Queen’s Speech

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, events in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Pakistan, the South China Sea et cetera show that we are in a very dangerous and highly chaotic world, but defence hardly features in her Majesty’s gracious Speech. There is reference to working for peace and security on Europe’s borders, but the only hard piece of planned action on defence is:

“Legislation will be introduced to improve the complaints system in the Armed Forces through the creation of an ombudsman”.

Important though that may be, does it really convince people such as Putin that we in our country take hard power seriously?

To be fair, the gracious Speech does say that the Government will host the NATO summit as a,

“sign of the United Kingdom’s commitment to the Alliance”,

but as our defence spending is, on present plans, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan—and that is before any more cuts in the next spending round—due to fall to 1.7% of GDP, one has to have doubts about that commitment. The US Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, urged NATO allies on 3 June this year to raise their defence budgets due to the Ukrainian crisis. He urged NATO to,

“come to grips with the potentially dire consequences of current trends in reduced defence investment—consequences that … pose as much of a threat to the alliance as any potential adversary”.

Many NATO allies, he said, have slashed defence spending in response to the financial crisis, and only a handful meet NATO’s target of spending 2% of their economic output on defence.

Our nation has slashed spending on defence, and we are guilty as charged. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that he expected the allies to make commitments on military spending at their summit in Wales in September. It is very good that we are holding that summit there, but why have the Government not made that commitment in the gracious Speech? What a wonderful opportunity that would have been. It is all very well to talk of working for peace and security on NATO’s borders, but that demands a strong NATO. What do the Government intend to get out of the conference that is so crucial to the future of NATO? There has been no real indication of and, I fear, no real thought about what we want to achieve.

As an aside, the British people should also be aware that the greatest grand strategic threat to the defence of our islands—something that all of us hold dear—is without a doubt the possible separation of Scotland.

I am sure that your Lordships will be very surprised to hear that I shall now focus on the maritime side of things. The Defence Secretary gave a keynote speech two weeks ago on that topic and said that as we pull out of Afghanistan,

“the primary significance of maritime power will come back into its own again and we are reminded that we are a maritime nation and maritime power is crucially important to our security and to our prosperity”.

Well, bravo to that. He is absolutely right and I feel that he is singing off my hymn sheet, but where is the planned investment to ensure that we have that maritime power? Successive cuts mean that we have 19 escorts to protect British global shipping and international global shipping, all of which is run from London, to escort our forces necessary for global reach, which I think is important, for the protection of our 14 dependencies and to help to ensure the stability necessary for our worldwide investments—which, more than any other country in Europe, I hasten to add, we have in most parts of the world—and our trade. The fact that we have only 19 escorts in our Royal Navy is nothing less than a national disgrace.

A serving admiral recently highlighted in an internal naval publication the impact of cumulative spending cuts on the Navy’s ability to carry out its duties. In particular, he highlighted the price of unrelenting operational tempo due to too few ships and too many tasks. That reads across to the other services as well. Consequently, there is a lack of time for basic maintenance before ships deploy, churn and outflow of staff, and an overreliance on civilian consultants to solve technical problems. He states that overall material readiness continues to decline. Apparently, some warships have had to be towed back to Britain—that is absolutely appalling—after malfunctioning at sea. The number of submarines we have available is at an all-time low. Rectifying that clearly demands investment.

On the plus side, the naming of the first of the new carriers, the “Queen Elizabeth”, on 4 July is something I think our nation should be very proud of—albeit that the process from the SDR in 1998 to the present has been rather tortuous. The second carrier, HMS “Prince of Wales”, is well on its way to completion and it is quite wonderful to go up to Rosyth to see all this amazing work going on. But on current plans, after the investment of over £3 billion in the construction of “Prince of Wales”, it is intended to tie the ship up and not use it or possibly even sell it at a bargain basement price. That is inconceivable when it only costs £70 million to run it each year, if one relates that to the £3 billion. This means that instead of our nation having a carrier available 100% of the time—and, my goodness me, I promise your Lordships that in the next 50 years our country will need that, sadly—we will have one available for only 80% of the time. In a national emergency, of course, we could have had two carriers but we will not be able to generate them very easily.

All my experience, and I am sure that of many of your Lordships, tells me that when a crisis arises it will be in that 20% of downtime. That is the way it goes; the jam always falls downwards. I believe that the money must be found from contingency to run both carriers. After all, on top of all the cuts we have had to defence, defence has given back to the Treasury almost £5 billion in underspend since SDSR 2010. A statement in the gracious Speech about investing to run the carrier and resolve the manning shortfalls would have been very nice, as it would have shown that commitment.

I end by saying that as a nation we should be proud of our Navy, its people and what it achieves around the world, day in and day out, but we are balanced on a knife edge. Without an increase in defence spending, we are on a road to disaster. The Navy will not be able to do what the nation expects of us. In this highly dangerous world, is that really the intention of the Government?