House of Commons
Thursday 7 July 2005
The House met at half-past Ten o'clock
Prayers
Mr Speaker in the Chair
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The House will be aware that there have been a number of very serious incidents across London this morning. The relevant Ministers are currently meeting to assess and clarify the situation. A statement will be made at the earliest opportunity, but obviously it is important that they should have the opportunity of identifying precisely what has happened before they come to the House.
Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. We are grateful for that statement from the Leader of the House. Of course we understand that it will not be possible to make a statement at the moment, but we will be pleased to co-operate whenever the Government can do so.
Oral Answers to Questions
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The Secretary of State was asked—
Single Farm Payments
As announced in February 2005, the Rural Payments Agency expects to start making payments under the new single payments scheme in February 2006.
At the NFU conference in February this year, the Secretary of State made it clear that the Government were minded to make interim payments to farmers under the single farm payments scheme to help the many thousands of farmers who will inevitably suffer cash flow problems, provided that they are within European rules, which has yet to be checked. Will the Under-Secretary confirm that such two-stage payments are permissible within European rules?
We have not ruled out making an advance payment but it would need new EU legislation, something we are discussing actively with the Commission.
I can assure my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary that the measure is very important to farmers all over country. The farmers in Chorley to whom I have spoken are very worried that the February cheques may not arrive and they need that cash flow. Will my hon. Friend ensure that if it looks like there will be a hiccup or that the cheques will not get there, there will be interim payments, without which those farmers will struggle during a bad time, coming up to Christmas?
It remains our priority to ensure that we meet the target date of February of next year. That is what Ministers are actively focused on. Advance payment carries a considerable risk with changes to the new IT system, which have been the cause of some of the teething troubles. We are also in discussion with banks on the cash flow implications for their farming customers of implementing a new scheme.
I also support the demand for interim payments. The Under-Secretary may not be aware that, in the past few days, the price of fat stock has collapsed by 10 per cent. If that continues until the big sales in the autumn, livestock farmers, particularly upland ones, will have a serious cash flow problem. If there is a delay in the single farm payment cheques, farmers will have serious problems.
There is not much else I can add for the hon. Gentleman. Obviously, I take seriously what he says about his constituents, and hill farmers in particular, but we are focused on achieving the February target that we have set. We are also mindful of the difficulties that farmers are facing and we are having the discussions I talked about earlier.
It is good to hear my hon. Friend say that this matter is being given the correct priority. At my rural issues task force meeting on Friday, this was the most important issue to be discussed. A representative of the banks was there and indicated that the Government were asking whether the banks might lend money to farmers free of interest. That is a novel idea that we could examine in other fields, but as long as we can get the message out to those farmers that we will make those payments, a lot of the fears will be assuaged.
As ever, I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I pay tribute to his work in liaising with farmers in his rural constituency and in keeping the House up to date with these matters.
Will the Minister comment on the recent attacks on single farm payments by the Government and will he assure us that that will not hinder any of the payments?
If I heard the hon. Gentleman correctly, he was suggesting that the Government were attacking the single farm payments scheme. We are not. Obviously we are discussing CAP reform in the wider context of the European finance settlement and we are doing that in the interests of the country, of farmers and of European citizens.
The Minister referred to the February target date. He will be aware that the Government's target is to start paying in February, but to pay 96 per cent. by the end of March. Does he accept that most farmers therefore assume that they are looking at March at the earliest, rather than February? Is he aware that some of the single farm payment money has been hived off, or modulated off, to pay for the entry level scheme, and that that scheme, too, is in absolute chaos? Farmers who asked for help six months ago still cannot make their applications. Not only are they facing a delay in their substantive single farm payment, their access to the other money—they see that money as theirs by right because it was originally modulated off—is being delayed even further into the distance. How much longer do we have to wait before the Government make a decision stemming from the remarks that the Secretary of State made at the NFU conference six months ago?
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made no secret of her anger and frustration at some of the delays. As and when we have something to announce with certainty, we will do so. However, as things stand for both the entry-level scheme and the single payments scheme, we remain committed to the February payment.
Like many MPs with rural constituencies, I frequently meet National Farmers Union representatives over a quarterly cycle. Could the Minister clarify for those who raised the point with me at our last meeting whether it will be possible to buy or sell land or entitlements after the single payments scheme has started?
I might have to get back to my hon. Friend on that question. Some of the complex aspects of the single payments scheme leave me a little perplexed at times, and that is possibly one of them.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions (EU)
Latest figures show that the original 15 EU members had reduced their greenhouse gas emissions in 2003 by 1.7 per cent. compared with the Kyoto base year and are on track to meet their combined Kyoto target of an 8 per cent. reduction through planned policies and measures and use of the Kyoto mechanisms. The enlarged EU had reduced its emissions in 2003 by 5.5 per cent. compared with 1990.
Does the Secretary of State agree, given the relatively slow progress being made by the EU towards meeting its Kyoto targets, given that yesterday President Bush once again affirmed that he would not be prepared to accept compulsory emissions targets for the United States, and given that the developing world has consistently said that it will prioritise economic growth over environmental targets, today's discussions at Gleneagles are more about rhetoric than reality? Does she accept that when it comes to securing a global consensus on emissions targets we are going backwards, not forwards, instead of going "Forward, not back"?
No, I do not agree. What is more, I am surprised that the tone of the hon. Gentleman's voice suggests that he would take pleasure from such an outcome. It is definitely not in the interests of the world either for there to be discouragement of attempts to reach agreement to move things forward at Gleneagles or for there to be anything other than a warm welcome if we are able to achieve such movements. It is certainly recognised outside the United Kingdom—whether or not it is recognised here—that already in this G8 year this country has done an enormous amount to put the issue of climate change much more prominently on the agenda of leaders across the world and to engage, for example, the Chinese, Indian and South African Governments and others much more fully in discussions about what the global community can do to tackle those problems than has ever been the case before. I think that the whole House will welcome that: it certainly should.
The EU is definitely taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and I am sure that the EU states at Gleneagles will argue for a strong post-Kyoto regime as a way forward on the issue. We all want the US to sign up to such a regime. However, I suspect that the choice will be between a coalition of the willing, excluding the US, signing a strong agreement to tackle climate change, and an agreement watered down so far—so that the US can sign up to it—that it is almost meaningless. Which would she prefer?
What I would prefer is for the G8 to reach a consensus at Gleneagles on something that is strong enough. That will not, of course, satisfy those who have set high and ambitious goals—in some cases, perhaps, deliberately and in others through lack of understanding—that there is no prospect of the G8 talks securing. We are anxious to achieve three goals. First, we want an acceptance—whatever the precise wording or exact phrases people are prepared to sign up to—of the direction of travel and that this is a major and significant problem that requires urgent action. Secondly, we would like a plan of action to cut emissions, not just to set targets for cutting emissions, on which the G8 could agree. Thirdly, we would particularly like to achieve an agreement to have a forward dialogue about what we do after the first Kyoto commitment period, in which so far no one in the developed or developing world has yet been prepared to engage.
Most of us who want action on tackling climate change hope that agreement will be reached at Gleneagles, and recognise the work that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has done to put the issue on the agenda of that meeting. Whatever happens at Gleneagles, Britain clearly has the opportunity to set the tone for the EU for the next six months and beyond. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that it remains the British Government's view that environmental sustainability goes hand in hand with economic reform as one of the top priorities for the next six months, and there is no way that we should be required to choose between them when setting the direction of EU policy for our presidency and beyond?
I strongly share that view, as do the Government. That is a point of view and a track record that we strongly commend to the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, many countries have significant energy needs and could have a significant impact on climate change, but they might be less prepared—or not prepared at all—to act if they thought that they would have to sacrifice the opportunity of developing or, indeed, of feeding their populations. We have to make it plain to them that they do not face that invidious choice, because they can do both.
I recognise that the Government have had considerable success in moving this matter up the political agenda. The right hon. Lady will acknowledge that there is a gulf between those who agree that the planet is warming because of mankind's actions, and those who do not. Has she considered setting up some form of research, possibly jointly with the G8 or the EU, to get the world's finest scientists to try to nail down whether mankind is causing global warming? If there were such research, it would carry the authority to enable the Secretary of State to make progress on the matter.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the goals that the Government have set. I take his point, but in many ways that was what we sought to do through the conference that was convened in Exeter in February—which perhaps did not receive as much publicity as it should have done, because there was rather a lot of publicity about some potential elections. There is no doubt that the conference advanced our understanding that the threat is more substantial and more immediate than previously imagined, and that it will cost less to tackle it than we had previously thought if we begin early enough. That is both an encouraging and a discouraging message. Only a few days ago, the national academies of science of every G8 country and China, India and Brazil produced a strong joint statement about their belief that climate change is happening and is man made. Through our G8 and EU presidencies, I hope that we will be able to take action to tackle it.
I share the Secretary of State's hope that the discussions at Gleneagles today will produce a way forward that leads to a process, at least, that leads in turn to agreement on action by China, India, Brazil and perhaps the US, as well as the EU. However, the Secretary of State will recognise that the EU also needs to be seen to play its part. While she is undoubtedly right that there has been some slight progress, she will also recognise that the EU has not made great progress. I hope that she also agrees that the UK needs to play its part if it is to take a leading role. Does she accept that at the moment the UK is not reducing carbon dioxide emissions at anything like a satisfactory rate and that more Government action will be required in the coming years?
Of course, we all want the EU to meet its targets and commitments. Indeed, one of the things that we will do during our EU presidency is try to focus attention on the degree to which that is happening.
The signs are more encouraging than the right hon. Gentleman suggested, however. About 15 member states, including the United Kingdom, are expected to either meet or exceed their individual Kyoto targets, without taking into account the impact of the EU emissions trading scheme, which we cannot yet quantify. Indeed, in the wider EU, another nine countries are on track to meet their Kyoto targets. The United Kingdom has already met its Kyoto target for greenhouse gas emissions—something that is often overlooked—several years ahead of time. We are on track, even in present circumstances, to exceed our Kyoto target to the degree that the latest predictions are that our greenhouse gas emissions will be down by 20 per cent., not 12.5 per cent., by 2010.
None the less, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that, although we have done better on other greenhouse gases, we have a continuing problem with CO 2 . That is why we are having a review of our climate change programme at the present time to get us back on track. I hope that we will able to show the House that we can do so and that we will have the support of the whole House in that.
The Secretary of State will certainly have the support of the Opposition in taking measures to address the CO 2 problem, which I am glad she acknowledges. Does she also acknowledge, however, that her Department needs to play its role in a coherent fashion? If she does, can she explain why the Warm Front programme, which her Department sponsors and pays for and which is doing excellent work in relieving fuel poverty and insulating houses, is also subsidising the introduction of oil-fired central heating? At the same time, the clear skies programme is funding a joint venture involving the same organisation that runs Warm Front to institute photovoltaics. Why is the Department sponsoring at the same time something that increases CO 2 and also something that reduces it, rather than melding the two?
Although the right hon. Gentleman is right to identify that my Department funds the Warm Front programme, we do not run it ourselves; we run it through companies and agencies. Without knowing the precise circumstances to which he alludes, I cannot know whether there were specific and valid reasons why oil-fired central heating might have been pursued in a particular case, although I can certainly say, for example, that I have lived in a place where there was no gas supply and very few other options.
I cannot comment on a specific case without knowing the circumstances, but it is certainly the case that through the Warm Front programme, and in any other respect, we attempt to be consistent and to ensure that we meet our own goals.
Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act
Guidance was issued on 6 June and is available on DEFRA's website.
Many articles were placed by the Government before the general election indicating that they were tackling all sorts of environmental crime, including litter, chewing gum on the pavements, people repairing cars on the streets and other such stuff. Expectations were raised and people expected local authorities to act. The only problem is that most of the really sexy stuff—the stuff with teeth—does not take effect until 2006 or 2007, so people are getting very frustrated and they are blaming local authorities, which are also getting frustrated. Will Ministers make clear which bits of the 2005 Act are in force today and which bits will come into force in 2006 and 2007, so that people do not have frustrated expectations about which bits of environmental crime will be tackled?
It might take me rather a long time to read out the whole list of which bits come in when. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman gets his idea about 2007, as all the provisions will have commenced by April next year. The provisions that have already commenced include those on litter, adverts, waste and noise. In October, there will be further commencements on abandoned vehicles, and more on waste and crime and disorder. As I said, the rest of the measures will all have commenced by April 2006.
I welcomed the passing of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, unlike certain people in this Chamber, but I am concerned about the speed of implementation and about what is being implemented. I asked a written question about section 2 of the Act and it was transferred to the Home Office. I am unclear as to which parts of the legislation are the responsibility of DEFRA and which are not, and I ask whether clarification might be made available to ensure that implementation across the board can proceed in an orderly fashion.
I would be happy to provide my hon. Friend with the clarification for which he asks, but I say to him and to other hon. Members that it it is not unique that some of the provisions of Bills passed in this House have to be implemented through regulation or secondary legislation. That process requires proper consultation, as I think hon. Members would expect. The details of the provisions of the excellent 2005 Act extend across a number of Departments—the Home Office, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and local government—and it will involve consultation with other Departments. I hope that he will join me in applauding the provisions of the Act. As I am sure he will agree, local environment issues are high on people's agenda.
Biscuit Industry
The UK biscuit industry needs to be able to buy its raw materials at similar prices to others on the world market. We will therefore be looking for substantial price cuts and increased competition as key elements in an EU sugar reform agreement.
My right hon. Friend will know that in Pendle we have a celebrated biscuit maker, Farmhouse Biscuits, which exports its tasty biscuits throughout the world. It does so, however, with one hand tied behind its back, as it has to pay £450 a tonne for EU sugar, while it could buy world sugar at £150 a tonne. Even with the proposed changes in the EU sugar regime, Farmhouse Biscuits will still be paying more for EU sugar than it could get on the world market. I press my right hon. Friend to do something about this matter, because we are now importing more biscuits, cakes and confectionary into the United Kingdom than we are exporting—and that is not very good.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend because he not only makes a very powerful point, but gives a perfect example of why the issue of sugar reform is important much more widely than among groups that are usually quoted in respect of their views and understandable concern about the impacts of potential reform. He is right that even if the reforms went through entirely as proposed by the Commission, EU sugar prices would still be twice the world price. That gives a clear picture of why the regime is unsustainable and has to be reformed. I realise that it will be only a crumb of comfort to him to know that the price comes down by a third.
I entirely endorse what the Secretary of State has just said and I welcome very much the reform of the EU sugar regime. Can she guarantee to the House that that reform will include, at the very least, an end to the export subsidies on sugar, so that where we do export sugar, it is not putting third world farmers out of business?
I am grateful to the hon. Lady. It is very much part of our goal and our wish to see export subsidies as a whole phased out. She is right to identify that one of the areas of concern is the impact of long-needed reform on growers in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the least-developed countries. She will probably know that, alongside proposals for the sugar regime, there were proposals for an action plan to help those countries. During our presidency of the European Union, discussions on sugar reform will be on the agenda of every meeting of the Agriculture Council. One of those meetings will indeed hear from ACP and other such producers that are affected.
Flooding (North Yorkshire)
We will assist farmers by applying animal health rules sensibly and considering reinstatement of walls and fencing necessary to maintain environmental objectives. The North York Moors national park authority is proposing to submit a specific bid to DEFRA for funding for the flood damage, and that will be discussed when we receive it in more detail. The Bellwin formula is also available for those who qualify.
I am grateful to the Minister for that encouraging reply. Areas around Snilesworth moor and Arden moor, north-west of Helmsley, have suffered utter devastation. Trees have been uprooted and up to 50 miles of walls and fences have basically been destroyed. Much of that was paid for by Government grants, so Ministers have an investment. The hill farmers cannot afford to pay to put right the damage. We have established an emergency fund locally, and I hope that the Government will make a significant contribution to it.
I express my sincere condolences to all the people who were affected by the recent floods in north Yorkshire. We are trying to be as sympathetic as we can in relation to the response. As I have outlined, the Rural Development Service will be talking to the national parks and the farmers, and we will be looking at the force majeure rules to see what we can do to assist.
My hon. Friend will know that properties in north Yorkshire and elsewhere that are at risk of flooding will be listed on the Environment Agency flood map and other maps produced by organisations such as Norwich Union. At a meeting that I attended yesterday in my capacity as chair of the all-party flood prevention group yesterday, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister informed me that in home information packs for home sellers, flood risk does not have to be declared whereas risk of mining subsidence does. May I urge my hon. Friend—I know that it is a controversial and difficult subject affecting 2 million properties—to urge the ODPM to give flood risk and mining subsidence equal treatment?
My hon. Friend makes a good and important point. We talk to the ODPM on these issues at regular intervals. Flood risk maps are publicly available, and I recommend that people see whether their home is in a flood risk area. I understand my hon. Friend's point, which is a serious one, and we will certainly give it thought.
The Minister will be aware that the flood damage not only caused devastation in villages in the Vale of York but affected properties in Thirsk that were flooded less that four years ago. Will the hon. Gentleman bring forward the flood alleviation scheme for Thirsk? As regards properties such as the dental practice that has been told that it is simply uninsurable, what help can the Department give with the insurance industry?
Again, I express my condolences to people who are affected in Thirsk. The hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Rydale (Mr. Greenway) have asked to have a meeting with me, and I shall be only too pleased to arrange that. We will then be able to discuss some of these matters in more detail. The schemes are brought forward not by DEFRA but by either local authorities or the regional flood committees. I understand that there are proposals for a scheme in Thirsk, and I shall be happy to discuss that in more detail.
Bovine TB
Latest provisional TB statistics for Great Britain indicate that 1,964 cattle were slaughtered as bovine tuberculosis reactors or direct contacts in May 2005.
I thank the Minister for that reply. I met a farmer recently in my constituency, in the village of Cruckton, near Shrewsbury. He was so desperate about TB that he allegedly shot a badger. He got into terrible trouble with the local police. There is an effective moratorium on the granting of licences for the killing of badgers. This is putting farmers such as my constituent in a terrible position. I ask the Government to look at the matter again and to relax the granting of licences for killing badgers.
I have every sympathy for the farmer to whom the hon. Gentleman refers. If he proposes relaxing licensing conditions to allow individual farmers at a local level to obtain licences, I must point him to the evidence of our badger culling trials, which show that the localised limited culling of badgers makes the bovine TB situation worse. The hon. Gentleman is wrong to imply that there is no badger culling going on at present. More culling is taking place under our own trials than took place when the Conservative party was last in office.
Given that badgers, as the Minister knows, caused more cattle tuberculosis in Devon last year than the number of cattle that were destroyed during the foot and mouth outbreak, will the hon. Gentleman please consider lifting the protected status of the badger?
The hon. Gentleman seems to be advocating lifting the protected status, which would allow a sort of free-for-all, not proper strategic control, which we are considering. We certainly have not ruled that out. This week, the National Farmers Union published its paper outlining how it would like the Government to proceed. We welcome that as a contribution to the debate and we are considering the paper carefully. We are conducting our own cost-benefit analysis on badger culling, based on the recent Irish trials, and we hope to be able to say more on this by the autumn.
