Royal Navy: Frigates
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, I take very seriously the noble Lord’s concerns on this issue. As I have said on earlier occasions, we want the first Type 31e in 2023, with five ships delivered by the end of 2028; that is to replace the five Type 23 general purpose frigates. As he knows, the Type 31e is being procured through competition between UK shipyards. We will not have the result of the competition until the end of this year, so until then, it will not be possible to make predictions about whether the delivery date that we have charged industry with is definitely deliverable—but we hope that it is.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, since the noble Lord raised the question of the Type 31e, I remind the Minister that when it was first promoted, it was described by some as a cheap frigate—a description which appears increasingly inept, to use the word of the moment. Originally, the price was to be £250 million. Do the Government now accept that a figure of £350 million is much more realistic, and that such a figure will require additional funds from an already overstretched budget and will make the obtaining of the promised export orders much more difficult to achieve?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I do not agree. As I said, we want the first ship in 2023, with five ships delivered at the end of 2028, and we are still setting industry the target of an average production cost of £250 million per ship. All the information I have had says that that is still realistic.
Afghan Interpreters: Security Clearance
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Earl Howe
I sympathise with my noble friend’s question, but it is important to understand the point I made earlier: it is not easy to make a general statement here, because each case has to be treated individually. As I mentioned, it is often not the person’s trustworthiness or nationality that is at issue, but what their degree of vulnerability would be were they to work in the operational theatre they are seeking to be employed in. That is not a question that admits of a standard reply.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, I accept everything the noble Earl has said, but is there not a pragmatic dimension to this? It is one thing to have a scheme, but if the scheme takes a long time to be implemented is that not likely to discourage others from offering their services?
Earl Howe
Yes, it may, and the noble Lord is right that that is certainly a risk if it is perceived that the UK is treating anyone unfairly. We are very conscious of that. At the same time, it is not fair on the individual who applies to work—in these cases, for NATO in Afghanistan—to overlook their personal security, that of their families and the measures that would be needed to protect both the individual and their families in those circumstances.
RAF: Operational Conversion Unit
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, the first tranche of 48 aircraft will be the F35B, which is capable, as the noble Lord knows, of operating from land and the “Queen Elizabeth” class aircraft carriers. Decisions on subsequent tranches of Lightning will be taken at the appropriate time. Of course, the number of aircraft deployed will depend on the circumstances and the nature of the deployment. The minimum number to be deployed will be one squadron; that is, 12 aircraft. The plan is for full operating capability in 2023, with two squadrons, but of course there is scope for each carrier to have as many as 36 aircraft deployed on it.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, the noble Earl will be aware that the Defence Secretary, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, made the rather surprising admission that it was his ambition to open some new military bases in the Far East and the Caribbean. Can we be satisfied that any decision of that kind will not undermine the original commitment to purchase 138 F35 aircraft, particularly given the fragile state of the equipment budget?
Army: Divisional Manoeuvre and Deployment Training
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, yes, the Army is already prepared to deliver a division, albeit at best effort. As I have just said, it is working towards its Joint Force 2025 structures that will deliver a more capable force at higher readiness. The point the noble Lord makes about enablers and logistics is well made. The exercises in which the Army has participated recently have been a very good test of those enablers.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
Does the Minister agree that the exercise proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, in his Question is much more satisfactory than any desk-bound exercise, if I may put it that way, not least because it allows the demonstration of capability as a practical illustration of deterrence and provides reassurance for our allies? Why does the Army not take the opportunity of a showcase to show that it possesses all these qualities?
Earl Howe
With respect to the noble Lord, in effect it has done so. Exercise Saif Sareea in Oman, for example, which the noble Lord will be aware of, demonstrated very capably the Army’s ability to deploy in strength overseas with partners. I can reassure the noble Lord that the training the Army undertakes, both in the field and by way of simulation, is fully up to the standards he would expect and enables the Army to be confident of its ability to field a division.
