Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, the review rightly identifies that the risks of unsustainable population growth, pandemics, global warming and unconstrained migration are a backdrop to all the decisions that we are making. Taken in conjunction with harnessing rapidly changing technological advances, such as AI, quantum computing, the use of space, hypersonic missiles, robotics and unmanned combat vehicles, warfare is clearly changing.

The Defence Secretary is right in preparing for future wars, not past battles—but he is being economical with the truth when he calls this the biggest defence investment since the end of the Cold War. Notwithstanding the much-welcomed four-year uplift to defence spending, announced last November, the key driver of this review has been cost. Talk of

“giving us deployable, capable forces, equipped with next-generation capabilities”

is not able to disguise a further reduction in our nation’s overall military capability. Clearly, there needs to be investment in technology—space, cyber et cetera, as I mentioned—but this puts ever more pressure on an already overstretched budget. The plan as presented has a great deal of jam tomorrow but pain today. Should there be conflict in the short term—when you look around the world, you see that there might well be one—we would have to fight with what we have got.

One of the most striking aspects of the integrated review, mentioned by a number of speakers, was the change to UK’s nuclear posture. There are a number of sensible possible rationales for some of the changes but, without doubt, the increase in future holdings of warheads has huge a diplomatic downside. These changes need to be much more clearly explained. Under Putin’s direction, Russia has spent billions modernising its nuclear forces, but of more concern is its development of new, more devastating, nuclear delivery systems—some of them are quite horrifying—ditto China. This nuclear dimension is of greater concern in view of the collapse of international agreements to limit numbers of warheads, types of delivery systems and the complex confidence-building measures that used to be in place to avoid the risks of war by miscalculation. Again, this needs to be resolved and addressed.

The review quite rightly reinforces the commitment to, and importance of, the NATO alliance for UK and European security. France’s President Macron is looking forward to an entirely new transatlantic “security architecture” for the 21st century: his vision is an all-European defensive collective that is armed up and can act independently and ahead of, in his words, a brain-dead NATO. The idea is delusional and highly damaging both to NATO and the security of Europe. President Biden has made sweeping declarations that Europe and the United States must again “trust in one another”, but President Macron’s agenda seems to cross his bows, and our nation needs to be wary of being drawn into this European army defence quagmire.

I am delighted that the Government have recognised the importance of sovereign capability in procurement and its importance for national resilience and indeed the economy. The decision to base our defence and security on a maritime strategy is welcomed and absolutely the right thing to do. As you can imagine, it was music to my ears to hear the Prime Minister say:

“If there is one policy that strengthens the UK in every possible sense, it is building more ships for the Royal Navy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/11/20; col. 488.]


A highly capable and resilient globally mobile military will help to prevent a major world war far better than a heavy division deployed on to the continent.

However, one has to face the stark reality that our already embarrassingly small frigate force, as mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, is going to shrink still further over the short to medium term. When will the next five Type 26 frigates be ordered—we have been waiting for ages for them to be ordered—and are we speeding up the delivery programme? The present programme is glacially slow and dramatically adding to the cost.