Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Lord Roper Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Roper]

My Lords, I find myself rather more in agreement with the majority of the members of the committee than I do with the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert. I congratulate my noble friend and his sub-committee on the report and on securing this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, is of course right in one matter. Although the report is the result of the work of the sub-committee, it is the last report which, as chairman of the European Union Committee, I agreed before ceasing to be chairman of that committee, and therefore he quite rightly says that my name appears on it. I am sorry I missed the errors to which he has drawn attention. I read it at the time and I thought that it was a very good report.

Like many reports from the European Union Committee, this one will be extremely valuable for the wider discussion of ESDP issues not only in this House, but outside. Although, as the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, has said, a number of things in it have been said before, they are put together in a context and with a relevance that, given the current situation, I believe to be particularly useful. Perhaps I may also say a word about the ministerial response from Sir Gerald Howarth as he now is, but who at the time was the Minister for International Security Strategy. It was a helpful and positive response, perhaps more positive than some would have expected him to make. But, again, it shows the value of the committee in holding the Government to account on areas of their activity. Given that ESDP and CFSP are intergovernmental matters, it is of particular importance that national Parliaments should be monitoring them and paying them proper attention. That is because these are not areas in which the European Parliament has co-decision, they are matters for which national Parliaments have primary responsibility in terms of watching the activities of their own national Governments.

Rather like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I have to say that the progress which has been made on defence has in many ways been disappointing. Progress since Lisbon is not as significant as one might have been expected, and the report sets out some of the reasons why that has been the case. One should perhaps look at those. It is clear that falling defence expenditure has made life more difficult. Also, as a number of noble Lords have said, there are difficulties in generating forces because of the vast numbers of non-deployable forces, and the fact that in our defence expenditure, we are not using the money. We are big spenders, but we are bad spenders, a point made particularly by the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Over the period there has been a certain UK reticence about European defence because of the historic misgivings that more European defence means in some way less NATO. That I believe has changed with the French return to the integrated military command of NATO and indeed has been reinforced in some ways by the UK/French treaties.

One of the other ways we have seen declining capabilities is that in spite of a good deal of discussion about pooling and sharing, and now in NATO of smart procurement, relatively little progress has been made. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, mentioned the AWACS and, since then, there has been the collective purchase of air transport aircraft by a number of countries. We talk about duplication, and one of the areas in which there is great duplication is in the 27 ministries of defence and structures of Armed Forces that do the same thing in many different places. We cannot get rid of them quickly, but there ought to be economies in co-ordination. However, any rationalisation of this sort would mean a loss of jobs in some parts of those ministries of defence and, indeed in the command structures of the Armed Forces. This has certainly led to considerable institutional resistance to pooling and sharing. Over here as elsewhere, turkeys do not usually vote for an early Christmas. We have to see that as one of the resistances to change in a number of areas of co-operation.

The discussion that we had on the Floor of the House yesterday following the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, on the European Defence Agency showed the continuing value of the agency, and it is important that the sub-committee has also been examining that in recent months. But, again, one can regret, as is discussed in the report, that it has not fulfilled its potential; it should have been able to do more and one should not be too complacent about it. We await the imminent decision of the Government, which we now expect in the late autumn—I am not quite sure when the autumn gets to be late. The review of the European Defence Agency being carried out by the Government may explain the extraordinary omission of defence from the list of topics in the review of the balance of competences announced by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary yesterday. In the Written Statement in Hansard, there is a list of all the departments that are going to be considered in the balance of competences, but, for some reason, defence is omitted. Perhaps the Minister will be able to explain the omission in his reply.

Relations between NATO and the European Union are obviously of great importance and our noble friend the High Representative has followed the example of her predecessors. One can have good relations personally between the secretaries-general of the two institutions, but while we still have the problems of Cypriot attitudes within the European Union and of Turkish attitudes within NATO, the chances of our being able to use the facilities and the Berlin Plus machinery, apart from Althea, are held back. That is another barrier to effectiveness in co-operation and it has certainly handicapped our development.

There is one point to which consideration might be given again—again, it depends on what future role the British Government play in the European Defence Agency. The Turks had certain access to one of the predecessors of the European Defence Agency, of much smaller capacity, which existed under the WEU—as did the Norwegians, even though they were not members of each. The Norwegians have been allowed to have access to and membership of the European Defence Agency. That is the sort of thing that might—I repeat, might—help a little in facilitating relations with Turkey, if that issue could be re-examined. I do not know whether it is practical, but at least it might be of some advantage.

Having said that things have gone wrong, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that, on the positive side, there have been successes. There have been missions, of which I shall give three examples, where the European capacity has provided added value, which is what we are looking for. The first of those was the deployment of EUFOR in Chad in 2008-09. It was certainly very helpful in preventing the difficult situation in Chad being affected by the disruption in Darfur. It would not have been something that NATO would have undertaken and is therefore a particularly good example—Mali may well be of a similar kind.

Similarly, although at first sight the fact that we have parallel anti-piracy operations of EU NAVFOR Atalanta and of NATO might seem a bad example of duplication, they have in fact provided extra flexibilities, with countries which might not wish to be associated with an operation which was exclusively NATO having been able to come in and involve themselves because of the European Union parallel activity. The existence of the EU NAVFOR operation has provided added value there.

Finally, after a period in which NATO ceased to have an active presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the European Union military and police missions in that very difficult part of the west Balkans have certainly played an important, indeed critical, role in assisting the maintenance of stability. The EU was able to bring a range of competences to play.

In conclusion, I once again congratulate my noble friend and the sub-committee on producing an extremely valuable and comprehensive report. I ask my noble friend the Minister to reassure us that the omission of defence from the review of European Union competences does not mean that the Government have taken the view that the European Union has no competence in this field.