Defence Review

Earl Howe Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Sterling on securing this important debate. As the debate has proved, his Question undoubtedly reflects the considerable interest in the subject across the House, and rightly so.

Before I address my noble friend’s Question directly, I shall set the context. As noble Lords are aware, the National Security Adviser has been leading work on a national security capability review since July. It has been an important opportunity for the Government to conduct a thorough analysis of intensifying threats to national security and to consider their impact on the implementation of the 2015 national security strategy and strategic defence and security review.

Defence has played a major role in the capability review, contributing a huge amount of work. There can be no doubt that we will continue to build on elements of that good work after the review has drawn to a close, further exploring the opportunities for modernisation that have been identified.

However, it is important that I do not pre-empt the completion of the capability review. Ministers will discuss its conclusions in due course and will consider what needs to happen next. Precisely because of that, and because we believe that the last SDSR is a sound basis for the work that we are doing, I am sure that my noble friend will appreciate that I cannot stand here today and commit the Government to conducting a full defence review.

The substance of my noble friend’s Question is the capability of the Armed Forces to meet global defence needs, as he well articulated. Those defence needs, and indeed our wider foreign policy, begin with the three national security objectives set out in the 2015 national security strategy: protect our people, project our global influence and promote our prosperity. The Armed Forces, and the wider defence enterprise, make an expert and admirable contribution to the fulfilment of those objectives. That will not change.

The protection of our people is clearly at the very heart of what defence exists to do. At home, the Armed Forces contribute to the resilience of the UK. They support the police under Operation Temperer and hold 1,200 troops at very high readiness under government winter preparedness plans. Their outstanding support to UK overseas territories in the Caribbean last year, following Hurricane Irma, offers a remarkable example of their capabilities in this latter regard. In UK airspace and territorial waters, the Armed Forces keep a constant guard against threats. The recent images of HMS “Westminster” shadowing Russian warships through the Strait of Dover will be familiar.

Beyond our borders, the Armed Forces protect us through their potent deterrent effect. We tend to think first of the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent, and more recently of our developing carrier strike capability. But every force element in our Armed Forces makes a vital contribution to our ability to deter. Wherever they are deployed, whatever task they are undertaking, the Armed Forces’ world-leading professionalism and skill send a powerful deterrent message to any would-be adversaries, and allow us to project our global influence.

In the latter context, our troops are building the capacity of our allies and partners across the world. In Iraq, the UK Armed Forces have helped to train over 60,000 Iraqi security forces. In Ukraine, the UK has provided defensive training in medical skills, logistics and counter-IED. We are training the Libyan coast guard, the Afghan security forces and the Nigerian armed forces, among very many more examples. Of course, the UK’s contribution to NATO and the UN reinforces international security and the multilateral institutions by which it is upheld. The UK is leading the NATO enhanced forward presence battle group in Estonia, commanding a significant proportion of NATO’s standing naval forces, and as my noble friend Lady Anelay reminded us, contributing to the UN Missions in South Sudan and Somalia.

Finally, defence makes a very large contribution to the prosperity of the UK. In December, the Secretary of State announced a huge £6 billion contract with Qatar for 24 Typhoon aircraft, a huge boost to UK aviation. Equally, contracts emerging from the national shipbuilding strategy—for the Type 26 and, as my noble friend Lady Wilcox rightly mentioned, the Type 31e—support thousands of UK jobs and hundreds of UK suppliers, as does the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle programme. The defence industrial policy was published in December. It sets out measures to help the UK defence sector to thrive on the global stage, including by supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, reinforcing critical skills and training, and increasing investment in defence innovation. I encourage noble Lords to seek it out.

These are our global defence needs. It is clear that the Armed Forces are meeting them. But changes in the global strategic context require changes in the way we conduct the business of defence and security. I have spoken in recent debates about increasing threats faced by the UK and its allies. I do not propose to repeat myself—I think we all agree that we have entered a period of sharply increased complexity and risk. The boundaries between competition, confrontation and conflict are becoming blurred, and the use of military and non-military capabilities is being blended. Our adversaries are investing heavily in traditional capabilities and in non-traditional tools, such as cyber and subversion. They are taking advantage of the proliferation of cheap yet sophisticated technology to exploit our existing vulnerabilities and to try to create new ones.

I will need to write to a number of noble Lords to give full answers to the questions put to me, but let me address at least some. First, there is the perennial question of the defence budget. Of course we must provide defence with sufficient resources to meet the country’s needs. But passionate as we may be about defence, we must do the same for health and social care, for education, for welfare and for civil infrastructure. Balancing those competing demands is the difficult business of government. I can, however, assure the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and my noble friend Lord Trenchard that the defence budget is rising in real terms: £35 billion last year, £36 billion this year, £37 billion next year and £38 billion the year after that.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, raised the subject of resilience. The need to maintain resilience—the ability to absorb the losses that you may suffer in theatre—is of course one that we fully recognise. I assure him that, as ever, it informs all deliberations on the structure of the UK’s Armed Forces as we go forward.

In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, in particular, the purpose of the NSCR is precisely to ensure that we have the right capabilities for the intensifying threats that we face, but also that we deliver those capabilities in the most appropriate ways.

The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, raised the important issue of cyber. He will know that the National Cyber Security Strategy was published in the summer of 2016. It was largely welcomed at the time. It is being delivered through £1.9 billion of investment in the national cybersecurity programme. Investment from that programme is helping the MoD to deliver the new cybersecurity operating capability, and a defence cyber school will open this year. GCHQ and the MoD are working in partnership to deliver the national offensive cyber programme, so that we really do have a world-class offensive cyber capability.

My noble friend Lord Freeman spoke about supporting the aircraft carriers and asked how we would maintain both carriers and maintain worldwide reach. I assure him that operating both aircraft carriers is affordable. Work is being conducted as we speak to plan the most effective and coherent way to operate the capability.

In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lee, who asked me about the propulsion systems on the Type 45, I can reassure him, I hope, in part, that Project Napier is addressing the reliability and resilience issues in the Type 45 destroyers. It is a programme that is progressing well and, if I may, I will write to him with further details.

We cannot and we will not allow the UK’s long-held military edge to be eroded, but maintaining our ability to meet those global defence needs and contribute to the national security objectives does not mean maintaining the status quo for our Armed Forces. It means upholding a long tradition of British innovation, harnessing new technologies and techniques. It means reinvigorating and reinforcing NATO, which maintains the bedrock of UK defence. It may also mean reprioritising how we allocate our resources to emphasise the most effective capabilities for the world in which we operate. We must consider the new threats that we face and the new opportunities for modernisation available to us. As the NSCR draws to a close, defence will continue to ask itself those questions and to build on the firm foundations that the review has laid down.