Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath]

I note that the noble Lord made that remark just before I speak, and I shall take the appropriate warning.

At the splendid ceremony that we had last week for the Armada canvases, I found myself standing next to a heavily uniformed naval officer who was looking at the canvas showing the fleet of Drake and Howard just on the tail and about to engage the Spanish. “God”, he said, “they had it so easy”. I said that it was the first time that I had ever heard anyone say that the British fleet had it easy in beating the Armada. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand me, sir. They had it easy because they were all teeth and no tail”. I asked him what he meant by that and he said that the present Royal Navy had no teeth left because all the money was spent on the huge tail of administrative burden that drags us back. If we could just have our teeth back, he said, we could have a much better and more effective force for a much smaller administrative tail that we have to drag around behind us.

When I was listening to the comment from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, about the four Type 22s that have to come out of commission in five months’ time, I thought how close to the mark that was. Those four Type 22s have at present a total crew of 768. Although those vessels might not be state of the art, if naval officers and men are no longer sailing on them, how many pirates will be captured by 768 clerks and civil servants? How many tonnes of narcotics will they be able to capture in the Caribbean? How many miles of Britain’s storm-driven shores will they be able to patrol of a cold winter’s night to the exclusion of any alien influences who want to come ashore? I suggest the answer is that there will not be one hostage released, not one pirate captured and not one tonne of narcotics captured. Those ships should continue to sail with blue-water sailors on board. The clerks and the staff at the back should be the casualty, not the ships.

The British Navy has had a long record of making do very well with assets which would appear to be coming to the end of their sell-by date. The 54 year-old HMS “Victory” led a fleet with an average age of 26 into Trafalgar. At Jutland, if Beatty’s seven battle cruisers are taken out, the average age of our fleet was 18 and, although we are not quite sure whether we won that battle, at least the German fleet never dared to come out of port again—so we did to some extent. The extent to which the frigates are a problem is that even if the Type 22s are getting near the obsolescence level, they can still do a lot of very useful work which will release the burden on the Type 23s—the jewels of the frigate fleet that we have, and the vessels which we need to look to.

That point came home very loud and clear to me when recently I had the privilege of a trip to Portsmouth to visit one of the new Type 45s. It is a magnificent ship but it is wrong to describe it as the finished article. It is work in progress; notably, it is lacking in the full sufficiency of its anti-submarine protection at the moment, while it has absolutely no decoy equipment on board; there is just a blank hole on the deck. It also needs the permanent presence of a Type 23 to protect its rear against submarines in any deployment where it has a risk. The Type 22s might not be able to do that job adequately at present, but the Type 23 would. If the Type 22s were being kept and used to do the patrol work off Somalia and in the Caribbean, that would at least remove the burden on the Type 23s.

We also need to consider other issues with the Type 45s. At the moment, they are armed with a wonderful system for anti-air resistance and can knock out 48 successive incoming missiles with a high level of accuracy and reliability. One then has to ask: what happens to the 49th missile when it comes in, if that utilises the entire capacity? The answer to that is very strange: “Ah well, we can override the weapons system of another Type 45, access their weapons and fire those as well”. The question then comes: “Does that not mean that when you have used those 48 up and still have not got rid of the invader, you are both sitting ducks in the water to be eliminated and so is the ship you are supposed to be protecting”? That means in turn that you have to have a hunter-killer behind them the whole time to take out the point of attack. The only viable and reliable flotilla in which you can send those ships out is to send the Type 45 with a Type 23 behind it, then a hunter-killer behind them to do the job for them.

If we look back at the history of the Royal Navy, it has, to take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, a wonderful record of adapting to cope with the thing that nobody could foresee coming. After Trafalgar, the Royal Navy was engaged in one of the longest, most bitter and, in terms of men and equipment, most ruinously expensive engagements because it had the responsibility of implementing the suppression of the slave traders. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, referred to the criticism of their impact on trade this morning. In fact, the Royal Navy suffered the most horrendous losses of any engagement that it has ever been involved in. It lost 32,000 men in suppressing the slave trade—the highest percentage of loss in any engagement in the history of the Royal Navy. It lost them principally because it adapted to the use of very small boats, which is what was necessary. It relied on sloops, brigs and cutters to do the job. It was cold steel and hand-to-hand, but it did the job.

One hundred and thirty years later, the Royal Navy did a very similar adaptation when it had to cope with the not wholly-expected dominance of the U-boat in the north Atlantic. It did that by developing a Yarmouth fishing trawler into what eventually became the Flower class, of which it built 678 at a total cost of £22 million. That sounds like a bargain today, considering what it did for us. The Flower class was a wonderful ship. Today we have a ship called the River class, which has gone into the water as a minesweeper. It has already been spoken of very favourably this morning. I suggest that the Royal Navy is missing a trick here. If it is seeking to hold on to its Type 22s, which it should—the same arguments apply to the “Ark Royal” and the Harriers as applied to the Type 22s; we should not get rid of something which is still useful—it should be looking at an upgrade of the River class to become a fully fledged gunboat with improved kill capability and speed, which would then be able to play a very effective role in anti-piracy and patrol work. You can get two of those for the cost of a frigate, minimum, fully upgraded. You could put on board an effective GPS positioning and reconnaissance system as well and it would not be an expensive product. You could include some anti-submarine capability as well. There is real value in doing a serious redesign of the River class and producing prototypes to see what they could do for us. They might be a very cheap and effective alternative to give us the teeth we need, as that officer was saying.

The Navy has had a wonderful history of delivering against the record and at above value. Let it get back to doing some creative thinking by looking back at its history at what it has done previously and doing it again.