It is rather hard to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, and even the most recent speaker, because they enunciated a number of the things that I wanted to mention. But, as we have heard, some repetition is not a bad idea. In the past 10 years, much has changed in the world of plant health and protection—and here I unashamedly issue a compliment to Defra, where the chief plant health officer for the UK, Professor Nicola Spence, has been a sure and steady hand in moving forward the health of our plant stock. We have also seen, as we have heard, Defra’s 25-year environment plan, which includes, in recent years, a tree heath resilience strategy, a Great Britain biosecurity strategy and a plant health research and development plan.
The arrival of Brexit has complicated the biosecurity landscape but has allowed us to get away from the EU’s one-size-fits-all approach to the subject, which tended to mean that problems originating in Mediterranean countries would inexorably find their way here, through common trade and travel arrangements. In that time also, the advance of gene sequencing for plants has given us a much greater understanding of the nature of the problems we face, and of the susceptibility of individual plants to the diseases attacking them. As has been mentioned, citizen science is now being employed to report infestations and diseases, and such reports to the chief inspectorate are now running into many thousands per year.
In summary, we are increasingly well protected by an ever-more alert department and its agencies, not to mention the financial side of things, but the work they are doing has been well received in the industry. All of this is well known and understood by those interested in the trades associated with plant health and movement, such as forestry and horticulture. It is also pretty well understood by those who live and make their livelihood in the countryside. But the great multitude of our increasingly enormous population have little idea of the problems which face us, and with which these agencies must deal. A cynic might add that a large proportion of them care even less. The real issue facing us, therefore, is awareness. As we have heard, the cost of the Chalara Fraxinus, or ash dieback, epidemic has been estimated at about £15 billion over the next few decades. That is a huge figure and, if you look out of the window of a train or at home, you see skeletons wherever you look. These have all got to be cleared and someone has to pay for that.
On the other hand, the value to the national balance sheet of our plant stock, both trees and the agricultural and horticultural sectors, is reckoned at £175 billion—in other words, it is worth looking after them.
There is an urgent need for continued, and increasing, training and awareness campaigns focused on all the sectors previously mentioned, and especially on a mobile, travelling public. This increased awareness must also extend to the amateur gardening sector—no more returning from trips abroad with sponge bags full of likely specimens and the soil in which they grew. To illustrate the size of the problem, there are reckoned to be 90 pests that can attack oak trees, 165 for potatoes, 130 for roses and 160 for tomatoes.
Possibly the two most high-profile concerns at present, both of which have been mentioned in passing, are the bacterial disease Xylella fastidiosa, which has devastated the olive plantations of Italy, France and Spain—olive is much more important than the other plants mentioned, but nevertheless they are all part of it—and the emerald ash borer, a beetle that attacks ash trees, especially when they are already weakened by another pathogen, the ash dieback. This pest is spreading across the world from its origin in the Far East and has reached Ukraine, which does not have a lot of time to deal with it. It has equally devastated the American ash population. I therefore have two questions for the Minister. What is the latest situation on these two pests, Xylella and ash borer? What measures are being taken to combat them?
There are some advantages to our being an island, and there is no doubt that our moat helps to keep things at bay, but many insects can travel over water. The Asian hornet and longhorn beetles have both arrived on the wind.
One area I find hard to understand is the behaviour of our nursery and horticultural trades in importing large volumes of plants that we can perfectly well grow ourselves. It should be impossible to obtain an import certificate without offering proof that the plant in question is not available from growers in this country. This is not a matter of civil liberties. It is a matter literally of life and death to the plant populations concerned, and to the livelihoods of our growers.
]]>Trees are such an integral part of our landscape, both urban and rural. They support biodiversity by housing a wide range of animals and providing them with food. They help make towns and cities attractive places to live and boost mental health. Imagine cities without the plane, platanus hispanica, or the common sycamore, acer pseudoplatanus—note the relationship—or even the flowering cherries and magnolias, silver birches and horse chestnuts which line our streets, fill our parks and keep us cool in summer, while also marking the passing of the seasons.
