Defence Spending

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that question. On the Treasury, the Chancellor has absolutely been involved throughout this entire conversation and is fully supportive, as is the Prime Minister, of exactly what we are trying to achieve. On gifting and the replenishment of munitions and stocks, everything that we have gifted, including in the announcement this week, is within its sell-by date but is no longer really necessary. Replacements are coming in of new, modern equipment. The Army is perfectly happy to gift this to the Ukrainian effort.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I used to work for Peter Carrington and Denis Healey, two great Defence Secretaries. I have been trying to work out how they would have reacted to this Statement. They would certainly have welcomed the increase in defence spending. It is clearly necessary and they would have said so. I think they both would have said that it is not enough but that it is certainly to be welcomed.

Denis Healey certainly would have found it impossible to accept the construction of the £75 billion. Could the Minister confirm that £75 billion is reached only by making the rather ludicrous assumption that the baseline is flat in cash terms, with reductions in real terms in every year of the six-year period? That is the baseline on which one can build annual increments summing to £75 billion. Perhaps he could confirm that is the case. Denis Healey would never have tried such odd accounting.

Peter Carrington would have argued that it is unwise not to prepare the country for a certain amount of pain. The Government are trying to present necessary defence increases as painless. It might be better to admit that there will be a cost, either in taxation or in less money for domestic programmes. The defence of the realm is the first task of government.

It is also absurd, in the week in which President Biden and Speaker Johnson have come forward with a rather substantial programme of assistance to Ukraine, for our Defence Secretary to stand up and say that the NATO partners looked to each other for leadership and the UK Government stepped forward to provide the alliance with the decisive leadership demanded in this knife-edge moment and that, in the build-up to the NATO summit in Washington, he—Mr Shapps—would be doing all he could to get alliance members to follow our lead. This is absurd talk. We should speak softly and carry a big stick. The stick is slightly bigger—not big enough in my view—after this week’s announcement, but we must learn to avoid the bluster and bravado and speak more sensibly.

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, the financial detail is quite complicated and I think it is better if we write and explain how the figures are built up.

It is clearly an ask for the British public. The cake is finite, as I have said before, and defence needs more. It is not an inconsiderable amount of money that we are increasing the defence budget by, and there is a question of how much money you can spend over time. It is rather like building a house, in that you cannot spend it all at once; you have to build up. If you look at where the investment focus is within the next few years, you find that, first, it is on firing up the UK industrial base, including £10 billion for a new munitions strategy. That is extremely important. Secondly, it is on ensuring that our Armed Forces benefit from the very latest technology, through the DIA. Thirdly, it is on guaranteeing long-term support for Ukraine; if we do not do that, it is just going to become more and more expensive. As the Secretary-General said the other day, this is the cheapest time to defeat the Russians. Fourthly, it is on ensuring that expenditure is effective through radical procurement reform, which I have already covered.

King’s Speech

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I intend to get to the King’s Speech via the Guildhall, with a brief exit through Rwanda.

There was much to applaud in the Guildhall speech on Monday. I hope that the Prime Minister is right that Russia cannot win in Ukraine, and I am sure he is right to insist that we must do all we can to ensure it does not. I echo, of course, his condemnation of the appalling atrocity on 7 October and of Hamas. I am also glad that he called for “urgent” and “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza.

Some 120 countries voted in the UN for a ceasefire; I am still not quite clear why we cannot be in that number. I suppose it is because the word is deemed to imply parity of esteem and legitimacy and so cannot apply to a terrorist group. I do not know. I think most of the world simply wants the killing to stop, and it would be in Israel’s interest to listen to that, because current tactics are simply breeding new recruits for Hamas—just as the killing in Beirut 40 years ago was the making of Hezbollah. We need to help, by working on the Qatari Government, who play host to Hamas, or the Iranian Government, who are the funders of Hezbollah, or the Russians, who arm Hamas.

There is a lot of diplomacy to be done, including in Washington. We must recognise that what Washington says matters in Tel Aviv. I hope the Prime Minister has rebuilt really close relations with the White House, because relations were considerably damaged by his predecessor’s courting of the President’s political opponents, and her predecessor’s willingness to alienate both the Administration and Congress by putting the Good Friday agreement at risk. I hope we are through all that.

If I had a criticism of the Guildhall speech, it would be that it risked seeming a little hubristic. To say that we are working

“to shape the world, not be shaped by it”,

and that,

“wherever there’s a challenge, wherever there’s a threat, wherever we can promote peace and security”,

we are ready to act, risks the retort that we can speak very loudly but our stick is fairly small these days. Putin has brutally exposed the illusion of the peace dividend and we have made too many false economies on defence. The Government have done very well to help Kyiv but have yet to come clean with the country about the real cost of security in an insecure world. We are not sufficiently insured. We have to pay a higher premium. The quality of our Armed Forces may still be very high but their quantity is plainly inadequate. Our leaders need to be honest about that, so maybe less hubris.

However, the point goes wider. The King’s Speech also said:

“My Government will continue to lead action on tackling climate change … support developing countries with their energy transition, and hold other countries to their environmental commitments”.