Modernising Defence Programme
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. When I first read it, I thought it was the sort of statement Pepys might have made—and probably with better reason. It is essentially a classic “We will try harder” statement. Let me illustrate. I was reading through it and trying to find something substantial, and I tripped over the phrase,
“the MDP has identified three broad priorities”.
I thought, “Well, that is different”. I went on to see what they were:
“We will mobilise, making more of what we already have ... We will make the most effective use of them … We will improve the readiness and availability of a range of key defence platforms”.
The noble Earl’s party has been in power for eight years. What has he done in the previous seven years, if not these sorts of motherhood-type things? It does say something tangible: namely, that,
“we will reprioritise the current defence programme to increase weapon stockpiles”.
I feel that “reprioritise” must have a specific meaning: to take from somewhere and give to somewhere else. One can hardly criticise increasing weapons stockpiles to more sensible levels—but can the Minister tell us where the money is being taken from to be reprioritised in weapons stockpiles?
Later in the Statement is the sentence:
“And, where necessary and appropriate we will make sure we are able to act independently”.
We are in the gunboat business again. What sort of independent missions does the noble Earl have in mind? To make that statement, defence must have developed a series of scenarios. Where does the noble Earl feel that acting independently would be a sensible thing for the United Kingdom to do?
Turning the page, the Statement says that,
“we will modernise, embracing new technologies to assure our competitive edge … targetting priority areas”.
This is 2010. Surely a good Administration who have been in power for eight years should have been doing that all along.
It is really only on the second page that there is anything new. We are going to have a “defence innovation fund” and a “transformation fund”. Can the Minister set out in detail what these funds are intended to do and what the difference between them is? The Statement reads:
“I will ring-fence £160 million of MOD’s budget to create this fund”,
and then talks of further funding. Previously, it speaks about “£50 million” in the “next financial year”. That is £210 million—a little over 0.5% of the defence budget. This is nothing like the amounts of money required to make a significant impact. Later, it says:
“We will embrace modern business practices”.
What are they? Why have they not been embraced before? I like this phrase:
“We will develop a comprehensive strategy to improve recruitment and retention of talent”.
Is that code for, “We are going to fire Capita?” It comes from such a low base that surely getting rid of it and having the MoD doing its own recruitment would be the way to go. Is it not true that, with Capita’s help, we are losing net numbers of trained personnel?
The Statement goes on to say something that might actually be meaningful—that a permanent net assessment unit will be established. That could mean a radical change in how the MoD makes its decisions. It could mean a movement towards the centre or it could mean that it is just some unit that passes comments. Can the Minister spell out what structural changes will be made to make this net assessment unit meaningful?
Earlier, the Statement reviews how the threat has become more significant in a whole series of areas and talks about £1.8 billion of extra money. I think that all this money has been announced before—I will be happy to be corrected on that. But can the Minister set out in some detail where and when the money will be spent? I have an uneasy feeling that it is just about enough to keep up with the increased threat.
The only glimmer of hope in the Statement is in the last paragraph:
“There is more work to be done as we move towards next year’s Spending Review”.
I hope that that is code for defence setting out to try again to get some more resources. The programme hinted at in the Statement—let us it call it “SDR 2015-plus-plus”—is unaffordable without cuts or more money, or are we going to muddle on yet again overpromising and underdelivering?
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for repeating the Statement. I share many of the observations that the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, made in the last moment or two. This is the second time that I have heard the Statement, because I took the opportunity to go and hear it when it was first delivered in the other place. I have to confess that hearing it twice has not improved it, in spite of what I anticipated being the mellifluous tones of the noble Earl, for whom I have the greatest respect. Looked at in the round, the Statement could easily have been made at any time in the course of its nine months of gestation. It contains a whole list of promises but is largely silent about how the promises are to be delivered.
