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Arms Export Controls

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Nicholas. I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to the issues that have been raised during this high-quality debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) on the way in which he has carried out his role as Chair, and the constructive way in which he presented the reports. As always, we have had some thoughtful contributions from the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) and the hon. Members for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) and for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), who speaks for the official Opposition. I appreciate the acknowledgement by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood that substantial progress has been made on arms export controls over several years. I also appreciate the comments from the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling saying that, in broad terms, the UK is in pretty full compliance with the EU's consolidated criteria. He went on to raise issues concerning components, China, Israel and Palestine, and I will come to those shortly. I support the comments made by the hon. Member for Cotswold in reference to the defence industry's importance to the United Kingdom, not only as the bedrock of providing high-quality goods and services to our armed services, but through the role that arms exports and the jobs associated with them play in the UK's economy. A key to the continuing success of the industry is good regulation, which is where effective licence controls are relevant. The UK can be proud of the standards that it sets and maintains, but it is important continually to be challenged. That is the purpose of this debate, and hon. Members do that regularly throughout the year. We may not always agree—I shall point out some areas where there are honest disagreements—but we will always engage, listen and consider thoroughly the reports that come from Committees. Hon. Members will be aware that we are coming to the end of the post-implementation review of the controls introduced in 2004. We are grateful for the input of the Committees, NGOs and industry stakeholders. All parties were struck by the collaboration that we managed to achieve together, and I look forward to that continuing. We will soon have completed implementation of most of the changes coming out of the review. We have taken significant steps to strengthen export controls where there has been concern, and to fulfil commitments and our responses to the public consultation. Hon. Members will be aware that we have introduced controls on sting sticks, and fully extended extraterritorial controls to UK persons anywhere in the world trading in small arms and man-portable air defence systems—MANPADS. We changed the controls on cluster munitions, subjecting them to the strictest controls, and we have controlled both extraterritorial trading by United Kingdom persons and trading within the United Kingdom, in addition to the full range of support activities. On 6 April, legislation will come into force to extend the fully extraterritorial trade controls to light weapons and to tighten controls on the transport of those weapons and similar goods of heightened concern between overseas destinations, and controls on their transit or transhipment via the UK. Officials have started work on pursuing our commitments on torture and military end-use controls at European level. Thanks to the positive and constructive engagement of our stakeholders, we have a strong package that will significantly enhance our controls where concerns have been expressed for a considerable time. I want to refer to some significant successes over the past year or so, and to respond fully to the many points that have been made during this debate. I was pleased that when I appeared before the Committee, I was able to announce that we were proceeding with plans for the introduction of civil penalties. I am firmly convinced of their value, and hope that we can obtain the necessary consensus in government so that the process of introducing a regime can begin in earnest. We have also introduced procedures for companies or individuals to have their registration for open general export licences withdrawn if they have a poor compliance record, or for other appropriate reasons, such as being convicted of export control-related offences. The hon. Member for Cotswold raised that point. There have been two major successful prosecutions. The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire mentioned John Knight, who was convicted of transferring machine guns between Iran and Kuwait, and sentenced to four years' imprisonment with a confiscation order of £53,000. Mehrdad Salashoor was convicted of illegally exporting to Iran navigation equipment that could be adapted for use in missile guidance systems. He was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment with a confiscation order of £433,000. On enforcement activity, we have increased the number of awareness events by 10 per cent. and the number of company training visits by 80 per cent. We are developing, and are about to launch, an online searchable database to improve access to publicly available licensing information. The industry and NGOs have been involved in the development and testing of the database, and we have offered to organise a demonstration for the Committees. We introduced SPIRE on time and within budget, which was an outstanding achievement. Despite that introduction and a 35 per cent. increase in applications, we have exceeded performance targets over the past 12 months. Hon. Members will be aware that a directive to simplify the terms and conditions for the transfer of defence-related products in the EU was adopted by the European Parliament on 16 December. It will now be considered for adoption by the Council of Ministers. Due to the efforts of the UK delegation, which included the Export Control Organisation, and representatives negotiating the directive, the Government believe that there will be few practical implications for the UK export licensing system, which remains robust.