Armed Forces Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, let me start by saying that I agree with everything that has been said so far. I have put my name to some amendments in subsequent groupings that seek to ameliorate some of the worst aspects of Schedule 6, where I think the Government have got it badly wrong. I will seek to develop those arguments further when we come to those amendments.

Let me pose a question to the Minister. My understanding, like that of the noble Earl, Lord Minto, is that this move is largely driven by a desire to centralise much stronger financial control. If such central financial control is necessary for financial efficiency and propriety, how on earth will the Government carry out their agenda of decentralisation more widely across the country? Since this is a Government who seek to promote devolution, decentralisation and much greater local control, how on earth can this particular part of the Armed Forces Bill be consonant with that policy? They simply cannot have it both ways. I wonder whether the Minister, when he responds, could address that point.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and honour to follow the several noble Lords, including two noble and gallant Lords, who have already spoken; of course, they have tremendous expertise. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, because she made a point that is very important for the more general argument and not just about Scotland: the reserves are not a reserved matter. That says something about how it all operates and how local it is.

I have the honour, as a Sussex man, of being a member of the Sussex Club. We have an absolute rule that we have no speeches ever but, at our annual dinners twice a year, as well as the loyal toast, of course, we have two other toasts. One says, “Prosperity to the county of Sussex”. The other is to the forces of the Crown.

The link between those two toasts says it all. This is partly why we do not have speeches. This is what we are talking about here: this is why it matters, and why it is rooted. We must remember that the origins of all our armies, unlike the origins of the Royal Navy, are not as standing armies but as regiments raised. That is how the loyalty of the people has always been bound in. It is quite a serious historical, emotional and cultural matter.

However, we should not rest our argument only on that point, central though it is. It could be argued that for some reason, these arrangements are out of date. We would then need to think about whether they would be more efficiently done if they are centralised. The noble Earl, Lord Minto, said that centralised non-departmental bodies are a majorly difficult feature of modern British government. It is all to do with the problem of answerability. What comes into rhetoric a great deal in modern government is that we need “an independent body” to do something or other. That sounds lovely, because we all want independence, but what does that independence mean? It means a person with a bureaucratic background being appointed by bureaucrats. There is almost no answerability to the public more widely, or even to Parliament. Therefore, I would be suspicious of that.

Following on from what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, said, this is relevant now because the Government have inherited this measure from their officials, but it is not consonant with their own policies. The so-called “Manchesterism” from the Prime Minister is, in a way, a modern and more urban version of the thing we all are praising in relation to the reserves in the counties. It is the idea that local loyalty matters, that local people understand these questions better and that power should be devolved. This measure is going in absolutely the wrong direction.

This matters particularly because this Government are trying to shift all of that. Also, we must not forget the wider picture. We live in a dramatically more dangerous world than we have done for a very long time. The loyalty we are talking about needs to be constantly cultivated. People need to understand why their service matters. This will make it harder for them to understand, at a time when we want them to volunteer.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, thinks there is some intellectual coherence in the Government’s approach to regionalisation, given that in the last 24 hours, they have abandoned large swathes of it, including in my part of the world. However, I understand and take on board what he says.

I do not want to make a political point—having just made a political point. I strongly agree with the noble Lord in suspecting that this has the hands of officials all over it. Knowing the Minister as I do, I am not wholly convinced that this has his support. Of course, he will have to support it, as a government proposal, but I think he will get the arguments against it as well as anyone else would.

I am always nervous about any form of military reorganisation when it comes to recruitment. I bow to more distinguished military figures in this Chamber than I was, and it is very dangerous to speak about military experience, given how long ago, in my case, it was. However, I have witnessed over the years—and in the other place was a critic of—the move to change how we recruit our Armed Forces, not least through the use of Capita, which I always thought had disaster written all over it, in capitals. Indeed, that was a view shared at one point by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I am pleased that the Government are transitioning to the Armed Forces recruitment programme, which will come into force next year. We can only hope and pray that it will do us better service than did the Capita project.

But, of course, what we lost during all that was the whole issue of recruiting regiments from their localities, which has been enormously important over the years, not least because it engenders comradeship among those who join together from different parts of the world when they serve abroad. We have seen that throughout history. I agree that to try to centralise everything goes against the Government’s idea of localism. I can quite understand some officials sitting in the MoD on a quiet Friday afternoon thinking, “We must bring all this together. We cannot have all these independent organisations. It is much easier to have one”. But I think it would be a great mistake.