Imagine, too, the countryside of Britain without those crowning glories among our common trees: ash, oak, beech, chestnuts—both horse and sweet—birch and alder. The list goes on, but one is missing: the English elm. Much reference has already been made to this wonderful tree, and the fact that many of us in this House are old enough to remember the majestic columns of ulmus procera dominating the countryside. There are now only a few thousand healthy specimens of this variety left in the UK, mainly in urban environments and, surprisingly, most in Brighton, after the ravages of Dutch elm disease killed an estimated 25 million trees. This pest, a beetle, was first identified in 1918 in Holland by some very well resourced and clever microbiologists; that epidemic died out and a second and more virulent attack hit the whole of northern Europe in the 1960s. This appears to have originated in Canada on imported logs, so it is not fair to blame the poor Dutch. However, this pest showed us in sobering fashion what could happen if insufficient measures were taken to control it. We do not seem to have learned that lesson.
This brings me to the disaster facing one of our best loved and most numerous native trees: Fraxinus excelsior, the European ash. In this case, the problem is a fungus rather than a beetle, although the Americans are facing a similar disaster caused by a beetle, the emerald ash borer, which has not yet made an appearance in this country. Our ash dieback is caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, which originated in Asia. Recent estimates suggest that this disease will kill around 70% of our native ash, which will amount to something in the order of 70 million trees. Some surveys put the total number of mature trees in the country as high as 130 million. When you consider the size and visual impact of this species, that will leave an even bigger hole in our landscapes than the elm.
The fungus arrived here by various means, including wind spread, but one of those routes was undoubtedly the major trade in young plants imported from Holland. The Dutch nursery trade is hugely successful, and I have no problem with that, but it flies in the face of common sense to import ash whips and saplings from a known disease-ridden environment to plant in our gardens and parks. Ash both seeds and grows prolifically in this country, as anyone who has had to pull up ash seedlings around ash trees knows only too well. Why then do we need to allow the import of such plant material? However, unreported so far by other commentators, I am told that Queen Mary University has managed to isolate the genome of disease-resistant ash trees they have found. This gives us hope that maybe we can go forward with a method of planting ash that will remain resistant.
On a related point, a great many of these ash trees we will lose are in hedgerows and parks around the country. When they die, as they assuredly will, it is a known fact that they become brittle and if left standing are likely to drop limbs or even fall over altogether. The idea of leaving them, as elms were left, simply does not stand up—sorry for the bad pun. This makes them dangerous and those responsible for them, be they in public or private ownership, will be liable. This will entail felling and removal of any tree within 60 to 70 feet of a road or footpath.
This process will be very costly; the cost to the economy has already been estimated at £15 billion. Will the Government be prepared to assist local authorities and landowners in the removal of this vast stock of dead wood? Some form of grant linked to the number of trees to be dealt with and a specific timescale would be a good starting point. The silver lining is that ash is an excellent firewood and can be turned into woodchips for biomass fuel plants. Perhaps the Government could go further and incentivise the building or conversion of such plants to ensure that this unfortunate source of energy is not wasted.
In my own small patch of west Sussex, surrounded by unmanaged woodland, I have in the region of 50 ash trees in a patch of less than three acres. All are affected to a greater or lesser extent. Extraction will involve heavy machinery and, with the Wealden clay underfoot, it would be impossible for about nine months of the year. With no road close by, it will be extremely difficult, not to mention messy and unsightly. Scale that up to the size of the ash woods prevalent in the south of England and you can see the problem.
In the current wave of enthusiasm for planting trees to offset our carbon emissions, some words of caution should be voiced. Politicians like big numbers; Jeremy Corbyn promised to plant 2 billion trees over the next 20 years. This would be the equivalent of 100 million a year. That is the equivalent of 270,000 for every day of the year, or nearly 200 per minute. This is, however, only about twice the estimated requirement for carbon neutrality by 2050 to be achieved. This would require UK woodland cover to increase from about 13% of total land area to about 20%, but much of that increase would have to be on land currently used for farming purposes. The conflicts of interest are obvious. These trees should be UK native species and not so-called non-natives. A native species arrived here before or during the last ice age; non-natives, by definition, arrived over the last 8,000 years. This should not include exotics, such as the fast-growing conifer types which have been imported, largely from North America, to provide the so-called battery hens of the arbori- cultural world.
