One Hundred Year Partnership Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Marland, and have this opportunity to make a small and relatively brief contribution to this debate. I do not have anything to add to the International Agreements Committee’s excellent observations on the agreement itself. I agree with the prevailing view expressed so far that the partnership agreement does not present any specific new obligations; there are no specific deliverables and there is no measurable or accountable substance to what is being offered.

I recognise that one of the principal purposes of the treaty is, therefore, purely its symbolic signalling of enduring support to Ukraine. However, I find this lack of definition in respect of deliverable substance somewhat disconcerting, especially in the area of hard and tangible military support. I say this because we are enjoying—if that is the right word—unusual levels of geopolitical uncertainty at the moment and it is very difficult to understand how our assessed national security policy objectives are being prioritised in order to inform the optimum use of the very welcome uplift in defence expenditure that the Government have recently announced.

To expand on this further, I offer at least six national policy objectives that are potentially vying for military resources at the moment. The first, obviously, is the need to make our national contribution to re-establishing conventional deterrence against Russian expansion in Europe. I say this in the context of our extremely poor national record of meeting our NATO targets over the last 15 to 20 years. The second is the need to enhance the resilience of our own domestic critical national infrastructure against conventional and increasingly hybrid threats. The third is the need to support Ukraine either in continuing to fight Russia or, in the context of a potential ceasefire, to enhance rapidly its fighting power and deterrent capability.

The fourth is the potential requirement to lead and significantly contribute to an enduring operation to oversee a potential ceasefire agreement in Ukraine—the nature, demands and risks of which are yet far from clear. The fifth is the emerging requirement to refashion the delivery of European security in the context of the United States of America withdrawing its security guarantees to Europe. The sixth is something of a catch-all: to meet whatever residual global security role the Government believe we should retain the national capacity to fulfil. I include in this such diverse commitments as the security of the overseas territories, South Korea, AUKUS, the evacuation of citizens from danger overseas and so on.

I fear that we face at least two significant challenges in meeting the demands of these six potential policy requirements. First, we simply cannot meet them in the context of any current projection of defence expenditure, so we have to prioritise. The second is the hard reality that the capability demands of each policy requirement are to some extent either marginally or completely different. The choices to be made are not so much ones of where to use capability as what capabilities we invest in to optimise the reduction of strategic security risks.

I suggest that, as of today, the policy decision over which we have the least control—the one that is infinitely the most worrying and would result in the most expensive capability deficiencies—would be the removal of the current US security guarantees to Europe. This scenario underpins my concern about entering into partnership agreements with countries without being absolutely clear about the defined extent of our military commitment. I would extend my concern to the need to be even more careful about committing forces to a ceasefire monitoring role without an absolutely clear understanding of the associated risk, and in the context of a partner to that ceasefire that is now proven to be wholly malevolent—in this case, Russia.

In closing, will the work of the strategic defence review, which feels increasingly overdue, provide the capability recommendations needed to meet these various policy objectives? What priority is being applied to them? Does the Minister share my concern that the affordability considerations might result in the need to take intolerable risk?