Arms Exports and Controls

John Stanley Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

As this will be our last opportunity during this Parliament to debate a report by the Committees on Arms Export Controls, I start by thanking most warmly my colleagues from the four Select Committees who have served on our Committees during this Parliament for the time that they have given, and most particularly for the tenacity that they have brought to our scrutiny of the Government. I also thank our staff who, because they are so few in number, are exceptionally cost-effective. Most particularly I thank the Clerk, Mr Keith Neary, who has given the Committees exemplary service for the greater part of the Parliament during which he has been Clerk.

I am conscious that the increasing width and depth of our Committees’ scrutiny of this key area has imposed a significant additional work load on the four Departments concerned, especially the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, both of which we have visited as Committees to see arms export control procedures in operation. I thank the officials for how they have responded to that increased work load, and I make it clear that in so far as there are shortcomings in those responses, that is entirely a matter for Ministers. That brings me to the two areas of major shortcomings that I must address in opening this debate, both of which relate to what the Committees and I regard as the single most important area of Government policy: the export of weapons and dual-purpose goods that can be used for internal repression.

The previous Government’s arms export control policy was set out in a ministerial written answer on 26 October 2000 by the then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain). It included a key statement of policy, which remained unchanged throughout the life of that Government:

“An export licence will not be issued if the arguments for doing so are outweighed…by concern that the goods might be used for internal repression”.—[Official Report, 26 October 2000; Vol. 355, c. 200W.]

We spent two years during this Parliament going hither and thither with Ministers on whether they adhered to that policy, had changed it, or were seeking to change it. That was brought to a conclusion this year when the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills announced the present Government’s arms export control policy in a written ministerial statement on 25 March. When that statement appeared, the previous Government’s policy wording, which I have just quoted, was dropped. Notwithstanding that fact, the Business Secretary said in his statement:

“None of these amendments should be taken to mean that there has been any substantive change in policy.”—[Official Report, 25 March 2014; Vol. 578, c. 10WS.]

Since March, when the Business Secretary gave his written ministerial answer, the Government have made various attempts to downgrade or outright dismiss the key policy wording on arms exports and internal repression in the original ministerial written answer of October 2000. First, in their latest annual report on United Kingdom strategic export controls, which was published in July, the Government chose to describe the wording in question as “the preamble”, even though the word “preamble” does not appear anywhere in the answer given by the right hon. Member for Neath.

Then, in a letter to me on 6 October, the Foreign Secretary tried to maintain that that key wording did not represent a statement of policy at all, saying:

“The text in question did not contain any substantive statement of policy.”

I leave it to hon. Members to judge whether that is the case:

“An export licence will not be issued if the arguments for doing so are outweighed…by concern that the goods might be used for internal repression”.

That was the statement in the written ministerial answer recorded in Hansard.

I stress to the House that it was the unanimous view of all four Select Committees comprising the Committees on Arms Export Controls that that wording did represent a substantive statement of policy. It was also the view of the right hon. Member for Neath, who came before the Committees to give oral evidence on that very point. When we asked him specifically whether he thought that policy on arms exports and internal repression had changed, he said:

“So I do think the policy has changed. It is a more relaxed approach to arms exports.”

In the light of those facts, as far as the Committees are concerned—we made this clear in our report—only one, regrettable conclusion can be drawn from those important exchanges on arms exports and internal repression: the Government have made a significant change in policy, but have not been prepared to acknowledge that such a change has taken place. I put it formally to the Government that they should consider most carefully whether they should now offer an apology to the Committees and the House for making a change in policy without being prepared to acknowledge that to the Committees.

[Sir Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)]

My right hon. Friend is making an important point. Hon. Members may be aware that, in terms of development, the UK scores extremely well except on one significant issue: arms exports. That is the issue that drives our ratings down the development index. The Minister might not think that that matters, but will he acknowledge that there is a perception, which the Chair of the Committees is bearing out, that the UK is more inclined than other countries to sell arms to countries and regimes where their use may be questionable? That slightly undermines our reputation for being a pro-development leader.