During the NFU conference in February, the Secretary of State responded to a question on this issue. The people in the hall were rather underwhelmed by what she said. This matter has been going on for so many years. Every vet will say that there is a definite connection between bovine tuberculosis and badgers. When will we see a properly structured selective cull? It is all very well talking about receiving evidence from here, there and everywhere, but we are five or six years down the road and nothing has happened. Money is being wasted on destroying cattle and it is a matter of the Government sitting on their hands. It may be unpopular to kill off some badgers, but at some point the Government will have to grasp the nettle, and a proper selective cull will have to be introduced, which in effect will assist the species.
As I have said on many occasions, the Government are not shying away from difficult decisions on this matter. The hon. Gentleman uses the term "selective cull". What does he mean by that term? There is currently no live test for bovine TB in badgers. So any cull, by implication, would not be selective. As I have said repeatedly before the House, we are not ruling out badger culling. However, any decision on badger culling must be based on sound science. We must be satisfied that it would be cost effective, would work and would be practicable.
Does not the Minister recognise that bovine TB has become an extremely serious issue for farmers, particularly in the south-west and Sussex? It is a big animal welfare problem as well, for both livestock and badgers. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that farmers believe that the Government are kicking this issue into the long grass and not taking early decisions when they could do so? Is it not time that funding was made available for pre-movement tests for cattle movements and a proper test to ensure that we control the badger population where there is an identified link with bovine TB and that population in particular areas?
I note the hon. Gentleman's suggestion that more taxpayers' money should be spent on paying for the costs of pre-movement testing. I do not agree with that. It goes against the way that this country and all other countries are moving towards more cost-sharing on animal disease in agriculture.
I do not accept the suggestion that the Government are kicking the matter into the long grass. We must move forward on the basis of sound science. It was only early this year that the Irish trials were peer reviewed. As soon at that review took place, I set in motion a cost-benefit analysis to analyse those trials. As I have said, the NFU only this week presented its own document setting out its suggestions. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman would expect the Government to respond to that document within two days.
Since the Department was set up in 2001, what has been the total cost to the taxpayer of TB?
I cannot give the right hon. Gentleman the cumulative cost off the top of my head, but I can tell him the cost for the last financial year for which figures were available. The overall cost for TB in the year 2003–04 was £88 million.
The Minister has explained how serious a financial problem this is. Many Members on the Opposition Benches have explained what a crisis this is for farmers. We all accept that he needs to operate deliberately and sensibly. Does he accept, however, that patience is wearing very thin and that as time moves on, farmers and those concerned with animal welfare will not tolerate endless studies? Will he give the House an undertaking that by the time we reach the autumn he will be taking the action that his study shows is necessary?
As I have already said, we hope to complete the cost-benefit analysis by the autumn. I do not think that it would be right for me or any other Member to prejudge the outcome of that study.
Environmental Regulation
The Department is committed to reducing the administrative burden of regulation on businesses by at least 25 per cent. over the next five years. We will establish a baseline cost of administrative burdens by May 2006.
I notice that the Minister cannot answer the question. It will not surprise him that I refer to Sue Hemmings's pet crematorium and pet cemetery in my constituency, where five animals a year are buried. She faces licence application fees of £6,000 and £1,100 a year. Sir John Harman, chairman of the Environment Agency, has written to me, recognising that this all seems disproportionate in terms of the scale and risk of Mrs. Hemmings's operation. I thank him and his officials for looking for a way round those absurd fee levels—but he also tells me that the Secretary of State approved the ludicrous fees. What planet does she live on if she does not recognise the impact that those astronomical and unjustifiable fees will have on small businesses with tight margins?
There are two issues here. Regulation is important and has a sensible role, in relation to pet cemeteries as well as other things. The other issue is the cost. It is not unreasonable to examine the costs to see whether they are proportionate. Of course there has to be an element of inspection and management, and it is not unreasonable that people who are part of what is being inspected should contribute towards that. That is a fair distribution of burdens. However, I understand the hon. Gentleman's point, and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), has been talking to the Environment Agency about whether the costs are proportionate to the size of the business and the risks involved.
I want to ask about the regulatory regime for recycling plastics, because in my constituency one company, a significant employer, imports waste plastic from the Netherlands because that is cheaper than buying it in the UK, and another company exports waste plastic to China because that is more profitable. Does my hon. Friend accept that that is economic and environmental lunacy, and will he have another look at the regulatory system that leads to such anomalies?
In this case, the cause is not so much the regulatory system as the workings of the market. Like my hon. Friend, I would much prefer recycled plastics to be used in our own country, but I am glad to see that more and more plastics are being taken out of the waste stream; that is extremely desirable. The fact that there is strong demand in China that underpins the market has some benefits in terms of keeping the market going and developing it. Specific kinds of plastics may be available in other countries that fit the demands of some of the processes here. The waste and resources action programme is considering the whole issue of plastics and the market for them, and I am sure that it will address some of my hon. Friend's points.
The Minister will be aware that in the continuing absence of devolution and the Assembly in Northern Ireland, matters such as environmental regulation and the costs thereof fall to be considered by this House. Will he therefore liaise with his counterparts in the Northern Ireland Office so that we can have as wide a debate as possible on the cost and effect of environmental regulation in Northern Ireland, where it needs to be brought much further up the agenda?
I assure the hon. Gentleman that as a ministerial team, we all talk to our counterparts in the Northern Ireland Office. Many of the concerns that have been raised in this House are concerns in all parts of the United Kingdom, but Northern Ireland has its specific issues. It has made good progress in certain areas of regulation and waste management. I very much hope that we will see devolved government reinstated in Northern Ireland, and it is incumbent on all of us, from all parties, to do all we can to ensure that that happens.
The Minister said that regulation was important, so perhaps he will turn his attention to the implementation of the new hazardous waste regulations, which make the Environment Agency responsible for monitoring producers of hazardous waste who register through the bulk e-mail system. The system was supposed to be ready in May or June. Why is it still not available? That leaves companies unregistered and, potentially, hundreds of tonnes of hazardous waste uncollected.
I am not absolutely clear what point the hon. Gentleman is making, but I shall be happy to look into that situation. My understanding is that the regulations have been implemented and are being applied to operators of landfill sites and producers of hazardous waste. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), who has responsibility for such things, will be only too pleased to look into any specific details that the hon. Gentleman can give him.
Marine Environment (Recreation)
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has recently published a guide for local authorities on managing coastal activities, which has been widely welcomed by them, and by other users, as a valuable tool for overcoming potential conflicts through negotiation, with compulsion, through byelaws, as a last resort.
I welcome that guidance; the Minister will recognise that this is a busy island, both onshore and offshore. Will he undertake to meet a small delegation from one of the foremost areas of expertise in this area, the safety in leisure unit at Swansea institute, which has been examining the conflict of recreational uses in the offshore environment? Those people might have some interesting ideas for him to consider further, which would have an impact on constituencies throughout the whole of the United Kingdom, not least Bridgend and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mrs. James), which include very attractive parts of the south Wales coastline.
Yes, I would be happy to meet a delegation brought to me by my hon. Friend, and I am well aware of the problem, as I represent a near coastal seat myself.
Radioactive Waste (Consultation)
None. Corwm will undertake a number of rounds of public and stakeholder engagement as part of its agreed work programme. It is for Corwm to decide precisely how it will publish its consultation findings in line with its guiding principles of openness, transparency and the provision of a full audit trail for the recommendations that it eventually delivers.
I thank my hon. Friend for his answer, but does he not agree that while we are waiting for Corwm to produce its solution, particularly for high-level waste, it is important for the people of this country to understand what is happening with that sort of waste and know that it is secure, so that we can go forward into the future with a balanced energy policy?
My hon. Friend is right. It is important that current waste storage facilities are properly regulated by the Health and Safety Executive, the nuclear installations inspectorate and the Environment Agency—and I can assure him that that is the case. We need a long-term strategy, particularly for high-level nuclear waste, and that is Corwm's remit. It will report in July next year.
"Securing the Benefits" Report
My colleagues in the devolved administrations and I continue to hold regular meetings with representatives of the fishing industry and other interested parties as we implement the recommendations of the Prime Minister's strategy unit report.
I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. "Securing the Benefits" is a positive document, with references throughout to liaising with stakeholders. However, as many of the recommendations will be implemented through the regional advisory councils, which are so big and have so many sub-committees, can he reassure me that the voice of the fishing community will be heard all the way up to him, and all the way through to the Commission?
I am sure that my hon. Friend will ensure that that happens; she, and other hon. Members who represent fishing communities, do an assiduous job on behalf of their fishermen. I can assure her that that will be the case. One of the huge benefits that the process has given us since the Prime Minister's strategy unit report was published is the bringing together for the first time in a new relationship of co-operation not just the fishing industry and my Department, but environmental groups and others, through the regionalisation of the common fisheries policy. That gives us an opportunity to move forward on the basis of consensus for the first time, in an industry where in the past, it has been quite difficult to get people round the table to agree to anything.
I think that my hon. Friend will find that that consensus is already there to build on, and the industry is happy with the report—but will he agree to an earlier discussion? "Net Benefits" channelled the industry towards the regional development agencies, and Yorkshire Forward has set aside money to try to help fishing, but because of the restrictions on state aid, it now finds that it cannot give it to the industry, except to be spent on plastic safety helmets—the industry could have millions of those if it needed them. Will my hon. Friend receive a delegation from the fishing industry to discuss how we can get round that difficulty, and how the regional development agencies can help the industry?
I am acutely aware of the issue to which my hon. Friend refers because it has been raised with me several times, most recently at the annual general meeting of the United Kingdom Association of Fish Producer Organisation. I am trying to resolve the situation to the satisfaction of my hon. Friend and the industry that he represents. I am happy to receive a delegation, but hope to have resolved the matter before I need to do so.
Toner Cartridge Waste
By law, those responsible for the management of waste, including toner cartridge waste, must take all reasonable steps to ensure safe disposal.
Is the Minister aware that there is a problem with the disposal of toner? Although it has been declassified, many landfill companies refuse to accept it, so the disposal of waste causes a major problem to the toner re-use industry.
Yes, I am aware of the problem. My officials are working closely with both the producers and the waste disposal industry to try to secure solutions to it.
Single Farm Payments
It is hard to overstate the importance of the June 2003 reforms in transforming the core elements of the common agricultural policy and laying down a new direction for its future evolution. Crucially, with the introduction of the single payment scheme, the link between the subsidy paid to farmers and the level of production has been broken—that is the so-called decoupling process. That means that farmers' activities will no longer be dictated by what the subsidy regime requires them to produce, with all the costs and bureaucracy entailed, because they will be free to farm for what the market wants.
I listened with interest to the Minister's earlier reply. My farmers tell me that the problem appears to be the bureaucracy, so the way in which the Government lay the blame on a computer system going slightly wrong once again is not good enough. Why should farmers be made to pay because the Government still have not quite got their act together on the computer and information technology schemes to back up implementation?
We are implementing a significant new scheme. As I said earlier, we made it clear back in February where in the payment window between December and June the payments would be made—they will be made in February next year. There have been problems, especially with the digitisation of maps, but we are doing everything that we can to overcome them.
I recently met farmers in my constituency who were complaining about the lack of clarity given and the confusion that comes out of the Government. They say that most things received via the Government are wrong and must be corrected. What is happening to improve the situation?
Together with my noble Friend Lord Bach, I am meeting the Rural Payments Agency and other relevant officials to discuss as a matter of urgency how we can increase the RPA's capacity for processing the digitisation of maps. The problem is essentially one of capacity, so we are extending the hours worked to run the IT system both by adding an extra shift and by increasing the hours worked over the weekend.
Energy Green Paper
We very much welcome the timely publication of the Green Paper, which represents a real opportunity to influence the future development of energy efficiency policy in Europe. We will therefore be taking forward the public debate on the Commission's proposals during our presidency with the aim of securing an ambitious plan of action.
I thank the Minister for that reply. In November 2004, the Prime Minister told his MPs to reject amendments to the Housing Bill that would have increased home energy efficiency targets. What will the Government do to encourage energy efficiency improvements in the UK?
The Government are implementing a range of initiatives to improve energy efficiency. Those measures must be effective and realistic and they must work. Of course we discussed the warm front programme earlier, which is an important part of the way in which we address fuel poverty. A review of building regulations is ongoing. They will come in from April next year and are designed to reduce energy use by 20 to 30 per cent. in new buildings. We also have an Anglo-Swedish initiative on sustainable housing in addition to other initiatives. Energy efficiency features in the climate change review and a joint Treasury energy efficiency review is going on to examine all these matters, because energy efficiency is a serious matter and one of the most effective ways of reducing emissions and meeting our carbon dioxide targets.
What steps are being taken to increase the use of micro-generators in homes to improve home energy efficiency? Can any further measures be implemented with financial incentives to encourage the use of alternative materials for such micro-generators, such as biomass?
My hon. Friend is quite right: there is real potential for micro-generation. I was pleased with the recent policy statement made by my hon. Friend the Minister for Energy about the Government's commitment to encouraging micro-generation. We need to examine certain issues, such as planning and the actual technology, but in the near future we will have the real prospect of micro-wind turbines being available for domestic use. We will also have the prospect of micro-combined heat and power plants. We are already encouraging biomass generation and my hon. Friend might like to know that the new Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs office in Gloucester had a biomass central heating system fitted recently.
While I accept the importance of the points that the hon. Gentleman has just made, will he pay regard to the fact that he has a responsibility for the beautiful and fragile landscape of these islands? Does he thus accept that wind farms are not a very acceptable way of creating sustainable energy and that, in addition to the things that he rightly mentioned, we need to look carefully at the nuclear option?
I do not accept the hon. Gentleman's point and especially his assertion that wind farms are not sustainable. I commend the recent Sustainable Development Commission report to him. The commission examined the whole question of wind generation and reached the conclusion that onshore wind generation is currently the cheapest form of energy generation and that it has increasingly become more efficient and effective. Of course there are questions about the landscape and visual perception, but they are subjective. There are people who do not object to the look of wind turbines and in fact find them attractive. The nuclear generation option was left open in the energy White Paper, but if we consider the possible costs of, and time scales involved in, nuclear power, there is a lot that we can do on clean and renewable energy in the short term, rather than going down the nuclear route now.
Will the Minister assure us that if micro-wind turbines are used extensively throughout the UK, suitable consideration will be given to planning permission so that they do not become a visual blight on our neighbourhoods?
As in all things, I think that there is a balance to be struck. There is already special protection for conservation areas and we should take account of the impact of rooftop micro-generation on listed buildings and such areas. However, on the other hand, micro-wind generation is a new British-built technology, so we do not want to put unnecessary barriers in the way of its development and application. The balance that must be struck will form part of our debate on wind generation. It also forms part of the strategy that my hon. Friend the Minister for Energy is considering and that we in DEFRA are considering, too.
Climate Change
DEFRA officials are currently analysing responses to the climate change review consultation and we will publish the summary of responses on the Department's website shortly.
I thank my hon. Friend for his answer because I have been chasing his Department for the summary. He will be aware that Cabinet Office guidelines state that a summary of consultation responses should be produced within three months. Will he undertake to ensure that the Department does better in the future?
Yes, a minor inconvenience like a general election rather slowed up the process, but I can tell my hon. Friend that I have seen the consultations and that they have been collated. They are very interesting in relation to the submissions that people made and we intend to have them on the website as quickly as possible. When Question Time is over, I shall speak to my officials to ascertain what is happening on that front.
As yet, there have been no formal intergovernmental discussions on the commitments, following the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol. Article 3.9 states that parties must start to discuss the next commitment period by the end of 2005. That will be at this year's Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties on December in Montreal.
I am grateful for that answer, but we did not have a clear answer earlier to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker). Do the Government prefer a strong agreement to tackle climate change signed up to by almost every Government except the United States or a much weaker agreement to which the US could sign up? That seems to be the choice and I would be grateful for a clear answer about the Government's preference.
I am happy to give the hon. Gentleman a very clear answer. We are looking for a positive outcome from the Gleneagles discussions that will take us forward on the whole issue of climate change. We have spelled out our proposals and we have no intention of signing up to a meaningless statement.
Business of the House
Although our thoughts are very much elsewhere this morning, will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The business for next week will be as follows:
Monday 11 July—Remaining stages of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.
Tuesday 12 July—Opposition Day [5th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate entitled "The Failure of the Tax Credits System" followed by a debate entitled "The Government's Failure to Deal with Licensing Chaos". Both debates arise on an Opposition motion.
Wednesday 13 July—Motions to approve the Membership of Select Committees and other House Motions followed by Motion to take note of the Fourth Report of the Committee on Standards and Privileges, HC 472, Session 2004–05, and to approve the revised code of conduct.
Thursday 14 July—Remaining stages of the Consumer Credit Bill.
Friday 15 July—The House will not be sitting.
The provisional business for the week after will be:
Monday 18 July—Second Reading of the Crossrail Bill.
Tuesday 19 July—Second Reading of the London Olympics Bill.
Wednesday 20 July—Motion to approve the draft Council Tax Limitation (England) (Maximum Amounts) Order 2005 followed by remaining stages of the Regulation of Financial Services (Land Transactions) Bill.
Thursday 21 July—Motion on the Summer Recess Adjournment.
Friday 22 July—The House will not be sitting.
For the convenience of Members, the provisional business for the week commencing Monday 10 October will include, on Monday 10 October, the remaining stages of the Civil Aviation Bill.
The House will already be aware that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will be making a statement at Gleneagles at noon and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will be available to make a statement to the House at the end of business questions. The House will want me to say that our thoughts are with the emergency services and I pay tribute to the excellent work that they do. I have been involved in previous emergency planning preparations and I know how hard and how superbly members of the emergency services work. We should also reflect for a moment on the families and friends of those who have suffered today.
Clearly, as the Leader of the House says, the business of the House is overshadowed by this morning's dreadful events in London. It is obviously too early to know the full details of what has happened, but I know that the whole House will wish to echo the sentiments expressed by the right hon. Gentleman and send our sympathies to all those caught up in these terrible incidents. We also want to express our gratitude to the emergency services and the medical staff at London hospitals who are currently dealing with the problems and working to help the victims.
I am grateful to the Leader of the House and, indeed, to the Home Secretary for agreeing to come to the House so soon to brief Members about what has happened. I ask the Leader of the House to ensure that, as matters develop over the rest of today and over the next few days, Members are regularly updated so that we are kept informed of what is happening in relation to these events. Does he agree that it is essential that we do not allow terrorists to undermine the democratic process in this country? They must not be allowed to undermine the fabric of our society and we must resist them with 100 per cent. vigour.