When we examine some of those promises, we see that they reflect things which the Ministry of Defence should be doing now as a matter of course. Surely we are currently enhancing,
“efforts with our allies and partners”.
Indeed, one would think that the very possibility of Brexit would surely make that an even more urgent requirement. Are we going to “act independently”? For example, if independent action in defence of an overseas territory were required, surely we would be capable of doing that at the moment. Why are those two issues focused on in that way that they are in the Statement?
Nor is there any mention of the immediate challenges that face the Ministry of Defence, such as the gap of billions of pounds in the equipment budget—an issue that the noble Earl will recall I have raised with him on two recent previous occasions. How will that gap be filled? I will return to the question of financial support in a moment or two, because the Statement contains a couple of sentences that justify careful reading and interpretation.
There has already been reference to the fiasco of Army recruitment. How will that be remedied? Is the company that has responsibility simply to be sacked? Why not go back to the previous system, which, as far as I recall, was effective? Was the idea of letting it out designed to save money? If it was, it has certainly not been successful in the sense of producing the promises that were made in respect of it.
Finally, there is the question of the continuing fall in and erratic nature of the value of the pound. How is that affecting the ability of the Ministry of Defence to continue with its programmes of acquisition? What steps, if any, has the Treasury offered in order to assist if necessary because of these fluctuations?
Perhaps the most important passage is the one to which I referred a moment ago and said that I would come to. Two consecutive sentences say:
“We also need to create financial headroom for modernisation. Based on our work to date, we expect to achieve over the next decade the very demanding efficiency targets we were set in 2015, including”—
here there is a typographical error—
“through investment in a programme of digitally enabled transformation”.
I know of no government programme of “digitally enabled transformation” in the recent past that has proved anything other than more expensive than intended and with delivery several years after it was originally projected. It is a pretty optimistic tool to use in the issue of finding headroom in defence spending. I suspect that that tells us that the Ministry of Defence is not expecting any more increase in expenditure.
In advance of today’s Statement and the publication of the report, there was an apparently well-sourced leak that the Secretary of State for Defence was going to announce that one of the ambitions would be to raise defence expenditure from 2% of GDP to 3% annually. That did not appear in the Statement. When the question was put to him specifically in the other place by the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, he very neatly sidestepped it. I suspect that that might well be an ambition of the department—but I equally suspect that the Treasury has made it pretty clear that that ambition is not capable of being resolved.
It is also a pity that we have had the Statement and that the publication of the report did not take place in sufficient time for it to be considered as a whole. I very much hope that the noble Earl will, through the usual channels, be willing to commit to endeavour to have a full-scale debate on the terms of the report. That is a much fuller indication of what the Government’s intentions are—albeit, so far as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and myself are concerned, that the report and the Statement leave a great deal to be desired.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords for their questions and comments, which, in some respects, have covered similar ground. I will endeavour to reply to as many of the points as I can.
It is a little unfair to level at the Government the accusation that we have been doing very little since we came into office. Chapter 1 of the report spells out the wide range of investment and procurement that the Government have taken forward since 2015 in particular. That programme continues on a rising budget, as is often overlooked.
The noble Lords, Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Campbell, asked about the additional money we were granted in the Budget. The first thing to say is that the additional money granted to us this year and next will enable us to proceed with programmes that we are clear are priorities. One of these is our defensive cyber programme; another is stockpiling and spares. A further priority is the work we are doing at pace on offensive cyber. The money will also enable us to proceed with a more cost-efficient profiling of payments relating to the dreadnought programme. More generally, the money is excellent news for our modernisation programme in a number of areas. The report spells those out. Some would say that the significant thing about the Budget settlement is that we are not anywhere near making or talking about the kinds of cuts to military capability that some commentators were predicting earlier in the year. That sends an important message.