With Brexit, we have an ideal opportunity to strengthen our phytosanitary regulations. We have talked about invasive plant and animal species; these regimes must be strengthened and enforced, and we should certainly stop the import of plant varieties which have a history of disease and can be grown from seed or cutting successfully within our own industry. Further appropriate funding for the Animal and Plant Health Agency would be a start.
Sadly, it is too late for the ash, but it may still be possible to save and protect other species such as oak and chestnut. The Government’s tree health resilience strategy of 2018 was a good start, but can the Minister outline the measures being taken to improve our protective shield in the wake of Brexit and inform us of progress made in achieving the aims of that strategy in the two years since publication?
]]>The naval reserve was formed out of a national register of seamen in 1835. On mobilisation in 1914, it already consisted of some 30,000 officers and men and was intended to provide a reserve of trained personnel drawn mainly from professional seamen and trawler-men for rapid mobilisation in times of emergency. In 1958, after the Second World War, it was amalgamated with the much larger RNVR, which was by then an officer-only reserve, as part of the post-war rationalisation of Reserve Forces. This led to the establishment of a dozen sea training centres based in 12 commercial ports around the UK, which were specifically designed, as we have heard, to keep the Royal Navy in the public eye and to provide seagoing training for volunteers, from ordinary seamen to commanding officers. These training centres were equipped with a permanent force of Ton-class mine countermeasures vessels, which were organised into the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, and some smaller craft. This squadron provided training in all disciplines of naval life and career progression up to command of a small ship. In 1984, the MoD introduced a new class of 12 mine countermeasure vessels to replace the old and rather tired wooden minesweepers. These River-class vessels, not to be confused with the current batch 1 and 2 offshore patrol vessels of the same name, were withdrawn within 10 years as a result of the Options for Change review and sold abroad, mainly to Brazil and Bangladesh. At this point, the RNR lost any meaningful seagoing role, and with it the incentive to recruit for all trades and for command. Who wants to join a reserve that does not have the essential tools to train those who are interested in joining, and with no ships and no crews?
The RNR has since been reduced in size by successive defence reviews until, by 2010, it consisted of 3,600 trained personnel. The SDSR of that year sought to increase the size and role of the Reserve Forces, but recruitment difficulties and some controversy over the continuing reductions in regular strength—what exactly are the underlying reasons for reducing regular strength and increasing reserve strength?—had the effect that, by 2015, this number had fallen to 3,160. The most recent figure for 2018 is 2,750. These volunteers are seen as part of a “whole force” arrangement with the Regular Navy, of which they form roughly 10%, and are designed to facilitate movement between the two groups for training or support purposes. Again, that looks very much like using the reserves as a back-up when and where you do not have enough people in the regulars. This figure is for reservists who have completed the first two phases of their training, both basic and trade. However, the Ministry of Defence is now reporting its overall figures as 3,600, which, for the first time, includes those reservists who have completed only phase 1 training—basically a few weeks of marching around a square. A cynic could argue that this massaging of the figures does not assist the service’s cause.
Another fundamental point is that the figures for the Royal Naval Reserve include a fairly steady number of Royal Marines reservists—usually about 750. The current Royal Naval Reserve number of trained reservists is therefore only about 2,000. These volunteers are spread between a total of 18 units and subdivisions, which may seem surprising, given that it means that there is an average of only around 110 personnel at each, but it preserves the essentially local nature of the units and enables local recruitment to continue unaffected by distance. Another potential source of training, however, is the 15 university royal naval units—sometimes known as URNUs—which come under overall RNR command, although managed by the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. These operate some 14 small inshore patrol craft—exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, was suggesting—of the Archer P2000 class, and all trainees are treated as officers under training, being taught leadership, navigation, seamanship and other similar disciplines. As it stands, however, this means that there is no scope for their use for general training of reserves. Each URNU consists of some 50 undergraduates, who join for three years. The vessels were built in a steady stream between 1985 and 1998, which means that they are all at least 20 years old, and I see no indication that their replacement has been formally discussed.
At present, it seems that the Navy’s three batch 1 offshore patrol vessels—“Tyne”, “Severn” and “Mersey”—are seen as surplus to RN requirements with the arrival of their batch 2 successors. The hybrid HMS “Clyde”, currently the Falkland Islands guardship, may find a further role. The brand-new HMS “Forth”, which was commissioned earlier this year, appears to be suffering from so many faults that she has been taken back in hand by her builders for rectification work, and her crew transferred to “Tyne”, one of the older class, which has been reactivated from reserve. Being charitable, this should prove to be a temporary situation, which will leave the three older OPVs available for disposal or for future use in reinforcing our border and fishery security.
And here is where the RNR might come in, by providing crewing and incentives. Since these vessels are only 15 years old and are fairly basic patrol ships with simple systems, could the naval service not find a use for them? They require a crew of 30 men, which is well within the capability of an RNR unit to provide, and, if the Regular Navy cannot find the men to man them, this could be a useful solution to the worrying problem of border and fishery protection post Brexit. They also have the capacity to carry up to 20 troops, which would provide excellent additional trainee accommodation for RNR personnel. The Border Force has only a very small number of coastal enforcement cutters, three available at any one time, and these vessels could augment this. I envisage their use in fishery protection—they were technically part of the Fishery Protection Squadron until they were retired—and for coastal law enforcement once we leave the EU. By sharing them between RNR units, one could be based in each of the three dockyard ports, Portsmouth, Devonport and Faslane, and could be maintained partly by the RN establishment, and partly by their own pool of trained ratings.
This would provide an incentive for young volunteers to get to sea, as well as for older regular service “leavers” who could join the reserve to provide the specialist knowledge required to maintain the ships and train their successors. Such a hybrid manning system might initially lean rather heavily on the regular service, but as it gained momentum, this should give way to a steady stream of volunteer crews available and trained to assist the regular service.
At the same time, we should continue the programme of using small numbers of maritime reservists on board regular RN ships to generate more seagoing interest within the reserve, and I suggest that the Archer-class P2000 patrol boats of the URNUs should be fully integrated with RNR activities to maximise the use of these handy small vessels. This will give ample opportunity for the volunteer reservists to train in their own time, but it is important that the reserve is not seen—to echo the noble Lord, Lord Sterling—as some steady-state manpower provider to the Regular Forces. It is also important that the reserve ethos is not lost. The current shift to the “whole force” stance has inflicted a cultural change on the reserve which makes recruitment more difficult than in the past.
I request that the Minister comment on the plans for disposal of the OPVs and for manning in the future.
]]>But we must look more objectively at our relations with that country. If we trace the timeline of history back to the 17th and 18th centuries, when leaders such as Peter I and later Catherine II, both later known as “the Great”, reigned over a vast country with massive social divisions, we see a country where strong and stable government was a prerequisite for controlling the population. When weaker Governments or rulers became established, things tended to fall apart. Sounds familiar, does it not? Democracy is a little-understood concept in Russia, both pre and post revolution. Strong rulers have always been the most successful. We therefore delude ourselves if we seek to impose our liberal democratic standards on a country that has never seen itself as fundamentally a western state. We have to take it as it is and seek to work with it in any way we can.
When I first came face-to-face with Russians during the Cold War, I tended to think that they must be 10 feet tall and particularly good at walking on water. Longer experience of underwater operations revealed the feet of clay that decisively prevented them from such aquatic initiatives. Later, in the Russia of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I met many ordinary Russians who came across as normal people who had had inculcated into them a vast amount of propaganda about what the western allies would do to them if war were to break out. Most were healthily sceptical about all that.
President Putin, who fits a mould which goes back centuries, is the second-longest serving ruler since 1918, having not yet overtaken Stalin, although I do not seek to draw any parallel between them. When I met him in the office of mayor Anatoly Sobchak in St Petersburg in the 1990s, he was a typical KGB officer. Fundamentally, nothing has changed and he sees his role as being to give Russia and its people their self-respect back after the, as many of them see it, disastrous collapse of the Soviet system. While we laud Gorbachev and tend to despise Yeltsin, Russians often see it the other way round.
With its economy in a mess and substantially smaller than our own, Russia does not necessarily seek to expand its military influence beyond what it sees as its natural borders. Rather, it seeks to expand its economic hegemony and influence through the levers of power available to it. These consist largely of oil and gas reserves, but also lie in its ability, as a command economy, to take centralised decisions quickly and act upon them. It believes that its diplomatic initiatives, backed by limited military force, will assist its climb towards the pinnacles of respect that it seeks. It has embarked on modernisation of its armed forces, although it is hard to see how it appears to have achieved so much in so short a time without spending far more than the advertised 5% of GDP on such programmes. There is nothing new about such deceptions. Some estimates put its Cold War spending at near to 50% of real GDP.
Putin has moved steadily to re-establish the state’s authority over its rebels, especially the financial rebels liberated by Yeltsin’s largesse, and has given the official classes their respect back by building on anti-western feelings. However, it is in the areas of AI and robotics that Russia believes that it cannot outspend the West. These areas will therefore constitute our new levers of power and we must build on them to establish a new and more open dialogue with the Russian state.
It is time to stop cold-shouldering this physically massive player on the world stage and start to bring it in from the cold, as Smiley would say, by engaging it using the very considerable tools at our disposal. What it craves is respect—respect for its contributions to defeating Hitler and for its recovery from the failure of communism. Respect costs nothing to give, but we must find a way to open the doors, start to unwind sanctions, and begin talking about mutual threat reduction—in a modern sense.
]]>Discussion has focused largely on equipment, preparedness and procurement but the other main area, the nature of the threat—what is a sufficient level and what is needed overall to make the contribution suggested?—has been defined by SDSR 2015, which, for better or worse, is the road map in use until the current quasi-review reports. Indeed, while it is clearly evident that procurement has been far slower than expected, it has to be accepted that thus far SDSR 2015, in naval terms at least, is our only set of directions, unless some of the darker rumours reported in the press about the axing of the LPDs “Albion” and “Bulwark”, and the consequent loss of an amphibious capability, turn out to be true.
However, I wish to look at a more immediate and pressing problem—namely, the people who will be required to man and fight these systems. Recent statistics indicate major shortfalls in personnel, which are not being made up by recruitment. It is clear that service morale and recruitment have suffered badly from a combination of factors: the reduction in conflict operations in the Middle East, with the consequent lack of a sense of purpose and direction; stagnation of pay and conditions; failure to incentivise enough young men and women to join the reserves; and regular and prolonged separations. This all leads to low morale among serving personnel, and further leads to retention rates being below recruitment rates.
The Royal Navy has a target of 30,450 personnel and is currently 1,000 short of that. Of this total, some 8,000 are Royal Marines. The Royal Marines is the only European marine force currently capable of conducting amphibious operations at brigade level. Therefore, the naval personnel available to man the new aircraft carriers and the other assets expected to come into service amount to fewer than 20,000. This is a shockingly low figure given the requirements of training, rotations, family life and so on, and must be the main impetus behind the proposals now being voiced to remove the Royal Marines’ capability to land a brigade-sized force anywhere in the world. This was a major plank of SDSR 2015 and Joint Force 2025 and, at the very least, should be maintained. Vague talk about giving one of the carriers an amphibious capability should be dismissed for what it is: a red herring. However, if there is no alternative to withdrawing “Ocean”, “Albion” and “Bulwark”, has consideration been given to laying them up in maintained reserve until such time as the recruitment situation has improved or we suddenly have a pressing need for their services? These are highly specialised vessels with much service life left, and selling them off to a foreign navy or, worse, to a scrapyard, will go down very badly in the public prints and with the public at large.