This morning's news has clearly diverted attention away from the Olympic bid, but the Leader of the House and I want to add our voices to the congratulations sent yesterday to Lord Coe and the bid team. Will the Leader give us more information about the timetable that he envisages for the Olympic Bill? How quickly will it be able to pass through the House? Clearly, it needs to be properly scrutinised, but Conservative Members would like to see it pass into law as quickly as possible, subject to that proper scrutiny, to help the bid team migrate into the games team. We can then start the long and hard process of making the games a reality.
Finally, when does the Leader of the House intend to publish the detailed motions for debate next Wednesday?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It is important to have up-to-date and accurate information to put before the House. I know that the relevant Ministers are currently meeting, but my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will provide more detail as and when he can—not only, I hope, at the end of business questions, but throughout the day and as and when necessary. The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to demonstrate to those who are trying to disrupt our society and democracy that we will not in any way be intimidated by their threats.
As far as the Olympic Bill is concerned, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for observing that it is important to get the legislation through as quickly as possible. Clearly, the Bill will require appropriate scrutiny, but we have already allotted a day before the summer recess to allow the Bill to make rapid progress thereafter.
Some motions have already been tabled for the House business day next week and I anticipate that further motions will be tabled later today.
I refer the Leader of the House to early-day motion 440, on Zimbabwe and asylum seekers.
[That this House recognises that there continues to be a real risk of persecution in Zimbabwe for those who are perceived to be politically active in opposition to the government and the ruling party, and acknowledges that some people such as Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) activist and supporters are more at risk than others; further notes that there are an estimated 1,800 Zimbabweans in the UK who have failed in their attempts to win asylum; and based on the recommendations of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, urges the Government to review its policy of returning Zimbabweans who have failed in their efforts to be granted asylum.]
I am sorry to return to the subject, but we seem to be getting nowhere. I appreciate that the Home Secretary is particularly busy today, but the question of the large numbers of asylum seekers on hunger strike, two of whom face a particularly serious situation, is an important one. Yesterday Lord Justice Collins asked the Home Secretary not to deport any more Zimbabwean asylum seekers until he considers the matter in more detail on 4 August. Can we have an assurance that this matter will be debated and that we will have some sort of statement over the next two days? Some people's lives are really at risk.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made a written statement yesterday on removals. He set out in some detail the basis on which the Home Office approaches these issues and provided information about those currently refusing food. Food is available to all those who are being detained and they are seen daily by a medical practitioner to check their condition. I can tell the House than none has been hospitalised at this stage.
On a day when it is right that all parties in the House demonstrate how we stand together on such matters, may I associate my right hon. and hon. Friends and myself with the comments made by the Leader of the House and the Conservative spokesman? I also wish to express our thanks to those in the emergency services for their work, which I saw for my own eyes at Aldgate this morning. Their work is extraordinary and very much appreciated.
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for both the statement later this morning and his readiness to ensure that the House is kept properly informed. Of course, that statement will necessarily be a very early assessment of the situation, and it will be necessary to come back, perhaps on more than one occasion, to explore the issues involved more fully.
On other matters, is it possible in the near future to hold a debate on the United Kingdom's bilateral relationships with the United States? It seems an entirely appropriate moment to consider both the positive aspects of those relationships and the difficulties that the two nations face jointly. I am very aware of the concerns that have been expressed on Capitol hill, for instance, about the future conduct of our policy in Iraq. It is right that the House should also have the opportunity to discuss those matters and others, such as our arrangements on extradition and other security issues.
Is it possible for the Leader of the House to look again at the way Northern Irish legislation is debated in the House? It is becoming a matter of great concern both to those who represent Northern Ireland constituencies and to other hon. Members who have an interest that legislation is passed by virtue of statutory instruments with no capacity for amendment. There is a limit to the extent to which legislation can be properly scrutinised in that way. Is it not appropriate that we now look again at how we approach those issues?
Lastly, we would also wish, of course, to be associated with what should have been a day of celebration on winning the Olympics for London. We look forward to the Bill that the Leader of the House has indicated will be introduced. Perhaps I could just make one suggestion to him. A very large sum of public money will necessarily be involved in setting up the Olympics for 2012, and it will cover a great number of Departments. May I suggest that there might be a role for a special Select Committee of the House to scrutinise overall the arrangements for the Olympics from now until 2012, so that the House can consider what is and is not happening—progress and non-progress—and ensure that the House is properly represented and has the opportunity to make sure that the Government are playing their role to the fullest extent?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his observations.
On the specific points that he raises, the US-UK bilateral relationship is an excellent, outstanding one. Although I am sure that the Government would welcome a debate emphasising the positive aspects of that relationship, I do not anticipate the need for one, given the quality and strength of the relationship already.
As for Northern Ireland legislation, I have indicated in answer to previous questions on the subject that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is looking at the situation. Obviously, although legislation is enacted for Northern Ireland by statutory instrument, there has generally previously been debate on the primary legislation, as it extends to other parts of the United Kingdom, so it is not as though such legislation is never debated in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests.
As for public money, obviously, we are confident that an appropriate funding arrangement has been put in place for the Olympic games. Indeed, in my judgment, that is one of the strengths of the bid that proved successful. Certainly, the hon. Gentleman's suggestion about a special Select Committee is something that will be considered through the usual channels—although, obviously, it is ultimately a matter for the House.
The Government will shortly announce the results of their consultation on updating part L of the building regulations, part of the objective being to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent. to comply with legally binding elements of the Kyoto agreement. Will the Leader of the House ask the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to put up a Minister to respond to an urgent debate on those proposals? The model used in them—the notional house—will make the incorporation of chimneys in new houses highly unattractive in future. That will be very damaging to the British flue and chimney manufacturing industry, which involves many thousands of jobs, including at factories in my constituency. Before the consultation results are announced, may we please have a debate? I have bid for a debate in the House but, as yet, have been unsuccessful.
After that detailed exposition of the issue, I anticipate that my hon. Friend will perhaps not need a debate, but the issue is obviously complex, and I should have thought it suitable for debate in Westminster Hall or on the Adjournment. Certainly, he can apply for an urgent debate in the normal way, but I will ensure that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister is made aware of his concerns and, no doubt, he will write to him in the usual way.
I welcome the debate on Wednesday setting up the Select Committees and debating the revised code of conduct. I think that the Leader of the House also mentioned that we would debate other House business. Could he shed some light on that and indicate how he envisages the debate on Wednesday being structured if we are to debate a number of different issues?
I hope to put a number of issues before the House by Wednesday. There are some consequential changes, following the appointment of the new Select Committees, and there will be a number of other tidying-up aspects, if I may call them that. Some of the orders already appear on the Order Paper. As I indicated earlier, I hope to place others on the Order Paper later today. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members will accept that this is an important opportunity for the House to debate a number of issues of great concern to right hon. and hon. Members. I hope therefore that he will allow me a little time in which to table as many orders as appropriate, so that the House can thoroughly consider all aspects of its business. It seems to me—I hope that he agrees—that this is an opportunity for us to debate as much as we can of our Standing Orders and procedures at the start of a new Parliament.
I do not know whether my right hon. Friend recalls a conversation that we had in 1991, when he had the privilege of representing me and a few thousand others in the European Parliament. At that time, we discussed the need to reform the common agricultural policy, and I am sure that there is unanimity in the House about the Prime Minister's initiative to use the European Union presidency to make major reforms to the CAP not just from the point of view of agriculture, but from that of the developing world. Can we look forward at an early stage to the publication of proposals on what changes we hope to get in the CAP?
Of course I recall precisely the specific conversation that my hon. Friend mentions, not least because I was regularly talking about the reform of the CAP at the time, and it is important that we continue the efforts. There has been substantial change in the way in which that policy operates, and I know that that is something that he and other hon. Members have strongly supported over very many years. It is a priority for the Government during our presidency that we should set in motion the process of further reform of the CAP, not least because of the impact that it has on developing nations—a matter that has been much in the public eye in recent times—so I hope that that process will continue successfully. However, we should reflect on the fact that not all farmers in my hon. Friend's constituency—an area that I know well—enjoy enormous financial support from the CAP. I saw a report this week on the plight of hill farmers in places such as the High Peak of Derbyshire, where they certainly often struggle to make ends meet financially. We should not always assume that every farmer benefits enormously from the CAP. That is often far from the case.
I wonder whether the Leader of the House could give some thought during his busy week to ministerial courtesies. When we in the Opposition were fortunate enough to be Ministers and Members of Parliament—our parliamentary colleagues—asked to see us, we went out of our way to ensure that they did, particularly Opposition MPs, because we were very conscious of the fact that they could not usually nobble us or get to us in the Division Lobby. In the past couple of weeks, I have made written requests on perfectly valid constituency issues—one was on a community hospital, the other on the effect of the closure of a railway line—to see two of his ministerial colleagues that have been dealt with fairly peremptorily by one paragraph letters. The Leader of the House has expressed concern about turnout at general elections. It is not surprising if turnout falls at general elections if Ministers are contemptuous of the perfectly legitimate concerns of Members of Parliament. It is a matter of courtesy that perhaps he could take up with his colleagues.
I am concerned to learn that. Since becoming a Minister, I have never refused a request from an hon. Member to see me in my ministerial capacity. That has certainly been my practice, and I would hope that all my other ministerial colleagues adopted the same course. If the hon. Gentleman would like to write to me in confidence, I will look at the matter and take it up with the appropriate Ministers.
Sport will have a major boost over the next few years with the Olympic games coming to London, but may I ask my right hon. Friend to do what he can to ensure that non-Olympic sports such as cricket are not excluded from the increased resources and increased participation in which, I hope, this development will result? With that in mind, will he arrange for a debate on the future of state school cricket, so that we can look at ways of making it far more competitive, and put it on an equal footing with the cricket played in the independent sector?
I once tried to demonstrate how cricket is played to my American family, with conspicuous lack of success. It is certainly important that, in providing the extra funding that goes to sport, such funding is associated not only with the Olympic bid, but with the Government's overall programme for supporting sporting excellence in this country and that we do not neglect sports such as cricket, which are clearly hugely important to the people of the United Kingdom.
The Leader of the House may have noticed my Bill, published today, entitled the International Development (Anti-corruption Audit) Bill. He may also have noticed that the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is a signatory to it, and that there is deep concern about whether the public accounts of certain developing countries measure up to the efficiency requirements. Moreover, there is the question of corruption and of where the money is going. Given that this issue will come before the G8 tomorrow, will the Leader of the House draw the attention of the Secretary of State for International Development and of the Prime Minister to this Bill? I hope that the Prime Minister will indeed discuss the issue with the other members of the G8. This Bill is a very important cog in the practical delivery of the prevention of corruption.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for drawing this issue to the House's attention, not least because the National Audit Office has considerable international expertise in this field, which it makes available to countries that might benefit from it. He doubtless knows that the G8 is acutely concerned about the standards of practices in developing countries in respect of financial probity and regularity; indeed, it is likely to attach some conditionality in that direction when it comes to the provision of aid and debt cancellation. I know that my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for International Development have this important issue at the forefront of their minds.
I know that my right hon. Friend enjoyed, as I did, last week's fantastic fleet review. Did he share my disappointment at the poor quality of the outside broadcasting, particularly by the BBC? Will he organise a debate on outside broadcasting, so that we can determine whether the BBC faced a resource problem or whether what happened was a policy matter? If the latter was the case, it should be condemned.
I was proud to be part of last week's fleet review, on board the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Ruler. The BBC were not on board, which perhaps explains the problem that my hon. Friend mentions. I am sure that the BBC, which follows our proceedings closely, will have already noted his point. An appropriate BBC official will doubtless write to him immediately.
Before this morning's dreadful events, this was going to be a second day of great celebrations of London's successful Olympic bid. Those of us who served in the Government Whips Office with Lord Coe were pleased to note that our efforts were not entirely wasted. Will the Leader of the House seriously consider the comments of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath)? We need a process through which this House can monitor developments between now and when the Olympics take place, be it a Select Committee or appropriate Ministers coming regularly to the Dispatch Box.
All those who played such an excellent role in securing the Olympics for London and the United Kingdom, including the noble Lord Coe, are to be congratulated on their efforts. I said earlier that I will explore through the usual channels the suggestion that the House be regularly informed not only about developments in the process of the Bill, but about the financial consequences. It is important that we have regular debates and discussions on how the preparations for the games are proceeding.
The Leader of the House is aware that, this week, the Lord Chancellor published proposals on legal aid that will effectively mean a cut in the criminal legal aid budget. That will have a dramatic effect not just on high street firms, but on the quality of barristers that we get in this area of law. As a former legal aid Minister, the Leader of the House will know that there are difficult judgments to be made on this issue, but it is important that we discuss the whole budget and the proposals before they are implemented.
Having spent two years of my ministerial career grappling with the subtleties of legal aid and its regulations, and with the response of the legal professions when I attempted a modest change—usually, the response was extremely generous—I recognise that this is a sensitive and important issue. I had understood that my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor's proposals were essentially concerned with large and expensive criminal cases, but I am certainly willing to look again at them. If they have a more extensive application, I will re-examine this issue. However, I do not see why such large and expensive criminal cases will necessarily have the impact on the high street that my hon. Friend suggests.
May I associate my hon. Friends, myself and the people of Northern Ireland with the comments of the Leader of the House, the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition and the Liberal Democrat spokesman? We in Northern Ireland have passed this way many times. We have walked down the dark road, the bloody road, the road of separation, and we can sympathise. Not one of my members has not been attacked. Fortunately, we have all come out of those attacks, but many people have not. They leave behind them those who sorrow, many of whom do so hopelessly. We have walked this way, and we understand the feelings of the whole country at this time. I welcome the fact that the Government spokesman made it clear that there will be no giving in, no surrender to this matter, and that we will see in this country what we saw in Northern Ireland after the bombings and killings: signs up saying, "business as usual". Let the democrats make it business as usual, and with strength and fortitude walk on to a day when this scourge will be cleansed from this nation.
I could not possibly improve on what the hon. Gentleman has just said, and I agree with him entirely.
Notwithstanding this morning's terrible events, I am sure that the Leader of the House will agree that this country's music industry and musicians are very important to us. Does the Department for Culture, Media and Sport intend to respond to early-day motion 270, which is concerned with sound recording copyright for British artists?
[That this House notes that the copyright of performers and recordings made in the United Kingdom and the European Union is limited to 50 years, whereas performers' sound recording copyright continues for 95 years in the USA and for an average of 75 years in most non-EU countries; recognises that UK and EU recording artists are often denied income from the playing of their recordings during their lifetime; and calls on the Government to recognise this as denial of income due to living recording artists for their work and to alter UK and EU copyright laws to correct this injustice.]
As the early-day motion points out, in this country such copyright lasts for only 50 years, whereas in the USA it lasts for 95 years and the world average is 75 years. Does my right hon. Friend realise that, when people play the recorded music of artists such as Dame Vera Lynn, she receives no royalties? The same is true of some of the music of Cliff Richard, Humphrey Lyttleton and many other artists. Is it not time that we treated such people fairly during their lives and allowed them to receive royalties for the playing of their sound recordings in the UK?
Hon. Members are being unusually kind today in allowing me to range over my previous experience. As a Member of the European Parliament, I dealt routinely with several copyright directives that affected sound and music. I certainly share my hon. Friend's concern about the lack of protection for some of our performers. I know that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is considering the problem as a matter of urgency and with great seriousness, and I will ensure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State writes to my hon. Friend when she returns from her successful visit to Singapore.
The Leader of the House will recall that, last week, hon. Members of all parties raised the subject of the workers at APW Electronics, whose pension fund was wound up in circumstances that meant that they will be eligible for only 20 per cent. of their pensions. Will he impress on the Minister for Pensions Reform the necessity of coming to the House and explaining why financially prudent people who have done everything that successive Governments have asked of them are not being considered for any sort of compensation, when the numbers involved are small and the money could make a lot of difference to many people's lives?
As the hon. Lady said, the issue has been raised previously. There are obviously rules that affect whether the Government are in a position to provide appropriate compensation. The Government have provided significant sums for assistance to employees whose pension scheme has failed, but one of the conditions is that the principal employer should be insolvent. I understand that that is not the position in the case that she mentions. The Government believe that solvent employers have a duty to support their schemes and provide the benefits that members were expecting. That is the Government's position on the case.
May I revert to the successful Olympic bid? When the Leader of the House is considering how Parliament will scrutinise the Bill, it is important to ensure that the benefits extend to the whole country, especially construction services throughout the country. Given the increase that we will need in construction skills, regeneration and building, will my right hon. Friend arrange for an early debate in the House to consider adequate funding throughout the country for the construction skills that are needed for regeneration? We especially do not want a cut in local budgets for further education colleges.
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Although the bid's strength was its concentration in a specific area of London, benefits will clearly flow to the whole country. People throughout the country were delighted by the bid's success. She is right that there should be some consideration of the national benefits that will flow from the bid's success. I am sure that that can properly be raised in the Second Reading debate that I previously announced. I am also aware that it is already anticipated that some of the facilities that will be provided in that narrow and focused area for the games will be used elsewhere in the country. There will be national benefits through opportunities for, as my hon. Friend suggests, construction companies, and some of the tangible results of those efforts will be spread around the country.
May we have a debate entitled "Should Civil Servants be able to Speak Out Freely?", in the context of the inspirational comments of Louise Casey, a civil servant who is apparently close to the Prime Minister? She said, among other things, in the context of advice to Ministers, who should listen:
"Turn up in the morning pissed. You might cope a bit better, love."
She said of her experience of meetings with Ministers:
"The most powerful person in that room is Betsy who brings the tea round."
Does the Leader of the House agree with those comments by a senior civil servant; and is he proud that she is close to the Prime Minister and gives him advice?
I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman took the same view of civil servants speaking out when he was a distinguished Minister. I do not recall his advocating from the Government Benches the right of his civil servants to speak out publicly. Whether he did or not, there is a code that conditions circumstances in which civil servants may speak out. I am sure that it will be properly applied in the case that he mentions.
May we have an early debate on the movement of civil service jobs? Does my right hon. Friend know of the plan to close the Export Credits Guarantee Department in Llanishen in my constituency, thus moving 30 jobs back to London? Does he also know that, in the 1970s, a Labour Government moved those jobs from London to Cardiff and that the proposals appear to contradict the Government's policy? Will he arrange an early debate on that, given that there are some very aggrieved people in Cardiff?
I am not familiar with the specific circumstances that my hon. Friend raises, but I shall ensure that the relevant Department contacts her and explains matters. She is right that the Government's overall approach is to try to ensure that jobs are transferred from London and the south-east. We acknowledge the extra housing and travel costs in a part of the country that is generally more overcrowded than elsewhere. I will ensure that the matter is examined and that the appropriate Minister contacts my hon. Friend.
Bearing in mind the fact that the elected representatives of the people of Northern Ireland do not have the opportunity to discuss openly and debate properly many serious issues that affect the people of Northern Ireland, will the Leader of the House find time to debate the nitrates directive, which could put many farmers in Northern Ireland out of business?