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[Sir John Stanley]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point as a member of the Committees on Arms Export Controls and the Chair of the International Development Committee, and I am sure that the Minister will want to respond to it.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

In their excellent report, the right hon. Gentleman’s Committees draw attention to the sale of anti-personnel equipment to Bahrain and raise quite reasonable concerns about its use to control demonstrations and so on. For a while, it seemed that the Government were listening to such concerns, but in April last year, they changed their policy and did indeed sell armoured personnel carriers and other equipment to Bahrain. Does he have any continuing concerns about the supply of such equipment to Bahrain and its use there?

[Sir John Stanley]

The Committees most certainly do. As the hon. Gentleman will have seen, we included in our report specific questions to the Government about how particular items that have been approved for export to Bahrain can be regarded as compatible with the export criteria that they supposedly follow. We therefore have responded specifically to that.

I come now to our second area of disagreement with the Government on arms export policy and internal repression, which is with particular reference to exports to authoritarian regimes. In successive reports the Committees have made—again unanimously—the following recommendation:

“the Government should apply significantly more cautious judgements when considering arms export licence applications for goods to authoritarian regimes which might be used for internal repression.”

Regrettably, in successive responses, the Government have declined to accept our recommendation.

I shall set out one of the most striking differences between what has happened under the present Government and what took place under the previous one. Under the previous Government, going right back to their election in 1997—shortly after which came the foundation of the Committees, thanks to the initiative of the late Robin Cook, who was the first Foreign Secretary to produce an annual report on arms exports—the number of revocations or suspensions of existing licences stood at a mere handful. However, during the lifetime of the present Government, there has been a massive use of some 400 revocations and suspensions. I do not think that can be attributed only to the fact that there has been a considerable amount of international turbulence and conflict during this Parliament, as there were wars and turbulence during the previous Government’s lifetime.

I make it clear to the Government and the Minister that I am in no way critical of the huge number of revocations—indeed, I believe they are entirely justified. The key question, and the issue that has been exercising the Committees, is whether export approval should have been given to all the licences in the first place. To reflect what was said by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), in broad-brush terms, the Government’s policy on the export of goods that could be used for internal repression to authoritarian regimes has been that if the situation in a particular country looks to be reasonably quiescent, there is a fairly considerable presumption that the export should be approved, with the Government no doubt saying to themselves, “Well, if things turn really nasty in that country we can always revoke the export licence.”

I suggest to hon. Members that nothing illustrates the weakness and limitations—and indeed the perils—of that policy more clearly than what has happened in Libya. Prior to the Arab spring, there was a significant arms export trade, approved by the Government, to Libya under the Gaddafi regime. Not surprisingly, when the Arab spring came and the Government announced their total list of revocations of arms export licences to Arab spring countries, the greatest single number—a total of 72 licences—was for licences for Libya.

We all know what happened when Gaddafi fell from power. Back in the UK, the Government had imposed their revocations, but they were of very limited effect, for the simple reason that they are of no use whatever for exports that have already been shipped. As I have said before, it was an exercise in shutting the stable door after the arms had bolted. What happened in Libya itself? The security arrangements around Gaddafi’s arms dumps vanished and people ransacked them, principally for financial gain, as they saw an opportunity to make quick and substantial money. As UN experts have reported, those stockpiles were then sold on and dispersed all over the middle east and north and west Africa.

I suggest that nothing better illustrates the cogency of the Committees’ recommendation for a significantly more cautious policy when dealing with arms export licence applications for arms that can be used for internal repression than what has happened in Libya. It is regrettable that, in their response to successive reports, the Government have failed to accept our recommendation for caution. I certainly hope that a future Government will take a different view.

I turn now to the Government’s export policy towards a few individual countries, starting with Russia. The publication of the Committees’ latest report happened to coincide almost exactly with the appalling shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine. That created something of a dilemma for the Government, because although, on the one hand, Ministers, led by the Prime Minister, were rightly condemning the Russian Government for being complicit in the shooting down of the airliner and the terrible loss of life, on the other, as was shown by our Committees’ report, there were no fewer than 285 extant British Government-approved arms export licences to Russia, with a value of some £131 million for the standard individual licences alone.

