Ukraine and Wider Operational Update

Lord Harper Excerpts

Monday 12th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

The whole point of us saying that we are willing to deploy troops to Ukraine, with France and perhaps others, is precisely to ensure that any peace agreement arrived at is guaranteed and acceptable to the Ukrainians. That is important. It is what the Ukrainians want and have asked for, and we negotiated on that. As I said to other noble Lords, the Americans are working with us to provide some sort of security guarantee. Putin needs to negotiate with us. He is the impediment to peace in Ukraine. We say to him: let us negotiate in a way that is acceptable to the Ukrainians.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, to take the Minister back to the question of resources, he will be aware that the Chief of the Defence Staff gave evidence to a Select Committee this afternoon and confirmed that there is a gap between the funds available and the ability to spend on current strategic defence programmes. For reasons I do not quite understand, he said that the size of that gap is a secret. Can the Minister be a little more open with us?

The real point of my question comes back to what I said last week. The defence industrial plan is a signal of how serious the Government are about putting our money where their mouth is. Last week, the Secretary of State said that the Government were working flat out on it. There are indications that it will not be published until the spring. He will know that, in government, “spring” is an elastic concept. I would not want the Minister to have to work flat out for six months. Can he give the House a bit of an indication as to whether we are talking about something that will be here in the next few weeks, or is it months away? We will draw conclusions from his answer.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I do not want to disappoint the noble Lord but I will not be a hostage to fortune and say that it will be in a few weeks, or when it will be. All I can say is that we are working as hard as we can to deliver as soon as we can a defence industrial plan that meets the needs of the budget we have and the needs of the country to deliver the military force and capabilities we need. That is what we are seeking to do. The noble Lord will continue to argue the case for more money and resources. We are working with the resources we have and seeking to deliver the military capability we need.

In my answer to the noble Baroness, I was trying to point out that, even within the existing budget, this country does an awful lot of which we can be proud with our existing military and the Armed Forces personnel that we have. But there is no doubt that the debate that the noble Lord quite rightly raises will continue.