Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

John Spellar Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I rise to speak as Deputy Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to this debate. May I pass on the apologies of the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who has had a minor operation this week? As we know, he has very strong views on our defence capacity and would probably have wished to express them fairly vociferously in this debate. The defence estimates cover a vast range of work, but I will need to compress my remarks to 10 to 15 minutes to allow other contributions.

This is a dramatic time for defence issues. The agony of Ukraine intensifies, as President Zelensky’s powerful address to us yesterday made clear. The crisis has, of course, been building for a number of years, as Russia has launched successive cyber-attack warfare in the Baltic states and kinetic warfare in Georgia, Crimea and the Donbas. It has now exploded dramatically and tragically in Ukraine. We declare our solidarity with the country, the people and the military forces of Ukraine.

How are we in the UK to react to the dramatic shift in international security relations? Clearly, our Government and Parliament now have to give an urgent and positive response to the long-standing demands of our Defence Committee that we must move towards 3% of GDP for defence spending. The Budget in just over two weeks’ time has to respond positively to that imperative. Colleagues on both sides of the House will speak about detailed aspects of the consequential changes to personnel and to equipment, not least reversing the proposed reduction in numbers of the Army. To leave them sufficient time, I will focus on the broader context.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank the right hon. Member, my friend, for giving way. Surely one of the lessons of what we have seen in Ukraine is that a small group of utterly determined trained, or indeed untrained, men and women can use small arms and anti-tank weapons and stop a hugely bigger force. We are therefore just in time to reverse some of the decisions in the integrated review, such as scrapping 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment, an infantry battalion that proved its worth in 2009 hugely gallantly.

[John Spellar]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention—I think he should have declared an interest. He is absolutely right; the defence estimates and the Budget need to reflect the new reality.

I want to concentrate on the broader context: the ideological battle that is taking place, and the institutional shake-up that is consequently required. Most crucially, we have to recognise the full-spectrum approach of our opponents. Commentators in the west often gabble glibly about hybrid warfare, but in the framework of cyber war as an alternative to kinetic capability, and often in a mechanistic way, rather than understanding the political context and the need for whole-of-society resilience.

The Soviet mindset, of which we are now seeing a resurgence, is quite different. For these people, politics—politik—is everything. All agencies of the state are engaged. For too long we have ignored the multidimensional attack on our society, but that is a luxury we can no longer afford. This also means that the integrated defence review has, to an extent, disintegrated, and requires a major revamp which should start immediately. This necessary intellectual rethink must now focus primarily on state-on-state conflict.

Over many years, I have posed a question a number of times to military figures, defence officials and academics. During the cold war, we based our defence and security posture on our assessment of “the Threat”, with a capital T, and I have asked what the Threat is today. Invariably, I receive the answer that we face a variety of threats, but that is not the right answer, because the question is “What is the existential threat to our nation and society?” It is not terrorism, Islamist or otherwise, ugly and vile though that is. Today we—the people of Ukraine, the people of Europe, and indeed the west more widely—know the answer. It is a revanchist Russia and its desire to re-establish the Soviet territory, although I accept that in the longer term, as the defence review states, a revisionist China may be a more significant challenge. That means that today’s estimates are fundamentally an historical document, as, indeed, is the review.

That is not just down to the violently aggressive attacks by Putin’s Russia, but is also, thankfully, a result of the vigorous response not only from NATO allies but from formally neutral countries such as Sweden and Finland, where for the first time there is a public majority favouring NATO membership. The most seismic public reaction has been in Germany, where the new Social Democratic party Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has rewritten decades of German policy of both parties in his historic speech to the Bundestag. Equally dramatic was the wide political support, including support from the German Greens.

Chancellor Scholz stated clearly that President Putin had created a new reality which required an unequivocal response and a dramatic shift to supply Ukraine with weapons. He also made it clear that making international solidarity possible required new, strong capabilities. Essentially, that means that Germany must invest more in the security of the country. He addressed the readiness crisis in the Bundeswehr, which has been widely publicised and has featured in discussions we have had with our German counterparts. He stressed the need for aeroplanes that can fly, ships that can set out to sea, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their mission. He has designated a one-off sum of €100 billion to set up a special fund, and has pledged an annual 2% of GDP.

I suggest to the Minister—I should welcome his observations—that we may also need to revise the ideological decision made by his Government, although not by current Ministers, to abandon our bases in Germany. I do not think the indication that we might make some minor return meets the need presented by the current challenge.