That led at one point to an unknown spokesman in No. 10 announcing to the media that many of the British Government’s arms exports to Russia were for the Brazilian navy, which I have to say came as news to me, as I suspect it did to a considerable number of other people. However, I thought that I should follow that one up, so I wrote to the Business Secretary to ask him for the stated end user of each of the 285 extant arms export licences to Russia. Disappointingly, he refused to give the Committees that information unless we agreed not to make it public. I see no justification for imposing that condition on the Committees. It is hardly in accordance with the Government’s supposed commitment to transparency on arms exports, and it raises a significant issue of policy for the Committees and, therefore, the House. The Government already make public the countries to which approved UK arms exports are going, but in many cases we need to know not just the names of the countries, but the end users in those countries. For example, will the end user be a Government body, a Government security authority or a civilian user? That is key information, but at the moment, the Government simply pick and choose when they will disclose the end users. They gave the Committees the end users when we wanted to know who they were in relation to the export of dual-use chemicals to Syria. They told us the end users when we wanted to know who they were for sniper rifles exported to Ukraine. However, they have refused to give us that information for Russia on the basis that it may be made public, and the Committee will want to address that policy issue further.

What is the Government’s present policy on arms exports to Russia? The Prime Minister said in the House:

“On the issue of defence equipment, we already unilaterally said—as did the US—that we would not sell further arms to Russia”.—[Official Report, 21 July 2014; Vol. 584, c. 1157.]

I would be grateful if the Minister clarified two points. First, when the Prime Minister said that we would not sell further arms to Russia, was he saying that all or only some will not be sold to Russia? If he was saying just some, which will continue to be sold? Secondly, on new licence applications, will the Minister clarify whether the Prime Minister’s statement means that all new licence applications to Russia are being refused, or only some, and if only some, which? The Minister’s clarification will be helpful.

I am sure that there was great concern among hon. Members on both sides of the House about some of the measures taken by the Hong Kong security authorities against those who were exercising their right to demonstrate peacefully, and especially the fact that tear gas was used against demonstrators. I am in no doubt that if the Metropolitan police had used tear gas against those who recently demonstrated peacefully in Parliament square, there would have been considerable concern and perhaps outrage on both sides of the House.

I thought that the Committees should do their own analysis of precisely what items of lethal and non-lethal equipment that could be used for internal repression the Government had recently approved for Hong Kong. We took the information from the website of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills for the last two years from January 2012. Our analysis showed that the Government had approved tear gas exports to Hong Kong in four of the past eight quarters since January 2012. If those licence approvals were given on the grounds that the security authorities in Hong Kong would never use tear gas against those demonstrating peacefully, that was a questionable assumption, given mainland China’s track record of dealing with peaceful demonstrators. Our analysis of lethal equipment approved for export to Hong Kong since January 2012 showed that it included pistols, sniper rifles and gun silencers, which were all stated to be for use by a law-enforcement agency.

I have written to the Business Secretary to ask a series of questions about the Government’s policy on arms exports to Hong Kong, including:

“Have any extant Government approved export licences to Hong Kong been revoked or suspended?”

I also asked:

“What is the Government’s present policy on approving new licences for the export of arms and equipment to Hong Kong that could be used for internal repression?”

We have just received the Business Secretary’s reply, a key paragraph of which is:

“No licences for Hong Kong have been revoked, suspended or had Hong Kong removed from a multiple destination open licence. The Foreign Secretary has advised me that the use of tear gas by the Hong Kong police was an uncharacteristic response at an early stage of the protests, the scale of which caught the police by surprise, and was not indicative of a wider pattern of behaviour that would cross the threshold of criterion 2. In his view that, since that incident, the Hong Kong police have generally approached the protests carefully and proportionately. I have accepted this advice.”

I am sure that the Committees will want to reflect on the Business Secretary’s response and then report to the House. My own view, having received that letter only a short time ago, is that the reply seems to reflect the more relaxed approach to arms exports that could be used for internal repression to which I have referred. It certainly makes me wonder whether, if the original wording in the October 2000 statement by the right hon. Member for Neath had been retained instead of dropped, those arms exports of both lethal and non-lethal equipment would have been approved in the first place.

[Ann McKechin (Glasgow North) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, given the political situation in Hong Kong and the concerns that have been expressed internationally, there must be a real risk of a recurrence of exactly the sort of event during which tear gas was used against civilian protestors? There has not yet been a resolution of that protest; it continues in Hong Kong today.