Both noble Lords asked about the circumstances in which we might act independently. I would not want to place too much emphasis on that part of the Statement. In the vast majority of situations we plan on the basis of working alongside our allies in NATO—the cornerstone of our defence—or as part of some other multilateral force, hence the emphasis in the report on the theme of international by design, which was a key strand of policy articulated in the SDSR. We are the lead nation in the JEF, for example. We lead the framework NATO battalion in Estonia. However, the nation would expect that we should, in exceptional circumstances, be able to act independently, not least in defence of the realm and our overseas territories, and to respond effectively in disaster relief and humanitarian operations that our allies might not necessarily wish to take part in.
As far as the modernisation of defence practices goes, we in the ministry are aware that there is ample scope for more automation and digitisation in back-office functions more broadly. This is covered quite well on page 17 of the report. It is about instilling a culture in defence built on leaner structures and less cumbersome reporting lines, not least when it comes to our relationship with industry.
The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked what the practical difference was between the innovation fund and the transformation fund. Both are about improving our capability. The transformation fund will add to our ability to pursue promising new projects, technologies or equipment at the pace required to counter the threats. It will focus in particular on opportunities to increase our lethality and mass. The innovation fund, which of course emerged from the SDSR, is a 10-year programme. That is much more about seeing how new ideas can transform defence and testing the utility of those ideas at an earlier stage of their development. It is also about pump-priming good new ideas.
Both noble Lords asked me about the people programme and, in particular, about Capita and our recruitment and retention. We accepted the conclusions and recommendations of the recent NAO report. We await the PAC report before replying formally, but I will just say that the tone of the final report is disappointing and provides only limited acknowledgement of the work that the MoD has undertaken or has planned. The NAO recommendations largely address areas in which work is already under way or planned. As regards Capita, we accept, of course, that the recruit partnering project has not performed to the satisfaction of the Army or, indeed, Capita itself. Significant time and resource has been invested to improve that situation. Part of the problem is that the defence recruiting system let us down. Significant additional Capita resource has been deployed to improve the DRS performance and, while there continue to be issues, I can tell both noble Lords that performance has improved significantly.
The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked about the strategic net assessment. Strategic net assessment is an intellectual discipline. It looks across all dimensions of military competition and assesses how the choices of both friends and foes may play out over the short, medium and long term. Its conclusions can be used to develop more nuanced and better-informed defence strategy so that we can better anticipate our adversaries’ actions and counter them more effectively. That will be closely co-ordinated across government to ensure coherence.
My time has almost expired, but I want to answer the question of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, about the funding gap in the equipment plan identified by the NAO. The NAO report reflects the unlikely situation where all the equipment plan financial risks materialise at the same time. We are confident that we will deliver the equipment plan within budget this year, as we did last year. We recognise the financial challenges that our programmes pose: they are ambitious and complex but we are addressing these after securing the financial boost arising from the Budget and reducing forecast costs through efficiency savings. We have taken steps to enable longer-term affordability by improving financial management of the plan. A new executive agency has been established to lead on procurement and in-service support and decommissioning of all nuclear submarines, as the noble Lord is aware. It is important to understand that the MoD manages a £5.1 billion equipment plan contingency and a £1.1 billion nuclear contingency within the £186 billion allocated to the plan precisely to manage those cost pressures.
As for the value of the pound, I believe that I have said on previous occasions that we benefit from being able to engage in hedging operations to shelter the fluctuations in sterling against the dollar, in particular. I will write to noble Lords on those questions that I have not had time to answer.
Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jay, who today was once again authoritative and perceptive. Those are qualities which necessarily apply to the most reverend Primate who opened the debate. I was interested to understand that he had addressed the United Nations Security Council on some of the issues we have been discussing. Perhaps on a more private occasion he might be willing to give us a personal report on just how well he thought his remarks were received, because I can think of some current members of the Security Council who might find some of the things he said a little uncomfortable.
Let me begin by saying how much I associate myself with the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, about the fact that soft power and hard power are mutually reinforcing. That is set out in a report produced by your Lordships’ House in 2014, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. That rather lines me up with the noble Lord and against the analysis provided by the noble Baroness who is no longer in her place.