In an article in today’s Telegraph, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, Louise Sandher-Jones, talked about the mobilisation of some of the 95,000 retired people who have served in the Armed Forces for an exercise next year. I know they have raised the age at which veterans can be mobilised from 55 to 65—unfortunately, that excludes me by a year or two, although I hope I might have some use somewhere along the line if they are going to do that—but my point is that, if we are talking about a mass mobilisation, it goes back to the debate we had on an earlier clause about how to contact people. We are talking about contacting people who have not been in contact for decades. They live all over the country. What better way of connecting with those people and fostering some sense of purpose and community than by doing it through the existing structure?

The whole way that we do our military, to use rather bad English, is going through a transition, with much more concentration on our Reserve Forces and mobilising them in the case of an emergency. I therefore urge extreme caution to the Government, and to stop tinkering with this at the present time. Of course, the RFCAs are not above criticism—I understand a lot of improvements have already been made—but it is senseless, and the timing is wrong, to follow what the Government are proposing to place in their wake.

King’s Speech

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in the gracious Speech, it is stated that His Majesty’s Government

“will continue to give its full support to Ukraine and its people and it will endeavour to play a leading role in providing Ukraine with a clear path to NATO membership”.

That most welcome commitment was emphasised by the decision of the new Defence Secretary, John Healey, to which the Minister referred, to travel to Odessa immediately on taking office. There he promised a new package of support for Ukraine. It was the right time and the right place.

I was in Odessa the previous month. There I visited the bomb-damaged cathedral and the museum of fine arts. Part of the museum had suffered a direct hit, and the movable works of art had all been taken to a place of safety. Putin’s war is, among other things, an attempt to destroy Ukrainian culture. Blasphemously, he invokes Christianity as part of his justification for doing so. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, said, it is depraved.

I want to bring out a key word in the passage of the gracious Speech that I just quoted—“continue”. This country’s policy towards Ukraine has been bipartisan since the welcome departure of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour leadership. This continuity gives it great strength, as the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, mentioned, and our new Government should be congratulated on this. But there is a slightly unacknowledged problem: the United States, which after all leads the alliance, enjoys no such bipartisanship over Ukraine. Indeed, the subject is in play in the coming presidential election, as emphasised by Donald Trump’s recent choice of JD Vance as his running mate. As a senator, Mr Vance has been vehement against US backing for Ukraine.

Those close to Mr Trump insist that he does not want to be the president who, as they put it, “loses Ukraine”, and it was good to hear that Mr Trump and President Zelensky had a cordial telephone conversation last Friday night. Nevertheless, the continuing uncertainty surrounding his attitude and that of his fellow Republicans is literally lethal. It causes paralysing doubt about what Ukraine can do next. This doubt may well persist for six more months, or indeed further. In the meantime, lesser allies wilt and Ukrainian casualties mount.

Compared with the Republicans’ attitude, that of the Democratic Party seems closer to our own. Unfortunately, it is not quite as simple as that. I draw your Lordships’ attention to a revealing recent confusion. Meeting President Zelensky at the Washington summit, our new Prime Minister gave him the impression that Ukraine was free to use Storm Shadow missiles to attack Russia well within its borders. President Zelensky tweeted his delight at this game-changing offer—but then things shifted. No, said a Whitehall briefing, there had been no change in the way the missiles can or cannot be used. The fact that the Storm Shadows are Anglo-French was invoked as a reason why this could not be a unilateral decision—but I believe that the chief anxiety here is the anxiety of the White House.

President Biden’s support for Ukraine has always been genuine but never complete. The White House feels itself constrained by Putin’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons if NATO missiles attack Russian territory. This is a particular preoccupation of President Biden’s national security adviser. It is reported that he got in touch with 10 Downing Street to ask for the denial to which I referred.

Goodness knows, the threat described is something that would worry any statesman, but it should be noted that since 2022 Putin has issued many blood-curdling threats to NATO allies that he has not fulfilled. He knows that the promised US response to any nuclear attack by him would be punitively high.

I conclude by saying that, at least until the presidential election is decided, and probably for some time after, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, pointed out, neither America’s European allies nor Ukraine itself can rely on steady US leadership. This difficulty is probably made worse by the replacement of the Atlanticist President Biden by Vice-President Harris as the Democratic Party candidate. Into the gap thus created will creep all sorts of fine-sounding plans for a ceasefire, which, despite what the noble Lord, Lord McDonald of Salford, told us earlier, would almost certainly help Russia and damage Ukraine.

This will be a time when a heavier burden of leadership in helping Ukraine win—and I do mean win—will fall on the European part of NATO. It will fall particularly heavily on Britain as the strongest and staunchest NATO power in Europe. People of all parties must encourage our Government to rise, both in spending and in strategy, to the challenge to maintain the peace of Europe.