[Sir John Stanley]

There is certainly a risk of a recurrence of exactly what the hon. Lady describes. I hope that a lesson has been learned by the Hong Kong police that it is not acceptable to use tear gas against those who are demonstrating peacefully. It remains a matter of concern to me, and I am sure that the members of the Committees will want to look closely at the analysis that accompanied my letter to the Business Secretary. The Committees will want to scrutinise closely whether it was wise in the first instance to approve exports of the sort of equipment—lethal and non-lethal—to which I have referred.

In turning to Israel, I want to make it crystal clear at the outset that I condemn unreservedly Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel. However, Israel has serious questions to answer about its use of lethal weapons that has resulted in the recent death of well over 2,000 Palestinians—men, women and children—in Gaza, the great majority of whom were certainly not Hamas fighters.

The Foreign Office, in its annual human rights report, includes Israel—entirely rightly in my view—in its list of the 28 countries of top human rights concern to the British Government. In our latest report, we have listed for each of those countries the extant UK Government-approved arms export licences. Our report shows that Israel has the third largest number of extant arms export licences of those 28 countries, with a total of 470—a figure exceeded only by China and Saudi Arabia. In addition, our report shows that of those 28 countries’ extant arms export licences, the largest by value is Israel’s, totalling £8 billion in value. However, I want to stress this very important point: that £8 billion is largely made up of a gigantic cryptographic equipment export order, valued at £7.7 billion, which the Defence Secretary, when he was Minister of State at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, assured the Committees was

“for purely commercial end use.”—[Official Report, 21 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 426WH.]

Early in August, following what happened in Gaza, I wrote to the Foreign Secretary, asking him to list the controlled goods that the British Government had approved for export to Israel and that the Government had reason to believe may have been used by Israel in the recent military operations in Gaza. The Foreign Secretary gave me his reply on 19 August, saying

“officials have judged it unlikely that many of the components that were the subject of extant licences were for incorporation into systems that would be likely to be used offensively in Gaza”.

However, he went on to say, significantly in my view, that

“12 licences have been identified…where, in the event of a resumption of significant hostilities, and on the basis of information currently available to us, there could be a risk that the items might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

I think that is a very significant statement by the Foreign Secretary, and it once again reinforces the Committees’ recommendation for a significantly more cautious policy when dealing with the export of arms that can be used for internal repression.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I have two points to make: first, was the right hon. Gentleman concerned about the supply of drone aircraft parts to Israel during the recent operation and, I believe, since then? Secondly, was it ever identified exactly what the commercial purpose of the massive £7.7 billion order was, and what the boundaries were between commercial use, civilian control and military use?

[Sir John Stanley]

The hon. Gentleman, again, is on to a very important area, and that again highlights the need to get much more transparency about end users. He makes an extremely valid point, which applies even more strikingly in relation to non-democratic countries—one-party state countries such as Russia and China, in effect, where there is no clear boundary between the Government sector and the private sector at all. That is why we need to get the Government to accept that these Committees, and therefore the House, are entitled to end-use information.

On components for unmanned aerial vehicles, I can only refer the hon. Gentleman to what I just read out from the Foreign Secretary’s letter; he specifically refers to components that were for “incorporation into systems”. His view was that it was unlikely that they were used in Gaza, and I cannot take it any further than that, I am afraid.

If I may, I will just complete my points on individual countries. There are obviously a very large number of individual countries and others want to speak, and I want them to have their full time, but I make this point: in our report, we identified 12 countries in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list of 28 countries of top human rights concern where it seemed to us that specific exports appeared to be in breach of one or more of the Governments’ arms export criteria. In our recommendations, we asked the Government to state why those exports were approved. Those 12 countries were: Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Uzbekistan and Yemen. We also asked the same question in relation to five other countries that are of concern to the Committees but are not on the FCO’s list of 28. Those five countries were Argentina, Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia and Ukraine.

For most of those countries, as the House will see in the Government’s response to our report—the Command Paper—the Government came back with a fairly formulaic response, certainly as far as the opening of their reply was concerned. They used this formula:

“The Government is satisfied that the currently extant licences for”—

and then they put in the name of the country—

“are compliant with the Consolidated Criteria”.

I want to assure the House that we shall not let the matter rest there. In our view, there is a substantial mismatch between what has been disclosed about extant licences and the Government’s arms export criteria. We want to examine that further, and we shall take oral evidence shortly from the industry and non-governmental organisations, and from the Business Secretary and the Foreign Secretary.

