, I am not yet totally convinced that the recruitment levels will meet expectations, particularly in view of the barriers to bringing reservists in that many hon. Members have spoken about and despite the measures in the Bill, a number of which are extremely welcome. The Bill sets out a number of measures to help us recruit more reservists and retain them in their employment. There are measures in clause 44 to deal with additional payments and measures in clause 43 to deal with unfair dismissal. As we have heard from others, little is said about the barriers that some reservists or potential reservists face in squaring their reserve career with potential new employers.

[Mr Havard]

Before my hon. Friend moves on to the particulars of the people being recruited, does he agree that one important consideration is that the figures given relate to ambitions for 2018 and 2020? We are on a journey from here to there. Therefore the sequencing of the number of reserves against the number of regulars may need to be monitored very carefully in order to see whether the ambitions set out can be achieved against the timings set out.

[Stephen Doughty]

I absolutely agree. There are some real questions that must be asked. Other significant changes are going on at the same time as this transition in the composition of our armed forces, such as the return of troops from Afghanistan and Germany, which are major logistical challenges.

I hope that all employers would see the value of having reservists on their staff, quite apart from demonstrating their commitment to wider national purposes, but sadly the reality is that we often see differences. Even when employers recognise that value, there are some genuine challenges, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) outlined, particularly for smaller companies. Obviously, that will be particularly so given the increased number of conditions under which our reserves can be deployed and the length of those deployments.

Therefore, will the Minister assure us that clear measures will be set out to support reservists in handling difficult questions from new or existing employers about the changes proposed by the Bill? The Bill and recent announcements have generated a great deal of media interest, which might have put worries or concerns into the minds of new or existing employers. I want to ensure that reservists and those who wish to join the reserves are properly equipped to deal with those challenges when asked questions by employers.

I understand that the MOD has outlined its intention to gather further evidence of any disadvantages faced by reservists and perhaps take further measures in a future armed forces Bill. The Secretary of State mentioned a website, but I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether there are any plans for a more comprehensive survey of those challenges, particularly over the transitional period in the months ahead. What surveying and information gathering will take place to ensure that there will be a response to any challenge that arises, whether in a particular sector of employment or particular areas of the country?

As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire said, there is evidence of real concern resulting from those comments, as last year the Army Reserve recruitment target was missed by more than 4,000. I want more assurances from Ministers that we will not see a rise in that figure. A worrying survey from the Federation of Small Businesses has shown that a third of employers said that nothing, including the measures set out in the Bill, would encourage them to take on reservists. What assessment have Ministers made of the impact on some reservists—hopefully only a few—who might to choose to leave the service given the changes in the length of deployment and other changes outlined in the Government’s proposals that might not fit their personal circumstances or the expectations they had when they first signed up?

I do not want to paint a bleak picture. I would certainly be willing to speak to any employer in my constituency who is worried about employing a reservist and to talk about the benefits for them and the employee. Nevertheless, we must recognise that there will be a major shift in numbers and expectations. I worry whether the Government might simply be over-reaching themselves, which could leave us with gaps in capability or put stresses and strains on our overall reserve forces that are not sustainable. The Secretary of State tried to brush off that concern earlier by describing it as a potential for “lumpiness” in the transition process, but that might understate the risk. How long does he expect that “lumpiness” to persist and what exact impact does he think it will have on capability? As I said, that comes alongside some major logistical changes resulting from the return of troops from Afghanistan and Germany.

Finally, I will turn briefly to some of the concerns that have been raised about procurement. I share the concerns my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) raised about the potential squeezing out of smaller companies in defence supply chains. I certainly am aware of that from conversations I have had with companies in my constituency, such as BCB International, which provides excellent services and products to UK and other NATO armed forces. It provides a significant majority of camouflage paint and a significant proportion of survival gear, non-lethal devices and blast-protection equipment, and it does some excellent and innovative work. I want to hear more assurances from Ministers that such companies will not lose out as a result of these changes and that they will continue to play a valuable and innovative role in our defence supply chains.

Afghanistan

Dai Havard Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

As I have already said, I cannot at the moment give the details of which units will be in theatre in future. We make no secret about units being deployed—we make routine announcements on which units will be deployed to theatre—but I completely agree with my hon. Friend that a public discussion about which capabilities we will retain and withdraw and about when we will do that would not be helpful.

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

I, too, was able to visit Afghanistan with colleagues from the Defence Committee, as the Secretary of State will know, and we saw much of the progress he has described. However, we identified one particular issue on which I would like him to make an observation: the detention of prisoners at Bastion and the difficulties in transferring them into the Afghan justice system. I understand that two of them are charged with the murder of British troops. Will he comment on how that process is progressing?

[Mr Hammond]

I am happy to update the House on the detention situation, which is an important aspect of our operations. We suspended transfers into the Afghan justice system earlier this year because of concerns about the potential for the mistreatment of prisoners in National Directorate of Security facilities. Over a period of months, a significant number of steps were taken to increase our oversight of what happens to transferred prisoners. We were hoping to recommence transfers in the autumn, but two things happened. First, in a case that is being heard in the High Court in London, an injunction was granted against us, preventing further transfers into the Afghan system without the permission of the High Court. Secondly, new and classified information came to my attention that led me to make a decision to continue as a matter of policy to suspend transfers into the Afghan system. That means that we are holding significant numbers of detainees who are to be charged in the Afghan judicial system but cannot, for reasons of policy and legal impediment, be transferred into the Afghan system at present. We are improving and increasing the size of the detention facility at Bastion to reflect the fact that those people will be held in larger numbers and for longer periods.