I want to suggest, perhaps not on the same theme as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, some considerations with regard to the exercise of hard power. It might be thought that if soft power is successful, as it sometimes is initially, there will be no need for hard power—but if reconciliation were to break down, it may well need hard power in order to create an environment for a return to reconciliation. It is also the case that if reconciliation is proving impossible, hard power may be needed to create an environment for the discussion of reconciliation. One possible consequence is that the introduction of hard power may essentially have the effect of freezing events, so that what began as a ceasefire may well turn into a de facto long-term settlement. I have in mind the position in Cyprus, of which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has much more experience than I have and probably than almost all noble Lords in the House.
It is also worth reminding ourselves that hard power is not necessarily provided by coercion; the threat of coercion may be of considerable impact in considering the extent to which hard power makes a contribution. Even after successful reconciliation, parties who had previously been in disagreement may take some comfort from the regulating presence of hard power: for example, the continuing presence of a military mission of one kind or another.
In all these scenarios it seems to me that there are a number of principles that have to be applied, and I shall give some examples to suggest where that has not been the case. The hard power that is to be deployed must both be proportionate and have integrity. Reference has already been made in this debate to United Nations peacekeeping. The hard fact is that when it comes to peacekeeping missions, the United Nations has to take who or what it can get. The behaviour of some peacekeeping missions—I think particularly of the mission in which soldiers from Ukraine were involved—proved to be, to put it mildly, nothing less than catastrophic, involving abuse and worse. It is also the case that often when a request is made and an invitation given to offer troops for United Nations peacekeeping missions, impoverished countries apply, not necessarily those with a high degree of military acumen or ability. Often, those countries use the United Nations deployment to help to meet the cost of their military, sometimes to ensure that they obtain equipment which they would not otherwise possess and sometimes to pay their soldiers whom they would otherwise be unable to pay.
Of course, whenever a peacekeeping mission is commenced, the United Nations is entitled to expect that any countries which join will stay the course. Most of us may be aware of the rather dramatic events portrayed in the film “Black Hawk Down”. It portrays an event in Somalia which, not surprisingly, obtained a huge amount of publicity in the United States, and afterwards the United States mission was withdrawn, with what were inevitably damaging consequences. That argues very strongly for the fact that, if you are going to deploy your forces in circumstances where there is real risk, you need to be satisfied that you have public opinion firmly and courageously behind you.
Reference has also been made to Rwanda and, in a slightly different context, to the contribution of Kofi Annan, but it is generally recognised that his decision that the small United Nations force should be withdrawn may have contributed to subsequent events. I join the noble Lord, Lord Jay, in saying that I think it was a failure of what we rather broadly call the international community not to take steps to intervene in Rwanda, difficult though that might have been.
It is also said in this context that we have to pay due regard to the responsibility to protect. It began as the right of humanitarian intervention, as noble Lords will remember, contained in the speech made by Prime Minister Blair in Chicago. It is said—and I myself have enunciated this principle here, rather as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, did—that intervention should always be the last resort. However, I have to tell him, and remind myself, that the very distinguished civil servant the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Sir Michael Quinlan, took a rather different view, which was that often early military intervention may have a very beneficial effect by, as it were, squeezing off something that may develop to a much greater extent, whereupon military intervention becomes more difficult.
I think too of the credibility of intervention. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is not all that long ago in our recollection, it was only the deployment of NATO, with the United States of America in the forefront, that eventually created the circumstances for what we might call reconciliation, although current events hardly suggest that the position is by any means fixed. It was only because of good-quality, highly motivated and well-equipped intervention that there was a benevolent outcome.