I turn to the other area of our report, which is international arms control agreements. Virtually all international arms control agreements are designed to control or halt proliferation of both conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. The Committees have therefore extended their scrutiny of the Government’s policy to the entirety of international arms control agreements. The Government give an explanation of their policy in relation to some of those agreements in their “United Kingdom Strategic Export Controls Annual Report”, but a number of key agreements are omitted. For example, there is no reference to the fissile material cut-off treaty, or the chemical weapons convention, or the biological and toxin weapons convention, or significantly, to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

In the Committees’ last report, they recommended that the Government, in their annual report, make their coverage of international arms control agreements comprehensive, instead of only partial. It is disappointing that the Government, in their response to our questions on their annual report, have not accepted that recommendation, but I assure the House that the Committees will continue to scrutinise the Government’s policy across the totality of international arms control agreements.

I come to a few of the specific agreements, starting with the arms trade treaty. We warmly welcome the British Government’s ratification of the arms trade treaty on the first day it opened for ratification—2 April 2014. It is also very encouraging that the 50th country ratification, triggering the treaty’s legal entry into force, has now been achieved. According to the Government response to our report, entry into force will take place on Christmas eve 2014—an excellent Christmas present to all those concerned with international arms control.

However, it is particularly disappointing that of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council only the UK and France have ratified the treaty thus far. The US has signed but not ratified, and China and Russia have neither signed nor ratified. The House will agree that it would be a dismally poor example to the rest of the world if the remaining three members of the P5 failed to ratify the arms trade treaty. I hope that the British Government will continue to do their utmost to get those key countries to do so.

One of the most important arms control events in 2015, if not the most important, will be the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference. In our report, we recommended that

“the Government states as fully as possible in its Response what are now its objectives for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2015”.

We did not get a particularly full response from the Government, but they did come back with three objectives:

“We want to agree further progress towards a world free from nuclear weapons and to highlight our actions in support of this; encourage action that will help to contain any threat of proliferation or non-compliance with the NPT; and support the responsible global expansion of civil nuclear industries.”

I hope that the Government will be rather more forthcoming, both to the Committees and to Parliament, about their detailed and specific objectives, and how they propose to try to achieve them in the run-up to the NPT review conference.

One of the great and largely unsung achievements of the Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher era was the intermediate-range nuclear forces agreement of 1987. The INF treaty is far and away the most important nuclear disarmament agreement that has been achieved since nuclear weapons were created. It was also the first and only time that the US and Russia reached a nuclear disarmament agreement based on zero-zero on each side. Against that background, it is of great concern that reports have appeared that Russia may be in breach of its INF treaty obligations. I took that up with the Foreign Secretary, who in his reply said:

“The US State Department’s recent annual ‘compliance’ report (Adherence to and compliance with arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments) states that ‘the United States has determined that the Russian Federation is in violation of its obligations under the INF treaty not to possess, produce or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) with a range capability of 500 km to 5,500 km, or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles.”

That is a very serious statement from the Foreign Secretary and the US State Department. In my view, if the INF treaty breaks down, it will be the most serious reverse for multilateral nuclear disarmament that has so far occurred in the nuclear weapons era. I therefore urge the Government to do their utmost to mobilise the maximum possible international pressure on Russia to restore its adherence to its INF treaty obligations.

To conclude, Ministers are never happier than when they can deal with difficult issues with comforting generalisations. The devil is always in the detail, and in no area is that more true than arms export controls. I therefore make no apology for the length of the Committees’ latest report, which, taken with the all-important volumes of evidence, runs to some 1,000 pages. I hope that it will prove a valuable resource to those in the House and outside who want to inform themselves about the actuality of the UK Government’s arms control and arms export control policies, rather than just resting on ministerial generalisations.

The Committees are not remotely self-satisfied about our scrutiny and are sure that we can improve it further, but I believe that now in the UK Parliament we have the most detailed and most open parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s arms export policies of any of the major arms exporting countries, including the United States, where, under the relevant legislation, there are financial cut-off thresholds below which exports do not have to be reported to Congress. We of course have no such financial thresholds in our Parliament and in the relevant legislation.

In the course of this Parliament, the Committees on Arms Export Controls have substantially widened and deepened our scrutiny of the Government’s policies. First, we have for the first time put alongside the list of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s countries of top human rights concern—the 28 countries to which I referred—the extant arms export licences approved by the British Government for each of those countries. That has been an extremely worthwhile and very illuminating exercise. It has certainly left me, on certain points, with considerable concerns, but others will draw their own conclusions.

