Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Trefgarne Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I declare a small interest: I am chairman of a small company that manufactures defence-related equipment, although it has no business with the UK Ministry of Defence. Like other noble Lords, I share the expressions of sympathy for those who have died recently in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This was well underlined only yesterday evening when the gallery of the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, which records some 164 holders of the Victoria Cross, was opened at the Imperial War Museum by Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal.

We come to this matter in a serious financial situation, to which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred. He explained how the serious international financial situation had led to all our difficulties, but he was not so clear in explaining why such problems were so acute at the Ministry of Defence. How was it that the Ministry of Defence was able to commit itself to huge expenditure—I will not argue with the noble Lord about the precise amount—for which there was absolutely no provision in the forward costings and was never likely to be? What were the accounting officers doing? It may be that the accounting officers were overridden by Ministers at the time. We shall never know; it is a matter for the previous Administration that is not revealed to the present one. Clearly something went wrong, in that the Ministry of Defence was able to commit itself to so much expenditure for which there was no money available.

My noble friend Lord Lee, whom I had the privilege of serving with in the Ministry of Defence all those years ago, complained that politics was playing too great a part in these matters. However, I seem to recall my noble friend trying himself to bring more politics to defence procurement when he and I were responsible for these matters. Of course, my noble friend has changed his views on other matters since then, so perhaps we should not complain too much.

One of the most disappointing aspects of defence policy over recent years has been a decline in the strength of the reserves—the Territorial Army, the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and the Royal Naval Reserve. They represent enormously good value for money and it is a great pity that they have been allowed to decline so far. I hope that I may be allowed to reflect personally on how I came to the Dispatch Box to announce the increase of the Territorial Army to 83,000 souls. I am not sure how many there are today; I think that there are around 30,000. I came to that Dispatch Box to announce the formation, at the request of my late friend the Earl of Selkirk, of 607 City of York Squadron Royal Auxiliary Air Force, which was to be equipped with Wessex helicopters and assigned a role in support of 2 Infantry Division, then based in York. At that time, 2 Infantry Division was commanded by a young Major General, Mr Peter Inge, now the noble and gallant Lord, Field Marshal Lord Inge, who is in his place today—and quite right too. I came to the Dispatch Box and announced the acquisition of 11 river-class minesweepers for the Royal Naval Reserve. I do not know what has happened to them but I recall that my wife launched one of them. I seem to recall that the wife of my noble friend Lord Lee launched another.

I turn to the recent letter in the Times, signed first by the noble Lord, Lord West, who is sadly not in his place today but knows what I will say. He had a long and distinguished naval career, but he blew it by becoming a Minister in the Government who have just left office. He was a much loved and successful Minister but I take the view that Chiefs of Staff, particularly the service chiefs and the Chief of the Defence Staff, ought to serve all political parties with equal enthusiasm and loyalty, or maybe zero enthusiasm and loyalty if that is how they feel. They should not become as overtly political as the noble Lord, Lord West, did. I do not complain of his work as a Minister but it sat oddly that a distinguished admiral—a former Chief of the Naval Staff, no less—should take a job as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Home Office, as he did.

I turn now to the substance of the letter to which the noble Lord, Lord West, other naval officers and one distinguished Royal Marine attached their names. They seemed to be complaining that, because of the withdrawal of the Harrier fleet and the aircraft carriers on which it would sail, we would no longer be able to recover the Falkland Islands as we did on 1982. A much better alternative is to deter somebody from attacking the Falkland Islands in the first place. Manifestly, we failed to do that in 1982. To my shame, I stood at the Dispatch Box and announced the withdrawal of HMS “Endurance”; the rest, as they say, is history. I say “to my shame” but it was a calculated and, in the context of the time, correct decision. We did not know what was then to happen. We clearly failed to deter the Argentinians in 1982 and we must not make that mistake again.

I put it to your Lordships that a squadron of Tornado aircraft, based in the Falkland Islands, together with the fleet-class submarines deployed to that region, are a much better means of deterring potential aggressors than a fleet of Harriers sitting on an aircraft carrier tied up in Portsmouth. Your Lordships must form your own view on that. Retiring the Harrier fleet was regrettable but, in the context of deterring an attack on the Falkland Islands and of needing a more effective air element operating in Afghanistan, it was the right decision. I make one further point about deterring an attack on the Falkland Islands. One of the turning points in the Falkland conflict in 1982 was the sinking of the “Belgrano”, which was carried out by one of our nuclear-powered submarines. Those submarines will play an effective part in the deterrent in the times ahead.

My final regret is over the maritime reconnaissance aircraft, which are being withdrawn. They form an essential part of our nuclear deterrent, alongside the Trident submarines. It is therefore a matter of great regret that airborne maritime reconnaissance is being withdrawn, as it is.

The strategic review that we are considering today is born of necessity. No doubt it is a regrettable necessity, but let us be clear that the Government had no alternative.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Rosser on so effectively and so definitively refuting the bogus myth of the £38 billion deficit, about which we have heard too much. After my noble friend's refutation, I hope that no one will be so shameless as to purvey that any further. I was going to speak on that but now I do not need to do so.

I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, make the suggestion that we should have available in the House, and no doubt in the House of Commons as well, on temporary secondment, uniformed officers of the Armed Forces to keep us informed on military and defence matters. That was one of the 40 recommendations of the study on the national recognition of the Armed Forces, which I was privileged to chair three years ago, and it was one of only two recommendations out of the 40 which was not accepted by the previous Government. I hope that, with the advocacy of the noble Lord, we may have more luck with the present Administration on that point.

