Defence

Debate between Lord Spellar and Martin Docherty-Hughes

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I am mindful of your dictum, Mr Deputy Speaker.

May I start by following up on the comments of the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) about Boeing, because it is about not just getting the contract right in the first place, but enforcing it afterwards? Even when Boeing and other companies have given assurances and agreements, they have not been held to account for them. I fear that the MOD will find a similar problem relating to the hack of the accounts of our personnel, in that the Treasury adamantly, stubbornly refuses to take past performance into account when assessing future contracts. That has to change. For heaven’s sake, I thought that one of the supposed advantages of Brexit was that we could take back control. By the way, our European competitors have been able to do that within the confines of the EU, but we have an ideological battle within the civil service, and Ministers have to take it on across Departments.

May I also apologise for—as is quite obvious—having a cold? It was acquired in good service, as the results in the west midlands last week showed, which colleagues will have noticed. I was hoping that the Minister for Armed Forces, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) would respond to the debate and that he would at least acknowledge, if not welcome, that the council for the home of the British Army is now run by the Labour party, with its excellent leader, Keith Dibble. There is a lesson in that for us. Keith Dibble has been on the moderate side of the Labour party—pro-defence, pro-good sense—for many years and has built up a Labour group that can actually relate to the good people of Aldershot and Farnborough. That is also true in the wider sense for the Labour party. At certain stages in our history, Labour in opposition has been less sound on defence. That is not just a correlation, but a causal factor. Indeed, when Labour is sound on defence, as we always have been in government, the British people have confidence.

This year, we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of NATO—an organisation set up by the Attlee-Bevin Government, who also developed Britain’s nuclear capability. Throughout the changes of Government over that period, we have had a continuous at-sea deterrent. I have to say that Conservative performance has quite often not matched up to their rhetoric—we heard quite a lot of rhetoric from the Front Bench today.

At the end of the cold war, we had “Options for Change”: taking the peace dividend, cutting recruitment, running down equipment, and withdrawing our forces and armour from Germany. It looks as though we are going to have to remedy that at great cost.

We spoke earlier about the nuclear submarine renewal. In March 2007, under the Labour Government, this Parliament agreed to a motion moved by my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Dame Margaret Beckett) on the principle of the renewal of the nuclear deterrent submarine programme, with the gateway stage to be further decided between 2012 to 2014. At that stage, David Cameron declined to do that, having allowed himself to be blackmailed—I say he allowed himself, because I do not think the Conservatives would have broken up the Government and given up their jobs, as California was not beckoning at that stage. We have therefore suffered considerable extra cost. Workforce teams have been broken up, the rhythm of submarine manufacture up in Barrow has been lost, and there has been an effect on the crews and our equipment. That is a real worry.

I also have a worry about our current submarine programme. I absolutely agree with the principle of the nuclear national endeavour, but I am very concerned about some of the detail. On the nuclear skills taskforce, the Government say:

“we are investing to increase our intake of nuclear sector graduates to around 2,000 in the next four years”.

When I posed a question to the Department for Education, I was told that there are 65 undergraduate enrolments in nuclear and particle physics courses and 190 postgraduate enrolments—a total of 255. I do not think they will all go into the defence industry, and I have found it hard to get data about how many of them are actually British citizens. Given the security requirements—if those who issue security clearance can get their act together—the Government are seriously underestimating the need to expand those courses and prioritise British students in our nuclear national endeavour programme.

On expenditure, I know from previous debates and from the Defence Committee that many Government Back Benchers agree with the critique and recognise that the dead hand of the deadbeat Treasury—not just recently but over the past 100 years or so—has seriously undermined Britain’s defence capability time and again. In the inter-war period, there was the infamous 10-year rule—defence expenditure was based on the assumption that there would not be a war for 10 years—and in 1915 there was the shell crisis.

It concerns me that, while history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Back in July 2021, the Defence Committee had General Hodges, the head of the United States Army Europe, giving evidence. He reported on the 3rd Division participating in an American warfighting exercise in Texas. The British Army ran out of every bit of important ammunition in about eight days of exercises. Nothing was done about it.

That was known, yet, when the Ukraine war started in 2022 and it became clear very early on that it was going to be very much an artillery war—there are newer drones and missiles and so on, but artillery plays a crucial role—it took from early 2022 through to July 2033 for the MOD to sign an agreement with BAE to produce the extra shells. There is not that sense of drive and urgency, especially when we are dealing with a country such as Russia that has put its whole economy on a war footing. Even now, we have only two artillery shell plants: Durham and Glascoed. Glascoed recently had demonstrations outside it by people trying to close it; why they are trying to stop them producing shells for Ukraine is another matter, and I certainly hope the union representing those workers will be taking up the case.

