AUKUS Defence Partnership

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am not an engineer or a naval technical expert on ship build, but I would say that he is quite right. There is now a repository of skills and experience that will contribute greatly to how this type of submarine is designed. It has already been established, because it is now being known as SSN-AUKUS, that it takes us a step further than where we originally thought that we would be with a successor to Astute. Those aggregated skills are very important, and I am sure that they will be put to very valuable effect in determining the final design of the submarine.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My noble friend Admiral Lord West, while welcoming the Statement, said—and I noted this carefully—that it was a very brave decision. If any of my civil servants or military advisers had said, “Minister, this is a very brave decision”, I would probably have avoided it. That has been given substance by the lack of anything concrete in terms of cost. On an enterprise of this size, there must be some idea of the ballpark figures. We already have the example of HS2. I am not going to go down that track—no pun intended—but there is a figure in the public domain, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Browne, of $245 billion over 30 years. That is a substantial amount of money, and it will be even more substantial when inevitably, like all procurement in the Ministry of Defence, it increases over the next 30 years. Can the Minister have a stab at it again and tell us the realm of possibility on which this decision was taken? It cannot have been taken without Ministers having any idea of how much it is going to cost.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

While the noble Lord’s noble friend Lord Coaker has remained positive about this, as his right honourable friend in the other place did, I am slightly disappointed at the rather despondent demeanour of the noble Lord, Lord Reid. This has been universally regarded as one of the most important and exciting announcements for UK defence and our Royal Navy capability that we have seen in decades. This is a hugely important development. I am in no doubt whatsoever that the Government have made the right decision to proceed with this. It is a tribute to the United Kingdom that Australia and the United States thought that we were a valuable and reliable partner to bring into this.

On the cost, I will not stand here uttering figures which I have no foundation to justify, however much the noble Lord might want to tempt me into doing that. We cannot put a precise figure on the cost of building one SSN-AUKUS submarine. It is a decades-long programme. The final figure will depend on a number of factors, and it will include the final design, how many we build and when we build them. We recognise in terms of cost that this is a hugely important commitment, but we also have no hesitation in saying that, for the security of the country and our ability to contribute with Australia and the United States to a more globally secure world, it is absolutely the right decision to take.