Defence Spending

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The main reason why this welcome uplift has come when it has is Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Does the Secretary of State agree that if Russia and Putin are seen to fail in Ukraine, the threat to NATO will be put back for at least a generation? Conversely, if they succeed, the threat to NATO will intensify. Will he therefore do everything he can to persuade our allies, especially certain parts of the United States’ new political establishment, that the success of Ukraine is essential for the peace of Europe and, indeed, the peace of the world?

[Grant Shapps]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Although this is £75 billion and although it takes our budget to 2.5% of GDP, that is a fraction—a fraction—of what it would cost if Putin were successful in Ukraine. There is no chance he would stop there—none. Other autocrats elsewhere would look at that and exploit the idea that all they have to do is outwait the west and we will get bored of it—through some form of attention deficit—and give up defending the things we said we would never stop defending. That, in the end, would cost us all a huge amount more.

Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Francois]

The Chair of the PAC is entirely right, although in the MOD context, if it is groundhog day, “groundhog” sounds like a vehicle that has slipped to the right.

More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the Defence Committee, on which I serve, published a damning report on 4 February 2024, entitled simply “Ready for War?”. I have served on the Committee since 2017 and this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the all-party Committee, which includes six former MOD Ministers, concluded:

“Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary. ”

In plainer English, and as the subsequent detail in the report starkly points out, despite a considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment, not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve. The full report can be found online.

Given that it takes years to build a modern warship—a totally ridiculous 11 years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate—and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war”, one with little further warning, we would have to rely on whatever equipment we had to hand or could rapidly remobilise. We simply do not have enough war-winning kit to win as it is. As the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 10-year equipment plan illustrates starkly, the difference between what the MOD aspires to buy and the funding it is likely to have available is £17 billion. However, it is worse because the three services account for the plan on a different basis. Without going into all the technicalities, an apples and apples comparison across the three services shows that the gap is £29 billion. Even beyond gaps in capability of our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment that we do have. Without them—and far too many of them are leaving, as the Chair of the Defence Committee said—even multi-billion dollar aircraft systems simply remain in the hangar.

One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MOD has now become in relation to people is the saga of Capita—or, forgive me, “Crapita”, as it is now affectionally known to the Defence Committee. It has totally messed up the recruitment system for the British Army. A few years ago, its share price topped £4; today, it is barely 13 pence. Everyone in Defence knows that the outsourced contract has been a disaster, yet absolutely no one in the upper echelons of the Department has the moral courage to sack the company. The Defence Secretary recently described the situation in The Times as “ludicrous”. He is absolutely right. Indeed, no doubt he has made a note of his own comments on his own famous spreadsheet, but still nothing actually happens. Capita limps on as the Army bleeds out—with, in some parts of the Army, three soldiers now leaving for every one that Capita somehow, painfully, manages to recruit. If we think we are going to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner, we are living on a different planet, in a parallel universe, in a fantasy dimension.

Given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, the British taxpaying public are quite entitled to ask why so little of our defence capability works properly. Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles 60 years old? Why do we have hardly any battle tanks that actually work? Why do we have hardly any submarines that are now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that perennially break down whenever they try to leave port? Bluntly, it is because we now have a Ministry of Defence that has become in recent years a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by needless, self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; in which some senior civil servants are now more interested in wokery than weaponry, endlessly ripped off by some of their own major contractors, such as Boeing, to name but one; and in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old—and the procurement system for replacing them so broken—that we now cannot fight a major war with Russia for more than a few weeks, as it well knows.

Moreover, as the Red Book clearly shows in tables 2.1 and 2.2, we are cutting the core UK defence budget next year by £2.5 billion and playing “smoke and mirrors” with the donations to Ukraine and with addressing an overspend on the nuclear enterprise from the Treasury reserve in order to pretend otherwise. This act of what the Russians call “maskirovka”, or strategic deception, is wholly unworthy of a Conservative Government. If Members happen to believe, as I do, that the role of our armed forces is determinedly to save lives by convincing any potential aggressor that, were they to attack us, we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing.

This is not an intellectual parlour game. Ultimately, this is about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s re-education camp, but we might not know that if we walked into the current MOD. We can try to blame the military, for instance, for so frequently over-specifying new military equipment, such as Ajax, that it enters service many years late, but in the end the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge.

The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—he who desires peace save-line3should prepare for war. Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a pre-war world, surely we had better start preparing for it, if we are to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it, and we should now do that in earnest, before it is too late.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I know that he is coming towards the end of his speech. Would he care to remark on a couple of slightly more optimistic features of deterrence, because deterrence of conventional forces depends on far more than an equal balance of equipment, even though, as he says, we are nowhere near achieving that? It also depends on our allies and others who will fight in the same cause. Does he not accept that it is not just enough to take our defence spending up to 3% or more, such as the 5% we regularly spent through the cold war, but essential to ensure that our American allies remain totally involved in the deterrence process and that the Ukrainians succeed in fending off Russia, because if they succeed we can contain Russia in the future, as we successfully did in the past?

[Mr Francois]

I agree with every word my right hon. Friend, the former eminent Chairman of the Defence Committee, just said. My one caveat is that the MOD’s excuse for these capability gaps is that we can rely on allies to fight with us. But they will be relying on us, and if we are unable to support them or they are on wartime tasks elsewhere, things might go horribly wrong.

I say all of this not just as someone who served proudly as a Territorial Army infantry officer in my local Royal Anglian Regiment during the cold war; not just as someone who is still very proud to carry the late Queen’s commission; not just as a former veterans and then Armed Forces Minister in the Ministry of Defence, albeit almost a decade ago; but most of all, as I said at Prime Minister’s questions last week, as the devoted son of a D-day veteran. Stoker 1st Class Reginal Francois died when I was 40 years of age. He told me one night of the carnage—his word—that he witnessed that day, albeit from offshore, on a minesweeper named HMS Bressay. In the afternoon, they were opposite Omaha beach.

Let me quote Shakespeare’s famous phrase:

“This story shall the good man teach his son.”

My father was a good man. The story that he told me was of a country that eventually, reluctantly, had to go to war against the evil of Nazi tyranny because for years its politicians had been so parsimonious—he actually said “tight”—and so naive that when Nazism emerged, we completely failed to deter it. That is the lesson of the 1930s, but it was also his lesson to me.

My father made me take a solemn vow that, as his son, I would never take living in a free country for granted, because, as he said, too many good men had died to achieve it. Two years after we had that conversation, he was dead. That is why I am here this afternoon. That is why I came into politics in the first place. As a wartime serviceman, my father was a great admirer of Winston Churchill, our greatest ever Prime Minister, who led this country through a war of national survival and then lost a general election for his trouble. When I walked into the Chamber earlier this afternoon, I could still see the damage caused when the Chamber was bombed in 1941. Churchill insisted that it not be repaired, lest we forget, and he was right.

In summary, I may not be my father’s contemporary, that famously courageous MP, Leo Amery, so I cannot claim to “speak for England” on this matter, but I was elected to speak for the people of Rayleigh and Wickford, and so, on their behalf, I issue this stark warning today. The skies are darkening. Brutal dictators with powerful weapons at their disposal are on the rise. The democracies are on the backfoot rather than the front. History tells us time and again, and indeed ad nauseam, that the appeasement of dictators—be they called Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin—does not work. We should be increasing the defence budget to at least 3% of GDP—what my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) used to call “at least three to keep us free”—not cutting it, as we now are, and pretending that we are not. The first duty of Government, above all others, is the defence of the realm, and we forget that at our peril. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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[Mr Jones]

It is laughable, as my right hon. Friend says. We need to make sure that we actually invest, because this is about skills and about ensuring that we have the workforce.

We have seen the effects when we just pull out of such work. We cannot look at our skills base as a tap, which we turn on when we want it and turn off again when we do not. We cannot do so, because we have seen the costs of that—for example, on the Astute programme. To be political, it was again the Conservative Government who stopped building submarines, so we had a gap in skills, and it has taken all the effort recently to rebuild that skills base and ensure we get it back. We must have such a skills base continually, and that has to be done by working with our European allies. Whether the zealots of Brexit and the anti-Europeans like it or not, if we are talking about things such as stockpiles, we do have to work with allies and make sure that we can deliver them through the supply chain we have.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jones]

No. I am sorry, but I do not have the time.

I now come on to what will happen after the next general election. Is there going to be a massive increase in defence expenditure whoever wins the election? No, there is not. We know that, so let us just tell the public that. What we need to ensure is that we get the maximum effect from what we do spend. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), who speaks for the Labour party on defence, will—if he gets the job—have a big task facing him if we are successful at the next general election. My heart sinks a little when he talks about reviews. Yes, we need to have a review, but we also need action straightaway.

It is now critical that we take some key decisions, and there are very difficult discussions to be had, not just with the British people about where Britain is realistically in the world today, but with some of the members of the armed forces and the chiefs, in saying, “We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do it well, and we’re going to make sure we are safe as a nation.” Is that defeatism or saying that Britain is finished? No, it is not. I think we have a proud future, and we have some great military and diplomatic assets, including in the way we do things. However, we should not delude ourselves that we will be going back to some pre-Suez or pre-second world war global Britain as an imperialist power. We are just not going to be able to do that, and I think we have to be honest with the British people.

There also now has to be speed. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) said about munition shelling, we cannot have a situation in which it takes a year for munition stocks to be replaced. The tempo has to be increased, so action will have to be taken very quickly. I am all in favour of a review and a study of policy—in the last few years in this country we have lacked any thought-out policy work or strategy, and we need that—but we also need action.

It is a daunting task that will face any Government after the next general election, but let us be proud of the members of our armed forces, who work on our behalf to keep us secure. There is an impression that defence is somehow a Conservative issue; I am sorry, but it is not a Conservative issue. A lot of the men and women in our armed forces come from the poorest and most deprived communities in our country, but they are proud to serve their country, and I think we should be proud of them. We should give them the clear commitment that they have our backing, but be clear with them that we must be realistic about the tasks we ask them to do to keep us safe.

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[James Cartlidge]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s clarification. Either way, I think we can all agree that it is important that we understand the extent to which our armed forces are ready and are out there serving the country as we speak.

Our continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent is entering its sixth decade of service, and our armed forces have helped us to become Ukraine’s most front-footed ally. We have trained more than 60,000 Ukrainian military personnel since 2014, and we are delivering more than £7 billion of military aid to Ukraine within our overall aid package worth almost £12 billion. That support is unwavering, with the recent announcement of our latest £2.5 billion package of military support for Ukraine being a £200 million uplift on the previous two years. Beyond our support for Ukraine, our armed forces are participating in every single NATO mission.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intervene. I did not apply to speak in this debate because I could not be sure that I would be here at the end. Will he impress upon the House how our aid to Ukraine is vital because, if Ukraine successfully thwarts Russia, all those dread scenarios about an attack on NATO will not happen? Similarly, although President Trump is a worry, it is at least a relief that he has begun to say that, provided Europe does its bit, he will continue with America’s support for NATO, should he be elected.

[James Cartlidge]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The hon. Member for Rochdale (George Galloway) accuses us of imperialism in how we deploy our armed forces, but the whole purpose of our support is precisely to help Ukraine resist the imperialism of the Kremlin that he has shamefully supported while condemning what he calls the “Zelensky regime”. We heard him say it, and it is absolutely shameful.

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[James Cartlidge]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It shows why I want to see us supporting our sovereign capability, because where the Spitfire was there in the 1930s, we hope that the global combat air programme will be there in the 2030s.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Will the Minister allow a brief intervention?

[James Cartlidge]

As my right hon. Friend has already intervened, I hope he will allow me to make some progress and refer to comments from colleagues.

Obviously, there has been particular debate about spending. The shadow Secretary of State was unable to answer whether Labour would match the figure of 2.5%, but a number of my colleagues wanted us to go further and faster. This point was put well by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). The Chair of the Defence Committee and others have suggested that we should look back to the sort of GDP figures in the cold war, although they did not necessarily say that we should go to exactly those amounts. However, as was said by the hon. Gentleman, who I believe was in military intelligence, in those days almost all of eastern Europe was an armed camp full of Soviet divisions, whereas now those countries are in NATO, so the situation has changed profoundly.

As was rightly said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Sir Alec Shelbrooke)—one of my predecessors as Minister for Defence Procurement—if we increase defence by a significant amount, the money has to come from somewhere. An increase from the current level of about 2.3% to 3% equates to £20 billion, which is not a small amount of taxpayers’ money. Even an increase to 2.5% equates to an extra £6 billion. So it is Government policy to support that but to do so when we believe the economy can support it on a sustained basis.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) made a passionate speech about how there had, in effect, been a cut to defence spending in the Budget, and several other Members said the same. I do not agree, although I accept that there is a debate about it. It is about the difference between the main estimate and the supplementary estimate, and some people have said it is about the inclusion of nuclear. To me, the nuclear deterrent is fundamental to defence, so of course it should be in the defence budget. We are not going to take out GCAP or frigates, and we are certainly not going to take out the nuclear deterrent, which is at the heart of the UK’s defence.

UK Armed Forces

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

To be fair to the hon. Gentleman, he makes an important point about the importance of alliances. NATO is fundamental to the defence of our country, the wider western world and our allies beyond. Critically, to put this in context when we talk about the state of the armed forces, which is what the urgent question is about, and the alliances that he referred to, let us remember that we have just launched Steadfast Defender, which is one of the largest ever NATO exercises, involving 96,000 personnel, of which almost 20,000 are from the UK. I believe that we make up 40% of the land forces. That is an extraordinary contribution by the UK. We also offer our nuclear deterrent to NATO. We are supporting our allies, we stand together under article 5, and we should all do everything possible to support NATO in its 75th year.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

May I commend to anyone interested in the historical context a report produced by the Defence Committee in July in 2019 called, “Shifting the Goalposts? Defence Expenditure and the 2% Pledge: An Update”, HC 2527? It shows that for the last 20 years of the cold war this country spent between 5.6% and 4.1% of GDP, calculated in the same way we do today, on defence. Does that not show both sides of the House that we have an awful long way to go now that there is a hot war in Europe before we match what we used to do when there was a cold war in Europe?

[James Cartlidge]

My right hon. Friend put that eloquently, and he speaks with great passion and expertise on the cold war and our recent history. As he knows, in the cold war era we had the working assumption that an invasion—or certainly a confrontation—could be launched on the border in Germany very quickly. We had a huge number of forces deployed, and given that threat we spent, understandably, a higher percentage of GDP on defence. Since then, we thought we had a more peaceful era. Those illusions have been shattered by Putin, and we have all had to wake up to that. That is why we have done so much to support Ukraine and, yes, why we will do everything possible to support our armed forces.

Situation in the Red Sea

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I thank the hon. Member for his—as he has described it—tentative support. I have noted that the House has been largely unified on this issue during the past four statements, following previous attacks. He asks about the mission creep situation. I hope he feels reassured by the concept that we have waited longer, in part because the Houthis’ capabilities have been damaged, so that there is a longer gap and we do not see this thing speeding up. We have no intention or desire to see it increase, but we will act if there continue to be attacks on commercial and naval shipping.

The hon. Member asks about China and Russia and I have to say that I agree; it is important that countries that are impacted by this—the entire world, but perhaps China in particular—do speak up. We would welcome China being more vocal about the situation. As I mentioned in my comments, a Chinese vessel has been attacked, so this is of direct concern to the country. I call on China and, of course, Russia—for what it is worth—to be more vocal on these issues.

Lastly, I just do not accept this Gaza-Houthi connection. I remind the House that the Houthis were against Hamas until 2015, and now they arrive on the scene and pretend to support them. They are opportunist thugs taking advantage of the situation and of people’s lives and misery—not just in Gaza but in Yemen—and they should stop and desist immediately.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will recall that, in handling this topic on 5 February, he strongly endorsed the suggestion that a lot of this trouble in the middle east was linked to tactics to divert from the war in Ukraine. Given that the route from what is happening in Ukraine to what is happening in the middle east is via Russia and Iran, is he satisfied that there is no inconsistency between the tough line being taken by the Ministry of Defence against the Houthis and the soft line being taken by the Foreign Office against their Iranian sponsors?

[Grant Shapps]

I somewhat reject that characterisation. To be absolutely clear, we are very much of the view that Iran is responsible; it funds, trains and provides equipment to the Houthis and many other Iranian-sponsored proxies in the region. It is also the case that it has probably lost control of some of them. It is important that we deliver those messages in many different ways to the Iranians. I have seen the read-outs of the ways they have been delivered, including directly, by the Foreign Secretary—and they were anything but weak.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 19th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey]

Such conversations happen all the time. Only last week, the Secretary of State was at the latest donor conference, followed by NATO Defence Ministers. I was in Norway a week or so earlier, having exactly those conversations with allies. As the right hon. Gentleman suggests, while traditional armaments such as artillery ammunition are important, so too, increasingly, are the novel precision weapons systems that the UK is very much at the forefront of supplying to our Ukraine friends.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Is it not time that both sides of the House came together to agree on a common policy of increasing defence expenditure, so that by increasing our support for Ukraine, we can set an example to our American allies, without whose help there can be no future for peace and security in Europe?

[James Heappey]

My colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench know that I try not to throw gratuitous punches in the House, and I know that they are enthusiasts for military spending, but their colleague the shadow Chancellor has thus far declined to say that she would adopt anything other than the 2% target for NATO spending, which is not the same as what the Government are currently spending, or what they currently intend to increase spending to, so the suggestion made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) is timely. It would be fantastic if, in the next hour, the shadow Secretary of State were to make the same commitment as we have.

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[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with answers I gave last week or the week before at the Dispatch Box, when I said that we will always look at what is happening in the Red sea. I have been there to meet the crews myself, and will make a judgment based on the reality on the ground. There is now also input from a conglomeration of EU countries that are coming to join Prosperity Guardian, and we welcome that input.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

In the debate on the Red sea on 24 January, I asked for confirmation that HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark would not only not be scrapped, but would not be mothballed. The deputy Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), with the Secretary of State for Defence alongside him, said in response that I was

“absolutely right to detect the supportive view of the Secretary of State for Defence.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2024; Vol. 744, c. 402.]

However, a journalist was subsequently told by the Ministry of Defence that nothing had changed, so are those ships going to be mothballed or not?

[Grant Shapps]

My right hon. Friend can rest easy: I have been down to visit HMS Albion since those questions, and I can confirm that one of those ships will always be being made ready to sail. He can therefore be very relieved.

Situation in the Red Sea

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

First, I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for this action. He asked a series of questions, which I will rattle through. Were the actions effective? Yes, they hit the targets. Were all the targets hit? Again, yes. We are still carrying out surveillance to find out the exact impact, but I think we can be very confident that all the relevant objectives were reached. We combined very closely with our US colleagues, and sometimes interchanged some of those targets with them. The right hon. Gentleman will have noted that, on this occasion, we were involved in dropping munitions on more targets than previously, so we carried a slightly greater weight than before.

The right hon. Gentleman asked whether the action was successful, and rightly pointed out that what we are seeing is rather more sporadic: the attacks, including on HMS Diamond and on merchant shipping, have continued, but in a much more ad hoc fashion. It is perhaps relevant that there has been no attack using multiple different weapons at the same time, which we saw, for example, on 11 January. The degrading will have had some impact on that. I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about the Prime Minister at the end—I want to set the record straight.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about Operation Prosperity Guardian. The simple answer, of course, is that none of us knows how long it will need to continue for, but we want it to come to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

We utterly reject any notion that these continued attacks by the Houthis are anything to do with the situation in Gaza. The Houthis are opportunist pirates who are using a situation to their benefit: a few years ago, they did not even support Hamas, but suddenly they want to be their greatest champions. They are over 2,000 kilometres away from Gaza; they are simply using the situation to their advantage, and it is wise for the House to not over-link the two. None the less, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to about the need to see a humanitarian truce and a sustainable ceasefire—that is the Government’s policy. We are working extremely hard to try to achieve that, including through discussions that the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and myself are having. Just yesterday, I was having those discussions in the middle east.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about RAF flights. The issue is not getting the aid to location—I have been working very closely with the Cypriot Government, for example, on how we can increase the amount of aid. The single biggest problem remains getting the aid into the country. We had some success with getting Kerem Shalom open, but what we really need to see is Ashdod open, in order to route that aid to Kerem Shalom and straight into Gaza. The Government and I will continue to push for that route, but the problem is not the flights taking off; it is the aid getting in.

Finally, turning to the fact that it is myself as Defence Secretary standing at the Dispatch Box, rather than the Prime Minister, the first thing to say is that it is the Secretary of State for Defence who actually has legal responsibility for these actions—who signs off the targets and, indeed, the legal authority. Technically, it is me who should be standing here, other than for the first couple of rounds, where the Prime Minister was dealing with something new and it was therefore very appropriate for him to be at the Dispatch Box.

The wider point that I would gently make to the right hon. Gentleman, though, is that the Prime Minister is in Northern Ireland today, doing incredibly important work—[Interruption.] I hear from a sedentary position the suggestion that we should have been recalled yesterday, but I unsure whether that would have been entirely practical. It is entirely appropriate that the Prime Minister is in Northern Ireland. I would have thought that the House would welcome the fact that that historic breakthrough has been marked by the Prime Minister, and it is very appropriate that I am here today to explain the activity of Saturday night to the House.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Do the Government accept that it is difficult to deter terrorist fanatics, and that one mainly has to contain the effectiveness of what they do until they are ultimately destroyed, preferably by our regional allies? Does the Secretary of State feel that there is in fact a link to a separate conflict, and that is the conflict in Ukraine? Is it not more than a coincidence that the proxies of Russia’s ally in the middle east have been so much more active while Russia is so desperate for us to turn our attention away from supporting Ukraine?

[Grant Shapps]

As ever, my right hon. Friend has absolutely hit the nail on the head. Russia and Iran are working together. Actually, the same kind of drones—sometimes the Shahed drones—that are being fired in Ukraine by the Russians, courtesy of Iran, are also being fired by the Houthis. He makes an excellent linkage point, and he is absolutely right.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey]

Within the serving cohort, such is the turnover of staffing within the armed forces that very few will have had direct operational experience alongside either the Afghan armed forces or even the patrol interpreters and others who are eligible for ARAP, but the hon. and learned Lady is right that some element of the serving force will be deeply invested in this matter. Obviously the chain of command is there to support them and answer their questions. Within the veterans community, the sentiment is very strongly held. The reality is that there have to be limits to the UK scheme, as there are to those of other countries. No country has made an open offer to those who served in the Afghan security forces; all countries’ offers are focused on those who worked directly with that country. Clearly what direct service looks like is a matter for debate. I suspect that a question on that is coming.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Surely special consideration must be given to those members of the Afghan special forces who, even if they did not work directly for us, worked extremely closely with us. Can the Minister tell the House how many, or how few, members specifically of the Triples and the special forces face a constant threat to their lives and ought to be rescued?

[James Heappey]

The number that is circulated is around 400 to 500, but that is not a number that the UK Government can necessarily verify because we do not have the employment records of those units.

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[Grant Shapps]

It is very important that our service personnel feel that they are not only honoured when they go to war but comfortable at home. One of the big things I am doing is pressing forward with the review of armed service accommodation, including by providing £400 million to improve that accommodation, which will make the lives of service personnel better at home.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

A

“short-sighted, militarily illiterate manoeuvre totally at odds with strategic reality”

was how the Defence Committee described, in February 2018, the proposal to retire HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark ahead of their anticipated lifetime dates of 2033 and 2034. May I advise and warn the Secretary of State not to be blindsided by the people who are raising this matter again after a change of Secretary of State for Defence?

Ukraine

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

I am extremely proud to stand here and defend the Government’s very strong record in supporting Ukraine. The Secretary of State gave a very important statement yesterday on the future of UK fast jet capability, and the trade mission that we sent to Ukraine last week makes it timely that I stand here now. The public understand the huge amount of support that we have given, and it is important to emphasise that we now need to move to the next phase—the long term—of helping Ukraine’s industry to support itself, working closely with Ukrainian partners. As procurement Minister, I have that as an absolute priority, as demonstrated in the last week by the trade mission.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s other points, I totally agree about the risk of Putin prevailing, and I am grateful for the cross-party support. On ammunition shortages, he specifically asked about NLAWs. Of course, that is not the only anti-tank weapon we have sent. In total, we have sent around 10,000 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, plus about 4 million small-round ammo, 300,000 artillery shells, 20 AS90 self-propelled guns, a squadron of tanks and a huge amount of air defence systems and uncrewed systems. The list goes on: 82,000 helmets, and training for over 50,000 Ukrainians in the UK to enable them to go back and fight for the freedom of their country. I am very proud of that record, but the Prime Minister has been clear: we know there is much more to do.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we have sent a great deal of ammunition to Ukraine. The question is, have we been able to replace that ammunition, especially in the context of a war that seems to be attritional and likely to go on for a considerable amount of time?

[James Cartlidge]

My right hon. Friend is an expert in these matters, and always asks pertinent questions. My constituents strongly support the effort we have undertaken to give all the weapons we have to Ukraine—not all gifted from this country, it should be stressed. Equally, they want us to replenish those stocks. That is why we have already signed contracts for NLAWs and lightweight multi-role missiles, and we have already taken delivery of the Archer 6x6, which is the interim replacement for the AS90 gun. It happens in parallel. We have to keep supporting Ukraine but, absolutely, we put the additional money from the budget to support the replenishment of our own armed forces.

Global Combat Air Programme Treaty

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

May I start by warmly welcoming the right hon. Gentleman’s welcoming of this treaty signing and the overall programme? As I say, Members on both sides of the House agree that the defence of the realm comes first. In an ever more dangerous world, it is important to have the facilities that a sixth-generation fighter aircraft would bring.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that the HQ is coming to London, but I want to put it on record that it is coming to the UK. We have not decided a location for it yet. I think there are 20-plus potential locations, so I would not want to assume that it will be based in London. We are not as London-centric on everything as he may be.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about examples of working internationally previously. It is worth pointing out that the Typhoon was Italian, British, German and Spanish, and it has been a very successful programme. We are used to working with partners, including Italy, which is involved in this programme.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about article 50 export issues. I think his question is born out of a specific concern about German export licences, which we believe are resolvable. Time will tell. On a wider basis, we recognise that such an aircraft can only be truly successful if the market is greater than the UK, Italy and Japan.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the broader equipment plans, and he mentioned the £16.9 billion programme. There are a number of caveats. Of course, we have seen huge inflation, but at the other end we have also seen a big expansion of the amount of money that is going into our 10-year equipment programme. That number, which was a snapshot in time, was taken before the refresh and takes into account programmes that will and will not happen, so it is not quite as black and white as he presented.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about cost sharing on the programme. That is part of what the process of discussions both on the treaty and on the new GIGO organisation will ascertain. That is because the industrial capacity and capability of each of the three countries is important, as is the intellectual property that will be brought forward. That is part of what that organisation is currently establishing. It cannot be prejudged simply because we are likely to have greater industrial capacity in certain areas relative to other countries. The amount of project ownership will therefore fall on these factors: how much money goes in, the intellectual property and the industrial capacity.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about RAG—red, amber, green—ratings. If I remember rightly—I will correct the record if I am wrong—one of the reasons for the red rating was about laying a treaty for the project. That is one of the reasons why we are laying the treaty for the project, and we will carry on systematically working through any other factors that could be slowing up the programme or causing the rating to be lower.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the timing for the treaty. I am pleased that there seems to be strong cross-party consensus on this. As he will know, passing such treaties in this House is not a particularly complex matter—the treaty will be laid before the House, and it will be a question for the business managers. In other countries—in Italy and particularly in the Diet in Japan—there is a rather more complicated process, so the time limiter is likely to be more on their side than on ours. They will be looking to lay the treaty at their end in the spring, and that is more likely to be the issue.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the timings overall. It is a compressed timetable, with a specific requirement for it to be in service for 2035, which comes from the Japanese side because of its aircraft replacement programme. Japan pressed the target, which we are fully signed up to, and there are a large number of milestones along the way, including a UK demonstrator aircraft, which will be very much sooner. I hope that that information is helpful. I am happy to write to him with any further detail and to take further questions.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

In welcoming this project for a long-term future aircraft, may I ask the Secretary of State whether he agrees that the threat picture that will face it will in large measure depend on the outcome of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? Can he say anything to the House about the efforts that he and fellow NATO members are making to ensure that Ukraine has some current aircraft with which to defend itself, so as to improve the prospects that will face us when this future aircraft comes into being?