This was an imaginative, bold and historic intervention. Scholz clearly, in Bismarck’s phrase, heard God’s footsteps marching through history, and managed to catch on to His coattails as He marched past. I hope that our Ministers see the significance of that intervention, and engage rapidly and deeply with our German colleagues to build on this new reality. I hope they will also engage with our own defence industry. The Financial Times reports that after Scholz’s speech on the Sunday, on the Monday the German Defence Ministry and defence firms were engaged in detailed discussions as to how to ramp up production. The MOD and ADS should take note, because that is the sort of national response that we need. I was talking with the industry yesterday, and this does not appear to have happened, particularly not in the supply chain, which is wondering where it fits into the changed environment.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

But this has been happening for many years. These are political decisions that have been taken, and nearly 30% of our procurement is now bought off the shelf from the United States, with no commitment from companies such as Boeing to reinvest to ensure that not only jobs but technology stay in the UK.

[John Spellar]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is vital to have a well-established industry to be able to respond to a crisis. The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury need to break out of the ideological straitjacket that states that domestic industry does not matter and we can buy from anywhere in the world. That is a hugely important change.

[The Minister for Defence Procurement (Jeremy Quin)]

In fairness, I must draw the right hon. Gentleman’s attention back to the DSIS—the defence security industrial strategy—in which we fundamentally changed our process of procurement. We have a new partnership with British industry, and in discussions with them over the last few days they have been extremely forward looking, as I know he would wish.

[John Spellar]

I would welcome a bit more detail from the Minister as to the nature and engagement of those discussions. I was talking to a representative from the industry only yesterday, and they are seeing precious little coming through. It is not happening in any way on the same scale or intensity as in Germany. We could argue that Germany is doing some catch-up, but it is really engaging with its industry. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has said, we give away huge orders and get little or nothing in return. Even now, the Minister’s own Department refuses to commit to building the fleet solid support ships in the UK, and his colleagues in the Home Office are giving an order for new Border Force vessels to a shipyard in Holland.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

It is worse than that. The Department used to hide behind European regulations, but now we are out of the European Union, we should be free to procure in the UK. I challenged the Minister before Christmas as to whether his Department was going to give a £10 million contract to Damen in the Netherlands for a special naval vehicle, and he said we should wait for the competition. Lo and behold, this week it has been announced that Damen has won that contract for a vessel that could have been built in this country.

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[John Spellar]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and we look forward to the Minister trying to give an explanation for that. My right hon. Friend mentions EU regulations. The reality was that no other country in Europe behaved like that, but that was one of the drivers for the British public thinking that the EU was not working in their interests. Had we actually behaved like every other European country, there would have been less anger in this country. Now the Government are claiming that they are bound by World Trade Organisation regulations, but the United States is a long-standing member—indeed, a founder—of the WTO, and it has a “buy American” policy. There is a deep ideology in the civil service, and unfortunately Ministers are afraid to confront it.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. He refers to countries that are thinking about joining NATO, such as Finland and Sweden, and there has been a sea change, as he says, in those countries and in Germany. I am a great believer in the British public, and I bet that every single Member here today is getting the same message that I have been getting way up at the top of the UK, which is that we need to defend ourselves against the bear, and against the threat. I believe that the public would warmly support us if we decided to reverse the dreadful cut in the size of the British Army. I think that that would give a great deal of strength to the Government’s elbow.

[John Spellar]

The hon. Gentleman will see that come through in my speech.

I hope this will, if not eliminate, at least reduce the facile attacks on our defence industry and its skilled, unionised workforce. Can we have no more ill-informed pressure on the City and pension funds to disinvest in defence firms, and no more blockades of their factories?

Likewise, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence cannot be mere observers. They have to engage, and the Treasury has to provide the funding to enable that engagement to be meaningful. They should follow the example of the great Ernie Bevin, who coincidentally was born on this day in 1881. He had the strategic genius to create not only the biggest trade union in the country, if not the world, but the NATO alliance. Furthermore, when American Secretary of State George Marshall gave his speech at Harvard in 1947, Bevin seized on a single sentence:

“The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

Through his energy and persuasion, Bevin generated a European response of sufficient weight and urgency to Marshall’s implied offer of American support, and the reconstruction of Europe followed thereafter.

Incidentally, Bevin also saw the need to create the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department to engage in the battle of ideas and the battle to counter disinformation—that is a crucial part of the spectrum—not only in the UK but across Europe. Also engaged in that struggle of democracy versus totalitarianism were leading Labour figures in the IRD Denis Healey and Richard Crossman, who had of course also played a prominent role in the wartime Political Warfare Executive. This cause is currently being championed in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly by its president, US Congressman Gerry Connolly, to put at its heart the democratic values on which NATO was founded.

