Defence Readiness Bill

Lord Harlech Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. She is right: I was with her up until the divergence of growth and resilience. Like other noble Lords, I am truly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, for tabling this Question and for the authority he brings to the debate through his work at the National Preparedness Commission. I declare an interest as a serving officer in the Army Reserve and as vice-chair of the All-Party Group for Climate, Nature and Security.

The core purpose of a defence readiness Bill is right. The power to mobilise our reserves and industrial base before a crisis becomes a conflict is precisely what the strategic defence review was correct to demand. However, the question before us is not only when the Bill will come but what it should contain. On that, the noble Lord is asking exactly the right question.

The instinct to keep the Bill narrow and treat it as a purely military instrument for a purely military emergency misunderstands the threats set out in our national risk register. The register draws no neat line between hostile state action and everything else. It lists pandemic influenza, severe flooding, prolonged power failure and the cascading loss of critical national infrastructure. When any of those materialises, the mechanisms we reach for are strikingly similar to the ones the Bill would create: we call on the reserves, we lean on logistics and private sector capacity, and we depend on the local resilience forums to hold the response together on the ground. It makes little sense to build those powers for one category of shock and leave them unavailable for the others.

There is a further dimension that this House should not overlook: the state of the infrastructure on which all our resilience ultimately rests. Much of it is ageing and some of it is, frankly, crumbling. We cannot be resilient against a pandemic, flood or hostile act if the pipes, grid and water storage that the country depends on are already failing under ordinary conditions.

I think it was on the Sporting Events Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, talked about the London 2012 Olympics and how the traffic lights could be controlled positively to let sportspeople and officials through without delay. Conversely, that could be cyber attacked or gridlocked. Anyone trying to drive through London not in the middle of the night may think that we are already under some sort of traffic light attack.

Renewing infrastructure is itself an act of national preparedness. Here lies the opportunity: when we rebuild, we can design in security and resilience from the very start, hardening assets against both the storm and the saboteur, rather than bolting protection on afterwards at far greater cost. Upgrade and protection are not competing claims on the budget; done together, they are one investment.

To take one example, we desperately need new water storage, yet no major reservoir has been completed in England since 1992. The nearest new scheme, the Fens reservoir, is not expected online until 2036 and the Lincolnshire reservoir not until 2040. That is more than a decade away for infrastructure that we need now. I do not accept that a reservoir should take the better part of 15 years to deliver. With the will and a planning regime built for urgency rather than delay, there is no reason why a scheme of this kind should not be built in more than two or three years. If we are serious about resilience, we must be serious about the pace at which we build the things that make us resilient.

This is not scope creep for its own sake; it is a matter of coherence and our treaty obligations. Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty requires each of us to maintain the resilience to withstand and recover from major shocks, and that resilience is not distinguished by the origin of the shock. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, proposed that the Bill should follow the model of the Climate Change Act 2008, with a statutory duty to assess our baseline preparedness, set targets for improvement and report annually on progress. I find that a persuasive architecture.

We do not need to start completely from scratch. We can build a national resilience framework that is a benchmark to our preparedness, using means already at our disposal. As a starting point, we could use the military framework of fighting power. The conceptual is how we think about resilience: what are our strategy and tactics for dealing with such a shock? The moral is the national conversation that other noble Lords have spoken about, understanding why we need to be resilient and the motivation. Then there is the physical: the flood defences, the back-up generators, the stores of bottled water. The concepts are already there; we just need to implement them and do so at pace.

I put two questions to the Minister. First, will the mobilisation powers in the forthcoming defence readiness Bill be capable of activation for the civil emergencies listed in the national risk register and not solely for escalation toward armed conflict? Secondly, will the Government commit to a breakdown of the £4.2 billion allocated to the reserves between now and 2030—on page 61 of the DIP, for anyone who is checking—given the importance to the reserves of in-year funding?