Army 2020

Dai Havard Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

And it was under Labour’s watch that the fiscal problem that underlies today’s announcement was allowed to build up. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we can learn lessons from the United States and Australia, which are two examples that the Chief of the General Staff and his staff have looked at carefully in formulating today’s proposals.

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

The memorial service for one of my constituents, Lance Corporal Richard Scanlon, which will take place on 21 July, will be easier now that we are not getting rid of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. I wrote to the Secretary of State about the criterion that was being used. Today’s statement is effectively a work in progress, which is understandable. There is now some limited information in the attached written statement about how the employment model might be taken forward and the discussions about the reserves. However, the argument about saving the Welsh Cavalry was not an argument simply about the Welsh Cavalry; it was an argument about how things looked across the whole of the United Kingdom. This is a United Kingdom issue, but it is also a Navy and an Air Force issue, and at some point I would like to know how the Secretary of State plans to show us how integration will work not only across the Army, but across—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Please resume your seat. Questions must be brief. Hon. Members can see how many—[Interruption.] Order. Hon. Members can see how many of them wish to be called on the statement. I cannot allow it to go until the very end, because we are time limited and there is other business to come. Mr Havard, will you please ask a question?

[Mr Havard]

My question is this. The decision about whether these formations are about need or about money will require further debate in this House, involving a lot of people. How does the Secretary of State intend to proceed?

[Mr Hammond]

It is a pity that the hon. Gentleman did not think of that before. Today’s announcement is about two things: addressing the fiscal necessity of putting our armed forces on a sustainable basis and structuring them to face the challenges of the future, post Afghanistan.

MOD Logistics (Bicester)

Dai Havard Excerpts

Wednesday 18th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[David Wright (Telford) (Lab)]

I am the MP for Telford. Donnington falls within the constituency of the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), but is about 150 yards from the boundary of mine, and many of my constituents work at what I will call the depot at Donnington, mirroring what the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) calls the depot at Bicester. Clearly, he is making a pitch for Bicester, but I argue that Donnington is an ideal location for the work.

It is important that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) has secured this debate. I am interested in the fact that, if further changes are made to how logistics operate in this country, they must be considered on a level playing field. If we are to make decisions about the future location of logistics work, we must use information that is even and level across the sites and easily understandable. We must be able to compare sites properly. I hope that the Minister will confirm that that will be done.

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman responds, I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short.

[Tony Baldry]

I do not think that the Minister or any of us would disagree with that. The point that I am making is that the hon. Gentleman who introduced this debate did so on the basis that systemic failures and abuses of practice were occurring at Bicester. My response is that he has not produced any evidence. Further, if there were any such evidence, I assure him that that it would have been drawn to the attention of management, politicians, the House and me by the trade unions and that it would have been investigated.

I understand, of course, that in the run-up to ministerial decisions about the future of defence logistics, there are some around the country who will have an interest in rubbishing Bicester, but I am sorry that it has been done in such a way. I will come to what I think would have been the correct way to deal with the matter.

[Tony Baldry]

I apologise if I did not refer to the right hon. Gentleman as such. He should not be quite so touchy. What Neil Firth said at that meeting was, as everyone would concede, that thousands of items go out from Bicester each day, and errors are always possible, particularly as priority is set not by Bicester but by the requesting unit.

A little while ago, a constituent of mine, who left Bicester shortly afterwards on voluntary agreement, made allegations not dissimilar to those made by the right hon. Gentleman, relating to boots and one or two other items. He did not assert that there were systemic failures at Bicester, but he thought that occasionally, boots and other things were made more costly than necessary. I immediately took up the matter with Ministers in the Ministry of Defence, and the Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) responded. In fairness, in response to my letter, a full investigation was carried out at Bicester. The Minister for the Armed Forces said, perfectly fairly:

“Every day, consignments and routes are developed to ensure that freight carriage is optimised and the use of commercial hauliers balanced against in-house resources. Of course, from time to time, routing errors do occur, but this must be placed in context. On a daily basis the JSCS”,

joint support chain services,

“handles between 8,000 and 10,000 transactions, of which the large majority are delivered on time and in the most cost-effective way. Indeed, the costs of transport have been reduced by £10 million in the past two years against 2008 operating costs and the level of service improved from a success rate of 80% of transactions completed on time based on 10 working days to a success rate of 95% based on seven working days.”

Suggestions were made about agency staff. The Minister for the Armed Forces said:

“Of course there are occasions when agency staff will be required to supplement existing staff resources, for example to respond to increases in demand and to meet operational needs. In such cases, existing MOD-wide commercial arrangements are used which ensure that agency staff are employed at the most cost-effective rate.”

He went on to conclude:

“JSCS is an operational organisation that exists to meet the often urgent requirements of the armed forces. The organisation, therefore, has to balance these demands against achieving value for money for the taxpayer. The 2009-10 annual report and accounts clearly demonstrate that operating costs are now 28% less than they were six years ago, but that service delivery has significantly improved.”

I suspect that if every public service could show a 28% improvement over six years, we would all be grateful.

There are two issues in respect of Bicester that I should like the Minister to hear. First, I genuinely believe that defence logistics should be consolidated at Bicester, for the reasons that I have said. I also suspect that, as part of that, the private sector will increasingly need to be involved, as it is currently involved, not least when investing in new logistics sheds, warehousing and equipment at Bicester. However, age is an issue. Bicester’s existing work force are loyal and have worked there for a long time, and being civil servants is an important part of their lives. I hope that if changes are made at Bicester, transitional changes will be possible whereby those with civil service status can retain it if new private sector investors and partners start to work more with the MOD on logistics handling, support and delivery. I am sure that that is possible.