Now we have to make our defence and security architecture fit for purpose for this existential struggle. Some of that is about recreating past capability and restoring our vandalised capacity for watching and understanding the dynamics of the Russian regime and, indeed, of Ukraine —the neglect of that after the fall of the Berlin wall was a scandal—and some of it is about recognising the relentless political nature of this struggle and funding organisations with multiple skills to wage it, while fully integrating our capacity.

I find it unusual, if not extraordinary, that the Chief of the Defence Staff and the heads of the intelligence agencies attend the National Security Council only as and when. Resources are crucial—that is what this debate is about—but mindset and doctrine are also vital.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman and I are both former Armed Forces Ministers. I have sat on the Defence Committee for five years, and he has served far longer than me and is now our excellent vice-Chairman. He can attest to the fact that the Committee has been warning about the increasing Russian threat for several years. Some of us were derided as hawks who always said the Russians were coming. Well, the Russians have now well and truly turned up, so the Committee was basically right. Does he agree that we must now review the entire integrated review, because what happened two weeks ago was a complete game changer in security terms?

[John Spellar]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his interventions not just in the Chamber but in the Defence Committee on these important issues. This is pertinent to a debate on the estimates, because resources and finances are obviously crucial, but it is the doctrine, the mindset and the organisation that decide the outcome. It is the same in Ukraine, where the morale of the Ukrainian forces, who are fighting for their homeland, is crucial when facing a conscript army who are not sure where they are or why they are there. That is why we have to get this right. We need an increase in the Budget in a couple of weeks’ time, but we also need a reset in our thinking.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

When I tabled a written question asking whether there needed to be such a review, I received a complacent answer from the Minister for Defence People and Veterans, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), saying that everything is all right and that we are meeting the current requirements. That answer came on 4 March, after this conflict had begun. There needs to be a review of our mindset to build up the security of our country, rather than just defending the Government’s position.

[John Spellar]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. This very much shows that a week in politics can be a very long time, but it also reveals, as she rightly says, a complacency about our situation and about the international situation, which was not justified by events.

In conclusion, what we have to question today is: is there the necessary understanding in the Government of the tasks and indeed the opportunities confronting them? Are they willing to rethink and provide the funds to implement urgent and necessary charge? Bevin understood this and seized the moment, and Prime Minister Attlee backed him to the hilt. So the fundamental question today is: are this Prime Minister, the current crop of Ministers and our dysfunctional civil service up for the challenge or even up to the job?

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[Peter Grant]

I wish I had not let the right hon. Gentleman intervene, because he has just stolen my thunder, but never mind—“It’s nae loss whit a freen gets”, I think is the phrase we would use in Fife.

The single living accommodation, at the time the NAO started looking at it on 31 October 2010, was being used by almost exactly 80,000 armed forces personnel, or more than half the entire number of people working in our armed forces. Some 36% of those 80,000 people were living in accommodation rated grade 4 or below. The accommodation was so poor that the MOD did not even have the cheek to charge rent on it—that is how bad it was. I do not know what accommodation standards legislation is like in England, but certainly in Scotland it would be illegal to rent out some of that accommodation as a private landlord, a social landlord or a local authority.

[John Spellar]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

I am sorry, but I really do need to make progress. I could talk until 7 o’clock, if the right hon. Gentleman wants me to, but I think other Members wish to speak.

The Public Accounts Committee reported that the Commands—the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force—planned to use some of the £16.5 billion of additional funding to address the backlog in maintenance and repairs of that accommodation, which at the time was estimated to be about £1.5 billion. The Committee reported at the same time:

“However, this extra funding seems to have already been spent more than once before it had even arrived with the Department”.

As I am sure many hon. Members are aware, if we listed the number of times that Ministers or civil servants told us that an MOD funding problem would be fixed by that additional money, welcome though it is, it would certainly add up to many times. Perhaps that is why they are a wee bit coy about giving us a detailed breakdown of exactly what the money will be spent on, because once they do that we will find out that it will not go nearly far enough.

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[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) for opening the debate. He is right that our thoughts today are with the people of Ukraine and the brave servicemen and women, and civilians, who are resisting the might and cruelty of Putin’s war machine. As the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) said, that focuses our minds in our debate on defence.

We need to ask how we have ended up with the smallest Army in our history. That has not happened by accident; it is a political choice. In 2010, a Conservative party came into power, in the coalition Government, that had argued before the election for more spending on everything in defence, but then, suddenly, they got into a programme of austerity, under the cloud of a mythical £38 billion black hole that the bad Labour Government had left them. That never existed and we know that because within two years, it seemed to have disappeared, given what the Government said.

