Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. His points on data are extremely well made, and I thoroughly endorse them.

I will restrict my points to the subject of health, because Britain’s defence absolutely relies upon the health of its people. That is not just from a recruitment point of view—we remember that in the Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War we struggled to recruit because our people just were not healthy enough—but because healthcare is now a key component of national resilience and competence. Adversaries realise that destroying a nation’s healthcare is a way to break the purpose and ability of different countries to support themselves. Russia made this point very clear in its wars in Chechnya, in Syria, and now in Ukraine, where hospitals are targeted twice a day by Russian drones, and Hamas embeds its fighters in hospitals, making them battlegrounds.

In future conflicts, health will be very much as decisive as weaponry. We have several vulnerabilities. The first is fitness to serve. The health of the recruitable population has declined to crisis levels. A third of young adults are overweight. Rising chronic disease and mental health conditions are now the leading cause of Army rejections; many more young people are required to care for themselves than are able to serve for the nation. The second vulnerability is the fragility of our healthcare system. Last June’s Synnovis ransomware attack was not simply an IT issue in a pathology lab; it very nearly brought the NHS to its knees. Thirdly, there is biothreat: new gene and cell-editing technologies increase the risk of bioweapons. Russia’s Sergiev Posad-6 facility demonstrates the global trend towards biowarfare capacity, and if it is horrendous to contemplate, that does not mean it is not significant. As the strategic review notes, we live in an age of gene and cell editing, where it is easier than ever to make biological weapons. But, despite the UK biological security strategy, UKHSA’s budget, lab maintenance and surveillance systems are all mothballed or cut.

The third is medical supply chains. The review rightly points out that the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of relying on international just-in-time supply chains, and I know, from my experience at the front line of the Covid response, how terrifying it is when you cannot get your hands on the medical supplies that you need. I ask the Minister for four actions: first, that we establish strategic reserves of medicines; secondly, that we set up health security command within defence equal to cyber and space; thirdly, to fund the defence medical services appropriately; and, fourthly, to prioritise new investment in biological threat surveillance to keep pace with adversaries.

Talk of a whole-of-society defence, as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, very clearly laid out in his introductory remarks, cannot be meaningful unless a society can heal its wounded, maintain its health infrastructure and support its health system. Medicine is as essential as ammunition; hospitals must be as resilient as the Army. The lesson is visible internationally. Taiwan, for instance, co-ordinates health security across all sectors, Finland makes health a priority and Israel integrates its health with its security.

Without comparable focus and investment, the UK remains vulnerable not just to missiles but to the cascading effect of poor health, neglected infrastructure and weak prevention. Modern warfare is won or lost not just on the battlefield but in clinics, supply warehouses and in the health of potential recruits. I therefore urge the Minister to address these specifics and to make health security an urgent and fully funded component of our national defence. There is diminishing time to close the gap. Our national security depends not just on missiles, aircraft and ships, but on every well-maintained hospital bed, strategic medicine reserve and healthy young person to serve.