Secondly, we have very substantially extended our scrutiny of the Government’s policies on international arms control agreements. That, too, is a crucial area, even though the subject tends to receive not much public attention, in Parliament or outside. Thirdly, we have in this Parliament extended our scrutiny to a whole series of additional export items, including drones, Tasers, cryptographic equipment, the UK Government’s gifted exports and Government-supported arms export exhibitions.

I hope that we have discharged our scrutiny responsibilities to the House of Commons effectively in this Parliament, and that we have created a strong and powerful springboard for our successor Committees to carry forward scrutiny of the Government’s policies in the key area of arms control and arms export controls in the next Parliament.

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[Mr Ellwood]

I hope that is as aggressive as the debate gets. Let me reiterate that the Government take their arms export responsibilities very seriously and aim to operate one of the most rigorous and transparent arms export control systems in the world. Our core objective in export licensing is to promote global security, while facilitating responsible exports. That means preventing controlled goods from falling into the wrong hands. It also means that we must not impede legitimate trade in defence and security goods.

All export licence applications are carefully assessed on a case-by-case basis against the consolidated EU and national arms export licensing criteria, taking into account all relevant factors at the time of the application, including the prevailing circumstances in the recipient country, the nature of the goods, the identity of the end user and the stated end use. A licence will not be issued if doing so would be inconsistent with any provision of the criteria, including if there is a clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression or external aggression.

The Government support the responsible trade in defence equipment. All nations have the right to protect themselves, as enshrined in article 51 of the UN charter, and they have the right to acquire the means to do so. Moreover, defence and security exports help to strengthen the UK economy and to support growth. As the shadow Minister said, the industry employs tens of thousands of people across the UK. In 2013, the value of UK defence and security exports rose to £13 billion—a 13% increase on the £11.5 billion recorded in 2012. Those exports also helped the UK to forge close relationships with allies and partners in support of international security objectives.

We must therefore seek to operate an efficient export licensing system that not only ensures rigorous export controls, but facilitates responsible exports. The case-by-case assessment of export licence applications remains the most effective way to balance those concerns. We follow a clear and well-understood procedure for each application, which involves circulating expert evidence to other Departments as a matter of routine, to make the best assessment possible, based on the evidence available at the time.

I want directly to address the perception that, in the relatively rare instances where licences are subsequently revoked or suspended, the export licensing system is in some way broken. That is certainly not the case. In 2012, the then Foreign Secretary conducted a review of arms exports, which found that there were no fundamental flaws with the export licensing system. However, the review did identify some areas where the system could be strengthened. As a result of that review, a suspension mechanism was introduced to ensure greater responsiveness to changing circumstances overseas.

The suspension mechanism allows for the suspension of pending licence applications to countries experiencing a sharp deterioration in security or stability such that it is not possible to make a clear assessment of whether the consolidated criteria have been met. Following EU Council decisions, it has now been applied to extant licences as well as pending applications. The suspension of licences should, therefore, be viewed not as an admission that there has been a mistake, but as an indication that, on the contrary, the system is appropriately in tune with the reality that circumstances change and that the export licensing system must be able to react appropriately.

Moreover, we have the power to revoke any licence if we judge that changed circumstances mean that it is no longer consistent with the consolidated criteria. Again, revocations should be viewed as indicative of the fact that the system can respond to change, not as a sign that our case-by-case assessment of export licence applications is flawed. We make the best decision possible at the time of each application, and if circumstances change, we can react appropriately. Action to revoke or suspend licences is, then, not a sign that the system is broken; in fact, the flexibility to respond effectively to change is a sign of health and demonstrates how seriously the Government take the guiding principle of responsible exports.

Having set out that overview, I would like to touch on a number of specific issues my right hon. Friend and others have raised. First, however, it would be useful briefly to reiterate the Government’s policy on assessing the risk of goods being used for internal repression.

Criterion 2 of the consolidated criteria, which has been mentioned a number of times, states that an export licence application should be refused if there is a “clear risk” that the goods in question might be used for internal repression or in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

Some confusion arose following the former Foreign Secretary’s evidence to the Committees in 2012, which was interpreted as suggesting that the “clear risk” test in criterion 2 had been dropped. Let me emphasise: the threshold of clear risk in criterion 2 has been the policy of successive Governments since the criteria were established in 2000, and it remains our policy. As confirmed in recent correspondence with the Committees, we have no plans to change that policy.

[Sir John Stanley]

May I correct the Minister on the point he has just made? There was no misunderstanding and no suggestion in the Committees on Arms Export Control that the criterion 2 “clear risk” test had been dropped by the Government at any point.

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[Sir John Stanley]

I thank all hon. Members for their generous comments on my endeavours as Chair of the Committees on Arms Export Controls. It is a unique conjunction of Committees to chair. I have no equestrian background at all, but I have likened it to trying to get a 16-horse stagecoach moving reasonably well in the same direction, which is particularly difficult when there is no ability to vote. We have achieved a lot even in just getting out the reports that we have. I thank hon. Members for their kind personal comments. I hope that the dedicated contributions of the hon. Members for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin) and for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) will be big plusses in their getting elected to one of the four Select Committees in the next Parliament. Perhaps one of them may end up as my successor. I wish them well.

I will briefly make one comment about the excellent speech made by the hon. Member for Glasgow North. She rightly and acutely picked up that the Government appear to have erected an additional hurdle before revocations or suspensions can take place to extant arms exports licences to Israel. I want to highlight to her an extraordinary contradiction that I am sure we will want to pursue. The Government have on the one hand dropped the broad test in the October 2000 statement of the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain) from the consolidated criteria, but they have brought it back when dealing with suspensions. We made that point in paragraph 126 of our report:

“The Committees conclude that the Government’s decision to apply the broad test of ‘equipment which might be used for internal repression’ rather than the narrow test of ‘clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression’ for deciding whether arms export licences should be suspended is welcome.”

I cannot begin to explain the Government’s contradictory position on that key point, but I am sure that we will be considering it further in Committee.

Again, I am grateful to the hon. Member for Islington North, who has been a dedicated attender of our debates. As for the four countries to which he referred specifically, he will be glad to know that they will all continue to be the subject of detailed scrutiny by the Committees. Three of the countries, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka, are of course among the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s 28 countries of top human rights concern. He must have been glad to see that the Committees on their own initiative have added Bahrain to the five other countries of concern that we highlighted and gave details of in our report.

As I heard it, the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) made what I consider to be an extremely welcome policy commitment on behalf of the Opposition Front Bench. I understood him to be saying that it is now the policy of the Opposition to restore the dropped wording that came from the October 2000 statement by the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain).

If the hon. Gentleman is looking for any reinforcement of the Opposition Front-Bench position from the Back Benches, I draw his attention to paragraph 123 of our report:

“As the broad test that: ‘An export licence will not be issued if the arguments for doing so are outweighed by […] concern that the goods might be used for internal repression’, which has been Government policy since October 2000, provides an important safeguard against military and dual-use goods, components, software and technology being exported from the UK from being used for internal repression, the Committees recommend that this now omitted wording is re-introduced into the Government’s arms exports controls policy.”

The hon. Gentleman will be glad to know that that was a unanimous recommendation of all parties on all four of the Select Committees concerned, which should give him some back-up to the welcome policy position that he enunciated.

I am grateful to the Minister for responding to the debate and for saying that he will send us answers in writing to those questions that he has not been able to deal with. I would be grateful if he could send me a copy as well, if that is in order, because I will obviously want to know what he says in response to the points made by other colleagues.

I must make it clear to the Minister that he did not address the fundamental policy issue as far as arms exports and internal repression are concerned. He made a number of references to criterion 2, what we call the narrow test or the “clear risk” test, which is a very limited test for a very simple reason. When can a risk be said to be clear? We can pretty well sell almost anything to anyone by saying, “There is a risk, but it isn’t clear, so we can approve the export licence.” That is the acute limitation of that test. If someone looks at our report and looks at the list of what has been approved by the Government, and for sale to which particular regimes, it can be seen just what a very limited test that is. That is why the Committees attached such importance to the restoration of the broad test—we have quoted this successively in the debate and I quote it for a final time—if we are to deal seriously and genuinely with not allowing to go out of the UK with Government approval British weapons that

“might be used for internal repression”.

Question put and agreed to.