Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, today is a very welcome opportunity to consider the defence review. But I am sure that, as the debate develops, it will also cover the wider aspects, including the China audit, soft power and development policies. They all need to be integrated, as they all have a part to play in keeping our country safe and our values protected.

On behalf of these Benches, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his team, whom he credited, for all their work on the review. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord McCabe. Given the fact that all three opening speakers are from north of the border, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, that another Scottish voice is very welcome in this Chamber.

My colleagues in this debate, with the experience that they bring, will rightly focus on various aspects in this broad area. I will focus on the wider safety and security landscape. My noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham, in winding up for us later, will focus specifically on defence.

We support a great deal in the review from the noble Lord. In the national security strategy, we accepted many of the judgments of the Government of the threats we face and the changing security landscape, both in potential conflicts and emerging dangers through technological change. We need to address them across all parts of government, the economy and society as a whole. We agree with that.

We have taken safety for granted, as the noble Lord said. There is to some extent a positive element to that. In a vibrant democracy, our people can simply to get on with their daily lives and take safety for granted, because of all the hard work of those within our Armed Forces and our security and intelligence communities. But, with conflict growing around the world, and with the climate emergency, conflicts abroad will have repercussions here at home.

Just yesterday in Grand Committee, we debated the tensions in May between India and Pakistan. That could have been an enormous conflagration, which would have had direct impacts here in the United Kingdom with the enormous diaspora community that we have. The Sudan conflict is being played out within our community here at home. Although geographically we are an island, we are not a security island.

There should of course be a high level of cross-party support. On defence, our Benches have a long and proud tradition of supporting our Armed Forces and veterans, as well as adhering to the view that the principal job of government is the maintenance of our national security. In that regard, I hope the Government will continue to engage and also bring regular updates on the many action plans proposed in the defence review and the national security strategy and the many workstreams that feed into its strategy. As the noble Lord said, this is not the work of one Parliament or one party. We all need to be engaged in that process, to ensure that the decisions made are sustainable and that we here in Parliament can appraise progress.

Parliamentary scrutiny is a part of our freedom that we seek to protect, and that is why many of us have been shaken by the lengths gone to by the MoD and the previous Government to avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny. I feel that this will have deep repercussions. With regard to yesterday’s revelations about the data breach and the extent to which parliamentarians themselves were not able to consider it, I hope that this Government will never follow that terrible example.

In many ways, the UK has a unique security need, but in most others we can act as a global, open and interconnected country—but only if we secure the support and partnership of others. In response to the publication of the national security review, I mentioned that, as an island nation, our shipping and data cables keep our economy alive. The noble Lord referred to that in his contribution. We were the first country to lay subsea communication cables, 175 years ago. Today, we are almost exclusively reliant on them for communications. Shipping contributed to our growth in the Industrial Revolution, and today our consumers are reliant on shipped imports and key sectors on shipped exports. Conflict between China and Taiwan would have an immediate repercussion here at home.

In order to defend this, we require our naval and maritime capabilities to be enhanced, our reach broadened, our intelligence services bolstered and our cyber resource reinforced. We agree that the way forward comes with the need for increased defence and lethal capability. We support the Government on increased defence expenditure, but it would be helpful if the Minister could indicate the breakdown of the sources of the overall 5% that was announced on national defence and security. What is the assumed level of growth of the size of the economy to meet the level of expenditure we expect to be necessary? Will the Minister provide more clarity on the timeframe and the certainty of the level of resources that will be available, rather than on aspirations? We need cross-party talks on this, too, if this is to be a generational approach, and a degree of consensus on planning and investment.

It is interesting to note Germany’s Zeitenwende—“sea-change”—in which Berlin has allocated €86 billion to defence, equal to 2.4% of GDP in this year. By 2029, annual defence expenditure is expected to reach €153 billion, or 3.5% of GDP—the most ambitious rearmament since reunification. Chancellor Merz has signalled a willingness to spend up to 1.5% on defence-adjacent infrastructure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, referenced, with potentially a French bridge and the French Government doing so, too. There may be vitally important infrastructure upgrades that are necessary for our whole national defence, including transport corridors and strategic mobility projects, coinciding with NATO’s wider agreement to split the 5% target into 3.5% for hard defence spending and 1.5% for expenditures related to defence.

Bundling may be justified, but we need a plan. It needs to be transparent, and we need to see it because an aspirational approach now needs to come with specificity, planning and transparency on procurement. This is not necessarily something where the United Kingdom has been a world leader in recent years, and how we link our procurement with that in the European continent and the United States will be vital.

We do not, therefore, depart from the level of funding, although we want to see more detail. We say, with respect to the Government, that it should not have been transferred from the official development assistance budget. That is a strategic mistake. We are seeing considerable reductions in programmes that have been part of the UK national security platform—successfully so—for many years. It is no surprise to me that in recent weeks we have seen public statements from former defence chiefs, military leaders, diplomats and heads of the intelligence community in the United Kingdom appealing to the Prime Minister not to cut the very programmes that have been national security-focused in conflict prevention and conflict resolution and in supporting allies to build resilient civil societies and institutions against malign interference.

The western Balkans was raised in the defence and national security strategies. Three times in the Chamber I have asked for clarity on the continuation of the western Balkans freedom and resilience programme funded by ODA, and I hope that that is not under threat. The UK and USAID cuts to the World Service and Voice of America frequencies and spectrums were immediately filled by Russia and are doing damage. We know that in the very sphere that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to, within eastern Europe and in other countries within malign influence, when we cut support for resilient institutions, freedom of speech, freedom of the media and the rule of law, Russia and China will fill that vacuum.

The FCDO network and our excellent diplomats were mentioned in the security review and also by the noble Lord. We agree with that. That is why we regret that year-on-year funding for that very network is now being reduced.

On other threats, such as biosecurity, I believe that we are less of an island than many might hope. I looked back at the UK’s first biological security strategy in 2018 under the previous Government, and I thought it was a good strategy. DfID and ODA were mentioned on almost every page—a recognition that biosecurity in the UK is weakened if it is also weak in the countries where we have a large diaspora community or a travel relationship. There was a reason why 10 years ago Ebola did not become Covid. It was because of the UK, DfID and our official development assistance. Now we have only passing references from the Government. I hope the Minister will be able to say that development assistance is a critical part of our partnerships around the world.

The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said, and I agree with him, that we are underinsured, unprepared and unsafe. To correct that, we need investment, partnership and for our allies to be safe also. We may well hear about the Commonwealth. The noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, speaks eloquently about our Commonwealth network, but the previous Conservative Government cut partnership support for developing Commonwealth nations by one-third and the incoming Labour Government have cut it further by 40%.

The Center for Global Development has already shown that those very countries are now moving to China, and in east Africa to Russia, for finance and more debt. It is not wise insurance only to spend on the eventuality of an emboldened adversary when we, by our very actions, are bolstering them. Official development assistance, according to the report on Tuesday by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, will be 0.24% at the end of this financial year, the lowest in the 50 years of development statistics. Why is this significant for this debate? It is because we know that conflicts now are never fought on one front, with one technology, one tactic and one means, and that that will always be the case in the future. We need an approach for our defence and security that is also for diplomacy and development. All should be complementary. It is not too late for the Government to ensure that they are not set against each other.