I have already told hon. Members about the Government's concern to ensure proper debate on Northern Irish matters. It is important to find the right way of allowing the citizens of Northern Ireland to communicate their views and their elected representatives to speak on their behalf. The directive is an EU matter and the House must resolve—I hope it will happen next week—the creation of appropriate European scrutiny arrangements that will allow European directives to be fully and properly considered.
My right hon. Friend may know that his predecessor scheduled a debate in Westminster Hall last Session about the work of the House of Commons Commission, thus enabling hon. Members to discuss its work in a way that had not previously been possible. The previous Leader of the House suggested that the debate might become a regular feature of the House's business. Will my right hon. Friend schedule a debate on the Commission's work before the end of the Session or early in the autumn when Parliament reconvenes?
That is an excellent and helpful suggestion. It is important that the work of the House of Commons Commission, in which I am proud to play a small part, is properly understood and discussed by hon. Members. I will examine when it will be possible to schedule such a debate. It will probably not happen before the summer recess, but I shall consider as a matter of some urgency finding an appropriate date some time in the autumn.
The Leader of the House knows that the Department for Transport has recently completed a consultation on public service obligations for air services in the UK. That is especially important to my constituents, given their wish to protect flights between Inverness and London Gatwick and Heathrow airports. Will he ensure that the results of the consultation are subject to a debate in the House before their implementation so that concerns can be fully expressed?
The hon. Gentleman has identified an important issue for his constituents and, indeed, for a wider group of people in Scotland. I shall certainly ensure that the issue is brought to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport, and I will encourage him to write to the hon. Gentleman. That may be a more expeditious means of discussing the issue than waiting for a possible debate.
Recently, my right hon. Friend responded positively to a request from hon. Members for a debate on Africa. Could I suggest that it might be an appropriate time to have a similar debate on the middle east? Clearly, events in Palestine are at an important juncture. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is either the first step towards a general withdrawal from the west bank and a viable two-state solution leading to security throughout the middle east, or the Israelis may regard withdrawal from Gaza as a final step, leaving a non-viable Palestinian territory and the annexation of the west bank by Israel, which could lead to long-term insecurity, not just in the middle east but in the wider area.
My hon. Friend is right to raise that important issue. I am grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members who made the recent debate on Africa such a success, and he is right to draw the analogy between Africa and current developments in the middle east. There have certainly been some positive steps in the middle east peace process in the past few months—my hon. Friend suggested that there is renewed high-level contact between the parties and a dramatic fall in the level of violence and in the number of casualties. We must all recognise, however, that the situation remains fragile.
I emphasise that the United Kingdom Government remain energetically engaged. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary visited the region on 7 and 8 June to offer UK support for both sides, and to encourage them to do all that they can to take advantage of the opportunities for progress. As part of our EU presidency, the UK Government will represent the European Union, including at the Quartet, and we will work closely with other international partners.
The Leader of the House has announced that the House will consider the Council Tax Limitation (England) (Maximum Amounts) Order 2005. Can he assure us that there will be adequate time to debate the eight local authorities involved? I say that with some passion, because his former ministerial colleague, the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), invited hon. Members and their local authorities to discuss this with him when he was Local Government Minister. Unfortunately, he is no longer in office so I went for a discussion with his ministerial replacement. We had no discussion at all—we were treated to "Good morning" and "Thank you very much". There was no engagement with the local authority budget, where things might be going wrong and where they could improve. We therefore need an adequate debate.
I am confident that detailed information will have been made available to the local authorities on the list, and there will be a number of opportunities for the hon. Gentleman to raise his concerns about overspending by particular local authorities. It is important that they accept the guidelines set out by the Government, not least to ensure proper protection for people paying council taxes in those areas. He will be aware that since 1997, the Government have increased funding in real terms to local authorities by 33 per cent. Given that that is by far the majority of the money available to local authorities, it is unfortunate that those particular local authorities could not remain within their spending guidelines as planned. That is precisely why the Government have taken action.
I am sure that when the hon. Gentleman has meetings with Ministers on this question, they are willing to engage in discussions with him, but he should bear in mind the fact that there is a difference between having a discussion whose conclusions he agrees with and simply having a discussion. I am confident that he will have had a discussion with Ministers, although he may not have liked what they said to him.
In the next few weeks, many hundreds of thousands of parents and children will turn their thoughts to the process of leaving primary school and going to a new secondary school. My right hon. Friend will know what a stressful experience that is for families, not least because they are torn between the rhetoric of parental choice and the reality of growing numbers of secondary schools being able to choose which children to admit. Can my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the whole question of fair admissions to schools, not least because the Government will shortly publish proposals for a new admissions code of practice?
I recognise that this is an extremely sensitive and important subject for parents and children at this time of the year. I know from constituency experience that this is the time of year when parents approach their Member of Parliament if they are dissatisfied with the allocation arrangements. I will certainly ensure that my hon. Friend is contacted by the relevant Minister and that appropriate details are supplied.
Further to the question of the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) about the way in which Northern Ireland business is dealt with, the Leader of the House will have heard points of order in the House yesterday. This is a serious issue, because five Orders-in-Council are going through the House this week. Three further Orders-in-Council relating to Northern Ireland will be introduced next week. None of them can be amended—it is a straight yes or no vote—which is clearly an intolerable situation. I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's commitment to discussions with other parties, but can he ensure that the Northern Ireland parties are included in those discussions?
I have already said that I take this very seriously and it is something that the Government would want to address in due course. I am readily available, should the hon. Gentleman wish to discuss the matters in detail with me, and I certainly wish to meet all the parties represented in Northern Ireland.
When are we going to have a debate on the Strategic Rail Authority, particularly on the lack of investment in the Coventry-Nuneaton line and the need for a new station once the Coventry arena has opened?
It is obviously important that we continue to increase the funding available for the railway network. Network Rail has taken significant steps in recent times to stabilise the financial situation. Indeed, reports that I have received demonstrate that that has been remarkable successful. After a long period of difficulty it appears to be on a sensible track for the future. As for the particular local question, I will ensure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport writes to my hon. Friend.
Wellingborough is a large and expanding constituency where many thousands of new homes are being built, but it does not have a hospital with accident and emergency facilities. Can the Leader of the House help a new Member by saying whether it is possible to debate that matter and other health services in Northamptonshire?
May I make two points clear to the hon. Gentleman? First, the Government have invested more money in the national health service since we came to power than any Government in history. That money is being used to provide new hospitals and new hospital facilities across the country, and I know that Government Members are extremely proud of that. I doubt that the hon. Gentleman could produce statistics on NHS funding by any previous Government that compare in any way with our investment. Secondly, on his observations about new housing and related planning issues, unlike our predecessors, especially a number of Conservative Administrations, the Government have sought to ensure that new housing permissions are granted only where there is appropriate infrastructure and support for the population. Many of the difficulties caused by new housing in the late 1980s and early 1990s were the result of the then Government's enthusiasm to build housing without considering the need for accompanying infrastructure. That was a serious planning mistake, and we do not intend to repeat it.
When will the House be afforded the opportunity in Government time to debate the continuing insurgency in Iraq? Bilateral relations between the United Kingdom and the United States, to which my right hon. Friend referred, may indeed be very close, but there is a clear difference of opinion within the US Executive, with one Secretary of State saying that the insurgency is in its death throes, and another saying that it might last for at least another decade. Surely that highlights something rather more important than a difference of opinion: the fact that a clearly thought out and well planned approach is needed to tackle the insurgency, which is rather broader than mere military attacks? Will the House be given the chance in Government time to offer its opinions on how the insurgency could be ended?
I suspect that my hon. Friend will have precisely that opportunity later today, during the debate entitled "Defence in the world", which is one of our regular scheduled defence debates. Having been present during previous debates, I know that my hon. Friend has assiduously raised such questions in relation to the insurgency in Iraq. I assure her that no member of the Government, I perhaps least of all, takes lightly the situation in Iraq and the appalling insurgency that is responsible for so many deaths, not only of coalition forces, but of thousands of Iraqi citizens and civilians who have been targeted deliberately by terrorist organisations in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
Is the Leader of the House aware that more than 12 million homes in Britain benefit from having an affectionate pet living with them? Will he take note of the concerns voiced by organisations such as the Dogs Trust and the Cats Protection League and many other worthy animal charities about the progress of the animal welfare Bill? Will that excellent Bill be introduced in the House of Commons by October?
I know how seriously the hon. Gentleman takes such issues and I am grateful to him for having raised the subject as he has. The Bill has been widely welcomed by animal welfare charities. It is an important measure on a subject that concerns hon. Members, not least because we all have a regular postbag on animal welfare matters. As a constituency MP, I know how frequently constituents write to me on such matters—an experience that I am sure is shared by other right hon. and hon. Members. I anticipate the Bill being introduced in due course, but I am not yet in a position to give the hon. Gentleman a precise date.
Given the priority that MPs and, indeed, the nation now give to international development, will my right hon. Friend consider extending International Development questions to one hour in the new Session, so that development issues can be fully scrutinised and debated by the House?
I recognise the important of development issues to the House. That is why we recently scheduled the excellent debate on Africa, in which right hon. and hon. Members had significant opportunities to debate current developments. The time given to departmental questions is dealt with through the usual channels, but I undertake to consider the allocation of time to the various departmental questions and I shall respond to my hon. Friend in due course.
In the light of yesterday's lobby by the Fire Brigades Union, will the Leader of the House arrange a debate in Government time on the regionalisation of fire control units, so that hon. Members can bring home to Ministers just how unpopular that penny-pinching and mistaken policy is?
I assure the hon. Gentleman the policy is not about penny pinching. It is about ensuring that the latest and best technology is made available in support of the excellent work done by the fire services. It is also important that the approach taken concentrates effort and time in the way that provides best value for money for council tax payers. I have received representations from both the fire service and the FBU and I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government consider the matter extremely carefully and seriously. We must achieve best value for taxpayers but at the same time ensure that we do not compromise the safety of the public, who depend on the tremendous work done by the fire service and the other emergency services.
I do not know whether the Leader of the House has had time to read the early-day motion that I tabled this week congratulating Whizz-kidz—an organisation that provides wheelchairs for disabled children—on its work. Problems with the supply of such equipment persist, so will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the whole issue of the supply of equipment for disabled people?
I have seen the early-day motion and I congratulate my hon. Friend on tabling it and other hon. Members on supporting it. The initiative is an excellent one, which is strongly supported by members of the Government.
In his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), the Leader of the House was kind enough to offer the view that employers who are solvent should stand behind pension schemes. The case to which my hon. Friend referred—the APW Electronics case, which also affects constituents of mine—is one in which the pension fund trustees were threatened by the employer with insolvency. It is important that the House make time to debate the question, because there are four or five schemes in the rather special circumstances that fall between the Government's financial assistance scheme and the Pension Protection Fund.
I do not intend to repeat my answer to the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), but it is important to acknowledge that there have to be limits on the arrangements for providing assistance. In the case in question, those limits affect the issue of the solvency or otherwise of the principal employer. I have nothing further to add to my earlier comments.
At the time the Olympics have been awarded to London, may I tell my right hon. Friend that the special Olympics 2005 are taking place at this very moment in the fair city of Glasgow? Will he discuss with our right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport and Tourism including people with special needs in the celebrations to be held here in 2012?
I take this opportunity to congratulate all those who have been involved in the organisation of the special Olympics. Having seen such events in previous years, I know what tremendous voluntary efforts go into them. I am sure that all those associated with the successful bid will play their part in supporting such excellent initiatives as the special Olympics.
The Leader of the House will be aware that the paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow is appearing before the General Medical Council in response to allegations of misdiagnosis in certain child death cases. Eighteen months ago, the Minister for Children and the Solicitor-General made statements to the House about the review of cases in the light of the judgment. Will the right hon. Gentleman find time for one of those Ministers to update the House on what has happened since then—how the review has progressed and how many people who may have been wrongly accused of and sentenced for murdering their child or children are still in jail?
I understand how sensitive the issue is to those parents, but before we take further action it is important to allow the current proceedings to be concluded, so that we can identify the circumstances as accurately as possible. However, I assure the hon. Gentleman that the responsible Minister is keeping track of these matters and will write to him when the proceedings have been resolved.
My right hon. Friend will know that the House used to have an annual debate on the Metropolitan police, when the Home Secretary was the police authority. Although we now have a police authority for London, today's tragic events have shown that there is a national dimension to the work of the Metropolitan police. Will he consider reinstating the debate on the role of the Metropolitan police, so that the whole House can discuss the national role that they play?
I have already paid tribute, but am pleased to do so again, to the emergency services, especially the Metropolitan police. From my previous responsibilities, I know the extent to which the Metropolitan police provide specialist services and activities that are clearly to the wider benefit of the country as a whole, and I pay tribute to those who are involved in that work. I think that it is important that the House regularly debates the work of the police as a whole across the country, but in saying that I do not detract in any way from the excellent work being done by the Metropolitan police service.
Following the Leader of the House's robust responses to the hon. Members for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) and for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) about the payment of compensation in pension schemes when one of the companies involved is still trading, is he aware that exactly the same circumstances apply at MG Rover, whose pensioners are not receiving any compensation because one of the companies involved is still trading? Will the Leader of the House kindly give me a response to those particular circumstances, and make it clear that those people will eventually receive compensation?
The hon. Lady knows better than I do that the financial arrangements at MG Rover are still the subject of investigation. There is still serious consideration of how to take forward the opportunities there, and the question of pensions is obviously of vital concern to many of her constituents and to others who were formerly employed at the company. I hope that she can be patient for long enough to allow the full inquiry to be completed.
rose—
Order. The Home Secretary has promised us a statement on the grave situation in London at the moment. I think that it would be more appropriate to suspend the House until the Home Secretary is here. I understand that he is ready, but he must brief his Opposition colleagues, and that is what he is going to do. I shall therefore suspend the House until 10 minutes to the hour. That will be the best course of action.
Sitting suspended.
Incidents in London
On resuming—
First, may I apologise to you, Mr. Speaker, and to the House for being slightly later than I had hoped in making this statement?
As the House will know, this morning there have been a number of terrorist attacks in central London. The situation is developing and I am not yet in a position to give a conclusive account of all that has happened, but I wanted to keep the House as fully informed as possible.
I begin by expressing on behalf of the whole country our sympathy for those injured and for the families and friends of those who have died. I am not in a position at this time to give precise details, but what I can say is that four explosions have been confirmed. The first was on a tube train between Aldgate East and Liverpool Street. The second was on a bus in Woburn place. The third was on a tube train between Russell Square and King's Cross and the fourth was on a tube train at Edgware Road station. As yet, we do not know who or which organisations are responsible for those criminal and appalling acts. Of course, our first responsibility is to protect and support the public at this time. The Metropolitan police are in operational command, using well established and tested procedures. The health services are providing first-class care and support.
On transport, the underground is closed and will remain so for some time; it will certainly be closed today. There are no buses in central London and Transport for London will decide when to resume services later today. Overground services are subject to substantial delays. Most stations are open, but some are closed. Network Rail will try to reopen them as soon as it can. Airports are operating normally. People are strongly advised not to travel into central London, as the emergency services must be allowed to do their work in the most effective way they can.
The Cabinet was informed this morning and since then I have chaired Cobra meetings to ensure that the whole Government commitment is properly co-ordinated and any necessary support is provided. The Prime Minister is returning to London from Gleneagles to chair a Cobra meeting later today. I will continue to keep the House fully informed.
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for coming to the House so promptly this afternoon. We understand only too well the matters that constrained his time.
I join the Home Secretary in saying that the thoughts and prayers of Opposition Members are with all those who were killed or injured earlier today and their families and friends. I, too, pay tribute to the men and women of our emergency services. Their response to events such as this is invariably heroic and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts.
This morning's explosions were acts of almost unspeakable depravity and wickedness, planned with the deliberate intention of taking innocent life, and the whole House condemns them utterly. This is an attack not just on our capital city, but on our country and our way of life as a whole. It goes without saying that the Government will have our full and wholehearted support in dealing with this assault on our society. We stand ready with them to play our part.
I welcome the Prime Minister's assurance earlier today that the important work of the G8 meeting in Scotland will go on and will not be disrupted by today's terrible events. Now is not the time to allow the terrorists to disrupt our lives in any way.
Now is also not the time for many questions, so I have just three straightforward ones for the Home Secretary. Could he tell the House what plans have been put in place to protect other British cities that may be at risk at this point in time? There is obviously confusion at such a time, but the most important thing is that people remain as calm as possible. To help with that, what plans do the Government have to keep the public informed about events as the day unfolds? Finally, will the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary return to the House on Monday, when more information is known, to make a full statement on this terrible event?
A prime aim of terrorists is to demoralise and divide our communities. It is right that we should be angry at today's atrocities, but it is no less essential that we should remain both clear-headed and united. We say to the terrorists that they will not succeed in setting us against one another. Britain has a long history of dealing with terrorism. We have joined together to fight it in the past; today we do so again. For now, the terrorism that walks the streets of London has no face, but whatever its origin, whatever its motive, our response will be the same—the British people will not be cowed and the terrorists will not win.
I am grateful for the wholehearted and powerfully expressed support of the Opposition. First, I appreciate the remarks made by the right hon. Gentleman; they are in the spirit that I would expect. Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman is right to pay tribute to the vast range of men and women who are working to keep the city working as it should at this time, and to their personal heroism and courage in often difficult circumstances. Thirdly, when I spoke to the Prime Minister this morning about this, he was keen to make it clear that his colleagues at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles were, first, sympathetic and supportive to us in this situation, and secondly, exactly as the right hon. Gentleman said, they feel that it is very important that the important work of the G8 is continued, and that is very strongly the Prime Minister's view. I want to express publicly my appreciation for the approach of the other Governments.
Let me respond to the right hon. Gentleman's specific questions. I can confirm that we have very detailed analysis of the situation in other cities. Information is going to police forces throughout the country. The Association of Chief Police Officers is represented in the Cobra meetings that I have been chairing, precisely in order to deal with the concerns that he expresses.
We will continue to provide public information in a very coherent way. It is difficult—I will be candid with the House—because there are a large number of rumours and uncertainties going around, for perfectly understandable reasons; I make no criticism of that. As the right hon. Gentleman says, that means that it is incumbent on me as Home Secretary, and the Government as a whole, clearly to communicate what is fact and not get drawn down too many speculative routes. That is why I have kept my statement to this relatively short set of remarks.
I can confirm that we will be very happy to give a full statement to the House next week. As I discussed with you a moment ago, Mr. Speaker, if it is necessary to make further statements before next Monday as the situation evolves, I stand ready to do so.
This is a sombre moment for the House and for the country. Let me first, on behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends, convey our condolences to the families and friends of those who have died and our sympathies to those who have been injured. I, too, acknowledge the magnificent response of the emergency services, who have once again displayed their professionalism and dedication.
