Defence Spending

Debate between Julian Lewis and Richard Ottaway

Thursday 12th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I enjoyed listening to the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn). It is 32 years since I first came to the House and made my maiden speech on defence and this is probably the last speech that I will make in the Chamber, but during those 32 years, I have never agreed with a word that he has ever said. None the less, I enjoy listening to him.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I cannot resist pointing out that the second name on the motion today, which is

“That this House believes that defence spending should be set to a minimum of two per cent of GDP in accordance with the UK’s NATO commitment,”

is indeed that of the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn).

[Sir Richard Ottaway]

Perhaps I can start again.

What is behind this debate, I think, is a fear of cuts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who is a valued member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, on bringing this debate. I agree with much of what he said during his opening remarks, except for the points that he made about intervention. It is a debate that we have had in the Foreign Affairs Committee and our latest report on the finances of the Foreign Office makes the point that the Foreign Office, like the defence budget, is at a crossroads. We have such a thinly spread diplomatic service around the world that either it needs to have more resources or it has to narrow its bandwidth and match its aspirations to the budget available.

Linking a percentage of GDP to any policy is, in my view, bad politics. It is not the way to run Government, and that applies equally to the aid budget and the defence budget. Economies go up, economies come down. Of course, we are not going to have the defence and aid budgets going up and down like a yoyo. These things have to be evened out over an economic cycle. As many colleagues have said, the defence budget has to match our requirements. We must look at it in the context of the threat. What is the threat to the United Kingdom?

I do not think anyone is arguing at present that there is any serious existential threat to the United Kingdom. If there were, the figure on the motion today would be 20%, not 2%. We can safely say that NATO and the EU have given us the longest period of peace for centuries. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said very effectively on the “Today” programme today, we cannot ignore the impact and the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.

Intelligence and Security Committee

Debate between Julian Lewis and Richard Ottaway

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I apologise to the House for my late arrival and for missing the opening speeches, but the Foreign Affairs Committee has been sitting tonight. The President of Turkey is in town on a state visit and the Turkish Foreign Minister and Baroness Cathy Ashton, the High Representative of the EU, have given evidence to us.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins), who is one of the new members of the Committee. I had the privilege of serving on the Committee from 2005 to 2010 and I found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my parliamentary life. He is quite right that Northern Ireland has moved up the agenda in recent years and I agree with virtually every point he made in his speech.

As this is the first debate on such matters in this Parliament, may I take the opportunity to pay tribute to the staff of the ISC, who are of the highest possible calibre? There are not enough of them, but that is not their fault. I also pay tribute to the agencies for their hard work and the way in which they protect the freedoms that we all value. The Foreign Secretary rightly praised them in his speech last Wednesday and we can all join him in his praise.

I also want to thank the three Chairmen I served under during those five years. Although it is regrettable that there were three, they all discharged their responsibilities with diligence and enthusiasm and were all of a very high calibre. I hope that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) is the only Chairman we have in this Parliament, as a degree of continuity is essential.

This is the first time we have looked at the report from the outside, so to speak, and one change I have noted—I do not know whether it is my imagination—is that there seem to be fewer redactions than in the past, which we recommended in the previous Parliament. We wanted reports to flow better, and I think that has been achieved.

I share the concern about the drop in funding—a 10% cut would concern anybody. The agencies do not seem to be alarmed, but a 10% cut in staff at the Secret Intelligence Service would certainly alarm me.

We host the Olympic games next year and I see that the agencies feel they are well placed to manage risks. However, that sits a bit awkwardly with the revelations in the past couple of weeks, after the report was published, that a review of security is under way.

I agree with the Committee’s conclusions about cyber-security. The national security strategy puts cyber-security as a tier 1 risk, but under the present strategy an uprising in north Africa is a tier 3 risk, so I do not know how much weight one can put on these things. At the moment, we just take the world as we find it and try to address things.

The Committee has noted that the Foreign Affairs Committee managed to get some of the World Service cuts reversed and would like to see the same happen with BBC Monitoring. I completely agree with that but I point out to members of the Intelligence and Security Committee who are present that the Foreign Affairs Committee’s recommendation was initially rejected and that it took a debate under the Backbench Business Committee procedure to raise it again before the Government took that on board. We have seen the growing influence of the Backbench Business Committee, and I do not know whether the ISC wants to get down to that level—get deep down and dirty, as it were—but it may be something it has to do.

I also welcome the conclusions of the coroner who said, in relation to the report arising out of 7/7, that the ISC’s conclusions were “detailed and thorough”. The coroner also made some interesting recommendations about the use of photographs. I note that the Committee found that any discrepancies would not have changed its conclusions. That shows the calibre of the work being carried out by the ISC—if the coroner can describe the work as “detailed and thorough” and it can be said that conclusions would not have been affected. That is an important point to make in relation to those who were so critical of the reports when they came out.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I am listening to my hon. Friend’s speech with great attention and I think that another word of praise could be said for the services themselves in that context. In the past, when they have found that they have inadvertently overlooked some piece of information, in providing that information to the ISC, they have not hesitated to own up to that fact even if it opened them up to criticism. It is incumbent on us to encourage them to do that and not to be deterred from doing it because it is a slight blot on their record when they do not get things right first time.

[Richard Ottaway]

I completely agree, and I have always been hugely impressed by the vast quantity of information. When there was just one needle in the haystack, they might not have found it the first time around but they did find it the second time around and quite rightly, as my hon. Friend says, produced it for the Committee.

On the Green Paper, may I support the point that was made about the handling of sensitive material, which I gather was mentioned by the Chairman of the ISC in his opening speech? The recommendations in the Green Paper are sensible and offer the best way of dealing with sensitive material, but I do not think it has to be instead of using a special advocate. It could well be in addition to using a special advocate and using the presumptions set out in the Green Paper.

Let me address the role of the Committee and the way it operates. Parliamentary oversight of a secret service is always going to have limitations. I do not think there is a silver bullet, regardless of whether the Committee is a Committee of the House. Let me give an illustration. The major foreign policy objective of our engagement in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda and international terrorists a base from which to carry out their operations. During the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report on Afghanistan, a number of witnesses told us that that is no longer a problem in Afghanistan, so at the Liaison Committee I asked the Prime Minister whether he was still receiving intelligence to that effect and he said he was. So, we are stuck with the same old problem that a major overseas deployment of the British Army and other armed services is based on intelligence that has not been subject to the scrutiny of the House. Those of us who were here at the time of the Iraq war know the problems that that can generate. This is an echo of the past. I have come up with a least-bad option and have written to the Chairman of the ISC to ask him to put it to the appropriate quarters when a suitable opportunity arrives and then to report to the House on the veracity of that information. I hope that, in the short term, that can be a way of dealing with the matter.