[Mr. Greg Pope in the Chair] — Arms Export Controls

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 2:30 pm on 5 November 2009.

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Photo of Roger Berry Roger Berry Labour, Kingswood 2:30, 5 November 2009

It is a pleasure again to introduce a debate on our Committees' report on arms export controls, the Government's response, and related matters, but first, may I say how pleased I am to see you in the Chair, Mr. Pope? I am trying to think of a good reason why you, and not someone else, are in the Chair, but I am pleased to see you. I do not know whether you chose 5 November as the date for this debate, but it is an interesting choice.

I thank my colleagues on the four Select Committees: the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee, the International Development Committee and what is now the Business and Enterprise Committee, but last year was the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee. Colleagues on all four Committees have worked incredibly hard to produce, again, a unanimous report, and I am grateful for that work. I am also grateful to the staff of the four Select Committees who served us so admirably, and particularly to our Clerk.

Thanks also go to the officials of the Departments that have had the great pleasure of responding to our questions over the past 12 months. I also thank the many individuals and organisations who submitted written evidence, and particularly those who appeared before the Committees as witnesses. We had three evidence sessions this year. One of those sessions was with the then Economic and Business Minister with responsibility for export controls, my hon. Friend Ian Pearson, and officials from what was then the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. We also heard evidence from the then Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend Bill Rammell, and officials from the counter-proliferation department at the FCO. Finally, we heard from non-governmental organisations and defence manufacturers in the form of the United Kingdom Working Group on Arms, which is essentially made up of Saferworld, Amnesty International UK, Oxfam GB, and the Export Group for Aerospace and Defence, or EGAD. I thank them all. I also thank the Minister for being here to respond to our debate.

Let me say at the beginning, as I always do, that the Committees recognise, acknowledge and compliment the Government on their significant progress over the years on arms export control policy. The system today is completely different from what it was when I first entered the House. In fact, when I first entered it, I did not know what the system was because we were not told. There has been enormous progress in recent years, and the Government deserve credit for that.

We value the greater transparency and accountability, particularly given the current focus on trying to secure an international arms trade treaty. We acknowledge the Government's leadership in that area, and support them. Having said that, it is natural to use this opportunity to identify some areas where there are still differences of opinion, sometimes significant, between our Committees and the Government. I shall select a few areas, and I know that my colleagues will pick up others.

Let us start with extraterritoriality. Over the years, the Government have extended extraterritorial controls on brokering, and we welcome that. They have done so for a good reason, and I cannot find better words than those chosen by the Government in their response to our last report. They said that the case for extending extraterritorial controls on the arms trade was

"to ensure that unscrupulous traders cannot pursue deals that concern the UK simply by carrying out the business from another country."

That is a clear, explicit statement. It is not good enough for one country simply to say that it will not license arms exports for a particular end user. It would be more sensible if countries took cognisance of the fact that that is not effective, because the trader could simply hop on a train or plane and do the same deal elsewhere. The Government's case for extraterritorial controls for UK brokers is that if we do not want them to pursue deals from the UK, we do not want them to do so from any other country either. That is an admirable summary of why we should have robust controls regarding UK brokers overseas.

From April, controls on the brokering of small arms and light weapons have been extended to cover the activities of UK persons when operating offshore. Previously, extraterritorial controls had not applied to small arms in such circumstances. The Committees welcome that change, for which we have argued for some time. Let us not forget that small arms and light weapons are today's weapons of mass destruction. Someone is killed every minute as a result of conflict involving small arms-500,000 people a year. The weapons that kill most people are precisely those, so extending extraterritorial controls on UK brokers who deal in such weapons is a welcome development of Government policy. It has never made sense to exclude small arms from such controls.

However, as we have previously argued, surely the Government's logic should be the same as that of the Committees-that all trade in goods on the military list should be brought within such extraterritorial controls. I said last year that the Government had outsourced policy making, but I shall be more charitable. They took the sensible view that NGOs and defence manufacturers are active partners in developing arms export control policy, and that it was sensible for them to ask whether NGOs and defence manufacturers-EGAD-could get together to consider ways of extending extraterritorial brokering controls to other items on the military list.

In our report, we said that the Government should set a deadline for those discussions, which were to result in draft proposals. Their response was that they had received a proposal, as we knew-it was delivered in the summer-and that they intended to respond to it formally by the end of October. It is now November and to the best of my knowledge we have not had the Government's response. Will the Minister tell the House whether the Government have yet sent their formal response to the proposal by the NGOs and defence manufacturers on the further extension of extraterritorial controls, and if not, why not?

We also recommended that the Government extend category B-that is what we are discussing-to include anti-vehicle land mines, as both the NGOs and EGAD had said that there was a valid case for doing so. In response to our report, the Government said that they would consider that, so will the Minister tell us their timetable for re-examining whether anti-vehicle land mines should be placed in category B?

Talk of extraterritoriality naturally takes us to the wider issue of brokers. For the third year in a row-it may be more than three years-the Committees have recommended in the report the establishment of a register of arms brokers. Previously, in oral evidence, the Government had conceded that the principle of a register of arms brokers had certain advantages, but they raised the question whether the administrative burden of introducing such a system would justify the benefit. However, I was pleased to see that in the Government response to our report, they said that they would be happy to consider the issue again. I welcome that, as I am sure other colleagues do, not least because the Committees visited Ukraine-I shall come to that visit again in a moment-and our experience there demonstrated, as we say in the report, the need for a register of brokers. Perhaps now is the time to explain.

A few years ago, Saferworld-one of the NGOs that has been very actively involved in putting its views to our Committees, for which we are grateful-invited a group of Ukrainian parliamentarians to come to the UK to observe our system of parliamentary scrutiny and to learn how parliamentarians here were involved in holding the Government to account for arms export control policy. The Committees met our colleagues from Ukraine and we had a useful visit.

Earlier this year, at the invitation of the Foreign Office, three members of the Committees-Sir John Stanley, my hon. Friend Mr. Borrow, who is not here, and I-visited Kiev. It was a return visit, essentially as part of the Foreign Office's commendable outreach programme, to enable us to have discussions with parliamentarians, officials and civil servants in Kiev about arms export controls and parliamentary scrutiny. At one of those meetings, the Ukrainian deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs happened to hand over a piece of paper that we discovered, when we subsequently had it translated, was essentially a list of UK brokers operating from Ukraine. Of course, Ukraine inherited a massive amount of former Soviet military equipment, and Ukraine itself is a major manufacturer and exporter of arms, so that list of UK brokers was of some interest. That matter is being examined.

My point is that the list seemed to be-how can I phrase this tactfully? It was not clear that our diplomatic representatives in Kiev were aware that such lists existed and were so easily accessible; I think that that is fair to say. That confirmed our view that if we are seriously to get a grip on international brokering of arms, it would be extremely helpful if there was a register of UK arms brokers, so that the UK knew which individuals and companies it was dealing with.