I invite the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd to come to Bicester. He is welcome to visit, and to come with me to meet the trade unions of Bicester, so that he can put his allegations and assertions to them and the work force at first hand. I think that he would be interested in their detailed response, but he would also see the huge land footprint at Bicester. It has a lot of surplus space that is not being used as effectively as it might be. I have no idea why, in the first world war, such a huge area of land was taken for those purposes at Bicester. The rumour is that it was to resist zeppelin attacks. That is a matter of history, but we have an enormous amount of space; we are at the heart of the country; and we have excellent rail and road connections.

Rather than an investigation into unfounded allegations about what is said to have gone wrong at Bicester, it would be more helpful to have a review of how to get the maximum potential for the country out of the Bicester estate, both for the defence industries and in terms of releasing surplus land for other commercial and residential use. The potential is considerable.

I do not think that the assertions made by the right hon. Gentleman have any substance. There is no smoking gun. In an operation as large as that at Bicester, things will occasionally go wrong, but I suspect that other logistics operations such as DHL, the Post Office and Amazon are not always perfect. I do not think that the percentage of error is greater in defence logistics than in any other major logistics operation.

To conclude, I return to the first line of the Library briefing for the debate:

“Bicester’s MP has called for the Ministry of Defence to consolidate its UK logistic operations in Bicester.”

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

I call Alison Seabeck. Are you right hon?

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Luff]

To be fair to the hon. Lady, I did not ask. I will check that, but I am sure that they would have been drawn to my attention had they been made. It is a fair question to ask, and I cannot give her a guarantee. There has been no Cabinet Office involvement, though; I assure her of that.

I will not arbitrate on Donnington and Bicester today. I have been to Bicester. I shall go to Donnington in July. I shall be even-handed, entirely, I promise both the hon. Member for Telford (David Wright) and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry). I shall not be arbitrating there. I think that I shall be able to give the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View the reassurance that she wanted on all the fundamental points she made in her speech, because this is a bipartisan issue.

Successive Governments over decades have dealt with problems with logistics, which is often the Cinderella of defence, and to which insufficient political attention is often given. That is one reason why I welcome the debate. It is good that the subject should be exposed in the House, and good to have the opportunity to record some of the remarkable achievements of people who work in logistics, often in adverse circumstances.

I think that I detected in the speech of the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd—if I am wrong I apologise to him straight away—an underlying hostility to the role that the private sector can play in delivering defence outputs more effectively. We, like the previous Government—it is a bipartisan policy—have found that using the private sector appropriately enables significantly better outcomes to be achieved for defence. Many of the things that we are doing in the logistics operation build on decisions made by the previous Government. We understand the role that the private sector can play.

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that no information that it is proper to put in the public domain, within the limits of commercial confidentiality, has been concealed. Detailed information is available, for example, on each and every contractor involved—I think that 17 are on the list—including exactly how much money they are paid and exactly what they do. I have written to members of the Public Accounts Committee with that information. I have the schedule here, and if we have time before the Division in the House is called, I may even read out all 17 names, what the contractors do and how much they were paid in 2010-11. I shall make sure that the information is available to the right hon. Gentleman after the debate.

No information is concealed. Indeed, the National Audit Office rightly goes over logistics regularly, and another NAO report is due out in the fairly near future. If the NAO has not spotted such things as the right hon. Gentleman is concerned about, and all the information is genuinely available, I am frankly suspicious about whether the allegations have any foundation. However, I will double check. Question after question has been answered, and nothing that it would be improper to conceal will be concealed. Some information, as the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View was kind enough to note, sometimes must be kept private for reasons of commercial confidentiality. That is frustrating for politicians and democrats, but sometimes it is important. However, we shall be as open as we possibly can.

I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd and will address some of his points in my speech—I have already done so in part; but I want to explain a little more about logistics commodities and services at Bicester, and the wider operation, to put his remarks in context. The organisation provides remarkable support to the UK armed forces, particularly to those serving on deployed operations, not just in Afghanistan but particularly there. LCS Bicester is one of three main storage and distribution depots for non-explosive stores, operated by Defence Equipment and Support. The other two are LCS Donnington, in Shropshire, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Telford, where I am going in July, and LCS Dulmen, in Germany. The role of those sites is to receive, store, maintain, issue and distribute non-explosive matériel on behalf of the UK armed forces and other Departments.

Last year, the National Audit Office published a report called “The use of information to manage the logistics supply chain”. In that report, the NAO—it is not I, a Minister, saying this, but the NAO—acknowledged the improved performance of the MOD’s supply chain and its effectiveness in supporting our forces in Afghanistan. In particular, the NAO’s report noted that the operational supply chain is more complex than the standard industry supply chain, which is not something that people often acknowledge.

To pick up on the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury, the UK’s delivery performance is comparable with that of commercial operators. We are doing as well as the commercial sector, which is a great tribute to all those involved, and a significant achievement. That is why I am suspicious about the allegations made by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd.

The defence equipment and support logistics commodities and services operating centre, of which MOD Bicester is a part, is key to the successful delivery of those services. The defence inventory is huge, complex and comprehensive. As at 31 December 2011, the gross book value of the inventory, excluding explosive stores, was about £29 billion. That represents 500,000 different line items, covering everything from clothing to medical supplies and engine parts. Those items are distributed to approximately 3,500 sites across the UK and around the world. Up to 8,000 issues are sent every day—some 1.2 million every year—ranging from small washers to aircraft wings. That is indeed a huge and complex operation. Given the sheer volume of items moved by the organisation—I am in no way complacent, because we do not tolerate error, either—it is inevitable that some mistakes will be made.

Turning to one mistake in particular that the right hon. Gentleman has made much of in the past, there is an appropriate saying: a lie is around the world while the truth is getting its boots on. Let us look at those boots once more. An item that should be routinely requested is sometimes marked as urgent by the unit itself; or items may be sent individually when they could be packaged together. That is normally the fault of the requesting unit.

