Ministry of Defence

Debate between Toby Perkins and Julian Lewis

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, and I will come to the issue of how we can use the percentage of GDP to track what has been happening to defence in a moment. I hope that the hon. Gentleman—a former Defence Minister in the Labour Government, of course, and a very good one—will try to be non-partisan about this for the simple reason that successive Governments are responsible for what has happened.

What actually took place was, as has already been hinted at, something that has been going on over a very long period. Colleagues on both sides of the House have heard me recite this so often that I am afraid they might do that terrible thing and join in, singing the song with me. But I will just run through it again. In 1963, the falling graph of defence expenditure as a proportion of GDP crossed over with the rising graph of expenditure on welfare at 6%. So we were spending the same on welfare and defence—6%—in 1963. In the mid-1980s, as we have heard, we regularly spent between 4.5% and 5% of GDP on defence, and that was the period when we last had an assertive Russia combined with a major terrorist threat—the threat in Northern Ireland. We were spending at that time roughly the same amount on education and health. Nowadays we spend six times on welfare what we spend on defence, we spend four times on health what we spend on defence, and we spend two and a half times on education what we spend on defence.

We have to ask what we mean when we say that defence is the first duty of Government. If it is the first duty of Government, it is a duty that is more important than any other duty, because if we fail to discharge it everything else is put in jeopardy.

[Toby Perkins]

I partly take the right hon. Gentleman’s point, if he is looking back to 1963 and the role of successive Governments from then to now. But it is also true that there was a substantial cut in defence spending in 2010-11, which bears no relationship to what happened in the previous 13 years. If defence spending had carried on increasing in real terms from 2009-10 to the present, £10 billion more would be being spent on defence than is spent under this Government. That is a substantial change from this Government to the previous one.

[Dr Lewis]

I will not defend what happened in 2010. I was a shadow Defence Minister for slightly longer than the duration of the second world war in the years up to 2010, and I was told retrospectively that the reason I never became a real Defence Minister was that it was known that I would not go along with what they were planning to do. So I am not inclined to lay down my life for the Cameron-Lib Dem coalition of those years. I did not do it then, and I will not do it now.

Having said that, it is all part of a bigger trend, and I come back to my projection of the situation. At the end of the cold war, as we have heard, we took the peace dividend. We had the reductions, which were reasonable under the circumstances. But in 1995-96—the middle of the 1990s and several years after we had taken the peace dividend reductions—we were not spending barely 2% of GDP on defence as we do now, but we were spending fully 3% of GDP on defence. From then on it was downhill all the way—

Defence

Debate between Toby Perkins and Julian Lewis

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker). Not for the first time, he has given great service to the cause of defence. He was an outstandingly good shadow Defence Secretary, and as long as there are people like him in the ranks of the Labour party the prospects for a bipartisan approach to defence remain excellent. I must extend that praise to all 11 Members from the four parties represented on the Defence Committee, every one of whom is strongly committed to the defence of this country.

Until recent years, little attention was paid to a possible threat from post-communist Russia, because for a long time after 9/11 counter-insurgency campaigns in third world countries were thought to be the principal role of the armed forces. However, we are now spending just £0.4 billion on operations of that type out of an annual defence budget of about £36 billion. According to the 2015 SDSR, that budget should by 2020 fund 82,000 soldiers, more than 30,000 sailors and marines, and almost 32,000 RAF personnel, plus another 35,000 reservists. To these must be added some 41,000 civilians, many of whom, like those who serve in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, are service personnel in all but name. Finally, there are special forces, as well as new units that have been created to deal with cyber-security and counter-propaganda. Then there is all the equipment, which currently comprises over 4,000 Army vehicles, including tanks and artillery; about 75 Royal Navy ships and submarines, including the nuclear deterrent; and over 1,000 RAF fixed-wing and rotary aircraft. As a portent of things to come, the services also operate a mixture of large and small surveillance drones and 10 unmanned hunter-killer aerial attack vehicles.

All in all, we still have a fairly full spectrum of military capability, and in absolute terms—as I am sure we would all accept—£36 billion a year is a considerable sum. Set in historical perspective, however, that level of defence investment falls far below the efforts that we have traditionally made when confronted by danger internationally.

The Defence Committee published a report on defence expenditure in April 2016. Entitled, “Shifting the Goalposts?”, it attracted attention for highlighting the inclusion of costly items such as war pensions and MOD civilian pensions at a time when Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Osborne were scrambling to meet the 2% of GDP benchmark which, as we know, was set by NATO as a minimum—not as a target—for all its members. The Government were entitled to include such items in their 2% calculations, but they had never chosen to do so previously. It was therefore clear that by resorting to a form of creative accountancy, we were no longer strictly comparing like with like in overall expenditure terms.

Our report was especially revealing in its tables and graphs, which were well researched by Committee staff. They showed UK defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP, year by year, from the mid-1950s to the present day, and compared those data with the corresponding figures for spending on welfare, education and health. We found that in 1963 we spent similar sums—about 6% of GDP—on both welfare and defence. Now we spend six times on welfare what we spend on defence. In the mid-1980s, the last time we faced a simultaneous threat from an assertive Soviet Union, as it then was, and a major terrorist threat in Northern Ireland, we spent similar sums—about 5% of GDP—on education, on health, and on defence. Now we spend two and half times on education, and nearly four times on health, what we spend on defence.

