Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord McCabe and his excellent maiden speech. I have known my noble friend for probably more years than either of us would care to remember. We worked together in the All-Party Group on Policing, and in the PLP departmental group on home affairs.

He describes your Lordships’ House as quaint but charming. I wonder if that was how he was described in Birmingham Hall Green when, as an export from Port Glasgow, he was given his peanut butter. His many years working with young offenders and children who have experienced trauma may not seem like it would be immediately valuable in fitting into your Lordships’ House—then again, it might. That pragmatic experience of needing to find practical solutions to problems will certainly add value to the deliberations we have here. Indeed, his self-description of being a generalist with common sense, focusing on solutions rather than ideological fantasies, could be seen as encapsulating the very best traditions of your Lordships’ House. My noble friend is very welcome, and we look forward to hearing from him frequently in the future.

This House, and indeed the nation, owes a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his team for the review we are debating. The assessment is candid: the UK is closer to the reality of war than it has been at any time in the last 60 years, and we are woefully unprepared for conflict.

As chair of the National Preparedness Commission, I particularly welcome the SDR’s focus on building a national defence effort that includes the whole of society, and the express reference to building

“national resilience to threats below and above the threshold of an armed attack through a concerted, collective effort involving—among others—industry, the finance sector, civil society, academia, education, and communities”.

The public have, to some extent, been shielded from the escalating risk, so the willingness of the Government to start the national conversation that my noble friend called for about national security, resilience and preparedness, is welcome and indeed essential.

Grey zone aggression is already threatening our daily lives. Cyberattacks against public and private organisations are detected daily. Russian submarines are encroaching into British waters. Geopolitical unrest is threatening continuity of supply chains, and disinformation campaigns threaten national cohesion. We have to improve our preparedness for all of these. The nature of these attacks will change and intensify. They will demand a nationwide response, a nationwide endurance, and, in the same way, we need to be prepared for all the other risks that we face.

Just think of what has happened in the last few months. We have had the cyberattacks on M&S and the Co-op, and four substation fires in five weeks—one of them shutting down Heathrow. They are probably not malicious but demonstrate the consequences of clapped-out, aged infrastructure and certainly highlight that vulnerability to future malign actors. West Nile virus has been detected in mosquitoes here in Britain. A wildfire shut the M25, following on from the driest UK March on record. Most recently, three ne’er-do-wells were found guilty of an arson attack on a warehouse that they carried out on behalf of the Wagner Group. I could go on. That is why the National Preparedness Commission has advocated the need for a threat-agnostic preparedness. As a nation, we must be ready for whatever may happen.

The SDR proposes a defence readiness Bill that would give the Government new powers to improve preparedness of key industries, support the mobilisation of resources when needed, and mandate annual reporting on our war-fighting readiness. Can my noble friend the Minister tell us when this will be introduced? The National Preparedness Commission has separately proposed a national resilience Bill, following the model of the Climate Change Act, that would place a legal obligation on government departments and public bodies to take account of and prioritise the need for preparedness and resilience in all their actions. Such an Act could establish an independent national resilience committee, akin to the Climate Change Committee, to advise the UK Government on their assessment of the progress being made and what additional measures should be taken.

So why not bring these proposals together? Let us have a national resilience and defence readiness Bill in the next Session of Parliament. This should spell out the respective roles of the UK Government, the devolved Administrations, mayors and local authorities. It would place explicit expectations on the critical national infrastructure and businesses more generally. It would strengthen and rationalise the network of local resilience forums and require them to engage with local businesses and the local voluntary, community and faith sectors.

We need the national conversation proposed in the strategic defence review. We must raise public awareness of the threats we face, the escalating risk of conflict, as well as the consequences of climate change, the associated extreme weather events and other hazards. The SDR has kick-started that process. The Government have acknowledged what needs to be done in the national security strategy, but now that must be turned into action. We have not got long.