It is true that we led on climate change, but then someone suggested that we “cut the green crap”. It is true that we led on development aid and gave it 0.7% of GDP, but we do not now, and much of what we do is spent domestically on Home Office policies. It is true we have not denounced net zero by 2050, but we have just decided to get there on a changed trajectory, meaning, in the words of the King’s Speech,

“without adding undue burdens on households”.

Therefore, we will pump out more emissions than previously planned, and once again we are not coming clean with the country. Getting there cannot be cost free. As with defence, I believe the country would respond well if the Government told it like it is.

Finally, on Rwanda and the Supreme Court ruling, the House will be relieved to hear that the new Home Secretary in the other place this afternoon did not agree with his Back Bench that the right response to the Supreme Court ruling would be to tear up treaties—the refugee convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. The new Foreign Secretary must be aware of how much reputational damage it would cost us if the Government did as advised by their Back Bench. They must know, because they saw how relations with Europe and America were poisoned when the last Prime Minister but one revealed that he had been happy to make an international agreement without ever intending to honour it. I am sure the new Foreign Secretary fully understands that pacta sunt servanda, and I hope he will ensure that the new Government will act accordingly. We are not Belarus. The convention stands for our values; let us not betray them.

Ukraine

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I was in Moscow in 1968 when the Soviet army put down Dubček, and I feel the same cold horror today that I felt then. However, this is much worse than 1968. In 1991, over 90% of the population of Ukraine voted for independence, with large majorities even in all those regions where there is a strong ethnic Russian population. Our locus to object is far stronger now than it was in 1968. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned the Budapest memorandum; it carries the signatures of John Major and Douglas Hurd. In it, the Russians promised that they would respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine within its existing borders.

The question is: could we have done more to avert this disaster? I doubt it. Looking at the paranoia and posturing in the Kremlin, I do not think there is much more we could have done. However, there are lessons to be learned of continuing validity as the crisis continues.

First, on sanctions, the best ones are those that deter. However, in order to achieve deterrence, you have to be ahead of the game and you have to go for scale and specificity. The first UK sanctions package totally failed the test of scale, and we are still failing the test of specificity. I do not believe that the Kremlin has paused for a second to consider what we have said about sanctions.

Secondly, we are talking only about sanctioning Russian exports. It is a very difficult thing to do, given that there is a world market in hydrocarbons. What is much easier to do and would have much more impact on the Russians is to sanction their strategic imports. Russia is even more an oil and gas economy now than it was when Putin came in, despite all his welcome early talk of modernising the economy. It has gone backwards. Its manufacturing sector has declined, which means that it is more vulnerable today to controls on the exports of sensitive technology to it than it was then. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was quite right when he spoke of reinventing CoCom—global controls on strategic exports. We seem to be going back to the Cold War—okay, we needed that instrument in the Cold War and we need it again now.

I have very little more to offer. I support everything said by the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, in a masterly maiden speech. I should like particularly to add my voice to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. Here I slightly part company with the noble Lord, Lord McDonald.

The detaching of Luhansk and Donetsk from Ukraine wins no plaudits in Beijing. Beijing has never recognised Abkhazia and Ossetia. Beijing is rather against the idea of breakaway provinces. Installing a puppet government in Kyiv will alarm not just the Baltic states, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia but an awful lot of Azeris, Kazakhs, Tajiks and Turkmen. This is not a crisis of Putin versus the West; this is not a crisis of Putin versus NATO; this is a crisis of Putin versus the world. We need now to be talking to all those in the former Soviet empire who are uneasy about the idea of the attempted recreation of the Soviet empire and all those in the developing world who are uneasy about what they see as the invasion of an independent state that voted by an overwhelming majority for independence. They are inclined to hope that maybe the world can do something about it. We need to be talking to all our Commonwealth friends and we need to be talking globally. This is not just Putin versus the West; this is Putin versus the world.

Armed Forces Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

I am aware that the attraction of trying to attach an obligation to central government is, in the minds of your Lordships, a convenient way of addressing a raft of perceived deficiencies and shortcomings, or issues that have not been addressed. Actually, there is a very good litany of achievements under the covenant that has not required any legislative status as such. I am thinking of things such as the inclusion of veteran-specific care pathways for mental health and prosthetic care in the NHS in England, and of Operation Courage, which brings together all three veterans’ mental health services—the transition, intervention and liaison service, the complex treatment service and the high-intensity service. I am thinking also of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which requires the Secretary of State to refer members of the regular Armed Forces in England to a local housing authority if they believe that they may be made homeless or threatened with homelessness within 56 days. We have the Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Act 2018, providing flexible working opportunities for the modern service family. We have a new schools admission code for England, which came into force in September of this year, specifically to ensure that service families are not disadvantaged by the mobility requirement when applying for school places. The Department for Education allocates additional funding in the form of the service pupil premium to state-funded schools in England with service children. The strategy for our veterans lays out our—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I do not disagree with all the good things that the noble Baroness is describing, which the Government have brought about, but I have not heard her address the central argument of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern: that it might be easier for the Government to persuade others to go on doing good things if the Government bound themselves in the same way as they are seeking to bind others. I suppose the noble Baroness could say that the Government feel bound already, but if so, why not spell it out in the Bill?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am sure the noble Lord has been listening carefully to the argument that I have been advancing, but I have been trying to distinguish between identified, critical core services—in this case housing, education and health, which the Armed Forces community said mattered most to them—and how we address the delivery of these services. In the main, these services are not delivered by central government but by a range of other agencies, and may be the responsibility of devolved Administrations, in turn delivering them through their agencies. The point I am making is that adding an obligation to central government does not seem in any way to address the need that we have identified that has to be addressed: the current disparity in the delivery of services across the United Kingdom. That, quite simply, is what the Bill is seeking to rectify. That is why trying to attach a covenant obligation to central government is something of a red herring—I do not actually see what it is going to deliver.