There is an understandable temptation on these occasions to speculate and to attempt to draw early conclusions. Does the Home Secretary agree that that temptation should be resisted at all costs? Nothing would be worse than a rush to judgment based on incomplete information. It is inevitable in these matters that the primary responsibility will rest with the Government. In discharging that responsibility, they have our unqualified support.
I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for the very clear and strong support that he has given, with which I completely associate myself. His remarks about speculation are entirely correct. An immense wealth of speculation can go into these events, and my determination, even as early as the meetings this morning, is to ensure that our decisions are taken on the basis of what is known, not what is speculated about.
In response to both Front-Bench spokesmen, the community as a whole, in my opinion, should seek to respond to these events in a calm and considered way—not to rush to judgment, but to make a decision based on the information that we are able to give, when we are able to give it, about what has actually happened, rather than on the sometimes fevered remarks that can be made.
I very much appreciate the support from the right hon. and learned Gentleman.
I join my right hon. Friend and the other two Members who have spoken in condemning this terrible outrage, which has occurred partly in my own constituency, where people have been killed and injured. I join them in paying tribute to the emergency services. It would perhaps be right to note that when danger arises, while most of the rest of us run away from it, the police, the fire service, the ambulance service, transport staff and doctors and nurses run towards that danger to try to reduce it. I am sure that my right hon. Friend will agree that those people do that not because they seek any financial reward or incentive, but because they are motivated by the public service ethic and a sense of duty to their fellow citizens.
My right hon. Friend is entirely correct. As a former Secretary of State for Health, he knows better than most in this House of the extreme professionalism and preparedness of the health services to which he refers. The Secretary of State for Health, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), and I have been keeping in close touch during the course of the morning, and she has had detailed accounts of what has happened that entirely substantiate the observations made by my right hon. Friend about the courage and commitment of those emergency services and of the other emergency services with which we are dealing.
I pass on my deepest sympathy to his constituents who are likely to have been involved in the events in his constituency.
I should like to identify myself and associate my party and the people of Northern Ireland with what has been said. We salute those who have, in the midst of this trouble, taken it upon themselves to carry out their duties in such a patient and practical way—and in such a way as to have brought comfort, no doubt, to those whom they have sought to help.
I should like to ask one thing of the Home Secretary. Will he try, if he can, to ensure that the nearest of kin get the message first? In Northern Ireland in the early days of our troubles, the press, the media and other outsiders rang up homes and said, "We've rung to say how sorry we are that your brother has been killed", and the people did not even know that their brother had been killed. That brought extra pain and sorrow, as I am sure that the Home Secretary will agree. I know that he cannot ensure that that is done, but he can take steps to ensure that the attempt is made to do it, so that further sorrow will not be piled on existing sorrow.
I very much appreciate the support of the hon. Gentleman, whose country and party are very familiar—too familiar—with the consequences of such situations.
On his question, yes, we will seek to ensure that the communication goes to the families directly. There is a well established procedure in place to try to ensure that that happens. It is a difficult process. Of course, I wish that I could guarantee that we would succeed on all occasions, but we will certainly do our very best.
I call the Father of the House.
The whole House will join me in unreservedly condemning this cowardly and calculated targeting of innocent civilians. Sadly, it is tragic proof that the warnings of terrorist attacks on London were not exaggerated; we can only wish that they were. The thoughts of the House, inevitably, are with the families of the casualties and the emergency services that are trying to help them.
It is too early at this stage to identify who is behind the attack. If any further information becomes available during the afternoon, will the Home Secretary consider making a statement at the end of business?
I will certainly consider making a statement at the end of business but, as I said earlier, we need to keep events under review to decide whether to do that. As you and I discussed, Mr. Speaker, I am certainly ready to do it, and we will see how the situation evolves as we go on. In response to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), in all circumstances I am not only ready but keen to make a statement to the House on Monday to report on the situation.
It is important at this time to focus on doing our very best to support the public services in dealing with the situations that they are facing, and to be candid that is the centre of my attention. The issues that my right hon. Friend raises in terms of understanding what has happened and why it has happened will very quickly come to the forefront of our attention, as they rightly should, but at this moment, my focus with that my colleagues in the Cabinet, is on trying to ensure that we do our very best to deal with the situation that we face.
On behalf of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party, I offer our unqualified support to the right hon. Gentleman. In condemning these unspeakable and senseless acts of cowardice, I wish him well in his efforts to stem what has happened and to bring these awful perpetrators of violence to justice.
I appreciate the support of the hon. Gentleman and his party colleagues. It is encouraging that right across every fragment of opinion in the House, we say that our democratic methods are the way to prevail and that we are determined to do whatever we must in order to ensure that those who seek to destroy that democracy are unable to carry out what they would wish to do.
Yesterday, Londoners were celebrating. Today, we are grieving, sympathising and waiting anxiously for news of our friends, relatives, loved ones and—in our case—constituents. Does my right hon. Friend agree that Londoners have resilience and common sense, and that we will bounce back from this terrible atrocity? Does he accept that we will listen to the advice that is given and wait before we make a judgment about who is responsible? Will he make sure that people are given clear advice about how they might get home, given today's serious disruption to public transport? It is essential that people know what to do in these circumstances. Some of us face a very long walk indeed if no public transport is available.
On that final point, I can tell the House that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport is focused on the problem of ensuring that people can get home properly this evening. He will be making judgments on that throughout the day and will give out information at regular intervals to ensure that people can live their lives as normally as possible.
On the question of resilience, I think that it is almost a truism to say that for generations the people of London have shown resilience in the face of appalling difficulties. I have no doubt that the reaction to events today will demonstrate the same courage. However, I want to highlight as well that the various governmental institutions around London present a much stronger and more co-ordinated approach to ensuring resilience, so we are now better able to deal with these emergencies. The combination of the resilience of our governmental structures and that of the people of London is the strength that we can celebrate today.
Defence in the World
[Relevant documents: The Fourth Report from the Defence Committee, Session 2004–05, HC 45-I & II, on Future Capabilities, and the Government's response thereto, Cm6616.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Brennan.]
May I begin—[Interruption.]
Order. Hon. Members must leave the Chamber quietly.
I want to begin by thanking my opposite number, the right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram). The Conservative spokesman gave the Government his immediate and spontaneous understanding and solidarity today. He also kindly offered to agree to a suspension or postponement of this debate, if the Government decided that that was the best course of action, and I am very grateful for that. Like the shadow Home Secretary a few moments ago, the right hon. and learned Gentleman responded with the generosity of spirit that we expect from him, and with the character that symbolises this House in times of difficulty. However, it is right that we proceed with the debate. As was made clear in the statement by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, part of the intention of these awful acts is to disrupt democracy, and it is right that we should show how resilient democracy is.
The sun that set last night on joyous and happy celebrations in London this morning rose to a day of awful, criminal savagery. It brings home to us again the character and courage of the members of our emergency services. Even as we speak, they are the front line of our response to these terrible acts. I am sure that all hon. Members have them in mind, and the difficult and dangerous work that they do, as we continue our work here.
I am also sure that all of us will want to express our utter condemnation of those responsible for today's attacks. We must ensure that they understand that they will not win in their attempt to break our will or undermine our democratic response to today's events.
In a sense, what has happened today reminds us of the terrible dangers that our servicemen and women face as they act in the service of the country. Even as we attempt to cope with the situation here at home in London, thousands of our service personnel are deployed across the world. They are helping to improve lives, deliver security and ensure peace, and they display the professionalism, courage and selflessness that continue to inspire the people of this country. On my own behalf, and I hope on behalf of the whole House, I want to place on record my personal gratitude to, and admiration for, those serving in the British armed forces across the world. On a day when we are expressing our thanks to the emergency services here, I want to thank them for the job that they do.
Only a few weeks ago, I saw that work in Iraq. There, British troops are playing an essential role—amidst the same awful and terrible dangers as appear to have afflicted us today—in reconstructing the Iraqi security forces and that country's civil society. We should be proud—and we are—of the outstanding job that our forces have done in Iraq, as elsewhere. In those dangerous circumstances, they have made an immense contribution to improving the lives of millions of Iraqis, enhancing their security, and providing them with the opportunities that we have taken for granted for so long—to vote and to have better access to clean water, health care and education.
The 65,000 UK service personnel have made that happen. Rightly, they deserve our gratitude, but I also want to place on record our appreciation of the support given by their families back home. They deserve our heartfelt gratitude as well.
Our servicemen and women, and their families, have demonstrated the same bravery and determination to get the job done as did those who served in previous decades, including in world war two. This week is veterans week, and so this debate is timely. I know that the House will wish to join me in paying the warmest of personal tributes to those men and women who served their country in the second world war, and since.
A personal highlight of the week for me has been that I and the Opposition spokesman have had the honour to invite and accompany Winston Churchill's daughter Lady Soames to many of the events. It has been wonderful to see the bond of solidarity that still unites people of that generation. It has been inspiring to see how that spirit lives on, in small ways, after all the years.
The Secretary of State has moved seamlessly from Iraq to veterans, and I agree with what he has said. However, before he moves on, will he give the House some idea of the timetable that he envisages in Iraq? For how long does he think that our troops will be there? Anyone who has been there will realise that there is a huge amount of work to be done, and that the private sector must make a lot of investment. Unless the situation is stable and secure, the necessary investment will not be made. I believe that the troops will have to stay for several years: does the right hon. Gentleman share that view?
I do not blame the hon. Gentleman for intervening—he was not to know that I intend to come back to the subject of Iraq. I was merely headlining some of the issues that I shall cover. In bald terms, we all understand that our task is to move forward to the political control of Iraq by the Iraqi people, to move forward in creating the capability among the security forces to protect and serve that democratic Government, and simultaneously to create the economic and social environment that demonstrates the benefits of democracy to the people of Iraq.
We have not set down rigid time lines for the downsizing or withdrawal of troops. Rather, we have made that conditional upon progress on political development and security and, to a lesser extent but nevertheless important, on the third element, economic development, but particularly the first two. This is not a prediction or a pledge, because our movement of troops will be conditional on the conditions that I set out, but I have said that I envisage that the trained complement of the Iraqi army—the army and security forces are now 170,000 trained personnel—could begin the process of taking the lead, though not the exclusive capability, in some parts of Iraq in the next 12 months. We would provide multinational support for that as long as the Iraqi Government wish, but it is possible that that process will continue.
Simultaneously over that period, we envisage that the political development—that is, the inclusion of the Sunnis in the commission to develop the constitution, thereafter the referendum on it, followed by the establishment of a full democratically elected Iraqi Government by the end of the year—will be progressing over the time lines that we have laid out. I hope that gives the hon. Gentleman some idea.
rose—
I shall come back to the subject of Iraq, if hon. Gentlemen wish to wait.
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. I know that he will join me in paying tribute to the 10 constituents who were killed in the terrible Hercules crash in Iraq recently, and I was pleased that he was able to attend the wonderful service in Salisbury cathedral in memory of them. Can he tell us when the report into the causes of that crash will be published?
On the first point, yes, as the hon. Gentleman knows, I do indeed join him in expressing my deep, deep regret and condolences to the families of the servicemen whose lives were lost in that Hercules crash. From speaking to some of the families, I know that the hon. Gentleman has been involved in helping them as a constituency MP and more widely. I cannot give him a specific date. Obviously, I want the report as quickly as possible because I know that the grief of a family is only compounded by a lack of knowledge of the circumstances of that loss. I therefore hope it will be published as quickly as possible. I undertake after today's debate to go back and make a further gentle inquiry. I do not want to be seen in any way to interfere with inquests or inquiries of any kind. I may create another problem if people get the suspicion that a Minister is somehow intervening. Nevertheless, it is perfectly legitimate from time to time to inquire, and I undertake to write to the hon. Gentleman and to the families to give them my latest appreciation of the situation, provided that does not transgress any of the independent players looking into the matter.
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, although I was about to set out the premise of my approach to international affairs. It seems that we are dealing with all the other bits first.
I am grateful for the Minister's generosity. He was beginning to touch on the question of troop withdrawal. Some in America have said that the American army may be in Iraq for 10 years. Can the right hon. Gentleman envisage any circumstance in which the British forces may be withdrawn, even if the Americans continue in place in Iraq?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. On the first part, I do not know of anybody who has said that the American forces would be there for 10 or 15 years, certainly not in their present configuration. I do know that my opposite number, the Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has said that he envisages—in contradistinction to some other comments that have been made—that it will not be an easy or a short insurgency to defeat, and that the insurgency could last for 5, 10, 12 or more years. That is not to say that the counter-insurgency will inevitably be led by forces other than Iraqis for that time period. The purpose of what we are trying to do now is genuinely to place the future democratic control of Iraq, with all its difficulties, with all its religious and ethnic groups—Sunni, Shi'a, Kurd—and to accompany that by a democratically controlled security force capable of defending that democracy and taking on the insurgency.
While it is possible to envisage a prolonged insurgency, through imported terrorism or through disaffected elements of the former regime—or through alienated members of the Sunni population—it is also possible, as the political element and the security of Iraq increase, to envisage that element taking a lead. That means that there is no definite time scale, but rather the prospect of a conditional withdrawal. I assure the hon. Gentleman that at the point at which the democratically elected Iraqi Government say "We would like you to go", we will go. I hope that that answers his question.
I know that some NATO countries—some NATO allies—have played their part very well in supporting us in Iraq, and have sent many troops. Is the Secretary of State satisfied that all NATO allies have done enough to support us in what we are trying to do—in our attempts to bring stability and democracy to Iraq?
There are two issues here. One is the number of multinational forces we have in Iraq, and the number of countries involved—some 27. The other is the specific issue of NATO.
No one needs to be a genius to understand that the origins of the intervention in Iraq were other than non-controversial. Many of our NATO partners took a view that was different from ours. Therefore, when they are encouraged to come together and provide support, inside or outside Iraq, for the rebuilding of both a democratic Iraq and the security forces there, that must be done with a degree of persistence but with sensitivity. At present, given all the circumstances, I am happy that all the NATO partners are contributing in what is the best way for them, in the light of the position from which they started.
There are, for instance, countries that do not want to have troops on the ground in Iraq, but which are nevertheless helping to train the Iraqi police force, or have made offers of that nature. I think that, in all the circumstances, the international community has responded. I am always trying to urge the institutions, including the United Nations, to play a greater role in assisting the Iraqis themselves.
We would never want to reach a point at which, on balance, the presence of our forces was more a problem than a solution. There will always be an element of both in the presence of multinational forces, but we want to be sure that our forces are contributing more to the solution of the security problem than they are contributing to the problem itself.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
May I make a little progress first? I shall take interventions from Opposition Members shortly.
I shall now abbreviate and simplify what I was going to say. As this is my first debate on this subject, I was going to outline my personal approach. Over the past few years—ever since the statement that our foreign policy, the foreign policy of a new Government, should have a moral and ethical dimension—it has been easy to gain the impression that we have fallen into what our critics would call a certain pragmatism, and what others would describe as a neo-conservative agenda elsewhere. Let me set out in simple terms my own view of Britain's role in the world.
I believe that at home, domestically, as citizens of this country, we do not have absolute rights, and we do not have the right to get ahead irrespective of the consequences of our actions for others. I hope that our political background—certainly that of Labour Members—is one in which the role of a citizen of this country is encompassed by a combination, or balance, of rights, interests and responsibilities. I see our role in the world in exactly the same way. We are citizens of the world, a world that is shrinking almost visibly before us. Acts which, long ago, could be branded as something happening in faraway countries of which we knew little and for which we cared even less are now brought before our eyes every day through new technology and communications. Transportation systems take us from one part of the world to another in unbelievably short times. If we ever believed that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world were no responsibility of ours, it gets harder by the year to do so. Therefore, in the international community and as a citizen of the world, this country has our rights to defend, our interests to maintain and also our responsibilities to discharge. In doing that, we sometimes have to use diplomacy, finance, aid and trade—all the matters that are being discussed at the G8—and also fighting power.
Sometimes we have to use fighting power to separate others, and sometimes to bend others to our will. That is the general approach that I take. In other words, I simply reject the view that if we take a form of action that coincides with anyone else's action, it is because it derives from some imposed neo-conservative view; it is because it derives from our own view of the world, which—at given points in time—coincides with action by those who hold other points of view.
The Secretary of State's comments are helpful and enlightening. Do his comments mean that we are not necessarily committed to maintaining our troop presence in Iraq, for example, just because the Americans are there? Is it possible, at least in theory, for us to withdraw our forces even if the Americans are still on the ground?
I never find these hypothetical questions very helpful. We are a sovereign nation, but we have responsibilities and allies. Chief among those allies is the United States. In general terms, I have made my view known. I spent decades opposing the US when it was bringing down democratic Governments and installing dictators. I do not have a problem when it brings down dictators and puts in democratic Governments, but that is not true for everyone.
In specific terms, in my opinion, the US armed forces and the population have shown a resilience and courage in Iraq—the hon. Gentleman will have his own views on that and, indeed, he has expressed them—that no one would have envisaged 10 or 15 years ago under such circumstances. Tragically, casualty figures for the Americans in Iraq are now approaching 1,800. We are a sovereign nation, but we will stay as long as the Iraqi Government want us and until the sort of conditions that I outlined earlier have been met. That is what we mean by saying that we will stay until the job is done.
The Secretary of State has just given a very impressive little speech on the maintenance of British fighting power. Does he accept that that has depended crucially for the past two centuries on the Royal Navy, which is now—for the first time in all those years—smaller than the French Navy? That is a matter of crucial importance. Will he use his first speech to the House as Secretary of State to show his profound commitment to the Royal Navy and give an absolute commitment that there will be no mucking around with the building of the two new aircraft carriers, which are essential for the maintenance of our effective fighting power?
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's comments about my nice little speech. I thank him for his nice little speech. Unfortunately, it is wrong. It assumes that bigger is better. He seems to have forgotten the lesson of Trafalgar, even within a fortnight of the 200th anniversary, that our side was smaller than the French and Spanish fleet. Nelson had 27 ships, compared with the 33 in the fleet he faced. He won, because fighting capability and power cannot be equated with the number of vessels. Fighting power depends on the technology on the vessels, how well trained the men and women aboard are and the morale of the troops. The training and morale of Nelson's troops gave him a huge advantage over the French and Spanish.
Let us bring the question to the modern world. Is it possible to have smaller numbers and greater capability? Of course, it is. For example, there were far fewer air sorties in the second Gulf war than in the first Gulf war but they hit far more targets because they used different technologically directed bombs—so-called "smart" bombs as opposed to dumb bombs. Let us consider the number of ships that are necessary for the United States to put out two, three or four carrier task groups. Because of the building of ships nowadays, there is a far higher return on the fleet on the sea active than would have been the case 10 or 15 years ago. That is why Defence Secretary Rumsfeld's prediction, when he worked for the Reagan Administration, that his fleet then would be twice the size of the one that he has now does not mean that his smaller fleet now is less capable. It is not.
