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Armed Forces

My Lords, we on these Benches also welcome the White Paper. My party, like the others, has done considerable work and published on the military covenant and support for our Armed Forces, and there is a great deal of common ground in this White Paper with which we can all agree—provided that it is fully implemented. We are all concerned about the degree of overstretch from which our Armed Forces have been suffering through heavy commitments over the past few years—““running hot””, as Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman in the other place, wrote in an early paper, Our Nation’s Duty, published in December last year. The strains on our forces, on their families, on reserves called up far more frequently than anticipated and on our equipment—and thus on the military covenant as such—have been acute. After the cuts which the Conservative Government made after 1990, thinking that we could cut back on our Armed Forces post the end of the Cold War, when I heard a Minister say in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that cuts in the probation services were going to affect not the front line but merely the tail, I was reminded of the problems we got into with Front Line First, which cut Defence Medical Services most sharply, from which we have been suffering since. We have had wars of choice for the past 10 years—what John Kampfner unkindly called ““Blair’s Wars”” and what the White Paper refers to as using our forces for good—in Kosovo, where there was a major operation in which we were prepared to commit almost half our effective army; in Sierra Leone, where a small commitment did a world of good; in Afghanistan, a necessary commitment though badly delayed with all that time lost between 2000 and 2006 which has made the reconstruction of the economy, society and state so much more difficult; and, of course, in Iraq, which my party strongly opposed and which thankfully we will complete, we hope, within the next six months. Perhaps the Minister will tell us a little about the prospects for completing the status of forces agreement in Iraq and how that will affect the remaining months that our forces will stay in Basra. I have not yet read that the status of forces agreement has been completed. As a result, we have had no spare capacity to contribute to multilateral forces in central Africa, in the Congo, in the Great Lakes region, in Sudan and Chad, or to do as much as we would have liked to train and provide logistical support for troops from African states in that very damaged continent. A range of wider issues follow from this: where should we commit to conflicts, under what circumstances, with whom and with what equipment? We should be addressing what we think are the likeliest sorts of conflicts, whether high-level conflicts between states of the kind which led to the intervention in Iraq or—I dread the thought—potential operations against Iran, or the Petersburg tasks of separation of combatants, peace enforcement, restoration of order, nation-building and reconstruction. We need different kinds of equipment and training for these actions. For interstate war we need aircraft carriers, highly capable piloted aircraft and perhaps even a new nuclear deterrent. For state-building and peace enforcement we need good armoured vehicles, personal armour, helicopters and pilotless drones. In all these we pursue closer co-operation with the armed forces of other states, which we need to pursue more actively and, I suggest, discuss more openly with Parliament. Do we pursue primarily continuing partnership with the United States, with its much larger armed forces with a rather different set of military doctrines, or more the French, the Dutch, the Danish and the Canadians, with whom we find ourselves operating in Helmand and elsewhere? I welcome the report of the UK-French helicopter initiative. That seems very much the kind of thing that we should be doing. Even peace enforcement now is increasingly hard fought. We are up against asymmetrical warfare with improvised explosive devices, grenade launchers and the like and, as in Afghanistan, we take heavy casualties. Welcome improvements in medical care and in evacuating the wounded mean that fewer die, but more return to the United Kingdom severely injured and often permanently disabled. The White Paper notes that, since 2001, 350 personnel have been killed, but more than 2,000 have been seriously injured or wounded, creating a new generation of long-term disabled ex-service men and women. We welcome the proposals for the Armed Forces compensation scheme. We welcome the extension of Selly Oak to house a separate military ward, and the further investment in Headley Court. We very much welcome what the White Paper says about mental health services for returning servicemen, veterans and Reserve Forces after active service. We look forward to hearing that these measures have been put in place. I was glad to see the comment in the White Paper that the number of ex-servicemen who are rough sleepers has declined. I was talking some months ago in Bradford to soup-run organisers, who told me that there is still a higher proportion of ex-servicemen there and in some other northern cities than there is in London. There is still a lot to be done in looking after ex-servicemen who find that the adjustment to civilian life after active service is very difficult. A lot of extra work is being done by service charities. I was at a concert in Bradford the weekend before last for the benefit of Help for Heroes, the excellent new charity that has raised a lot of money, particularly for Headley Court and for the badly wounded. However, as the White Paper remarks, the central responsibility lies with government—not just for the wounded, but for the families of servicemen, for their houses and for the educational needs of their children. It is good to hear about what is under way at Catterick. Last weekend I was in Richmond, talking to Liberal