As for Sierra Leone, it is interesting that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards, who subsequently became Chief of the Defence Staff, was a brigadier at that time, and it is generally accepted, not least by himself, that he took his orders in perhaps a rather more elastic way than the Ministry of Defence had originally conceived. However, if he had not exercised that degree of individual judgment, events in that part of the world would have been very much less favourable than they turned out.
These are not necessarily all joined-up illustrations, but I think they allow me to reach the conclusion that hard power cannot be an end in itself. There is no more dangerous proposition in the discussion of foreign affairs than the sentence, “Something must be done”. There must always be clear political goals, both tactical and strategic—and, once it has been decided to exercise hard power, there must always be the political will to carry the hard power through to the achievement of those goals. Without these principles, hard power might become an obstacle to reconciliation.
Shipbuilding: Appledore Shipyard
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, I do not accept that. We are committed to maintaining a fleet of 19 frigates and destroyers. That is what we have at the moment. The Type 26 frigates will replace some of the Type 23s and the Type 31s the rest of the Type 23s. I do not accept that the fleet is somehow dwindling because of the aircraft carriers.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, I cannot restrain myself from the observation that if the Royal Navy had as many ships as we have Questions about ships, we would be in a pretty good position altogether. The last time that this issue was discussed, the Minister told the House and myself that, notwithstanding the worst-case deficit in the Ministry of Defence equipment budget of £14.8 billion, the MoD would still be able to balance the books. Will that include cancellation or creative accounting, as has happened in the past?
Earl Howe
Not at all, my Lords. We are committed to our capital programme. If there has been any creative accounting in the past, we want to put that behind us because we want to be absolutely transparent about what our spending plans consist of. With regard to shipbuilding, as I said in my initial Answer, part of the trick will be to make the British shipbuilding industry more productive, innovative and competitive, and that is what we are seeking to do through the strategy.
Shipbuilding: Warships
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, given that the National Audit Office report of 5 November concluded that the Ministry of Defence equipment budget remains unaffordable by as much as £14.8 billion, where will the money come from to build complex warships?
Offshore Patrol Vessels
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
Is this issue part of the defence modernisation programme, which is of course a defence review by another name? The results of that review were promised in June this year. So far, no results have been published. What is the reason for the delay, and when will the results be announced?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the Defence Secretary published a Written Ministerial Statement on 19 July, as the noble Lord will be aware. It set out the headline conclusions of the modernising defence programme. I know that noble Lords were slightly disappointed with that Statement. We had hoped that it would be informative and reassuring—we had certainly intended it to be so. It confirmed the direction of travel; it described the work done to date; it set out some headline conclusions. Strictly speaking, the matter of the offshore patrol vessels is not part of that but, as I have explained, it is important to prepare now for the contingencies that may ensue from Brexit.
Royal Navy: Type 31e Frigate
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, the Type 26 programme is proceeding at pace, on time and on budget so far. The point that the noble Lord makes, about ordering all Type 26 ships in one go, might not be the right way to get value for money. If we had done that in the first instance, it is arguable that we would have overpriced the contract, because Australia has since come in with a firm order for Type 26 frigates. We are sure that this will play very favourably into the price of our next order for the Type 26.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, the noble Earl’s reply to the noble Lord a few moments ago was, to say the least, concise. He failed, however, to point out that the contract for the Type 31 has been restarted. Part of the problem, as the Government have indicated in their reason for restarting, is that the bids that were received were “not compliant”. I understand that to mean that the capability that the Government seek is not deliverable at the price of £250 million per ship. On that basis, the Government have a choice to make: either to reduce the capability or to increase the price. Unless they do one of those things, the exports on which the Government have set great store will not be achieved.
Earl Howe
I hope to reassure the noble Lord on those points. The contracts that were being competed for, and which have now been recommenced, were to pay for a series of design deliverables to support the main procurement contract; they were not the main assessment of industry’s ability to deliver the manufacture programme. We still believe that industry will be able to meet that challenge, and the procurement process, despite having been recommenced, is now proceeding at pace.