Although I respect the hon. Gentleman's work on the Public Accounts Committee, it is a false to assume that one necessarily has less capability because one has smaller numbers. That is patently not the case; otherwise we would have retained conscription in this country and would have 200,000, 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers who were very good at painting Nissen huts black and white but not very good at the front in a war.
I have a great deal of sympathy for what the Secretary of State has said and support much of it. However, can I take him back to the subject of Iraq and ask him whether our American allies have asked us specifically to replace the capability that other countries are taking out of Iraq between now and the end of the year? A gap will have to be filled, and I am curious to know whether we have had a specific request to fill that gap.
The answer to that is no.
My right hon. Friend argues that size is not always important, but does he agree that the Government are committed to one of the largest shipbuilding programmes ever? That is leading to shipbuilding returning to communities in, for example, the north-east when it was taken away from them under the Conservative Government.
The answer to that one is yes. I agree with my hon. Friend. We are getting through a lot of questions.
The Secretary of State will be aware that I met this morning delegations of workers from my Bridgend constituency who were exercising their right to lobby Members of Parliament about the possible removal of work at the Defence Aviation Repair Agency site in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith). They have grave concerns about the possible loss of their expertise. Will the Secretary of State join me in recognising the concerns that those workers have asked to be conveyed to the House? The majority of them are ex-RAF personnel who want the House to understand their ongoing commitment to the defence industry and to the defence of the country. Will he recognise the important role that such defence workers play in the ongoing security of this country?
Yes, I very much recognise that, and I do not blame my hon. Friend for raising her constituency interest in the matter. Workers in the defence industry play a very important role and, over the years, I have found that they have been prepared to go through some very difficult transformations and to re-educate, reallocate and so on in a way that has not been possible in every section of industry.
I hope that my hon. Friend will recognise, however, that the Government have an obligation, particularly when we have a duty of care, to make sure that, when we place young men and women in war situations, we get the best value for money not just to please the accountants but to make sure that the men and women whom we place in such situations are protected to the very best of our ability. Any pound that is wasted and that is not value for money is taken away from the protection, training, technology and so on that they have at the front.
I know that such points are borne carefully in mind by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State for the armed forces when he looks at these matters, but I hope that my hon. Friend will understand that we have an obligation, first and foremost, to maintain the effectiveness and output of our fighting power rather than a primary obligation to keep this or that industry in the position in which it has been for some time.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I promise my hon. Friend that I will come back to him, but we are now 22 minutes into the debate and I have read only three paragraphs of my speech. I am more than happy to spend a lot of my time answering hon. Members' questions instead of making a formal speech because I know how important these issues are, but I should make a little progress, if for no other reason than my duty of care to my civil servants, who have spent a lot of time preparing this stuff. The three paragraphs that I have read so far were actually written by me, so that does not help to bring my officials in.
I was pointing out the balance of rights and responsibilities in the international community. Of course we can argue about the way in which those responsibilities are discharged, but these decisions are not easy. The decision about Kosovo was not easy, but on balance the House supported us going in there, even though the United Nations Security Council did not—there was a veto. However, the House felt that it had a morally compelling responsibility that superseded that veto. I suppose—and hope—that we are discharging such responsibilities by doing what we can in Darfur, too.
Those rights and responsibilities form part of what has become a more complex security architecture because, as the world has become even more interdependent and changed in the post-cold-war period, the nature of the threats to our security have changed. It is accepted that we must address the political causes of problems, which is why at the G8 summit we will talk about not only aid and trade in Africa, but hopefully the middle east peace process. We must do that in addition to using what we would traditionally regard as the defence posture, or physical fighting power. We will debate today the broadest context of our interests and commitments throughout the world.
I have already said something about Iraq. We said at the time that we were committed to the long-term reconstruction of Iraq and that is still true. It is why we are still there two years on and why we will remain there until we have helped the Iraqis to complete the transition to a secure democracy. As I said at the beginning of my speech, we will not be deflected from that commitment by today's events.
We are making steady progress in Iraq. The infrastructure was severely run down in the years before the war and has not been helped since by being the target of terrorists and insurgents. Investment in services such as electricity and water, which was minimal for 20 years or more, is now increasing. Despite all the difficulties in the country, we can point to areas of progress. Around 2,300 schools and about 1,000 hospitals have opened. Some 70 million textbooks have been distributed. I do not want to present a glowing picture of the situation in the country, as some politicians have, but steady progress is being made, especially on the political and security sides. We are now embarking on discussions to allow the Iraqi people, through their representatives, to provide themselves with a constitution. They will then go on to a referendum and the election of a Government at the end of the year and I hope that the time lines will be met.
We remain committed to helping the Afghan people to restore security, stability and prosperity to Afghanistan. In the midst of the sombre situation in some parts of the country, let us remember that the presidential elections last October were an outstanding success, although that was unexpected in some quarters. The parliamentary elections this September will be a major step forward. About 1,000 personnel from all three services are deployed in Afghanistan, along with civilians. They are deployed as part of the NATO-led international security assistance force and also contribute to the US-led coalition. We are working alongside the Afghans and our allies to develop the capabilities and skills of the Afghan security forces, to help train the Afghan national army and to provide advice. Afghans and Afghanistan continue to need international military help. Elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban remain active there; we have not destroyed them completely.
Opiates, drugs and narcotics remain a huge problem. I understand that something like 60 per cent. of the country's gross domestic product is connected with the drugs trade, which makes it a formidable task to deal with. In my view, no country can develop a stable, sustainable and uncorrupt form of government unless and until that is dealt with. About 90 per cent. of the heroin in this country comes from opiates derived from Afghanistan. That position represents a threat both to Afghanistan and the United Kingdom.
We have agreed that, next May, we will lead the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters, which has an essential part to play in dealing with Afghanistan. At that stage, we anticipate that international security assistance force control will move from its current location in the north and the west down to the south. We will play some part in that, in addition to our role in the headquarters of the ARRC. We will move down to Helmand province, but I cannot give the House further details at the moment for the simple reason that I have not yet decided. There will be a multinational presence there, but we are still reflecting further on the details, the costs and the allies that might be with us, but as soon as I have further details, I will present them to the House.
As with all the other issues that I have discussed so far, in the face of a complex, multi-faceted security problem—not just the physical presence of an enemy with guns and tanks—we will attempt to achieve the same in Afghanistan as we hope to achieve elsewhere. We also need to address some of the roots of the problems, which touch on alternative livelihoods, economics, humanitarian aid, policing, judicial systems, the Foreign Office playing a major role in the politics, democratic control for the Afghans themselves and, in that context, the use of fighting power and force. If we do the one without the other, none of this works any more than will attempts to solve all the world's problems by military intervention while ignoring the causal economic, social and political injustices responsible for the problems in the first place.
I entirely accept what the Secretary of State says about great strides having been made in Afghanistan to introduce democratic processes and the rule of law. In that context, does he agree that it would be helpful if the United States could announce the end of the regime in Guantanamo Bay, which tends to undermine our support for the democratic process and the rule of law elsewhere in the world?
We continually discuss such matters with our colleagues in the United States and the right hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to know that that particular subject features from time to time in those discussions. I am not sure that it is helpful, though he invites me, to start giving public advice to our enemies on these matters. I believe that there is an awareness in the US that, in the immediate aftermath of the terrible and tragic events of 9/11, measures had to be taken, but as time goes on, they have to be continually reviewed. I am sure that the US will do that.
Moving on from Afghanistan, I want briefly to remember members of our forces serving in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, the Falkland Islands, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. By concentrating on only one or two major areas, we tend to forget that a great many servicemen and women face hardships and threats in their service abroad elsewhere. We should remember that their duties that are vital and demand considerable sacrifices. I can assure the House that, although those people may not be in the headlines at present, their contribution to defending our country and our security has not been forgotten.
Let me say a few words about our nuclear deterrent, which I am sure will remain a matter of continual discussion. Irrespective of the controversies about the tactics of those wanting unilateral nuclear disarmament 10 or 15 years ago, the deterrent has stood us in good stead over these years.
Of course we have done what we could over the past decade or so, particularly under this Government, to reduce our capability, and the House will know how we did so. We are the only nuclear power to have given up one whole system—the WE177 free-fall nuclear bombs—for the delivery of a nuclear deterrent. We publicly announced something that had, in fact, been undertaken by the previous Conservative Government: the detargeting of the missiles, which had happened as the cold war thawed. We felt that announcing that publicly and making the information public helped the process. We reduced the number of boats that were necessarily at sea at any given stage, so that there was one. So it takes days, not minutes, to retarget our nuclear deterrent.
All that has been done because the strategic defence review was committed to making reductions to what we called a minimum nuclear deterrent. Equally, we have made it clear, as recently as two months ago, that we are committed to retaining that independent nuclear deterrent. Before I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), who asked to intervene earlier—lest he wish to do so now—I wish to say that we have made no decision in detail or in principle about what comes next, by which I mean in 10 or 15 years' time, when the present system needs to be amended, reduced, enhanced or replaced by an entirely different system. We have not taken a decision on that, and when people ask me whether we will have the chance to debate and discuss that, I merely point to the past three Question Times and debates in the House, when hon. Members have already started to raise it, although I have not even started to consider the position on it. If my hon. Friend wishes, I will now give way to him.
On that point—not on the issue that I wanted to raise earlier, because we have moved away from that, have we not?—does the Secretary of State agree with William Perry, the former Defence Secretary in the Clinton Administration, that there is a better than 50 per cent. chance of a nuclear explosion on US soil because terrorists have managed to get their hands on fissile material? What are we doing to safeguard and protect the fissile material that is scattered around all over the place in the former Soviet Union?
I have not seen what was said on that occasion. I do not like to say whether I agree or disagree with something that I have not read. I hope that my hon. Friend will understand that; but certainly, what he identifies—the potential for nuclear or fissile materials falling into the hands of terrorists, for instance—is a very important subject and a very real danger. Through our non-proliferation activities and in many other ways, we constantly try to ensure—indeed, we have assisted the Russians in trying to ensure—that the dismantling of their warheads, many of which have been dismantled, and the storage of that material, and so on, is as secure as it can be. I cannot give any guarantee, as my hon. Friend knows, about other countries. I can assure him that we do our best in that respect.
On the safety of, for instance, nuclear warheads, I can assure my hon. Friend that, although we have not taken decisions about the replacement of the present Trident system, we have said—I have said so publicly in the House and outside—that we do, and will, spend money to maintain the existing system and, in particular, in a state of safety. An obligation of maintaining the nuclear deterrent in the first place is that we maintain it as both effective and safe.
I apologise for not being here for the other part of the Secretary of State's speech because of travel problems, obviously. He will have observed the results of the non-proliferation treaty review conference in New York, and he will also be aware that the non-proliferation treaty commits us and other countries—the other four permanent nuclear powers—to eventual disarmament. Will he give us some hint of what plans he has not to replace Trident but to ensure that we achieve nuclear disarmament?
I fully understand the circumstances that delayed my hon. Friend today; had they been different, I would simply have told him that I answered that question—in part—when he was not here. In doing so, I pointed out that we have tried to de-escalate the number of warheads to less than 200, for example, so we have been playing our part. Yes, I am disappointed that we did not get an agreement on the non-proliferation treaty. The United Kingdom played a reasonably important part in those discussions—in fact, in some conference sessions we acted as European Union representative—and we tried to secure agreement on certain elements. I am sorry that we did not do so, but that does not mean that there are no other ways of making progress. I can assure my hon. Friend that in considering the various costs, the associated politics and the military aspects of a possible replacement for the Trident system, we will do nothing that is at odds with our obligations to the international community.
I want to turn briefly to an issue that has already been raised: the nature of our relationship with Europe and the United States. We continue to believe that a strong Euro-Atlantic partnership, with NATO at its heart, underpins our security policy. NATO is an enduring alliance and it has been hugely successful in adapting to a changing strategic environment. On the other hand, we do not believe that our commitment to NATO is in any way incompatible with developing a European security and defence policy and related activity. We try, wherever possible, to ensure that the two institutions act in concert and in partnership—not in competition—and that they do not duplicate resources in, for instance, Darfur or Sudan. After assuming the EU presidency on 1 July, we will continue to try to develop the ESDP, and to lead the EU in a fashion that dovetails with our belief in NATO as a successful military alliance.
In a sense, the current strategic environment, the complex nature of the necessary security response—as opposed to simply a defence response—to many of the problems that we face nowadays, and the obligation to accompany defence with political initiatives and financial, diplomatic and humanitarian assistance, plays into the character of the European Union. It allows us to accompany NATO alliance capabilities with a degree of civil-military partnership through the EU. That, in turn, enables us to grow both institutions effectively in terms of cohesion, activity and capability, and to make them complementary rather than competitive.
Those three words—cohesion, activity and capability—will mark anything that I do as pro tem president of Europe's Defence Ministers. We need to increase our capability, but it has to be usable capability. There is no good in having shop-window forces or great numbers on paper if none of them can be used, if they are not fit for purpose, or if they are not the flexible, deployable, expeditionary-type outreach forces that are necessary in the world today. Secondly, we need to ensure cohesion. We need to bring together the necessary political, diplomatic, financial, humanitarian and military responses, to use what we need when it is needed, and to make the right judgments on the right occasions.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the battlegroup formation in Europe will greatly enhance the capability of individual countries and the contribution that they can make—unlike the single large force that was originally anticipated?
I agree with my hon. Friend. He knows that we provided one of those battle groups along with our French colleagues, with whom we work closely on everything, as hon. Members know—except the Olympics. We will also provide a maritime battle group force in two or three years. That has added a dimension of capability to the European Union that is better than some of the pipe-dream plans for an all-Europe army that would stand ready to move.
The EU increasingly needs the ability to act when NATO is not fully engaged, especially when the EU's broader capabilities and contribution in crisis prevention and management can be of added value. It is not always about large deployments. With flexibility and sustainability, we can achieve the required effects in other ways, discharging our responsibilities through, for example, critical enablers, support capabilities or defence diplomacy tasks.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I am reluctant to do so because I am aware that I have tested the patience of the House a little. I know that everybody wants the best of both worlds—to intervene on the speech and to complain that is it too long—but I shall give way once more and then attempt to finish quickly.
The Secretary of State has been generous in taking interventions. Will he give us one clear and simple example of any task that a European defence force could usefully fulfil, which NATO or a national army could not?
Some tasks require multinational activity in which the United States may not want to be involved heavily or at all. There is currently a requirement for a presence in Bosnia, but the US might fail. It contributed towards the presence but Bosnia is not primarily a responsibility of the other end of the transatlantic alliance; it is primarily the responsibility of the European end. I tell the hon. Gentleman what I sometimes say to my French colleagues: it is possible to maximise the utility of NATO and the EU in a non-competitive way, provided that we shape slightly different roles for them. The EU offers an opportunity especially for bringing together prevention, rehabilitation and civil-military organisation on the ground. That is not as easily achieved by NATO. Indeed, some of our transatlantic partners in NATO may not be especially enthusiastic about getting involved in those matters.
For example, let us consider Darfur. Sometimes I think that the world, by which I mean non-politicians—ordinary people who have as much insight and often greater sense than us—has watched events in the past 10 or 15 years and asked why somebody is not doing something. That was probably the case in Rwanda, is possibly the case in the Congo and definitely the case in Sudan.
As the right hon. and learned Gentleman says, it may well be the case in Zimbabwe as frustration with and tragic disappointment in the conduct of the country's leader grow.
When people ask why someone is not doing something, we have a duty to respond. However, we cannot always be in the lead. For example, in Darfur, it is right that the African Union should lead. We cannot always go in with only military means. Sometimes we have to go in under other leadership, for example, the African Union, and give an array of assistance, which is necessary for security but is not purely defence. I believe that we can develop some of the EU's possibilities and potential and the European security and defence policy without threatening NATO.
Although the position is better than in late 2004, Darfur remains unstable and insecure and the numbers of internally displaced people are increasing. Their protection and that of those who remain in their villages is not yet assured. The African Union's monitoring mission in Darfur is to be expanded to more than 7,000 personnel. Through NATO and the EU, we are making a contribution to giving logistic support and moving in the troops that the African Union wants to put in.
I appear to have made a mistake if I implied that we were in a battle group with France. I do not think that I said that—I thought that I said that along with France we provided a battle group. I did not mean that we provided a battle group along with France. There are two battle groups—our battle group and the French battle group. I hope that I have clarified my phraseology.
This week's events ensure that we will pass on the torch of remembrance to our younger people. There are three lessons. First, there is the unimaginably terrible cost of war. I am not sure that anyone in the Chamber has been involved in a war. I have not, and I do not think, however graphically it was described to me, that I could understand what it means to take part in war. The hon. Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan), however, may have been on active service, even if he has not been to war. It is difficult for my generation, whose fathers, mothers, grandparents were involved in war, to understand it, but it is much more difficult for younger people. Veterans' week is partly meant to bring home to them the high cost of war.
Secondly, we must remember that difficult judgments about war can show us that the costs increase with appeasement. It is always difficult to make judgments, but one thing that we can learn from the 1930s and 1940s is that if we are not prepared to take a stand on certain issues early enough, those issues will not go away; and instead of thousands, tens of millions of people may die. Thirdly, we must learn the benefits of peace and partnership. Whatever our differences with our colleagues in Europe, it must be considered an unmitigated success that in the last 60 years, after centuries of war and loss of life on a grand scale, we have managed to maintain peace in western Europe through the European Union. That would not have been likely in every part of the present EU had that institution not existed.
There are therefore lessons which we need to pass on. Above all, this week's events highlight the esteem in which we hold our armed forces and their importance. We maintain our position in the world and we act, I hope, through the discharge of our responsibilities as a force for good. Ultimately, that is because of the courage and hard work of the armed forces and the civilians who support them.
In conclusion, we owe a great deal to the armed forces serving today in many parts of the world, those who served so faithfully during the struggle against tyranny by defeating the most poisonous regime ever to emerge from Europe—the Nazi regime in the second world war—and those who have served their country and suffered hardship since then. Without them, none of us would be here today to defend and participate in democracy on behalf of a free people in a free country. That, above all, is the legacy and the testimony of those who have served in our armed forces.
It is quite a long time since the Secretary of State generously thanked me for offering to withdraw today's business if necessary in the light of this morning's circumstances. Like him, I am pleased that we have been able to hold this debate, as it is important that democracy shows that it is resilient against terrorism and that the terrorists are never allowed to achieve their evil purpose. It is therefore important that we debate this issue today. I apologise to the House because, for personal reasons, I cannot be here for the winding-up speeches.
Our debate takes place in difficult and, indeed, dark circumstances. This morning's incidents obviously have ramifications for our security and our defence. I am sure that there will be a time when questions need to be asked and perhaps lessons will need to be learned, but that time is not now. This is a time when our thoughts and prayers must be with the bereaved and the injured, and our gratitude, admiration and total support must be with our dedicated emergency services in the difficult work that they are carrying out on our behalf today. I pay tribute to them.