[Grant Shapps]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that air facilities and combat capabilities are essential to Ukraine, as we have seen. That is not just aircraft but unmanned vehicles of all types. That is why this aircraft—it will be known to some in the House as the Tempest, which was the name when we originally set off—will have the facility to fly unmanned. We know that Ukraine has chosen the F-16. We do not fly F-16s, but to persuade the world to give Ukraine aircraft, we offered the first training. That seemed to create a situation where other countries pitched in. We do, of course, help Ukraine in many other ways on unmanned aerial vehicles, some of which perhaps we will not go into here.

Former Afghan Special Forces: Deportation

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Heappey]

I am not sure where to start on that. What the hon. Gentleman I think is knowingly doing is conflating a number of separate issues. There is the issue over the processing of those who can legitimately come to the UK under the ARAP scheme. Finding those applicants in among tens of thousands of applications —many of which are duplicates and many of which are bogus, though plenty are not—has been a heck of a task for the team within the MOD that have been tasked with that over the past two years. However, we are getting to the bottom of the pile.

Crucially, those who are eligible under category 2, which is those who worked directly for the British armed forces, whether as patrol interpreters or cultural advisers and so on, are known to us. We have the employment records, so, as I have said to the House many times, we have been able to go into the list of applications, find those whom we are looking for and whom we know to have worked for us and accelerate their approval. As we get through the tail end of the applications, we are seeing lots of rejections, because frankly we have already gone ahead and found those who matched the employment records that we had from our time in Afghanistan. On those who are eligible for the core of the scheme, I have a great deal of confidence that we really are reaching the bottom of the list, and we are moving at pace to bring them out. I will first answer the hon. Gentleman’s question about the deportation of those who are eligible.

I spoke to both the UK high commissioner to Islamabad and the Pakistan high commissioner to London this afternoon before coming to the House. Both are entirely comfortable with the assurances we have received from the Pakistan Government that those for whom we have made an eligibility decision will not be deported. I know of one case where somebody who had received a rejection was deported before their appeal was heard. I am not sure that there is necessarily anything we can do to mitigate that—Pakistan is, after all, a sovereign country and has every right to say who can and cannot be in the country—but that person, whose review was successful, was successfully brought back into Pakistan and is now waiting to come to the UK.

As for those in Islamabad, wider Pakistan or any other third country and who may have worked for the Afghan special forces, the answer is that we cannot possibly know that, because we do not have the employment records of the Afghan special forces. Therefore, we cannot say who did and did not work with them. We know who has applied to ARAP, and every time someone does, we make an individual judgment about what that person did. Were they just a member of the Triples—heroic and important, but not necessarily working directly for and with us—or were they a member of the Triples who routinely worked with UK special forces or the intelligence community, who would thus be eligible under ARAP category 4? I appreciate that that is a suboptimal answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question, but if we do not know who worked for the Afghan special forces because they work for the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs or the Afghan Ministry of Defence, it is impossible to say how many of those people may or may not now be in Pakistan.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I think I am right in saying that the International Security Assistance Force was officially a NATO assistance force to the then Afghan Government, so what is there to prevent NATO countries from banding together and making joint representations to the Pakistani Government that whatever they do with former service personnel who, at our request, fought against the Taliban, they should not now mercilessly deport them to the tender non-mercies of the Taliban, who are currently out for vengeance?

[James Heappey]

I understand my right hon. Friend’s question. He is a great champion of this cohort. NATO countries—and, indeed, countries beyond NATO, like Australia—routinely make representations to the Pakistani Government, who have been incredibly flexible and supportive in working for us. The challenge—it is sad to have to say this—is that there are many people who claim to have served in the Triples who may well not have done. If my right hon. Friend were to go through the casework files on our system, he would see the same pictures submitted again and again as evidence by people claiming to have worked in the Triples. Absent those employment records from the Afghan MOIA or the Afghan MOD, it is incredibly hard to say who is and who is not legitimate, given that often people are accessing on social media stock photographs that they seek to use as evidence. I have every confidence that the Pakistan Government are being incredibly flexible and supportive, but it is very difficult to ask them to allow everybody who claims to have served in a unit to stay when that is incredibly hard to verify, other than when people in the UK MOD, the US DOD, the Australian Department of Defence or wherever else can personally vouch for the relationship they had with that operator.