That Government cut the budget by 16% because the Treasury wanted money out of that budget. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer) asked why this was about people—well, it was about people because that is how to get money quickly out of a budget. The Government did things such as making people take compulsory redundancy and losing people with vast experience, and it was absolutely shameful. If a Labour Government had done that, frankly, there would have been an outcry.

[John Spellar]

Is my right hon. Friend not shocked that that Government did not learn lessons from the cuts in personnel under Options for Change after the end of the cold war, which led to the same collapse in morale and loss of experience?

[Mr Jones]

My right hon. Friend is right, but these measures were not about that. They were about the Treasury making austerity cuts. We now have a situation where the present Government—who, again, talk in slogans—talk about the biggest cash injection ever. The budget will still be lower in real terms than it was in 2010. The fact is that, like the right hon. Member for New Forest East, I would agree with increasing the defence budget, but we have to recognise how we got to where we are today.

Interestingly, there is clearly some thinking going on in the MOD, because I asked a parliamentary written question last week, which I tend to do, as the Minister knows, on whether the cuts would be reversed. I would have expected to get a reply within days, but last night, I got a holding reply saying that the question of whether the MOD would reverse the decision on reducing the Army to 73,000 personnel could not be answered in the normal timescale, so I suspect that a lot of work is going on in the MOD on that. It has to look at that, because everyone who has spoken in this debate has said that, although we can have enough equipment and the concepts of war, at the end of the day, we need people. That is key.

As Members know, I have always been an advocate for defence and I would argue for more defence spending, but I think that argument will fall on deaf ears a lot if we look at the way that this matter is being managed internally in the MOD. The NAO report is a bit like groundhog day: every year it comes back with a catalogue of delays and overspends. Whatever the Minister says, I am sorry, but he should just read the report. The budget is not in surplus. It misses things out and looks at efficiencies. But it has been like this for the past 10 years, and efficiencies have never been achieved and never will be.

It is important that we use defence expenditure, if we actually get it, to generate capacity in the UK defence industry and ensure that we get the equipment we want. I welcome things like the national shipbuilding strategy, but I am appalled that, even this week, the MOD has given a £10 million contract to a Dutch yard for a vessel that could have been built here. The right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) has done a very good report that says that we should take social value into account when awarding contracts. I have asked the Department and now the National Audit Office to tell me what the formula is for that.

We are buying off the shelf from the United States and others, without any commitment to supporting our native shipbuilding and defence sector. I am one of the people arguing for more on defence, but I want to ensure that there is a proper defence industrial strategy behind it, not only to deliver for our armed forces, but to ensure that we get jobs and prosperity here. I see no evidence of that at the moment.

The last thing I would like to talk about is the nuclear deterrent. As the House knows, I have always been an advocate for our continuous at-sea deterrence, and these times have brought its importance into sharp focus. It will be important for the Department to ensure that the programme not only has finance behind it, but is actually on target. People have talked about the guarantees that Ukraine was given; whatever Putin guarantees is completely worthless, but the one guarantee that we have behind us is the nuclear deterrent. It is important that we maintain it.

These are dark times. We will hear a lot of instant judgments about what is happening in Ukraine, but we cannot have armed forces without people, and we have to invest in those people. It is not just about numbers, but about making sure that we have the right skillsets and that they continue. Frankly, the IR is now redundant and has to be revisited. And can we get away from the slogan “global Britain”? It is a great slogan, but it suggests that we are going to rule the waves and send power around the world. We will not, on our defence budget, and we never will again.

We have to ensure that we invest in what we are good at. It might be unpalatable for some Government Members, but we have to work with our European colleagues in NATO to ensure that we deliver a deterrent effect—I was going to say “on the Soviet Union”, and actually there is not much difference between that and Putin’s ideology and the way he is doing things. We have to ensure that that happens and is done in a coherent way. We have to get away from the rhetoric. Let us have a proper defence budget that is not only in balance, but puts the investment where it counts.

I will break the habit of a lifetime and agree with the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View, who has just come back into the Chamber: we have to invest in people. We can have all the best equipment in the world, but without the people, the skillsets and the right mix, we will not get a deterrent effect or treat our people right, as they deserve.

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[John Spellar]

With the leave of the House, tonight the Minister has heard a clear message. The peace not only of Ukraine but of Europe and the wider world is under threat and we must restate our commitment to our collective security through NATO backed by our nuclear capability. We must also have a reset of our plans and budget; our defence procurement process; and our doctrine, intelligence and messaging. I hope that that message has been heard loud and clear not only by the Minister but by the Treasury. The first test of that will be in the Budget debate at the end of the month. Can the Minister convey that message clearly to the Chancellor?

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).