In the specific case of the boots couriered to a unit in Northern Ireland, which the right hon. Gentleman raised at Prime Minister’s questions, that is exactly what happened. The unit used the wrong process to order the boots. It realised the mistake too late. I am not going to allow civil servants to override front-line decisions and say, “We do not think that is urgent. The officers in charge might think it is urgent, but we disagree.” That would not be right. The responsibility lies with the unit to use the appropriate requesting process.

What happened in this instance was a regrettable mistake, which the unit tried to correct too late. It was not corruption; it was not fraud; and it was not improper. It was a straightforward human error. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will not repeat his assertion. I am entirely satisfied that there was no fraud involved at all. The mistake was made by the Army, which it regretted and tried to correct.

I cannot guarantee that such mistakes will not happen again—we are all human beings who have feet of clay and who make mistakes—but I am absolutely confident that this is not a systematic problem. The right hon. Gentleman made that assertion in his speech, but I dissent from that view firmly and absolutely.

LCS Bicester is a well-run operation, which I am sure is also true of Donnington. The restructuring of the former Defence Storage and Distribution Agency—DSDA, of which LCS Bicester was a part—has produced significant savings. The FDSCi—future defence supply chain initiative—report, which followed the DSDA restructuring, was published in November 2009 by the previous Government and presented to the House, and I would be happy to send the right hon. Gentleman a copy. It forms the basis of my remarks today and represents more information in the public domain, which I hope will reassure him.

Between 31 March 2008 and 31 March 2012, the operating costs of DSDA and its defence equipment and support units fell from £285 million to £231 million a year. That represents a reduction of nearly 20% over four years. When calculated on a like-for-like basis, taking into account inflation, the cost of improved service and other exceptional one-off costs, the saving is 26%. That is an impressive achievement for which the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View should take her fair share of credit, on behalf of the previous Government, who initiated some of the changes.

Similarly, the cost of transporting MOD equipment has fallen by 21% over the same five-period period. I repeat that I have the detailed information on the use of companies and couriers that I would be happy to share with the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd. I will resist the temptation to read them all into the record, because it is a long list. I am surprised that he highlighted Palletways in particular. I assure him that there are people on the distribution list who get paid more than Palletways. Again, on a like-for-like basis, allowing for the impact of inflation and so on, the saving on the transport costs is 29%. It is 29% cheaper in real terms, which is a big achievement. A key performance is the average cost per transaction—the processing of an issue of receipt. The equivalent cost has fallen from £103 per transaction for the financial year ending 31 March 2008 to £79 per transaction in the year ending 31 March 2012. That is an increase in efficiency of 23%. Those are good and impressive figures.

Over the same period—I appreciate that this is a good news, bad news story—manpower numbers have reduced by more than 2,100 posts and the service to the customer has significantly improved. The average customer wait time—this is a really impressive statistic—has fallen from about 49 days to four days. That is an important figure, considering that our armed forces are heavily committed in operations in, for example, Afghanistan. I pay an even-handed tribute to both Bicester and Donnington in that respect. The operation of LCS Bicester and the two other main storage and distribution depots is a genuine success story. If there were an hon. Member for a German constituency and if they were present, I would congratulate him or her as well, although storage and distribution represent only one element of the management of our equipment.

We are proud of the spares and equipment availability in operational theatres such as Afghanistan, as it ensures that commanders are not constrained in conducting their missions. The same could be said for the manner in which we supported Operation Ellamy in Libya, which was another success for a logistics operation. Support for such operations must be our first priority.

Nevertheless—this is the scandal to which I alluded in my opening remarks—there is no disputing the fact that the defence inventory is, and has been for many years, too large in both value and volume and that any avoidable delay in reducing it will create many future challenges. We have to deal with the issue. There are a number of reasons for this situation. Many items are bespoke and have been purchased in bulk, based on an estimate of need stretching across several years, even decades in some cases. Other items are purchased with a view to ensuring that sufficient stocks are available to deal with a sudden surge for a short-notice or large-scale military deployment. However, that is far from the whole story.

There is a legacy—I am not making a point about the previous Government—of under-investment in the information systems to track and manage stores. The truth, as I said during my opening remarks, is that logistics is the Cinderella of defence, and that is manifest in this case. It does not seem to be a priority for investment, but it should be. Too often, the Department is unable to locate with confidence what it holds. It thinks and is reasonably sure that it has something, but it just cannot prove it to accounting standards quality when it should be able to. Moreover, it has often held too much just in case something happens.

I visited some of the warehouses in Bicester recently—I met my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury immediately before I saw them—and they are jaw-dropping. Stuff is being held that simply should not be held and it should be disposed of. The £29 billion stock holding is far too high. Too much inventory is stored for too long and at too great a cost to the taxpayer.

This is not just a British problem. Army surplus stores exist around the world. The situation seems endemic to defence, but we must cope with it. The inventory is large and it is growing, and we are determined to tackle it head-on. We have not been idle. The Department is making progress in improving inventory disposal through the stock transition programme, which was set up to meet Treasury targets to reduce inventory holdings in our main storage and distribution depots. We have arrested the rate of growth—it is still growing—in the defence inventory as a result of those disposal measures, and we are committed to bringing purchasing activity under much stricter control.

In December 2010, I announced to the House the introduction of the future logistics information services project, which represents a step-change improvement to the quality of logistics information available to the armed forces. It will ensure the long-term delivery of operationally essential logistics information to both the MOD and industry, and the significant financial efficiencies will contribute to the Government’s strategic deficit reduction programme, without reducing operational capability.