Like the Secretary of State, I pay tribute this week in particular to our veterans. It has been a real honour to be with them on a number of occasions and to be able to thank them for what they did for us. It is important that we never forget that and the sacrifices that so many of them made.
I pay a heartfelt tribute to our armed forces. We ask an enormous amount of them in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and other places. I have seen them at work in those locations in my previous role as shadow Foreign Secretary and I can say only that their professionalism and courage are second to none—we owe them a great debt of gratitude, too. However, those widespread postings underline the changing nature of today's security threat compared with the more predictable threat of the cold war. The consequent demands on our armed forces have been far greater than expected, and they will continue to be so. As the Secretary of State pointed out, we will continue to have a world role. I agree with much of what the right hon. Gentleman said about our responsibilities in the world, but if we are to ask our armed forces to undertake those responsibilities on our behalf, we owe it to them more than ever to ensure that they are properly funded, properly trained and properly equipped.
The recent National Audit Office report summed up the position, stating:
"the operations on which the United Kingdom's Armed Forces are committed have consistently exceeded this planned level of activity in the past three years. The Department considers that it is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future."
Conservative Members have in recent years repeatedly emphasised that fact, which has important consequences for our armed forces' structure, their training, their equipment and their overall readiness.
The Secretary of State provided a more philosophical dissertation today, but it is important that we examine the NAO report with some care. In my view it made grim reading, exposing serious or critical weaknesses in the ability of large sections of the armed forces to meet their readiness targets. It finds that 36 per cent. of forces had serious weaknesses in their readiness levels and describes 2 per cent. as critical—although I understand that that problem has now been addressed.
The capabilities of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force are being degraded as money is diverted to the Army for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In just one year the Royal Navy has seen a sixfold increase in cannibalising, whereby spare parts are plundered from one ship to keep another at sea, and for five of the past six years the armed forces have been operating at levels far above those thought to be sustainable.
On the Army, the report specifically finds that
"the Land contribution to any Joint Rapid Reaction Force will remain limited beyond the end of 2006."
It states:
"there continue to be shortages of essential personnel, including general and specialist medical staff"—
and that
"the cannibalisation of equipment will deplete the remaining pool of equipment that is available for other operations or to replace equipment damaged on operations."
That raises serious questions, which I hope the Minister of State will answer when he winds up the debate. For a start, what land contribution are we currently able to make and what units are potentially available? How many units, whether on operations or not, can be properly equipped following a process of what the report calls cannibalisation?
The report paints a devastating picture of the extent to which the Royal Navy has been deliberately degraded. It states:
"the Department has deliberately decided that it should take risk against the peacetime readiness levels of some maritime forces, reducing resource allocations for the first two years"
of the planning period. Those changes have introduced further risks to the Royal Navy's capability. The report notes:
"The readiness of the fleet began to decline in 2002 . . . and is forecast to keep falling during the Reduced Support Period, recovering, in a best case, from 2006–07 and in a worst case only after 2010."
How on earth does that meet the short-term availability needed for the taskforce requirements of the Government's expeditionary strategy and the long-term versatility of the fleet that is supposed to be at the heart of current defence doctrine?
We heard the Secretary of State say earlier that size does not really matter. Is there an irreducible minimum size for the Royal Navy?
I was coming to that. The Secretary of State used the example of the battle of Trafalgar. However, the great thing about the battle of Trafalgar was that although we had fewer ships, they were all in the same place, where they were needed. The simple truth is that a ship, however potent it is, cannot be in more than one place at a time. As we reduce the numbers, we therefore reduce the capabilities. This is nothing new. I draw the hon. Gentleman's attention to early-day motion 151, which has been signed by 99 Conservative Members. I am sorry that it appears not to have been signed by anyone from the other parties. It says:
"This House acknowledges that modern warships are much more powerful than their predecessors, but notes the obvious fact that the same vessel, however potent, cannot be in two places at once; deplores statements by the Government in the previous Parliament that numbers of platforms are no longer relevant".
I suspect that that addresses the point that the hon. Gentleman was making.
Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?
I will in a moment.
The recent Trafalgar day on the Solent, which I was privileged enough to attend, was certainly an uplifting experience, but, like my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), I felt a twinge of shame that our Navy is now smaller than that of France. I want to ask the Secretary of State whether our maritime security interests are really less pressing than those of France. If not, why are we allowing a situation to arise in which we are less able to deliver on them?
My right hon. and learned Friend might have heard me draw the NAO report to the attention of the Secretary of State at Defence Question Time on Monday. The Secretary of State replied that our forces in Iraq were showing their customary verve and élan, as the NAO report also makes clear in a very balanced judgment. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree, however, that we are now reaching a serious situation, particularly in regard to the Royal Navy? Does he agree, too, that there is a heavy responsibility on him? We have to make choices in opposition. I am not going to press him too much on this point now, but there are financial choices to be made, and we must make a commitment that we will reverse this decline in the Royal Navy when we next enter government.
My hon. Friend will find that another early-day motion that was tabled recently deplores the fact that four of our frigates are being decommissioned at the moment. Indeed, I attended a very sad ceremony in Marlborough in my constituency last Sunday, at which we undertook the custody of the bell and the ensign of HMS Marlborough, which is being decommissioned this weekend. We made it clear during the election that, by providing £2.7 billion more than the current defence budget, we would have kept those four frigates. We made that undertaking at that time. Obviously, we are some way away from producing our next election manifesto, so my hon. Friend will understand if I do not go into details of commitments for the future.
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
I will in a moment.
It is obvious that if these reductions—
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
May I just finish this point? Then, I will certainly give way.
If these reductions are to be made, it is obvious that the Navy will have to change the way in which it works. We cannot go on doing what we are doing with less and less to do it with. In the Government's response to the House of Commons Defence Committee report, "Future Capabilities", they stated that
"this year we will be implementing changes to three of our six Standing Tasks".
That will result in further reduction in the provision and support for British interests and overseas territories. In my view, this represents another abdication of our responsibilities. This is a sad day for the Navy.
I remember the Conservatives' promise of the £2.7 billion investment. However, it was based on a proposed £1.8 billion cut in defence, related to inefficiencies. We asked at the time where those cuts were going to take place. Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman tell us the answer now?
My predecessor, who did a tremendous job at the Dispatch Box, made it clear on a number of occasions that we had worked out our figures very carefully. At the last election, we were able to say categorically to the country that we would have saved those four frigates. We would have made that money available, and we would have saved the four battalions as well.
Am I picking up correctly the thrust of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's argument? Is Conservative policy on the Navy to retain numbers irrespective of the task that needs to be done or any change in the jobs that the Navy has to do nowadays? In that case, we should still have a Navy of cold-war size for a task that no longer exists.
No, as the hon. Gentleman would understand if he had listened to what I said. The Government admit that the Navy's tasks will have to change owing to the reductions that they are making. The Government are having to accept that that is what their reductions involve. For example, when we consider the decommissioning of frigates, HMS Marlborough was 15 years old and HMS Grafton is eight years old. The idea that we should scrap, decommission or sell on to another Navy ships that were commissioned only within such time periods requires serious explanations from the Government that have not been forthcoming.
I turn to the RAF. The NAO report refers to the temporary reduction in flying hours for fast-jet pilots from 17.5 hours a month to 16.5 for the duration of 2005–06. The current requirement is already a reduction from 18.5 hours, and the number of flying hours for fast-jet pilots has been reducing over recent years. On Monday, the Minister of State said:
"We intend to increase the hours next year."—[Official Report, 4 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 13.]
So will he tell the House whether that intention to increase flying hours will benefit all our pilots? Will flying time return to 18.5 hours or more? If not, what assessment has he made of the impact of the present reduction on the training of our airmen? Does he agree with the NAO that it could seriously degrade the skills of combat pilots? That is a very serious accusation indeed.
The NAO report should shame the Government. I have to say that I feel sorry for the Secretary of State because I believe that his heart is in the right place in relation to defence and our armed services. Certainly, much of what he said today indicated that. However, in the strategic defence review, for which he can take personal credit, the shortfalls that we are dealing with at present were not envisaged. His frustration at the bad stewardship of his predecessor, the current Leader of the House, on whose watch all that occurred, must be as great as mine. I hope that the Secretary of State will not be as supine as his predecessor in the face of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is really the cause of the trouble. He has never understood the nature of defence and has cared even less.
The truth is that at a time when our armed forces are pressured as never before, with deployments constantly above normal levels, the Government have been responsible for a catalogue of disasters that have reduced the effectiveness of our armed forces and cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds. Let me give the Minister a few examples; the first one may be small, but it is indicative. The Ministry of Defence spent £5,000 on torches for the SAS that could not be used because they rattled.
The MOD lost track of 200,000 sets of body armour and £241,000-worth of ammunition—in Afghanistan of all places. The MOD accidentally—that is the word that was used—scrapped helicopter rotor blades at a loss of £151,000. It mislaid two huge C130 transport aircraft undercarriage struts at a cost of £296,000. A human centrifuge used to train pilots was scrapped because it was too expensive at £14 million, but the MOD had to pay £14.4 million to scrap it and the Malaysians took delivery of it. The list is endless.
Losses and special payments have risen relentlessly under the Government. The amount was £116 million in 2001–02, £260 million in 2002–03, £559 million in 2003–04 and the cost may top £1 billion in 2004–05. That wasted money could instead have been used to avoid some of the damaging cuts announced recently. If those losses and special payments had been brought under control, the Royal Navy could have retained its frigates and the Army its four battalions. It is hardly a record of which to be proud.
Any wastage should be stamped on, but was not the right hon. and learned Gentleman a member of a Government who dug a huge hole at Rosyth when they took the decision to move nuclear facilities to Plymouth, wasting about £900 million?
I do not have the full details of that and I would not want to answer the hon. Gentleman on that basis. However, I remember certain areas of expenditure, not on defence, but on the dome and in other areas, where the Government have shown themselves to be very insensitive to the way in which they waste public money. In this case, what makes it worse is that they are not only wasting taxpayers' money, but doing so in a way that is reducing the security of this country and letting down our armed forces.
The Government should be even less proud of the gaping vacuum that is growing in the vital context of training. The squeeze on the defence budget has had a devastating effect. Reductions in training have a progressively damaging effect on fighting power and ethos, and its maintenance should be central to the Government's policy. While a heavy commitment to operations can offset some of these disadvantages, particularly in respect of command training, reducing activity levels for field force units that are not committed to operations is a self-inflicted wound. It is important that our servicemen and women be properly trained—certainly as well as previously, if not better. That is simply not the case today. Individual soldiers are less well trained than they were, training standards are too low, gunnery and field firing camps are cancelled, and training between infantry, tanks, engineers and those parts of the Army that may have to co-operate and fight together rarely takes place. I understand that the Ministry of Defence is even examining whether to cut brigade level training further.
The Territorial Army, the Royal Naval Reserve and the Royal Auxiliary Air Force have traditionally supported and complemented our regular forces. Without their dedication, our regular forces would not be able to function as they do. They have become an integral part of our ability to operate on the ground, not least in conflict situations. But is it right to put such pressure on them, and on their families and jobs, just because the Government will not face up to the damage to regular recruitment caused by their defence policies? The trend in recruitment should be ringing louder alarm bells. Far from being buoyant, as it was described by a Minister a month ago, official figures that we have received from the Government in answers to written questions show that recruitment to the RAF has more than halved in the past three years, while the Royal Navy has experienced a 30 per cent. fall and the Army a 20 per cent. drop.
Those figures are alarming and underline the effects of the significant pressures that are being placed on our armed forces by this Government. Our reserve forces are not an infinite supply. The dramatic fall in TA recruitment since 1997, which was also recorded in a recent written answer, speaks volumes. Soon they will not be able to backfill for regular units. Then the emperor's new clothes, which are largely hidden by the TA blanket, will be revealed, and the Government will have a real security crisis to address but nothing to address it with. That is a black hole that no responsible Government should allow to arise.
I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman and to everyone else in the House, Madam Deputy Speaker. I really would like to stay to discuss some of these issues of war and peace and life and death, but for reasons that will be obvious, the House will understand that I have to leave for Cobra and another series of meetings.
I am sure, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I speak for the whole House in saying that we entirely understand that the Secretary of State has to leave. Indeed, he was kind enough to tell me before the debate that he might have to do so, and I undertook, on behalf of Conservative Members, to be understanding about that.
I wrote to the Secretary of State following an article in The Sunday Times that suggested that there was a £18 billion black hole in the procurement budget. In response, he queried the basis of the calculations and claimed that the equipment plan was fully funded. However, I remain to be convinced. The MOD's performance partnership agreement with the Cabinet Office and the Treasury states that the MOD must ensure
"a more conscious match between equipment capability requirements and resources with a more balanced and affordable 10-year Equipment Programme".
Can the Minister tell us which programmes have been cut to achieve that "more conscious match", because those words do not mean anything otherwise?
Certainly, there are major budgetary pressures in the MOD's key programmes. I gather that the network enabled capability programme was recently reviewed and that the four-star change delivery group
"re-emphasised its importance stating that the Department's ability to deliver the EP in future years . . . depended on successfully addressing and avoiding the £2.3–3.4Bn estimated integration risk in the EP."
Perhaps the Minister can tell us a little more about those integration risks.
In my letter to the Secretary of State I asked him to publish the equipment plan. Many other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the US, are able to publish their equivalents without damage to national security. I am sure that publication of the EP would be very much welcomed on all sides of the House. The truth is that our armed forces are undermanned, underequipped and undertrained. Given what I have just said, the prospects look even grimmer.
The Secretary of State mentioned the future of the nuclear deterrent. The Opposition hope that a full debate on the matter will be held soon. I shall not deal with it in detail today, but the Minister of State should be forewarned that I suspect that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) may have something to say about it when he winds up for the Opposition.
I am interested that the right hon. Gentleman is looking forward to a debate on the nuclear deterrent. In his early-day motion 149, he calls for a replacement for Trident. I have offered a helpful amendment to that EDM, but unfortunately he has not accepted it. Is he serious about having a debate on the need for Trident or would he just go ahead and order a new generation of nuclear weapons?
We have made it clear that we want a debate before a final decision is taken. Our motion sets out the Opposition view of the matter, and has been signed by 102 hon. Members. In contrast, what the hon. Gentleman calls his helpful amendment has been signed by just four people so far. On that basis, hon. Members are already giving some indication of which side of the argument they support.
Has the right hon. Gentleman had the opportunity to discuss in detail with Michael Portillo, the former Conservative Defence Secretary, what caused him to change his views on the deterrent?
I read Michael Portillo's article. He is a very lucid and fluent writer and I understand what persuaded him, but it did not persuade me. The Opposition want a full debate on the nuclear deterrent so that we can explain our position, and so that those with a contrary view can do the same.
In a wide-ranging debate like this, we are also able to explore specific military operations in which we are involved overseas. Like the Secretary of State, I shall start with Iraq. I supported the war, and still support it. However, I have long been critical of the abject failure to plan for the aftermath—a failure in which the Government were totally complicit. The disbandment of Iraq's internal security apparatus, which I criticised at the time, was, quite frankly, crass. Even the American Administration has made it clear that they think that it was a mistake. It created a security vacuum, into which insurgents poured. They continue to do so, and we are paying a heavy price for that.
Ever since the remarkably successful election in January, Iraq seems to be descending deeper into violence. The rise of ethnic militias, the weakness of the economy, continuing high levels of insurgency and the endemic kidnappings continue. All, I fear, flow directly from the lack of a post-conflict plan. The consequences are clear. We are told that the troops will stay as long as necessary and, in the much used phrase, until "the job is done". But what is the definition of "the job", and who will judge when it is done? What are the geographical limits within which we will judge whether the job has been done sufficiently for our troops to start coming home? Does "the job" refer to our area of control in Multi-National Division (South-East), or to what is happening throughout Iraq?
On Monday, I asked the Secretary of State the same question. He said that the Government
"have not decided and do not have any plans for operating outside MND (South-East), but it is impossible to make those decisions until we get to that stage."
Once the Government consider that the job in MND (South-East) is done, will the Minister clarify whether he would be prepared in principle to extend the mission of the British armed forces outside that area, if the US Government were to ask for British troops to assist in other sectors? If so, what would be the criteria governing such a decision? That is an important question, because drawing down ultimately depends on restoring adequate stability and security to Iraq, which itself depends on the presence in those areas of sufficiently trained Iraqi security forces.
On Monday, the Secretary of State said that
"approximately 170,000 security forces . . . are now sufficiently trained gradually to take the lead in counter-terrorism."—[Official Report, 4 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 15–16.]
In the interests of transparency in this central part of the coalition's plans to ensure future security in Iraq, will the Minister say how many of the Iraqi security forces could take the lead in counter-terrorism today? Is there any truth in reports that right now only three of 107 army battalions—that is, about 2,500 troops—are fully capable of operating independently?
Everything in the end follows from security. In its absence, reconstruction cannot go forward, Iraqis will not put their faith in their Government and we will not be able to leave responsibly. We need a clear indication not of the timetable, but of the Government's strategy for eventually leaving Iraq.The answer to the foregoing question may, however, to a large extent depend on our commitments to Afghanistan and the international security assistance force. The violence in Afghanistan, as we know, has recently heightened. There are new fears that Taliban forces will escalate attacks in the run-up to the September elections. There are growing concerns that the coalition forces are increasingly involved in a war of attrition and, worse still, a potential drugs war as well.
The Prime Minister said in 2001:
"Ninety per cent. of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan. The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy."
There is a terrible irony in those remarks. The Government volunteered to take charge of narcotic eradication, yet under their control poppy production is now at all-time record levels. US diplomats in Kabul are openly claiming that the United Kingdom is, in their words, "substantially responsible" for the failure to eradicate poppy fields. The question I have for the Minister of State is this: what is our priority and what will be our priority over the next years in Afghanistan—to quell the insurgency or to curtail poppy production? In both cases, what genuine support can we expect from Afghan forces?
The divisions over Iraq led to one of the worst periods in transatlantic relations for the past 60 years. The recent disagreements over Darfur were a further reminder of the animosity on defence that, in my view, sadly and wrongly has developed between NATO and the European Union. The agreement made between NATO and the EU in relation to Darfur on 9 June was a fudge. The United States wanted NATO to co- ordinate the airlift into Darfur. France demanded an exclusively EU mission. Now NATO and the EU will run side-by-side airlift missions, supposedly co-ordinated through offices in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Britain, in order to be friendly to both sides in this extraordinary situation, will be involved in both. It could not be worse. This unseemly spat and the grubby compromise that has followed it is bad for the suffering people of Darfur, for Europe and for the transatlantic alliance.
Europe, working through NATO, has an unprecedented chance to prove its military worth. Europe, working separately, will not do so. Many continental forces have only the most basic logistics and communications capabilities and can hardly operate at all at any distance from home. Few can credibly sustain their own operations and have to rely almost entirely on the United States for intelligence, strategic support and military muscle. Separate European military structures are a self-delusion that can only weaken Europe and undermine NATO. With profound changes of thinking in America, they might eventually even decouple the US from the defence of Europe. It is a high-risk strategy and one that I totally deplore.
