Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Boyce Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boyce (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. It has been good to see that this SDSR has arrested the decline of the defence budget over the past five years and made some attempt to redress some of the woefully short-sighted decisions made in 2010. It is particularly encouraging to see in the Prime Minister’s foreword to the review his recognition of the need for,

“sea lanes to stay open and the arteries of global commerce to remain free flowing”,

and, from this, maritime security and the role of the Royal Navy moving back to where it should be in the centre of our defence strategy.

However, in the context of keeping sea lanes open, I have two concerns. First, safe navigation is fundamental. The Minister will be aware of the vulnerability of the global navigation satellite system—GNSS—to interruption and jamming and of the availability of eLoran, which is not similarly susceptible and provides a safe back-up in this eventuality. I declare an interest in this as an Elder Brother of Trinity House. Would the Minister care to comment on the Government’s intentions regarding a reliable and robust alternative to GNSS when eLoran is terminated at the end of this year when the French shut down their station, a station without which the eLoran system cannot function? There is a national resilience component to this—it is not just safe navigation—with regards to GNSS-generated positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT. It is on its signals that key elements of much of our national infrastructure depend.

Secondly on safe sea lanes, and as I mentioned in the debate following the Statement on the SDSR in the House last week, we should be concerned about the small size of our destroyer/frigate force. These are the workhorses of the fleet on which we depend to keep the sea lanes open. In replying to questions, the Minister said:

“As regards the sufficiency of ships, we are advised by the Chief of Naval Staff that a 19-ship destroyer and frigate fleet, capable of co-operating on a global scale, is what is required”.—[Official Report, 23/11/15; col. 518.]

That may be so, and it may be what the Chief of Naval Staff said, but that is only because the number of tasks that we have traditionally and quite properly undertaken has been cut to accommodate the paucity of escorts.

For example, if the aspiration to meet national security objective 2, which is to project our global influence, is to be sensibly realised so far as the Royal Navy’s contribution to the core MoD task of defence engagement is concerned, we need more ships to cover the necessary footprint. Although we may be able to draw some comfort about the announcement of the concept of designing and building a new class of lighter, flexible, general-purpose frigates, it is simply too long to wait until the 2030s to see them.

In the upcoming and new national shipbuilding strategy, I exhort the Government to see what can be done to bring forward the introduction of those ships into service. This will benefit the industry by having a better shipbuilding drumbeat; it will generate earlier foreign sales potential, where other navies like to see the Royal Navy using a class of ship before they buy into it; and, of course, it would underpin the United Kingdom’s role in supporting international security and stability in the light of the SDSR.