One of the logistics information systems that will be managed under FLIS is the management of the joint deployed inventory, or MJDI—I love these acronyms—which is now up and running and has reached its initial operating capability. MJDI will bring huge improvements, enabling the entire deployed inventory—the inventory that is overseas on service—to be seen on one system. It will encourage better use of stock, which in turn will lead to reduced repeat demands, lower stock levels and saved costs in storage and transport, all generating improved operational performance. Importantly, it will enable operational commanders to make informed decisions based on accurate and timely information.

To give a specific and important example, a four-year Bowman radio equipment asset management improvement programme was introduced in 2010. Since then, we have made good progress and a coherent and auditable inventory baseline has been established. It is not rocket science, but it is hugely important and we are doing it. Process improvement in the way in which the data are captured and managed will in future enable the Department to identify and track assets more effectively. This is really important stuff.

We recognise the importance of having a comprehensive corporate strategy to tackle the myriad complex issues, and have commissioned the development of a strategic plan for the management of the defence inventory. It is intended to deliver the correct conditions to incentivise and mandate improved inventory purchasing and disposal behaviours. We have a lot of attics at the MOD, and they are too full of stuff. We need to get rid of stuff, as well as acquire stuff more thoughtfully. The strategic plan is a significant piece of work and it has just completed phase 1 of its milestone.

The financial savings and efficiencies secured by LCS Bicester and all the storage and distribution sites over the past five years are impressive, but, as I have already said, there is a long way to go if we are to provide the best possible support to military operations and maintain the agreed quality and service to our armed forces.

In response to the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View, in August 2010, I announced that DSDA would renounce its agency status and that a new organisation, the logistics commodities and services operating centre, which brings together the key commodities purchasing, storage and distribution elements of the Department into one organisation, had been created. LCS Bicester is part of the LCS operating centre. The primary role for LCS is to provide support to military operation and force generation by undertaking procurement and inventory management of all non-explosive commodity items, including food, clothing, fuel and medical supplies; the storage and distribution of those commodity items, together with all other non-explosive stock across defence; the disposal of surplus MOD equipment and the operation of the British Forces Post Office.

LCS is currently developing a transformation project, which aims to consider how we can improve further our inventory management and stock control, rationalise current stock holdings—we are trying to thin them down, rather than fatten them up—and improve and rationalise storage infrastructure. That will include releasing surplus for disposal, which will be of interest to the hon. Member for Telford and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury. The project will also seek to improve commodity procurement and logistic processes, and optimise the size of the LCS organisation itself. The storage infrastructure requires investment to improve its condition and to rationalise the numerous dispersed locations.

Should the programme be taken forward—frankly, I expect that it will be—the first step will be to initiate an assessment phase, to explore the alternative delivery models available and whether they represent value for money, which I think addresses one of the questions asked by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View. The work would explore two options for delivering support in the future: industry integration and an in-house developed value for money benchmark. That review will consider all existing facilities. I emphasise that it is far too early to say what the implications will be for individual sites and that no decisions have been made.

In advance of the work at Bicester, however, a planning application for the retained footprint and for the sale and development of surplus land has been submitted to Cherwell district council, to prepare the way to the approach to defence logistics and to secure the value of the surplus land.

We must not forget that it is the people who work at LCS Bicester, Donnington and the other sites associated with it who make logistics operations succeed. The efficiencies and improvements that have been implemented at those sites are testimony to the quality of the people whom we employ, and I am grateful to them for what they do. I have met many of them and know that they are focused on providing the best support to our service personnel deployed on operations. I fully understand the vital role that they play. They are rightly proud of what they have achieved, and they continue to achieve a great deal.

I am enormously grateful for the commitment and dedication of all those who work to ensure that our armed forces receive the best logistics support possible. It is our job to ensure that the right framework is in place to make it work. That challenge has been ducked for too long—for decades, not just in recent years. Indeed, arguably we are addressing decades of neglect in these issues, and it will take time to deal with them. The change will come, but it will come slowly and incrementally. I am determined that we should improve the way that we do things.

If the criticisms made by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd contain any significant truth, I will, of course, want to address them very honestly and frankly. We need to do the best we possibly can to ensure that our armed forces can fight and defend our freedom as effectively as they have done in the past.

[Mr Dai Havard (in the Chair)]

I suspend the sitting until 4 o’clock or until such time as we can reconvene if Divisions take place in the House.

Armed Forces Personnel

Dai Havard Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dai Havard (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), my colleague on the Defence Committee, and his comments about the poppy.

The debate today is about armed forces personnel, so I shall talk about them and not necessarily about Parliament. It is interesting to find out who the people who currently serve are. Over a number of years, through the armed forces parliamentary scheme, I have had the opportunity to engage with our forces in theatre and out of theatre. One finds that a fantastic variety of people make up our armed forces. They have a fantastic array of skills, some of which we bothered to give them and some of which they come along with in the first place.

I remember being in Kabul doing some canvassing for the presidential elections. I was masquerading as a soldier at the time and it was not for any particular candidate; it was about the process of presidential elections. I said, “Come on, boys. We had better go over here. We’ll go to the caff and have a word.” They said, “You’re good at this, aren’t you?” I said, “Well, one thing I ought to be reasonably good at is canvassing. You do the soldiering, I’ll do the canvassing.” We were walking up the street when all of a sudden the Fijian flanker I had been given to look after me started to chat to the locals. I said to him, “How come you speak the local language?” He said, “I’m Fijian. I went to school with people who speak Urdu, and I can get along with these people.” I asked, “You’re not an interpreter, then?” “No,” he said. “I just get on and do it.”