Before the noble Lord interrupted me, I was simply explaining, by way of illustration, the point I have just been making: exactly what it has been possible for the Government to do without attaching any statutory obligation on them, and I am not even halfway through my list. At the risk of being tedious with your Lordships, I was also going to mention, finally, a new holistic transition policy that co-ordinates and manages the transition from military to civilian life for service personnel and their families when they leave the Armed Forces. The Defence Transition Services also supports those in that position. We have the Career Transition Partnership, and a range of initiatives and support packages covering a wide range of activity, all of which benefit our Armed Forces personnel. I merely adduce that list to illustrate how alternative processes allow areas of concern to be brought to light more readily and addressed more quickly through other means, if necessary, including action to be taken by central government departments and devolved Administrations, where appropriate.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who specifically raised the evaluation process. This would feed into our existing commitment to review the overall performance of the covenant duty as part of our post-legislation scrutiny. That review will be submitted to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee and will also be covered in the covenant annual report. This is in addition to regular parliamentary scrutiny, such as Parliamentary Questions and regular reviews by the Select Committee, or whatever form of inquiry Members of the other place and of this House may wish to undertake. The detail of the evaluation process is still being worked on with our stakeholders, but I hope that this background and the outline of the process provides reassurance that it represents a better way forward and that we are committed to continuing our work to mitigate the impact of service life on the Armed Forces community, wherever it may occur.

Listening to some of the contributions, it occurred to me that there may be a misunderstanding of the role of the Armed Forces covenant. My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern recalled an interesting and arguably disturbing situation, in which it is possible that Armed Forces personnel suffered harm. I undertake to look at that instance in detail; he provided a reference for where I can find more information.

However, I say to my noble and learned friend that central government, and the MoD in particular, are directly responsible for the Armed Forces, and the MoD has always looked after the welfare of service personnel. During the Bill’s passage through this House, we have heard how the support provided has improved, expanded and developed over time, particularly in relation to issues such as mental health. Central government and the MoD answer to Ministers, are held to account in Parliament, and may be held to account by the courts of this land. But the covenant is a separate concept: it is a promise by the nation as a whole to the Armed Forces community that they will not be disadvantaged because of their service. It brings in other organisations, such as health providers and local authorities, who are not directly responsible for the Armed Forces community but whose decisions undoubtedly affect them. It is this new duty that will ensure that these organisations consistently apply the principles of the covenant and can be confident of the legal basis for doing so. Based on this fairly lengthy explanation, I hope that my noble and learned friend will not press his amendment.

I turn to Amendment 17, also tabled by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern. I know that he is motivated by the best and most honourable of intentions, but I am somewhat unclear about its purpose. The new definition contained in the amendment adds nothing to the duties already set out in the Bill. Indeed, perhaps disquietingly, it seems to decrease the scope of that duty, which I know is not my noble and learned friend’s intention.

We are clear that the Armed Forces covenant is a promise by the nation to support our Armed Forces community. The amendment characterises the scope and character of that promise as an agreement between the Secretary of State and servicepeople. But, with the greatest respect to my noble and learned friend, in doing so, it fails to capture its essence: it is a much broader and more widely embracing concept.

The covenant was framed during a time of great pressure on the Armed Forces community. As I have described at some length, it has been delivered highly successfully in the succeeding decade because it captures the spirit of appreciation and voluntary support for that community from people of every walk of life across the United Kingdom. This voluntary spirit is why it is called a covenant and framed as something far greater than the more transactional approach that this amendment could engender. To express the covenant in the way proposed by this amendment goes against the spirit of the covenant and the many successful initiatives that it has produced, built on the widespread admiration and support to which I have referred.

The Armed Forces covenant is described on the government website for the Armed Forces, and on the front of the annual report, as

“an Enduring Covenant Between the People of the United Kingdom, Her Majesty's Government—and—All those who serve or have served in the Armed Forces of the Crown and their Families.”

That definition is not in statue, but the principles of the covenant appear in the Armed Forces Act 2006. That is why this Bill has been taking forward greater detail, to try to assist the delivery of vital services for our Armed Forces community.

The description I have just given of the covenant far better captures its nature, which provides the framework through which support for our Armed Forces community can thrive and grow. I thank your Lordships for indulging me with patience and courtesy, as these were important points which had to be addressed at length. In view of the explanation I have given, I hope my noble and learned friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment.