"May I echo the warm welcome for the signing on Friday of the demonstration contract on Type 26? But are the original assumptions from the 2010 strategic defence and security review still valid, or has anything significant changed?..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"I shall not detain the House for more than a few minutes. I welcome and support the Bill so far as it goes, but, like others who have spoken, I believe it could go further.
I welcome the work of the Service Complaints Commissioner for the Armed Forces in recent …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"T6. The Government have rightly tackled the long-standing chaos in the Child Support Agency, but attracted controversy with their new 4% admin charge on struggling parents with care when the other parent is not stepping up to the plate. What assessment have the Government made of the big drop-off in …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"The decision to procure the existing Trident nuclear system was taken in 1980. My starting point is that the world has changed a very great deal since then. Back then, we were at the height of the cold war. We had a known nuclear adversary that had the capability to …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"As I have said, it was something that we calibrated to be our need in 1980. If one casts one’s mind back to 1980, one will see that our conventional defences were very much greater than they are today. The scale of the nuclear deterrent that we mounted at that …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"I will come on to talk about the implications and the consequences of using nuclear weapons, but—although the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the security situation in and around Ukraine deteriorated rapidly—I do not accept for one moment that anything that has happened there makes the prospect of …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"I am making absolutely no attempt to predict the future; I am talking about the threat that I believe we face now at this point in time. For another nation sate to be taken seriously as a nuclear adversary, it needs a combination of capability and intent. Although it is …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"I am going to make some progress and I will take another intervention in a little while.
Our defences have seen round after round of cuts as the financial situation has deteriorated, and later this year we face the gloomy prospect of the whole thing happening all over again. Whatever …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"I was taking the lifetime of the submarines as being more like 25 to 30 years. If we operate them for 25 years at almost £3 billion, that would take us into the realms of £75 billion plus the building and decommissioning costs, which would certainly take us over £100 …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech
"The 2010 national security strategy identified the primary threats faced by the United Kingdom. Personally, I think it was correct in identifying the threat from international terrorism, cyber-attack, international crime, the security consequences of the sudden mass migrations of peoples, and pandemics as a result of climate change. All those …..." Nick Harvey - View Speech