The Gurkhas seem to have some Babel fish in their ear. Wherever one goes with them, they are always in some way or another able to communicate with the local people. When I was in the Balkans, there were Chileans and people from the area with a Gurkha in the middle. For some reason or another, he was able to make those people understand one another in some fashion. In the Balkans, as the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) will know, the Welsh also serve. Our communications fell down. The only reason we could speak to one another was that there were two Welsh boys with mobile phones and they could speak Welsh to one another, just like the wind talkers did for the Americans in south-east Asia.

There is a fantastic array of skills among our armed forces, but we have to equip them as well. They come with these skills by default and we use them, but we must not abuse them. One of the things that is missing from the debate is how we enable them to do the things we want them to do. I was in Iraq and the place was jumping, as it usually was when we went to Iraq. I was talking to an American, who said to me, “See, the difference is that we train warriors. They go forward—blitzkrieg—they can fight anything in front of them, but you train soldiers. Once the fighting is done, they take their helmet off, put the beret on and start to engage with people. They are multi-skilled, so it’s different. I don’t know what you do, but you train different people.”

That does not come about by accident. We must equip our armed forces and enable them. If, as the Minister said, we need to understand them, then we need to engage with them. I would recommend any Member to use the facilities of the armed forces parliamentary scheme to get under the wire and go and live in a tent or a ditch with those people for two or three days. Very often it will be, “And another thing—” so the Member will soon find out who they are.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I slept in a tent with my hon. Friend in Iraq when I served on the Defence Committee. Does he recognise that whenever we went anywhere, we always seemed to meet someone who was from Merthyr Tydfil?

[Mr Havard]

The “Taffia” is at work. That is true. At the local field hospital at Camp Bastion when we visited, Andy Morris, who is now Major Morris, was there as a paramedic. These are the people who jump in the back of helicopters and bring people out. He is a reservist, not a regular. There is a real debate to be had about what the balance of forces is going to be. The report by the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) is seminal. A decision will have to be made about the balance between regulars and reserves. We do not want to cheapen their capacity or their labour. We need to maintain and improve that quality. We must not make the mistake of using it as a way of cheapening the price, rather than improving the value.

The moral component is important. We heard reference earlier to war memorials. We all have the problem. I would like to find the bandit who nicked the bayonet off the Aberfan war memorial. We probably know who he is and where he lives, and we will get it back, but that is not the point. It is about respect. Tomorrow I will be in Rhymney comprehensive school, laying a wreath at the school at its memorial with the children. I will be visiting the cadets and the reserves at Maindy. We must engage with the people.

I do not have a big poppy. Perhaps the size of the poppy is important; I do not know. I have a 90th anniversary badge, given to me by the British Legion in Dowlais. There is a whole community involved. The social and economic impact that the Ministry of Defence has in all our communities is huge. We need to recognise that in deploying the resources that we have, because we also ask people to deploy.

Let me say a little about some of the things that we are discussing on the Defence Committee and the changes that are being made. Reference has been made to how it is possible to divide communities, as well as bringing them together. We can say that armed forces personnel have special interests, and therefore should have special services. By doing the right thing, we can inadvertently do something else and create divisions. Be careful that there is not a problem with consistency, rather than uniformity, in the application of these services across the United Kingdom. The right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) mentioned that earlier, and the same applies to Wales. The National Assembly for Wales yesterday published a document about what it will do to improve services for veterans.

The organisation of the health service will be different, because it is very problematic, as is housing and the rest of it. There is a variable geography and the operational delivery of services varies between Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England, but the Ministry of Defence must understand that the covenant is a UK document that will apply to service personnel wherever they are in the UK. If it does not have some consistency of application, it will get it wrong. That is a real problem it needs to grapple with, and I hope that we can help.

The Defence Committee—perhaps I am giving away secrets—plans to produce a report on housing in the same way as we produced reports on veterans and casualties. As my friend the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire said, the Committee’s work is to bring those matters to Parliament, because it is a servant of the House and our work should be debated here. Frankly, it is a disgrace that the House has not had a proper debate on the matter in more than 12 months. However well meaning Front Benchers have been in today’s debate, they have their political knockabout and absorb the time and the way the debate is conducted is not in the hands of Back Benchers. I know that the Backbench Business Committee has become some sort of petitions committee by default, but I appeal to it to provide time for the House to debate the work the Committee has been doing and allow Back Benchers to say what they want to say beyond the direct control of the Executive, rather than by any other process.

I would like to say one more thing about understanding people. We deploy the armed forces, so we need to protect them. One of the current debates about respect relates to people’s respect for how they are deployed and what we send them to do. The armed forces are sometimes uncertain about their legal and moral status, and if we are not careful, that will cause difficulties for the operational capacity to do things on the ground. It is known in the trade to those of us who discuss these things as the “lawfare-warfare” debate; is it legal, but is it also morally defensible? If we want respect and legitimisation, we must not only enable and provide for those people, but give them and the community on whose behalf they work some certainty that they are being properly deployed to do things that they feel comfortable being deployed to do.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

The morality of war is very well set out in the Geneva convention. As long as our officers and soldiers put the convention at the front of all their actions, they will not go far wrong.

[Mr Havard]

I agree that the Geneva convention sets out an important architecture, but let me give an example to illustrate my point. We were once running an internment camp—not a detention facility—in Iraq because that is what was required. That was legitimate and part of the UN mandate. It was legitimised, but it had to be reviewed from time to time and the authority to run it had to be agreed with the new Iraqi Government following an exchange of letters and all the things that go with UN activities. Otherwise, our military personnel, from Colchester and elsewhere, who were running the camp, which was not anything like Guantanamo Bay, needed to know that they were secure in what they were doing. They now serve alongside others, more often than not in coalition.

