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Armed Forces: Future Defence Policy

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of VT Group and Atkins plc. I am also colonel commandant of the SBS. Our Armed Forces are going through a torrid time, from being assailed by the hardships of Afghanistan—where we should remember that Royal Navy and Royal Air Force people are also playing a part, albeit with the Army taking the brunt—and by the low value in financial terms that this Government put on their worth. It is to their enormous credit that our service men and women continue to deliver with the utmost professionalism all that is demanded of them, wherever they are deployed at home or abroad. Afghanistan has had much mention, and I am sure that there will be more to come. I offer further observations about our defence policy and strategy, particularly with regard to resourcing and the view taken of defence by our Government. I start from the premise that, as has been mentioned many times in this House previously, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review was never properly funded, and I recall that a couple of years ago in this place we lamented the budgetary meltdown taking place in defence at that time. This was not given any acknowledgement by Ministers, but we know today how right that concern was and that we have descended even further into the morass. In particular, the deprivation of money to conduct day-to-day business is eroding morale and troops’ fighting effectiveness. The debacle of the Territorial Army funding muddle last week is a case in point. It is no good Ministers trotting out their mantra that under this Government the defence budget has increased year on year. The fact is that the defence budget has diminished year on year as a percentage of GDP, although we are at war. It has fallen even further behind when measured against inflation in defence equipment and support, which has been running at some 8 per cent higher than so-called defence budget increases—as the Minister said in his opening comments. By the way, as numbers in our Armed Forces decrease and life becomes increasingly cheerless for our service men and women—particularly those in the UK returning from, or preparing to go on, operations—the number of Defence Ministers has increased from four to six, with no doubt an extra bevy of civil servants, special advisers and support staff. This is a ratio that I do not get, but it would be nice if the Minister would comment on what sort of concomitant rise in productivity this had delivered—or maybe the increase has been to confuse and obscure the numbers of Secretaries of State whom there have been in the past four years. That is surely a reflection that the Government have not recognised and do not recognise that we are at war. We have a defence finance train crash which has long been predicted and has been exacerbated by Ministers’ reluctance or inability to take hard and programmed decisions. That simply adds more negative to the bottom line. It is too much to hope that the present Government will provide the necessary cash to allow their aspirations to be realised properly or honourably. Alternatively, it is too much to hope that they will cut their cloth—not least by not evading the issues by commissioning a defence review Green Paper rather than gripping the problem now. As for the Minister’s third option of doing better with what we have—he covered the other two in his opening comments—we shall see. The Minister tried to reassure the House that the review will analyse our national interests and will be strategic. Equally, can we be reassured that we can lift our eyes above Afghanistan? Of course it is absolutely our main effort at the moment, but it is not our only effort, either now or in the future. We would be unwise to assume that our total focus will be on that campaign, or something similar, in, say, 10 years’ time—in spite of some commentators averring that that will be the case. The past three decades are littered with examples of our catastrophic failure to predict the next strategic challenge. Where is our thinking taking us on the vulnerability of our country to the interruption of maritime trade, on which we have almost total dependence; or on the need to provide presence and prevention on a global scale where only maritime forces can deliver? I hope that we will see some beef behind the comments of the Secretary of State for Defence, made in a speech in September: ""Free trade has the capacity to limit the chances of international confrontation over access to resources, particularly energy … As an island nation with an economic dependence on trade, it is right that our Armed Forces act to protect international trade routes, for instance against piracy"." It is convenient for Ministers and people at large to adopt "sea blindness" because maritime threats are not as in your face as land ones. However, if our maritime capability—especially in the form of the workhorses of our fleet, the destroyers and frigates—continues to be cut back, we will not be able to restore this capacity quickly when we find our lifelines, not for the first time in our history, being seriously threatened. Whatever the outcome of the strategic review, when it comes to implementation we need clarity of vision, direction, command and control and accountability from Whitehall. Will the Minister comment on how this can ever be achieved with the Byzantine complexity of the committee spaghetti that passes for organisation in government circles? We all realise that myriad committees have arisen because it is far easier to create a committee than to take a decision. However, it is not healthy, and the sclerosis and turgidity that have developed are not conducive to the coherent and urgent work that is needed to provide for the defence and security of our country; nor, importantly and topically, to the provision of the agility that we require to deal with the pace of today’s operations. The Government can take little satisfaction from the way in which they have handled defence over the past decade. The lack of commitment has been evident and has brought defence to the parlous state in which it is today. From one end of the spectrum, where cadet forces have been denied training because of a retraction of funding; to the TA having its pre-deployment training cut by half even after the "reinstatement" of the TA budget—I heard about this directly from someone to whom it happened last week—to the incoherence of the equipment programme, the endless reprofiling of which conceals the bankruptcy of the department and enables politicians to avoid taking unpalatable decisions because of the potential fallout, which adds cost upon cost; to the lack of a strategic vision to plan for the future—all these and many more deficiencies have brought defence to a sorry state. Great things are expected of our sailors, soldiers and airmen, and great things are done by them; but it is wrong and immoral for the Government to have traded on their loyalty and indomitable can-do spirit to achieve this. They can take no pride in their stewardship of defence.