It has been said, quite rightly, so many times from different sides of the Chamber today that the strategic defence and security review was neither strategic nor a review that I do not need to repeat it. I think that has become the consensus in the country. However, I wish to comment on one very important aspect that has not been mentioned. The lack of consultation in the review process was particularly regrettable. There was no effective consultation with industry. As I have pointed out in the House before, there was only one meeting of the National Defence Industries Council between the election and the defence review. That is a terrible mistake. We now know that there is to be a Green Paper and a White Paper on defence industrial policy. In other words, the Government recognise that there are important consequences for our defence industrial structure of the defence review, but those consequences should have been taken account of in the consideration of the defence review. The defence review should have included precisely what we intended to preserve by way of defence industrial capability and structure in this country.

If the procedure was regrettable, the results of this so-called review have been utterly deplorable. I take in turn a number of the points where there have been devastating reductions in the nation's defence capability. First, I ask the Minister what are the savings from the reduction of the infantry of the AS90 and Challenger 2? My instinct is that the reduction is very small. If you reduce just part of the inventory and not all of it—thank God they did not get rid of all of it—you still have the fixed costs, such as training costs. I suspect that the actual savings—I shall bet a drink in the bar for the noble Lord on this—are very derisory and probably not much of a multiple of the 27 photographers and beauty or vanity consultants, or whatever they are, which the Government have seen fit to take on the public payroll for the benefit of the Prime Minister.

Secondly, I turn to helicopters. The Government have cut in half our order for two Chinooks. I am delighted to take full responsibility for that order. I am very proud that we made that order and that I got rid of the original future medium helicopter project and put the money into buying helicopters off-the-shelf as rapidly as possible. We have heard from the Conservative Benches this afternoon, from the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that he considers that there are still too few helicopters, but I am very proud that there are now 50 per cent more helicopters on the front line this year in Afghanistan than there were in the summer of last year as a result of the measures that we took. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that we actually need more. It is a great mistake to cut that order. It is all part of the Government focusing on protecting Afghanistan, which is absolutely right and important, but at the expense of all flexibility for our future ability to respond to different threats so that we shall end up well equipped for Afghanistan and able to fight no more than the last war once we have got through the Afghan conflict. That is a classic mistake to make in defence procurement; it is not one that we made in office, but it is one that I am afraid the coalition is now sadly making.

The prolongation of the Vanguard class and the postponement of the construction of successor class submarines was dealt with so devastatingly by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, that I do not need to enter into that. I just say that it appears, since that announcement was made, that far from saving public money, the Government will end up spending £1.8 billion more on keeping the Vanguard class in the water for that extended time—with the law of diminishing returns which always applies towards the end of the life of any class of naval vessel. That was not a very intelligent decision either.

I come on to the most important issue, which is the decision about the Harriers and carrier strike. I think that the decision to get rid of our Harriers is utterly unforgivable. It is quite the wrong decision. The right decision would have been to do what we were planning to do, and what I was working on at the time of the election. That is to withdraw the Tornados well before the original date, the official date, of 2022—I queried that date when I first saw it—but to withdraw them as and when we were able to upgrade the Typhoon with a ground support capability, with a full suite of weapons, with Paveway IV, Brimstone or its successor, with Storm Shadow and with a sensor equivalent of the Raptor, which has done so well in the Tornado. That was why, last year, we put more money into the Typhoon enhancement programme. I was hoping to be able to withdraw the Tornados by 2014 or 2015. There would have been a considerable saving there, but we would have continued to have a carrier strike capability right the way through.

I think that the Government think that they are geniuses—not, sadly, military geniuses but geniuses in predicting the future precisely and accurately. What they are saying to the country in this document amounts to this: “We need a carrier strike capability. There are threats in this world to which we might have to respond in desperation with that carrier strike capability. We have to spend the money, we have to invest in that capability, but”—they are telling the nation, “between the years 2011 and 2019, those threats will not arise”. How remarkable. How do they do it? I do not know whether they do it by astrology or tarot cards, but one can only either marvel or shake in one's boots that defence planning is being conducted on that basis.

Not surprisingly, that has opened up a very useful and healthy debate about our ability to fulfil some of our obligations—to defend, for example, the Falklands. I am not going to make any judgments about this, I will deal just in facts. The Government are saying that we have the capability, without any carriers, to defend the Falklands. What do we have? We have four Typhoons in Mount Pleasant. We have a company of troops. We have one runway fit for combat aircraft. What happens if, by subterfuge, sabotage, bomb attack, missile, or whatever, that runway is taken out? Presumably, if the Typhoons happen to be in the air at the time, the crew will have to eject, and we certainly cannot expect to be able to replenish the Falklands by airlift.

The Government talk about submarines. We have not got a submarine in the Falklands and I do not think—because they have not told the nation so—that they have any intention of basing a submarine on the Falklands. Let me tell them that if they did, they would have to assign two—probably two and a half—of the hunter killer submarines, Trafalgar class and, potentially, Astute class, to that role alone. That is not provided for in the number that we plan to build—the seven Astutes. If the Government are going to put a submarine there, they had better tell the nation that they are going to do that and explain how. If they are not, if there is not going to be a submarine there, they had better stop saying that submarines provide an adequate protection against a potential invasion of the Falklands. Some very serious issues have come to light over the past few days on this and we need an answer.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord. He has been very good at describing how he thinks the money ought to be spent to defend the Falkland Islands. Does he not realise that he and his right honourable friends left the financial arrangements in the Ministry of Defence in a complete shambles: there is no money?

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I absolutely do not recognise that. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Rosser has already dealt with that particular falsehood. What is more, I think that the Government are absolutely wrong to cut public spending generally, as they are doing, so far and so fast; and they are certainly wrong to take it out on defence in the way that they are.