The Americans are not signatories to the International Criminal Court, but the United Kingdom is. Often there are people on the ground in a foreign place with some sort of architecture of legitimacy between the Government who have asked them to go, or the United Nations, and individually they may well find that domestic and international law are different from one another. That issue needs to be considered. At the moment we put in place mechanisms that we believe protect our individuals who are on the ground, but they are citizens serving abroad. There is a relationship between international and domestic law that we need to be very careful about, and the subject will need debate, because I see operational service personnel second-guessing their decisions. Rather than doing what they would normally do, they send it back up just to make sure. The window of opportunity is gone.

I could give a practical example of that relating to the current problem of piracy in the Gulf, but I am not allowed to. The person concerned did not do wrong; they did right in order to protect themselves. What we must have in place is a decision-making process that enables us to take all those things into account with the speed that they need to be taken into account so that the decision-making process does not disadvantage the individual when they do the job that they are required to do, not later after some gang of lawyers have assessed whether it is right or wrong. We must celebrate all those who have served, all those who do serve, and all those who will serve, but we must be careful how we make organisational changes to do the things we wish to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I start by declaring my interest as a service pensioner and a current member of the reserve forces.

It is a great pleasure to follow four current and past members of the Defence Committee. I wish to develop a point that the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard) made in his extremely considered contribution, which is about the universality of the military covenant. I share his concern that we may forget that it is not a local covenant, or an English, Scottish, Northern Irish or Welsh one, but a UK covenant. In preparing my report “Fighting Fit”, on veterans’ mental health, and more recently a report on military amputees, I have been extremely aware of the need to ensure that the complexity of the devolved arrangement is worked through. I have been buoyed up by the understanding of that necessity among officials and Ministers throughout the UK. There is a strong understanding that we must ensure that the covenant is applied throughout the UK and in equal part. From my experience of preparing that work, I am confident that it will.

[Mr Havard]

I recognise what the hon. Gentleman says and congratulate him on behalf of all hon. Members on his work on both those matters. I hope he is correct that a consistent approach will be maintained over time. My concern is that the process needs to endure not just for the next five years or the next comprehensive spending review period, but for a long time into the future.

[Dr Murrison]

I entirely agree.

Last week, with a number of hon. Members, I rattled a tin for the Royal British Legion in Westminster tube station. That is always an enjoyable occasion and it is particularly pleasurable to importune colleagues as they come through the barriers, and to fix one’s gimlet eyes on precisely what goes into the tin—indeed, it restores one’s faith in politicians. Perhaps I should not name names, but without exception, they were all extremely generous. Such occasions are well appreciated in the House and I recommend that all hon. Members participate in future.

Like many right hon. and hon. Members, I shall pay my tribute this weekend—in my case at the war memorials in Trowbridge and Warminster. In each of the 10 years that I have been the local MP, I have noticed an increase in the number of people who wish to pay their respects. I was asked this morning on my local radio, which my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) knows well, why we should wear a poppy. One point made earlier was that there is an imperative pressure to wear one. The truth is that it is an individual choice—nobody should feel obliged to wear any badge or mark of commemoration. However, purely anecdotally, it seems that more and more people are choosing to wear a poppy, and they are sometimes people whom we would not necessarily expect to do so. They do so not out of a sense of militarism, nationalism or patriotism, but out of a sense that we need to mark the sacrifice and contribution of people who have fought in conflicts. We might or might not agree with those conflicts, but nevertheless, those who fought in them have shown the best of us in their soldierly conduct. That is why people choose to wear a poppy and to be so generous to the poppy appeal and the Royal British Legion.

I look forward to the armed forces covenant interim report later this year. I welcome very much the evolution of the external reference group into the covenant reference group, and particularly Ministers’ insistence that it should be independent. The evolution of the Armed Forces Act 2011 was interesting—as has been said, the Royal British Legion certainly made a big contribution to it. I do not entirely share the perspective of the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), but nevertheless, the Royal British Legion’s contribution was an important one. I look forward to seeing both the interim report and the covenant reference group’s response—its independence is extremely important.

I welcome Professor Hew Strachan’s work and the report of his independent taskforce, which was published in December last year. I hope we have an opportunity to discuss progress on the points in the interim report that have been accepted by the Government when it is debated later this year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank those Members who were responsible for securing this debate and, in particular, the Prime Minister.

It appears to me that more poppies have been worn this year than in previous years, and I find that heartening. That is certainly not down to “The X Factor” and the sparkly bright poppies that are worn by those who appear on television, but more young people are wearing poppies and it does my heart good to see that. Reference was made earlier to the Royal British Legion and there being, perhaps, an age barrier. It might have been the case that young people did not respond very much to past conflicts such as the first and second world wars and Aden, but the young people of today clearly do relate to the Royal British Legion. Those who are serving in Afghanistan and have served in Iraq recently are of their age group.

I can only imagine how good it must be for those who have family members serving, or those who have served themselves, to see younger and older people alike wearing the poppy with pride. That is a show of support for the services, and it signals that at this time of year the nation remembers those who have served their country and those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

I recently had the privilege of attending a coffee morning in a local town hall to raise funds for the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association. That event is held annually and it is a practical expression of support for the troops. By holding it, the people of Ards and Strangford have contributed more than £10,000. Everyone who entered the hall and donated, and had their coffee or tea and sticky bun—they were all home-made, I understand—did so for the same reason: to show support and express thanks to the troops. The window of the local wool shop in Newtownards carries an advertisement telling people that the store will contribute free wool to knit hats for our serving troops, and that it will send them out to them, too. Hundreds have already been knitted and sent out. In all our local shopping centres there are dedicated Royal British Legion personnel standing at poppy stalls. I see that the vast majority of people in the town are supportive of our troops, and I now have an opportunity to speak for them in Parliament.