There is no simple way to increase recruitment at a time of pay restraint and lack of challenging service, but there are plenty of arguments for improvements in the X factor component of service pay. A five-yearly review of the X factor is currently under way, and it would be an admirable moment to use it to improve service pay and conditions after so many years of being shackled to minimum pay increments by an austerity-obsessed Treasury. Indeed, I note that the Chief Secretary has recently written to the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body outlining her guidance that a 1% pay award would be appropriate. Will the Minister undertake to investigate this avenue?
Finally, to return to a question I raised in this House a year ago, the naval reserve figures are dreadful, at a total strength, including some 750 Royal Marines reservists, of 2,400 against an establishment of 3,100; that is, 23% below target. This clearly has a lot to do with lack of opportunities for naval reserve personnel. Will the Minister undertake to consider the handover to the Royal Naval Reserve of the older River-class offshore patrol vessels when the new deliveries arrive, to provide an incentive for seagoing training and promotion, as well as a means of providing fishery protection and Border Force support after Brexit?
]]>In times of peace, military expenditure tends to be the Cinderella of government spending. Large parts of the population see it as neither necessary nor desirable, and it falls to Parliament to persuade the voting public to accept spending on defence when so many other areas command their attention. History tells us that although we are seldom fully prepared for conflict when it arises, we occasionally get it right. Henry VIII regularly ran out of money to maintain his forces; indeed, he began wars only when he had received a new injection of cash. Elizabeth I’s expenditure on warfare was remarkably modest, but it cost the King of Spain two-thirds of the entire revenues of the Spanish Empire in 1585 to build the Spanish Armada. Note that he started three years before the date on which the fleet was to set sail.
Between 1690 and 1815 Britain was involved in a semi-continuous global struggle, generally against France and Spain. In this period, spending on the Royal Navy consumed the largest share of government revenues, with the results that we all learned about in school. I am of course assuming that most of us come from an era when such matters as Napoleonic history and the Industrial Revolution still formed a part of the history curriculum. In 1814, the last year of the Napoleonic wars, the British national budget stood at £66 million, of which £50 million was spent on the war. The Navy spent £10 million, but Trafalgar was behind it; the Army, pre-Waterloo, spent £40 million; and another £10 million was spent on mercenaries from Austria and Prussia.
Post 1815, and during the 100 years or so of the Pax Britannica, we were probably the most confident country on the planet—confidence has been mentioned in several contexts. The peace was substantially maintained by the large but increasingly outdated Royal Navy. Defence expenditure fell steadily as a percentage of GDP, partly because of the vast rise in GDP itself during the 19th century, but by 1900 it stood at just under 4%. The arrival of Admiral Jackie Fisher as First Sea Lord in 1904 saw a complete change in defence thinking. Fisher was convinced that war with Germany was inevitable, and set about modernising the Navy and preparing it for war with enormous enthusiasm. He retired for the first time in 1911, with the job done so effectively that defence spending, at 3% of GDP, was lower than when he had arrived, due to the massive efficiencies and savings that he had been able to make while completely renewing the battleship fleet.
Fisher had the public on his side. He was such a popular figure that, as he bullied Parliament into supporting his new building programmes, the public coined the phrase, “We want eight, and we won’t wait”, referring to yet another class of Dreadnoughts. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the First World War as probably the only military arm in Europe ready for the conflict, and defence spending at 3.15% of GDP. There is a magic quality to this figure of three; it crops up time and again. From 1920 to 1935 it remained fairly steady at around 3%, before rearmament began in 1936. The arguments of Churchill and others surrounding that process do not need rehearsing in your Lordships’ House; suffice to say that they were highly controversial at the time. I apologise to your Lordships for reciting all this history, but I hope my point is clear: we ignore the lessons of the past at our peril. The visionary Fisher managed to revitalise the Navy within 10 years—but it took him 10 years, in an age far less technologically advanced than today. The equally visionary Churchill managed to get the ball rolling in 1936, although we were far from ready when the war started.