At the height of the east-west confrontation, in every year from 1981 until 1987, we spent between 4.3% and 5.1% of GDP on defence. Between the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the failure of the Moscow coup in 1991, the cold war came to an end. Consequently, and predictably, a reduction in defence expenditure followed. That was known as the peace dividend yet—this is the key point—even after it had been taken, and even as late as the financial year 1995-96, we were still spending not 2% of GDP, which is the NATO minimum, but fully 3% of GDP on defence. That was without the accounting adjustments that have been used to scrape over the 2% line in the past few years.

To sum up, from 1988 when the cold war began to evaporate, until 2014 when we pulled back from Afghanistan, defence spending almost halved as a proportion of GDP. Now that we face a newly assertive Russia and a global terrorist threat, the decision to set 3% of GDP as our defence expenditure target can no longer be delayed.

[Toby Perkins]

I have also looked at the statistics mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman, and he is absolutely right about the creative accounting. Even taking that into account, it seems impossible to reach the conclusion that we have ever spent as little as we currently spend on defence in comparison with our GDP.

[Dr Lewis]

That is absolutely right. It is a measure of how far downwards our expectations were managed during the reductions in percentage GDP spent on defence under the Blair Government and the Cameron coalition Government, that it was regarded as a cause for triumph and congratulation when it was finally confirmed that we would not be dropping expenditure below 2%. The matter had never been questioned at all prior to that period.

Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Toby Perkins and Julian Lewis

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 30th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

As the Front-Bench speeches have indicated, there is a high degree of cross-party consensus on this initiative. That consensus was also evident in the report of the outgoing Select Committee on Defence published in April 2017, “SDSR 2015 and the Army”. The report concluded:

“We support the Chief of the General Staff’s commitment to changing the culture of the Army through initiatives on employment, talent management and leadership. Successful implementation of these initiatives could provide a structure within which all soldiers can achieve their full potential. However, we recognise that this must not be to the detriment of the Army’s ability to undertake its core role of warfighting. We note the concerns expressed about cultural resistance within the Army to this agenda, particularly in respect of Flexible Engagement.”

In their reply, the Government referred to their

“programme to widen opportunities for all, thereby better reflecting the demands of a modern society. This programme includes promoting a culture of inclusivity in which every Service person is treated with respect and is able to access a range of employment opportunities, including flexible working.

The Flexible Engagement System continues to be considered to be a positive and appropriately contemporary employment system.”

In the opening speeches, we heard reference to a point made by the Chief of the General Staff, Nick Carter, back in February 2015:

“We have a career structure at the moment which is fundamentally a male career structure. It has a number of break points which sadly encourage women to leave rather than encouraging them to stay.”

Although one aspect of the Bill, to do with presentation, was controversial in the upper House—I will come to that in a few moments—it is notable that the people who were concerned about that presentational point are four- square behind the substantive principles of the Bill. For example, Lord Stirrup, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, stated in the debate on the Queen’s Speech:

“Too many talented people, especially women, are leaving early because the terms of their service are not flexible enough to accommodate their evolving personal circumstances and the associated pressures. We cannot afford such waste: it is expensive in terms of training replacements and it impacts on our operational capability.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 June 2017; Vol. 783, c. 91.]

When considering what my reaction should be to the central proposals in the Bill, I came up with the following five questions. First, will an arrangement be overridden in cases of emergency? The Government have been absolutely clear from the outset that it will be overridden. There is no question that people will not be available to serve in the armed forces in a national crisis, when required, no matter what arrangements they have entered into for flexible working.

The next question I ask is: will skills be diminished? It appears from the scheme’s structure that that is not a significant danger, because the idea of flexible working in this way will involve people doing so only for a finite period after full-time service and before further full-time service. So the range of skills ought not to be diminished, and I believe that that safeguard is sufficient.

Where I am a little more concerned and would welcome further contributions is on my third question: will bureaucratic logjams be caused by appeals? The Government have done well in their briefing material, and it may be that some of it was prepared in response to the advantage of having had this Bill considered in the upper House by senior former heads of the services and even former Chiefs of the Defence Staff. Government briefing material has been very full and they have set out a complex scheme of how appeals will work. I am still in need of reassurance that we will not become bogged down in bureaucratic trials and tribulations, possibly going all the way up to ombudsman level. That is one danger that needs further commentary.

My fourth question is: will this send a positive or a negative signal to—

[Toby Perkins]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am apologetic for interrupting the right hon. Gentleman. I was waiting for him to take a natural pause, but one did not appear. Am I right in saying that there is a convention in this House that speakers should remain in their place for two speeches before they leave? The Secretary of State has left after only one speech, and the Chair of the Defence Committee is speaking. Have you been notified of any reason why the Secretary of State has had to leave so soon, when many of us would have expected him to want to know what was being said?