Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this debate. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham and my noble friend Lord Hutton of Furness on their maiden speeches. I now know more about Birmingham. I have a colleague from Birmingham; we know that it is the greatest place on earth. I thank my noble friend Lord Hutton for his thoughtful remarks and look forward to his contributions, particularly on defence, in the months to come.

I also pay tribute to the front-line troops. Tonight I will dine with a friend whose son died in a bomb clearance operation in Bosnia. Last weekend I met his colleagues. I am in awe of those young men, who do tasks that I could not imagine myself doing. I am sure the sympathy of the whole House goes to my friend, those like him and the friends and relatives of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition will work with the Government as closely as possible in matters of security and defence. They are too important for us not to co-operate wherever we can to secure the best possible security and defence capability for this country. However, quite properly, just as the Government did in opposition, we will be holding them to account. There has not been much comment on Afghanistan in this debate. That is probably because of the clear assurances given in both the White Paper and by the Minister at the beginning of this debate. Nevertheless, we will watch carefully to make sure that every part of those assurances is delivered. Our troops in Afghanistan need all our support to finish the brave operation in which they are involved.

Turning to the rest of the review, we have had a long and interesting debate. Realistically, I recognise that noble Lords are not waiting for my comments about their speeches but for the Minister’s response. Nevertheless, a preponderant number of noble Lords expressed concerns about the review. The phrase that struck me most came from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, who said that he had “deep, deep concerns”. Indeed, according to the Royal United Services Institute survey, 68 per cent of those in the defence community have concerns that this was a lost opportunity for a more radical reassessment of the UK’s role in the world.

It was very easy to pick up comments from around the defence community and elsewhere in Parliament about the review but I thought it sensible to read the source documents—the two volumes. You can, I hope, only do so by reading the national security strategy before going on to read the strategic defence and security review. I got as far as page nine of the first volume and read what, at first sight, was an extraordinarily reassuring statement. The document stated at the bottom of page nine:

“The National Security Council has reached a clear conclusion”—

there is no ambiguity in that statement—

“that Britain's national interest requires us to reject any notion of the shrinkage of our influence”.

I hope that the noble Lord will explain to me how he can stand by that statement given the 14 per cent reduction in the Navy, the 7 per cent reduction in the Army, the 13 per cent reduction in the RAF, the 29 per cent reduction in civilian staff, the ability to undertake an enduring operation reduced from 9,500 to 6,500, our surge capability reduced by a third to 30,000, the abandonment of carrier strike for a decade and the permanent abandonment of our maritime reconnaissance capability.

Nevertheless, despite that setback to my enthusiasm for the document, I pressed on. Indeed, to read the two documents as a whole is an interesting experience. You would think that the first document would finish with the last page; in fact, it finishes on page 12 of the next document. It is an interesting narrative. I am not sufficiently professional to be able to criticise it in any detail; that needs to be done over time. However, at least I accept that it is an attempt to work from the risks towards a series of strategic tasks. Those strategic tasks are listed on page two of the Strategic Defence and Security Review. That document then goes into the consequences. I was hoping to see an analysis of those tasks with military content, what scenarios related to those tasks, how the newly shaped Armed Forces would fit with those scenarios and how they would work together. However, you do not see that. You move on to page 15, which really says nothing about defence, except that there is a £38 billion hole. I was not going to cover this point in any depth but the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, did, so I must return to it. Will the Minister tell me where the £38 billion figure came from? I have searched what is available in the public domain and the nearest figure that I can find is £36 billion in the Major Projects Report 2009, published on 15 December 2009. The £36 billion figure is contained in one of the most irresponsible sentences I have ever seen in an NAO document. It states:

“The Department estimate, however, that the Defence budget remains over committed by £6 billion over the next ten years; this assumes an annual increase of 2.7 per cent in their budget after the end of the current Comprehensive Spending Review settlement in 2010-11”.

It then goes on to speculate:

“If the Defence budget remains flat in cash terms after this time”—

that is, for the next 10 years—

“then the extent of the over commitment widens to £36 billion”.

If there is no better source than that, I put it to noble Lords that the source is false. Even this Government in what they are putting forward are not suggesting 10 years with a flat cash budget.

When one goes back to the review, the document moves rapidly to principles. The principles on page 17 say things which are a little bit like motherhood in the sense that you could just as easily have said it last year as this year. I think that all but two paragraphs would be more or less identical to what one would have said last year. The two paragraphs in question say that we are to have smaller Armed Forces and that they are to be more selectively used. That is the only bridging interpretation between the tasks set out on page 12 and the cuts that start on page 19.

Is this a good package of cuts? Once again, I do not know. To know this, I would have to see the logic that led from the assumptions on page 12 of the first volume to the forces that we can now deploy. Certainly, the Treasury must feel that it is a satisfactory set of cuts. One assumes—because none of them has resigned—that the defence chiefs think that it is a satisfactory set of cuts. However, I say that it is as yet unproven. Certainly there are surprising elements, such as the carriers that will be delayed for four years from 2016 to “around 2020” to fit a catapult and some arrester gear. That is a lot of years to fit a catapult and arrester gear. There is also the decision on Harriers. I have heard the argument for scrapping the whole fleet, but we in this House have asked what would be the cost of a modest core fleet to maintain the capability on our current carriers in the mean time. We are looking at retaining “Illustrious” or “Ocean”. Why can we not retain “Illustrious” and a modest fleet to maintain a deployable capability to put what history teaches us can be very small numbers of fast jets over a battlefield? We need to know the figures to know whether or not to consider that was a good decision.

Many speakers have treated the civilian staff of the Ministry of Defence as if they are fat, lazy, ineffective and inefficient, and can be slashed at will. I declare an interest: I was employed as a non-executive director on the procurement side of the Ministry of Defence before I joined the Front Bench. Noble Lords should understand what an enormous range of tasks civilians perform in the Ministry of Defence. The ministry must be congratulated on the way in which, over the past decades, it has got people out of uniform. It has had the courage to persuade service personnel that, once they are no longer needed for fighting, many can sensibly become civilians and still be employed by the ministry. These people are frequently the repositories of, for instance, safety knowledge. They man the specialist teams that keep our equipment safe. They go head to head with defence contractors, who employ extremely able people to make sure that the last penny is screwed out of every contract. These are the people that we are talking about cutting by 29 per cent, when the overall size of the services is going down by only 10 per cent. What mechanisms will we put in place to make sure that this cut is made in a way that does not seriously weaken our capability, that does not put safety at risk, that does not put our procurement capability at risk, but does allow people who in the past have served on the front line to continue to provide a service to our soldiers, sailors and airmen?

On the face of it, this is not a strategic defence and security review. Perhaps, when we have probed it, it will emerge that the theme started in the first volume and developed through it sensibly translates to the force that is described in the second volume. We the Opposition will probe this over the months ahead. We hope that we will be part of a wider debate that will be much more inclusive than it has been so far of the defence community. For our country's sake, I hope that we will find that it all fits together, and that, if it is proved that in some places it does not, the Government will have the courage to change their mind.