In more recent times, we entered the Cold War in the 1950s with defence expenditure at 6% of GDP, and it was still at 4% by the early 1990s. Since then, the so-called Cold War dividend has had the psychological effect of lulling the country into a false sense of security, which is now, 25 years on, starkly apparent. Other speakers have detailed, and no doubt still more will do so, the effects of the obvious lack of “mass”—that is, numbers—manpower shortages, the reduction in the procurement for stocks of weapons and equipment, and the scrapping of useful equipment because its maintenance or manning cannot be funded.
My principal point is that we must start to think the hitherto unthinkable of casting aside some of the shibboleths of 21st-century expectations and politics. Today, real spending as a percentage of GDP, in figures that are not widely understood by the public, includes the following figures: pensions at 8%, health at 7.4% and welfare at 6%. Add all those together and you get one-quarter of our entire GDP. Education gets 4.4% but defence gets 1.76% for pure defence spending and 0.25% for other things that have been creatively accounted into the defence calculation.
We simply do not have 10 years, or even three, to prepare for the next conflict that may be forced upon us. Despite the rapid advance of technologies, development times have lengthened. Fisher built “Dreadnought”, the first of a new type of battleship, in a year. The latest “Dreadnought”, the first of the successor class submarines, will probably take 15 years. It took 10 years from project start to launch of the first Daring class destroyer. The Type 26 frigate project began in 2010 and the first vessel has yet to be ordered. The numbers of both these projects have been halved since inception. The Type 31 frigate—perhaps you could call it the other half of the Type 26—is still a figment of the collective imagination. I could start on the Astute class submarine programme, but embarrassment for my old service forbids further comment.
The elephant in the room is clearly social spending in all its forms. While most would agree that such spending is only right and proper, I argue that the balance has been dangerously upset by the post-Cold War lull in military need. I also argue that the 2015 SDSR has quite possibly already reached its sell-by date, and that another serious look needs to be taken at our defence needs rather than looking through the other end of the telescope—or periscope—at what we can afford when all the other budgetary pressures have been contained. The SDSR addresses development but fails to address personnel recruitment and retention to any great extent. To quote the Secretary of State for Defence:
“Nothing is more important than defending our country and protecting our people”.
I offer another quotation, which I think came from the Prime Minister:
“The first duty of the Government is the defence of the people”.
In conclusion, I point out that while we aim to spend 2% of GDP on defence, Russia spends 5.4%, the US only 2.3%—but of course from a vastly higher GDP base—China 1.9% and Saudi Arabia a huge 13.7%. I have a final question for the Minister, which has already been asked: what consideration has been given to removing the costs of building, maintaining and operating the strategic deterrent from the defence budget to its own separate vote?
Other than all of that, the main issue that seems to come across from noble Lords’ speeches is morale and recruitment—the hollowing-out of services personnel. Equipment can and will be built and budgets will provide for that, but we have to create an attractive enough platform for recruitment to bring enough people into the services and benefit them in order to create the kind of task forces and numbers that we have been talking about.
]]>The long and winding road to these hallowed portals has taken me via 15 years in the Royal Navy, 10 of which were in submarines, where I came across the Special Boat Service, including command during the Cold War of the 1970s. This was followed by 30 years in the City in a global trade house, where I spent many years as a member of the Baltic Exchange. I followed that with a period of cathedral custodianship, which is not a bad precursor to coming to this place, in many ways.
I wish to concentrate today on a relatively narrow aspect of the effects of leaving the European Union—the effect on our coastal and border defences. The new UK economic exclusion zone, or 200-mile limit, did not even exist as such in 1973, when we joined the EEC. It will consist of some 770,000 square kilometres of sea when we leave the EU, and many nations will cast covetous eyes on our riches, both fishy and oily. At the same time, we are faced with myriad considerations in defence of the border, many of which will be exacerbated by our newly independent status. We have to contend not only with serious organised crime, including drug-, people- and firearms-smuggling, but also with modern slavery, terrorism, immigration and, last but not least, fisheries protection and anti-poaching activities. There is a very large Spanish fishing fleet that will be very discomforted by the lack of access—in theory at least—to our parts of the north Atlantic.
