G7 and NATO Summits

Lord Harper Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord was in the House when Kneecap was raised previously, but I strongly condemned their behaviour at that time and continue to do so. On the other issue he raises, it seems to me that the greatest public service that any Government provide is to keep their citizens safe. That includes, as I said before, defence spending and resilience. Citizens who work in the Armed Forces or our defence industry take on a public service to keep people in this country safe, and we should support them in doing that. I know Northern Ireland has an important defence industry. To say that it is less important does not recognise the threats the world faces at this time. I think we would all love an ideal world where there were no threats, no violence and no areas of conflict, and we did not spend money on defence. That is not the real world. We have to protect our citizens. If we fail to do that, we fail in the first duty of any Government.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, in his Statement, the Prime Minister linked economic security, national security and what he called social security. He said that welfare reform was urgent and that the system was failing people every single day. Is not what has happened at the other end of the building a demonstration that the Government’s credibility is shot to pieces? They have literally taken out of that legislation almost all the reforms that they proposed, so their credibility is damaged on that important issue. That matters to our defence commitments, because our credibility in promising that increase in expenditure in the rest of the Statement is now damaged because the Government have demonstrated that they cannot find those savings. That demonstrates that those things are connected. The Government’s credibility is damaged, not just on welfare reform but reputationally on these important national security issues as well.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord will not be surprised that I fundamentally disagree with the point he made. Every time our Government have made a commitment to defence spending, we have kept that commitment. That is an absolute commitment. The noble Lord wants to tie that in with welfare reform. I have not heard anybody say that the situation that this Government inherited on social security and welfare spending is not one that needs to change. There are many measures within that Bill that practically everybody in the other place has supported. An example is the idea that somebody who gets a PIP and is disabled who wants to try to work should not go to the back of the queue and have to go through the system again if working fails. They should be able to try work to see whether it is suitable for them. The system that we have inherited needs change, and that change will continue.

The Bill has passed tonight. People agreed on the issue of reform. They now want to look at the detail. That is the process of legislation. The noble Lord was a Chief Whip in the other place. He knows how the process of legislation works. He lost enough votes himself to recognise how difficult it can be. What can never be accepted is that it is right to write some people off in the system and say that, even though they want to work, we are not going to help them to do so. Those are the measures that we are going to put in place. To link this to the Prime Minister’s comments about economic, national and social security, all these things make up what is good about life, the importance of life and the resilience we all need. Our safety, our resilience and how we treat the nation all link together, and that is how you have a healthy society that supports each other.