The United States has recognised that it cannot have single points of failure. In Glascoed there was recently an explosion; if it had been more serious, what would that have done to our capacity? The United States is building new, Government-owned, company-operated sites. It is not worried by the complaints about nationalisation; indeed, the powers given to the president to command industry are considerable. Yet we are still going through the same old, same old, relying on the companies putting in their cases. We do not have the luxury of that time.

I have been critical of Ministers and senior civil servants, but the senior military must bear responsibility for the situation as well. Year on year, they have focused on platforms rather than munitions or accommodation, and the costs of that are being seen in report after report from our Committee and indeed in the media. We must recognise that we now have a shortage not just of matériel, but of industrial capacity, plant, supply chain, skilled and production personnel, and any capacity to surge. We also have numerous single points of failure. I have mentioned the United States. France is commissioning a new explosive plant costing half a billion pounds, again recognising the shortfalls and the critical weaknesses in the system.

I am very pleased that although there has been a lot of focus on the nuclear pillar 1 in the discussions about AUKUS, in pillar 2 there is a lot of work on creating industrial capacity. I credit the Government with the work they are doing there on creating industrial capacity, but I stress that that cannot just be focused on the high-tech end. In many cases, our munitions and platforms depend on industrial skills and basic engineering, which are crucial to ensuring that they are maintained and that they work. We must recognise that we need that industrial base.

As the allies showed in world war two, we can shift domestic industry, plant and personnel to war production; Russia is demonstrating that today. Short-term cost-cutting, identified by the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford, will not do. Companies need workflows to create the workforce and the cash flow and to provide training opportunities for the workforce of the future. The Barrow submarine yard demonstrates the perils of running down the workforce. However, this is also about a pool of labour. For example, in the context of submarines there has been a great deal of talk about ensuring that people are trained in welding, but if other industries in other sectors are not also training welders, then—particularly if there is any drop in the workforce—they will go off and work in the oil and gas industry. Indeed, that is exactly what has happened, and incidentally it has also happened to parts of the United States shipbuilding industry.

We need a much more holistic approach across Government, because if people are being trained in one industry, it is impossible to control the flow out if there are opportunities elsewhere: there must be pressure on other companies to train as well. I have to say to the Minister that that is why the decision to offshore the commissioning of the fleet solid support ships is so incomprehensible. Given the need to maintain a workforce in certain yards and hence to maintain the skill base, shipping that out to Spain is scandalous. Furthermore, no other country, inside or outside the European Union, behaves in this way. The dead hand of the Treasury is dictating a policy that runs down our industry and ends up being much more costly in the long term.

The Ukrainian crisis has also revealed the need for effective collaboration. As the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford pointed out, we used to negotiate proper contracts of shared benefit, but going for “cheapest is best”—allegedly—has driven that into the ground. We need to work with other countries, which will include, as we have seen in the provision of munitions for Ukraine, working with European companies and European Parliaments. There will be no necessity to create new structures, but work will need to be done, and I suspect that there will be some willing partners in a number of the major European industrial countries, and that will mean a need for more real rather than financial engineers.

Finally—for I accept your strictures, Mr Deputy Speaker —I want to touch briefly on the subject of hybrid warfare and the so-called grey zone, on which our Defence Committee is conducting an inquiry. I do not want to pre-empt its findings, but I do want to urge the Ministry of Defence and the wider Government to take a broader, societal approach. The opponents we are facing, in Russia, China and North Korea, have the Soviet, Leninist methodology and ideology, across government and society. We have shown our ability to counteract that in previous conflicts, both hot and cold, but I think particularly of the Political Warfare Executive and the actions of the United Kingdom and the United States during the cold war. Sometimes the debate becomes a bit too focused on technology and techniques without an understanding of the political and ideological underpinning of conflict.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

One of the points that we have made previously in the Defence Committee concerns support for the Russian military archive, which was eventually moved to Shrivenham. Is it not about time the MOD took that archive far more seriously, given that it provides all the benefit of what the right hon. Gentleman is talking about?

[John Spellar]

What the hon. Gentleman refers to was just a manifestation of the running down of our Russia-watching capacity, in that context but also much more broadly within the system. I think there has been an attempt to repair it, but this should be a salutary lesson.

The present transformed security landscape requires money, manpower, mindset and matériel. We have to move further, and we have to move faster.