Democrat councillors who represent that area. They tell me that things are, without question, improving. I have one question about paragraph 2.22, in which we are told that the provision of new housing for service-leavers is very important, and that the Government will give £400,000 for it. It seems a very small sum for a very large objective. I note also the remarks about the 12,000 foreign and Commonwealth personnel in the UK Armed Forces—the Gurkhas, 3,000 Fijians, a substantial number from the Caribbean and so on. The question of earned citizenship, and of the earned citizenship of their partners and families, is being addressed in a much more satisfactory way. I recognise that the extent now to which we depend on people from Fiji and elsewhere reflects the difficulties we have in recruiting in our own cities from those pockets of deep, often second and third-generation unemployment. A period in the services would help to break the cycle of deprivation and underachievement there. In terms of joined-up government, I find contradictions between the continuing emphasis on long-term service for all and the increasing dependence on partly trained Reserve Forces; and between the emphasis on the armed services providing education and training for people who have missed out elsewhere and the suggestion that a smaller proportion of people will pass through the services, each serving for a very long period. We are told that 40 per cent of other ranks now serve for 10 years or more, often acquiring growing family commitments and risking losing touch with civilian life. The Americans have an exemplary record of using their services to provide education and training for the disadvantaged, including apprenticeships in practical skills, from computing to mechanical engineering. We support the remission of tuition fees after six years’ service; perhaps it should be a little less. We should perhaps encourage shorter term service to help citizenship engagement, which is dear to the Prime Minister’s heart but not mentioned in this White Paper. That would give a larger throughput of young volunteers with experience of military service for their country. The citizenship agenda ought to be more explicitly addressed in this White Paper. We have a reference to veterans’ day. Some of us feel that Remembrance Day is the closest thing we have to a national day and that it is time to rethink and reshape it. I was sorry that, for example, no recently returned active servicemen marched past the Cenotaph on 9 November and that cadet forces, the future of our services, were at the back of the march, not the front. I would like to see much more said about the role of the Reserve Forces, down now to fewer than 40,000 when we are told that 20,000 have served in operations in the past 10 years. It is time for a much wider debate on the future of our Reserve Forces since they have become so much more actively used in that time, with their role not only in supporting operations abroad but in assistance to civil powers at home—flooding, foot and mouth, BSE or a potential pandemic—and the wider role of the cadet forces in providing a sense of personal worth and self-respect to young teenage males in our cities. Reserve Forces have a particular value in likely operations in Africa and other areas where weak or failing states require assistance in state-building. Civil military skills are then particularly useful, and I note that almost all the armed services’ civil military units in the States are drawn from its National Guard, for similar reasons. My much lamented colleague Lord Garden used to say that we needed to take some hard decisions regarding British defence that we were ducking. It is now 10 years since the 1998 strategic review under the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, from whom I look forward to hearing. It was an excellent White Paper, even though it left out the multilateral European dimension, which the Prime Minister launched at St Malo a few months later. Lord Garden would also say that no Government would be likely to invest sufficient additional spending in defence to provide the full range of equipment and specialist units needed to meet all contingencies. We therefore have to choose. We have seen the emergence of a huge overhang in future defence procurement in which the future commitments clearly cannot be met within the existing budget, with delays in the future FRES and cutbacks and delays in helicopter orders, while reinforcing the joint combat aircraft and nuclear deterrent investment. My party produced a security paper last year that came to the conclusion that: "““The defence budget crunch, combined with doubts over when and how Britain should play a role in expeditionary deployments, is ample evidence””," that: "““Britain must take a long hard look at whether we can continue … to design our armed forces as an almost miniature version of the American military with a wide variety of military platforms””." Sir Menzies Campbell, in a paper published two months ago, said that we need a debate nationally about our political objectives. He suggested that we cannot carry on regardless, trying to maintain all our military objectives and commitments, but that we lack the possibility, particularly now that we are in a recession, of doing properly everything we are committed to do because of the immense additional funding that that would require. He suggests that we may need to focus rather more on the wars of today and to prioritise expeditionary and peacekeeping missions over state-on-state or full spectrum war-fighting capabilities, which would see, "““prioritisation of armoured vehicles, helicopters, strategic lift””—" about which the noble Lord, Lord Astor, has spoken— "““and intelligence gathering technology over large scale procurement such as fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear capabilities and submarines””." That, I suggest, is the wider context that lies behind the welcome Armed Forces welfare questions that this paper covers.