The latest figures show that Army recruitment is up across the board in Northern Ireland. That is noteworthy. In these times of economic uncertainty, people are having to look outside their normal comfort zone to find work, and it appears that the Army is filling a gap. There has been a rise in recruitment everywhere but particularly in what would have been nationalist areas. That speaks volumes about how members of the younger generation see themselves today.

When Newtownards celebrated the homecoming of the Irish Guards recently, one soldier remarked that the troops had been told that they could not parade through the streets of Belfast. They were bemused by that as many would have been returning to their home town. I was told that religion was not an issue between the troops, and I knew that would be the case anyway. When people put on the British uniform and serve in the British Army, they are our brothers—or sisters—full stop.

As these soldiers marched, there was a real buzz about the town, with thousands of people lining the streets to say thanks and to cheer on those who are out there fighting for Queen and country. For many of those involved it was a homecoming as they come from Ards. The Ards and the Strangford area has the largest Irish Guards association in the whole of Northern Ireland and, indeed, the United Kingdom. One’s heart could not fail to be touched by the mothers who were crying and smiling at the same time. It is not impossible to do that, as I very clearly witnessed. Among the familiar faces that we all saw, I also met some young men who had been injured on the battlefields in Afghanistan. Despite Northern Ireland having a population of only 1.8 million, 20% of all serving personnel—soldiers and those in the Air Force or the Royal Navy—hail from my own beautiful Northern Ireland. We have every right to be proud.

The service at St Mark’s before the parade was poignant and touching, as we sat with the soldiers and heard them pray for each other. They also prayed for the Afghans that they had met. The hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard) mentioned the special qualities of the British soldier and they are just that. The British soldier does his job in uniform and he very clearly does his job afterwards as well.

[Mr Havard]

In January I had the privilege of meeting members of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in Nad Ali, where I witnessed them starting the new initiative of local policing. The reason they could do that was because of the very qualities that the hon. Gentleman talks about. They could speak to the local people about their agricultural development in a way that they could relate to, and they were doing fantastic work in terms of not only security, but of building consent for a new Afghanistan.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that contribution. He gave me his card and he said, “You can speak in English or in Welsh.” As an Ulster Scot, I choose English. I was not sure about the other bit, because I would probably have got it wrong.

The number of people lining the street from St Mark’s through the town was incredible, and the streets were glowing with pride as crisp Union flags flew from every shop and every house, and were in the hands of many of the people who were there. There was a sense of pride and honour, which permeated through gender, age and religious barriers. All were united when they considered our troops and what they had done, and thanked them for it. That raises the question that we have the opportunity to speak about today: how can this House be more supportive?

As we come to Remembrance Sunday, we have a timely reminder of the sacrifices that allow us to stand in this Chamber and debate any topic—we are here because of what has happened before. My childhood favourite, Winston Churchill, stood in this House debating the merits of war and the need for war in eloquent fashion on numerous occasions, as the history books show. I do not do that today; today, I stand for our troops and say, “Recruit them, train them, equip them, feed them, speak with them, help them and support them.” For me, and I believe for everyone in this House, “We will remember them” is not a phrase but a promise.

We have had the opportunity to go to Afghanistan on a number of occasions through the armed forces parliamentary scheme, of which the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney is a member, as indeed are other Members here today. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), the Secretary of State for Scotland and Lord Maginnis were part of the group that went out there in March. Our troops need help on the battlefield, and we were much impressed by Camp Bastion and the medical facilities that were available. People there say, “If you ever get injured, make sure it is in Afghanistan and close to Camp Bastion, because you would not get the same medical help if you were involved in a traffic accident back home.” That is what we were seeing. On that occasion, two helicopters arrived—this was not planned, it was just the way things happened—with some American casualties and we witnessed at first hand the injured being taken into the medical centre and saw clearly the good work that is being done. I commend the staff for that.

The shadow Minister said that wherever we go in the world there will always be a soldier from Merthyr Tydfil. Wherever we go in the world there will always be a soldier from Strangford too. I say that because when I was in Afghanistan I had the opportunity to meet a young lady in the military police whose father I had helped with a planning application and whose mother I had helped with other issues. I also met a sergeant-major in the Irish Guards, who was from outside my constituency but whose uncle and aunt were personal friends of mine. I also had a seat at the Royal Irish barbecue there—for the record, it was a dry barbecue in Afghanistan, as there is no drink there. It was the first time that I can recall being with an Irish regiment at a barbecue where it was all water and lemonade. I sat across the table from a young guy who said, “Jim, it’s nice to see you here. I voted for you.” A guy in Afghanistan is able to tell me that he voted for me. I said, “That’s the reason I’m your MP—because you voted for me.” The service personnel asked me as a parliamentarian, and I believe they have asked every Member of Parliament, to be their spokesperson in the House, and I want to speak for them.

I also had the chance to be on a five-day exercise with the 1st Mercian Regiment in Catterick in north Yorkshire, which gave me the opportunity to speak to the troops and hear what they wanted. They are looking for security of their pensions and for continuity of service. They want the uncertainty of where they are posted to be sorted out quickly. They are looking for their housing issues to be resolved, for confirmation of their jobs and training, and for contact with their family. The Minister spoke earlier about wi-fi and the phone system. We witnessed that clearly in Afghanistan. The voice down the phone was their wife, their mum, their dad or their family and friends, and we noticed how important that was for the troops. We also witnessed the fact that they need a great deal of support.

The troops mentioned an issue which I hope the Minister will address in his closing remarks. They told us that they get 14 days leave, and sometimes on their way home they may find that they have to spend two days sitting in Cyprus, for example. That is two days lost out of their 14 days.