The Government’s aim is to secure our borders while still allowing legitimate trade to continue unhindered. This is, of course, an admirable objective, but we do need better funded and co-ordinated command and control facilities. Our border is a unique point of intervention and a critical line of defence, where the UK can, and does, identify and disrupt threats to our security. Brexit will throw our existing facilities and organisation into stark relief, and we need to be prepared for it. Without close and continuing liaison with our closest maritime collaborators and neighbours—Spain, France and the Netherlands—we will struggle to remain masters of our space, so we must maintain this at least as a part of our divorce settlement with the EU.
The National Maritime Information Centre, or NMIC, formed at Northwood in 2010, I believe under the aegis of the noble Lord, Lord West, is an essential tool in the garnering of information, but it is neither funded nor equipped to act as the national command and control centre for the maritime assets committed to border defence, which we urgently need. This funding, which would normally come from Home Office resources, is badly needed—I know this is another rant on the subject of funding our forces—and could transform the capabilities of NMIC. Of the many force elements which go make up NMIC, some are volunteer charities, such as the RNLI, but the majority could contribute, in addition to the Home Office.
The asset base that we have for dealing with all this is minimal and will require reinforcement if we are to be successful in defending our borders against such threats. We currently have a situation where the Border Force has three coastal cutters operating on our 11,000-mile coastline. It owns two more but budget constraints mean that it cannot operate them, so they have been lent temporarily to DfID and are currently in the Mediterranean in support of the refugee effort. The Border Force has also ordered eight high-end RIBs for coastal and riverine patrolling. However, the same constraints will allow it to take delivery of only four of them at this time. It does not currently own or operate any aircraft in a maritime patrol role—partially because of the aforementioned budgetary constraints—although the RAF is eventually due to receive nine new Poseidon long-range maritime patrol aircraft.
The Royal Navy has four larger offshore patrol vessels, suitable for fishery protection in the north Atlantic, although one is permanently stationed in the Falkland Islands, which leaves us with three. The new series of OPVs—called the Batch 2 River class—are under construction and five have been ordered. The fate of the first four, once the new vessels come into service, depends on who you ask, but the 2015 SDSR implies that they may be offered to the Border Force.
The Royal Navy also has a total of 15 mine countermeasures vessels, all of them minehunters. Most of these, as your Lordships are aware, are deployed either in the Clyde—which has seven—to protect the deterrent, or in the Iranian Gulf, which has four. That leaves four, which is clearly inadequate to protect our harbours from mine attack, let alone to assist in the defence of our inshore waters, which has historically been one of the primary roles of MCMVs.
The main objection to providing more assets for the defence of our border, apart from finance, appears to be that we cannot man more vessels, given present low rates of recruitment and retention. However, one asset that seems to be largely overlooked is the Royal Naval Reserve. This force has been allowed to wither on the vine, in contrast to the Army Reserve. Currently, the target is to have 3,000 members of the Royal Navy Reserve. In 1993, the RNR’s squadron of 12 MCMVs was disbanded and sold to foreign buyers. This squadron, based in 11 separate operating bases around our coasts, provided an excellent focal point for volunteer mariners to train and develop their skills and produced some superb seamen. The vessels were used for a multitude of tasks, which included coastal patrolling and defence. Instead of selling or scrapping the four Batch 1 River class OPVs when the Batch 2 vessels become available, why not transfer them to a revitalised Royal Naval Reserve, which could provide much needed back-up to the Border Force, and provide the Royal Navy with a ready source of trained personnel to supplement its very stretched manpower resources? The appeal of joining the current RNR and being trained to act, at most, as an armed guard on board an RN ship is low, but give them their own vessels and the chance to develop as a team and watch recruitment take off, especially among those trained by the RN but leaving for other reasons.
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