Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Earl of Cork and Orrery Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Cork and Orrery (CB)]

My Lords, in contrast to the large number of qualifications and interests which many noble Lords have professed, I can only profess to having been a Cold War submarine commander, but I have the interests of the senior service very much at heart. I thank the Minister for this debate, which has given us the opportunity to revisit and examine the entire defence area. We have heard the challenges to the rules-based order listed by many. They include, among others that have perhaps not been listed, famine of both food and water, nuclear proliferation and, perhaps we should say, even the new US regime.

In times of peace, military expenditure tends to be the Cinderella of government spending. Large parts of the population see it as neither necessary nor desirable, and it falls to Parliament to persuade the voting public to accept spending on defence when so many other areas command their attention. History tells us that although we are seldom fully prepared for conflict when it arises, we occasionally get it right. Henry VIII regularly ran out of money to maintain his forces; indeed, he began wars only when he had received a new injection of cash. Elizabeth I’s expenditure on warfare was remarkably modest, but it cost the King of Spain two-thirds of the entire revenues of the Spanish Empire in 1585 to build the Spanish Armada. Note that he started three years before the date on which the fleet was to set sail.

Between 1690 and 1815 Britain was involved in a semi-continuous global struggle, generally against France and Spain. In this period, spending on the Royal Navy consumed the largest share of government revenues, with the results that we all learned about in school. I am of course assuming that most of us come from an era when such matters as Napoleonic history and the Industrial Revolution still formed a part of the history curriculum. In 1814, the last year of the Napoleonic wars, the British national budget stood at £66 million, of which £50 million was spent on the war. The Navy spent £10 million, but Trafalgar was behind it; the Army, pre-Waterloo, spent £40 million; and another £10 million was spent on mercenaries from Austria and Prussia.

Post 1815, and during the 100 years or so of the Pax Britannica, we were probably the most confident country on the planet—confidence has been mentioned in several contexts. The peace was substantially maintained by the large but increasingly outdated Royal Navy. Defence expenditure fell steadily as a percentage of GDP, partly because of the vast rise in GDP itself during the 19th century, but by 1900 it stood at just under 4%. The arrival of Admiral Jackie Fisher as First Sea Lord in 1904 saw a complete change in defence thinking. Fisher was convinced that war with Germany was inevitable, and set about modernising the Navy and preparing it for war with enormous enthusiasm. He retired for the first time in 1911, with the job done so effectively that defence spending, at 3% of GDP, was lower than when he had arrived, due to the massive efficiencies and savings that he had been able to make while completely renewing the battleship fleet.

Fisher had the public on his side. He was such a popular figure that, as he bullied Parliament into supporting his new building programmes, the public coined the phrase, “We want eight, and we won’t wait”, referring to yet another class of Dreadnoughts. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the First World War as probably the only military arm in Europe ready for the conflict, and defence spending at 3.15% of GDP. There is a magic quality to this figure of three; it crops up time and again. From 1920 to 1935 it remained fairly steady at around 3%, before rearmament began in 1936. The arguments of Churchill and others surrounding that process do not need rehearsing in your Lordships’ House; suffice to say that they were highly controversial at the time. I apologise to your Lordships for reciting all this history, but I hope my point is clear: we ignore the lessons of the past at our peril. The visionary Fisher managed to revitalise the Navy within 10 years—but it took him 10 years, in an age far less technologically advanced than today. The equally visionary Churchill managed to get the ball rolling in 1936, although we were far from ready when the war started.

In more recent times, we entered the Cold War in the 1950s with defence expenditure at 6% of GDP, and it was still at 4% by the early 1990s. Since then, the so-called Cold War dividend has had the psychological effect of lulling the country into a false sense of security, which is now, 25 years on, starkly apparent. Other speakers have detailed, and no doubt still more will do so, the effects of the obvious lack of “mass”—that is, numbers—manpower shortages, the reduction in the procurement for stocks of weapons and equipment, and the scrapping of useful equipment because its maintenance or manning cannot be funded.

My principal point is that we must start to think the hitherto unthinkable of casting aside some of the shibboleths of 21st-century expectations and politics. Today, real spending as a percentage of GDP, in figures that are not widely understood by the public, includes the following figures: pensions at 8%, health at 7.4% and welfare at 6%. Add all those together and you get one-quarter of our entire GDP. Education gets 4.4% but defence gets 1.76% for pure defence spending and 0.25% for other things that have been creatively accounted into the defence calculation.

We simply do not have 10 years, or even three, to prepare for the next conflict that may be forced upon us. Despite the rapid advance of technologies, development times have lengthened. Fisher built “Dreadnought”, the first of a new type of battleship, in a year. The latest “Dreadnought”, the first of the successor class submarines, will probably take 15 years. It took 10 years from project start to launch of the first Daring class destroyer. The Type 26 frigate project began in 2010 and the first vessel has yet to be ordered. The numbers of both these projects have been halved since inception. The Type 31 frigate—perhaps you could call it the other half of the Type 26—is still a figment of the collective imagination. I could start on the Astute class submarine programme, but embarrassment for my old service forbids further comment.

The elephant in the room is clearly social spending in all its forms. While most would agree that such spending is only right and proper, I argue that the balance has been dangerously upset by the post-Cold War lull in military need. I also argue that the 2015 SDSR has quite possibly already reached its sell-by date, and that another serious look needs to be taken at our defence needs rather than looking through the other end of the telescope—or periscope—at what we can afford when all the other budgetary pressures have been contained. The SDSR addresses development but fails to address personnel recruitment and retention to any great extent. To quote the Secretary of State for Defence:

“Nothing is more important than defending our country and protecting our people”.


I offer another quotation, which I think came from the Prime Minister:

“The first duty of the Government is the defence of the people”.


In conclusion, I point out that while we aim to spend 2% of GDP on defence, Russia spends 5.4%, the US only 2.3%—but of course from a vastly higher GDP base—China 1.9% and Saudi Arabia a huge 13.7%. I have a final question for the Minister, which has already been asked: what consideration has been given to removing the costs of building, maintaining and operating the strategic deterrent from the defence budget to its own separate vote?

Other than all of that, the main issue that seems to come across from noble Lords’ speeches is morale and recruitment—the hollowing-out of services personnel. Equipment can and will be built and budgets will provide for that, but we have to create an attractive enough platform for recruitment to bring enough people into the services and benefit them in order to create the kind of task forces and numbers that we have been talking about.