On 15 June, the Prime Minister, rather surprisingly, referred in the House to the need for what he called
"serious debate . . . about. . . security policies for Europe in the early 21st century",
and he added the question:
"is our main alliance still with America?"—[Official Report, 15 June 2005; Vol. 435, c. 255–56.]
We would answer that with a resounding yes. Would the Government do so in the light of what has happened?
At a time when NATO can and must provide readily available, well trained forces for Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be a disaster if it was allowed to be undermined by ancient French jealousies or the fantasy of a European military superpower to rival the United States of America. NATO must remain the cornerstone of our national security and we must continue to play our full part in it. We must strengthen rather than weaken our armed forces. We need more infantry and more front-line capability. We believe that our Navy is now dangerously small and weakened and that scaling down our air power risks our security. The Government's defence policy owes more to the Chancellor's long-term ambitions than to the security requirements of the nation. We need greater manpower, better equipment and more training. Under this Government, in each case, we are getting less. They are risking the well-being of our armed forces and the security of our citizens. It is time they went away and thought again.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I had to think twice about whether I wanted to speak: this is a very sombre day.
I shall confine my remarks to the subject of the nuclear deterrent. I do not want to be painted as some kind of eccentric or peacenik, or as someone who would gamble with the nation's security. That is the charge that is normally levelled at people who question our need for the nuclear deterrent. It is a funny old world, is it not? We have a former Conservative Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, saying publicly and very cogently that there are better ways of spending the money.
I have often told people outside that this place is like a giant adult education institute where we can learn things. Four or five weeks ago, I learned a huge amount from Robert McNamara, who spoke in the Moses Room in the House of Lords. Opposition Members were present. It was as if I were in touch with history. Robert McNamara was 88 years old and as sharp as a tack—slightly deaf, but so impressive. There he was, 40 years ago, in the Oval Office at 4.30 pm on Saturday 27 October 1962—not as a note-taker but as an active participant, advising the President on how to respond to the Cuban missile crisis. There were three people in the Oval Office: McNamara himself, President Kennedy and the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Robert McNamara referred to him as "the chief".
Robert McNamara told us that the military were pressing for an invasion of Cuba. The military said that the CIA had intelligence showing that the missiles—there were photographs of them—did not have nuclear weapons on them. I was a paper boy at the time, frightened out of my wits like everyone else. Kennedy was told that there was a flotilla approaching Cuba with those nuclear warheads. The military said "You have got to invade, Mr. President." Of course, Kennedy did not invade. The flotilla turned round and went back to the Soviet Union.
Robert McNamara told us that it was only on the dissolution—the collapse—of the Soviet Union that we found out that there were missiles there that were targeted and had nuclear weapons attached. The information that the CIA and the military gave Kennedy was simply wrong. Had they decided, at 4.30 pm on Saturday 27 October 1962, to invade, there would probably not be a planet Earth now—or it would be just a charred sphere circling the sun.
Robert McNamara spent a lot of time thinking about that. He is not a peacenik; he is not an eccentric; he is a man who knows what he is talking about. He is advocating a massive cutback in the world's nuclear arsenal. He told us, and Opposition Members, that the United States had 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power to cause a Hiroshima. Of those 6,000 nuclear warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, and can be launched in 15 minutes. Robert McNamara told us that that was
"so bizarre as to be beyond belief".
Despite the end of the cold war fifteen or so years ago, McNamara said that US nuclear weapons policies are today essentially what they were 40 years ago. He said that they are
"immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and very, very dangerous in terms of the risk of accidental use".
That is despite the non-proliferation regime that has been with us for 40 years. His speech was an education to me and to all those MPs and peers who listened to him with such rapt attention.
It is not only Robert McNamara to whom we should listen. We should also listen to the former US Defence Secretary—a succession of Defence Secretaries are speaking out on this issue—William Perry, who served in the Clinton Administration. My friend the Secretary of State for Defence appeared to be unaware of William Perry's remarks, which is unfortunate, because they are important. William Perry said:
"There is a greater than 50 per cent. probability of a nuclear detonation on US soil within the decade."
Why did he say that? He said it because there is fissile material lying around all over the shop that is not being safeguarded. In the former Soviet Union, there are nuclear dumps everywhere. There are rotting nuclear submarines in the Arctic. The whole world is scattered with debris left over from the cold war.
The US spends the staggering figure—I would run out of zeroes if I tried to write it down—of $400 billion on defence. Robert McNamara told us that if it spent a tiny fraction of that, perhaps $1 billion, on attempting to safeguard the fissile material, we would all sleep more safely in our beds.
I am listening to the hon. Gentleman's speech with great interest. For the sake of completeness and accuracy, he should perhaps mention the significant amount of money and support that the US gives to the disposal of nuclear weapons within the former Soviet Union.
I do not doubt that, but Robert McNamara says that more should be done. It is an incontestable fact that those dumps exist and that they are not secure. They should be safeguarded. In fact, two US senators, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, sought to make appropriations to safeguard and protect those nuclear dumps, but their efforts were not taken up by the Administration, which is astonishing.
We have the bombs in London today and the tragedy of what has happened, but it is hard to imagine what might happen if some of these crazed, fundamentalist, Osama bin Laden terrorist groups got their hands on fissile material and had a suitcase nuclear bomb. I am not being fanciful. We must wake up to the possibilities. We need our Ministers to talk to the Americans and the others on the UN Security Council to get them to start taking the issue seriously. Instead of lecturing the country about how we need to update Trident, we should do something about safeguarding that fissile material, which could be the end of us.
My generation has grown used to the bomb. We grew up with it and it is very familiar. I was chatting to a colleague of mine, George Adam, who is the deputy mayor of my local council. He told me of his time as a serviceman, when he was sent to Christmas island for the British nuclear tests. He and the others were told to dress in white overalls. When the bomb was about to go off, he was told to turn his back to it, screw up his eyes and put his hands over them. He did that, but he told me that, when the bomb went off, he saw a blinding flash of light through his hands. He has not forgotten that and, when he told me about the Christmas island experience, I thought we should perhaps educate or re-educate people about the consequences of nuclear weapons and the terrible instability that they cause.
As we know, the Prime Minister is a great believer in open debate; he wants to encourage it. A couple of weeks ago, in answer to my friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), he said that the Government were going to
"listen to hon. Members before making any decisions".—[Official Report, 29 June 2005; Vol. 435, c. 1292.]
He said "listen", but the tragedy is that we will not have a vote on the matter in this House of Commons. We could spend billions on what, if anything, is to replace Trident. What is the point about endless debate on the deterrent if we cannot decide here whether it is the right thing for the country?
My friends the Members for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) and for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) and I have tabled a motion for debate in the parliamentary Labour party. It is not there to embarrass the Government. It says:
"This PLP questions the wisdom of spending billions replacing the Trident"
nuclear deterrent. The chair of the PLP has told me that the motion will come up for debate before we break for the recess, and I shall press it to a vote in the PLP. I see my friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) shaking his head, but it does not matter whether the vote is lost. Sometimes we just need a vote, instead of having decisions taken by some kind of osmosis. A lot of people out there, and many young people, want us to take a more robust line on nuclear disarmament. They do not want to hear macho posturing; they want us to take the issue seriously.
The Minister who replies will tell me that it was a manifesto commitment that we retain the nuclear deterrent. Sometimes before we enter into manifesto commitments, we could have a ballot of all Labour party members. If we had such a ballot of all members—a kind of clause IV moment—we would not spend billions replacing Trident.
My friend the Defence Secretary said in the debate and on Monday in defence questions that the Government are making progress. I acknowledge that. He told us that the Government unilaterally—so they can do some things unilaterally—have got rid of the WE177 freefall nuclear bomb and have de-targeted the Trident missiles. All those Trident missiles are prowling about on the ocean floor, but they are not targeted at an enemy. The Government have reduced—this is my Government—the number of warheads and the number of boats at sea, and I think that that is great. We ought to applaud and acknowledge what the Government have done unilaterally, but it is not enough. We still have Trident submarines, whose sole purpose—they do not have a dual purpose—is to blow up the world. I would get rid of all the Trident submarines, unconditionally.
There are some people on my side and definitely some on the Opposition Benches who say that that is a step too far. Perhaps the former Soviet Union, or Russia, is no longer a threat, but what about the Irans and North Koreas of this world? We could spend a few millions on a stand-off cruise missile, pop it in a fast jet and send it over the horizon to Korea if that is what we want. There are ways of having a nuclear deterrent without spending billions.
I am listening carefully to what my hon. Friend is saying and it is bringing back all my yesterdays in the 1980s Labour party—I still have some of the scars from those days. He argues for unilaterally giving up our nuclear deterrent, which is fine and I respect him for that. However, in his last comment he argued for a cheaper version of the nuclear deterrent. He cannot argue that we should give up the deterrent, yet say that a cheaper option could be available to deal with possible threats from failed states such as North Korea.
I thought that I was speaking as clearly as I am capable of doing, so it saddens me that my friend, who said that he was listening to my words, misunderstood me. Let me say it again slowly for him. I am not in favour of the Trident submarine system, so I would get rid of it—I said that. I also said that some of my friends on this side of the House would look at other options and went on to describe the cheaper options, such as stand-off cruise missiles. There is no contradiction in my position.
My hon. Friend will recall that Rob McNamara made a similar plea when he spoke at the non-proliferation treaty review conference in New York recently. Will he acknowledge that one of the arguments used by the elements in Iran and North Korea that want to develop nuclear weapons is the fact that the five declared nuclear weapons states show no signs of disarming? Indeed, their position is quite the opposite because Britain and the United States show every sign of wanting to re-arm further. It becomes harder to argue against nuclear proliferation if we ourselves are expanding the nuclear horizons.
That good point allows me to return to my old friend Michael Portillo. He has turned into a real ally because he wrote in The Sunday Times on 19 June:
"Whitehall thinks that possessing nuclear weapons helps to secure Britain's position as one of the five members of the UN security council. But if the ability to blow up the planet is the qualification for presiding over the world's peacekeeping body, then we should already have rewarded India, Pakistan and Israel with membership and we should be preparing to welcome Iran and North Korea."
I do not know whether the British Government think that the nuclear deterrent is a pre-condition of retaining our membership of the UN Security Council. I appreciate that the situation is immensely fluid, so we must start to think laterally about the way in which we respond to new challenges, instead of staying locked in an old position.
I am amazed that my hon. Friend is now a bedfellow of a right-wing individual such as Robert McNamara, who impressed me when I met him. I am also amazed by the idea of my hon. Friend getting into bed with Michael Portillo. Rather than trying to close the argument down, surely the way forward would be to do exactly what the Government want to do and have a serious debate about the shape and form that our nuclear deterrent should take, which I would support.
What a chilling thought: getting into bed with Michael Portillo. I too want a debate, but I do not want an open-ended debate that goes nowhere. I said in Defence questions on Monday—I think—that I want a focused debate. I want the Government to produce background papers showing advantages, disadvantages and costs. We must consider the effect on the Royal Navy. It was said earlier that the fleet is going down from 33 boats to 27—
To 25 ships.
The fleet is going down to 25 ships. Spending a fortune on replacing the boats—the terminology for the submarines—will have implications for the Royal Navy budget.
I want to end—[Interruption.] Is my friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) listening? I do not know how much it would cost to replace Trident because although I have tabled parliamentary questions about it, I am waiting for the answers to come through the pipeline. The Library has just published an excellent paper, which I would recommend to all hon. Members. It is called "Trident and the future of the British Nuclear Deterrent" and it tells us that Trident cost more than £9 billion—that is £9,000 million—at 1991 costs. If we go down that road again, another staggering sum of money that we cannot afford will be expended. It is a matter not only of Trident, but of something much more prosaic that we have all grown up with—the nuclear weapons establishment in Aldermaston. Since 2000—only five years ago—it has cost us £1.5 billion, as the Library paper tells us. If people knew that, they would be marching again today.
That is my view and I hope that the Prime Minister is listening—not just today, but subsequently. That is my contribution to the start of our debate. I hope that we can have an open debate, that the Government can be serious rather than just going through the motions and that we can secure in due course a cogent response to the points that I have made.
The hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) has raised a very important matter, to which I hope to return later in my own remarks.
The bomb blasts in London today have cast a terrible shadow over the whole country and this afternoon's debate and I associate myself with the comments of the Secretary of State for Defence and the shadow Defence Secretary. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those caught up in these terrible incidents and to their families and friends. Our thoughts are also with the emergency services as they go about their difficult jobs.
I wholeheartedly endorse the decision of the Secretary of State and others to proceed with this debate. It is right to do so, as it sends an important signal to those who wish to destroy our democracy. I thank the Secretary of State, who is no longer in his place, for his courtesy in giving me advance notice that, because of other serious commitments, he would probably not be present to listen to the speeches of myself and others. We fully understand that.
For all the disagreements in the House on different aspects of defence issues, there is a consensus that we live in a rapidly changing world. The uncertainties of old have changed but not disappeared and we are still coming to terms with the ugly new uncertainties of the 21st century. Our armed forces have to grapple with those uncertainties day in, day out, and I echo the tributes of others to the professionalism, dedication and bravery of all who serve on our behalf. The reputation of our armed forces is second to none, so we are right to be proud of them and grateful to them.
This year, we mark the 60th anniversary of the end of world war two, which is a sobering reminder of the costs and horrors of war. This week, we have been paying tribute to veterans of all wars and conflicts, and I applaud the Government's initiative in establishing the event. Last week, many of us were fortunate enough to participate in the magnificent Trafalgar celebrations on the Solent—a fantastic tribute, on which all involved should be congratulated. It was a privilege to be there. All those commemorations and events are a reminder of the freedoms that we enjoy and we must never take them for granted.
As part of the Trafalgar celebrations, some of us had the good fortune last week to attend a reception on HMS Invincible in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. What we did not necessarily appreciate at the time was the fact that it may have been the ship's swansong, as we now hear that it is to be mothballed.
The fate of HMS Invincible is symbolic of the major changes taking place as a result of the defence White Paper. Across our armed forces, a small-scale revolution is taking place at the same time as we witness some of the highest levels of commitment in the post-war period. The Defence Committee's fourth report of the last Parliament raised serious questions about the ability of the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces to manage that process. The Secretary of State has given a forthright response. In so doing, he has set his Ministry some very challenging tasks at a very difficult time.
Iraq remains the country's most pressing overseas commitment. Like other hon. Members, I pay tribute to the professionalism of those in the British armed forces who have served and continue to serve there. Similarly, I convey my condolences and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends to the families and friends of those who have given their lives in the conflict. We should not forget those who are recovering from the injuries and wounds that they have suffered there.
To say the least, the security situation in Iraq remains perilous—with more than 1,000 deaths since the formation of the new Iraqi Government in April and the recent kidnapping of the Egyptian ambassador-designate and the attempted assassinations of the Bahraini and Pakistani ambassadors this week—but some progress has been made in the provision of basic public services. With the Iraqi Ministry of Health reporting that more than 75 hospitals and nearly all the primary care clinics that were damaged or looted during and after the 2003 conflict have been rehabilitated and with further work under way to construct new—and rehabilitate older—hospitals in Iraq, progress looks good. However, we should not deceive ourselves that Iraqis are enjoying anything approaching a normal life, and they will continue to have a long, hard haul over the coming months and years.
Over what is now a very short period, the people of Iraq must finalise the constitutional arrangements that will enable them to take full control of their own sovereignty. The constitution must be drawn up by the 55 member committee by the middle of August to allow a referendum by the end of September that will, in turn, allow fresh elections to be held by the middle of December. None of that will be easy.
There are some positive signs, which we welcome. The constitutional committee has agreed to the membership of 15 Sunnis and the head of the general conference for Sunnis in Iraq has said that Sunni clerics will soon encourage people to register with the electoral commission and vote, raising hopes that political efforts by the Shi'a and Kurdish-dominated Government to draw the Sunnis into the political process may now be bearing fruit.
As that political process develops, the ongoing role of the coalition forces is increasingly in the spotlight. While recognising the key security role of the multinational forces, it is clear that the Iraqis themselves see the occupation, however mandated, as an ongoing political problem, not least because, as yet, there appears to be no clarity about an exit strategy. The signals from Washington are mixed: the Vice-President says that the insurgency is in its last throes, while the US Defence Secretary says that it may take a dozen years to quell the insurgents.
The Iraqis are right to want a clear exit strategy for the multinational forces and it is the coalition's responsibility to set out one. The Secretary of State for Defence gave some signs of that happening in his interview on the "Today" programme earlier this week and in his response to the questions from the shadow Defence Secretary on Monday and, indeed, in his speech today. We have started to see the beginnings of a strategy, and we are encouraged by that, as far as it goes.
Liberal Democrat Members remain of the view that we can make the greatest contribution to Iraq's internal stability and the development of its body politic by setting out a clear timetable for a phased withdrawal of our forces in line with the United Nations mandate authorised by Security Council resolutions. That must take account of the security situation, the state of public services and the completion of the constitutional process, but without such a strategy, the chances of a swift improvement in the terrible conditions in which Iraqis lead their lives will be minimal and the risks that we will become mired in a situation outwith our control will become all the greater.
In Afghanistan, we face a different set of challenges and realities, and we are taking on greater commitments. Much progress has been made since the fall of the Taliban Government in 2001 and another important step will be reached with the parliamentary and provincial elections due in mid-September, but the security situation in the country is bleak. As the UN special envoy, Jean Arnault, reported to the Security Council a couple of weeks ago, it is going through a "negative evolution", with almost 400 people killed by the Taliban this year. The soaring levels of heroin production are another indication of a country that is still in deep trouble and the statistics that the Secretary of State offered us earlier highlight that starkly.
We support the efforts that the Government are making as part of the international community's programme to bring long-term stability to Afghanistan. The leadership role being taken by the United Kingdom is a reflection of the skills and qualities of our armed forces, and they are to be congratulated on that. Like others, we look forward to hearing details of the forces to be deployed, as the headquarters Allied Rapid Reaction Corps takes on its responsibilities, as anticipated, in 2006. But this commitment comes at a time when the armed forces are seriously stretched. Squaring the circle of these substantial commitments will be no easy task.
The recent National Audit Office report, which has been referred to already, set out some real problems in respect of readiness. It gave the MOD credit for its readiness reporting system, but throughout the document serious questions are raised about our armed forces' ability to react swiftly to new and unforeseen threats or operational imperatives. It makes for stark reading. In the period under review, more than a third of our armed forces had "serious weaknesses" in their readiness levels. The NAO identifies intense pressure on supplies and personnel, which, it says, have been redistributed to a point where effective and well-equipped fighting forces can only be assembled by widespread cannibalisation of military units and supplies. It concludes that the MOD
"relies heavily on redistributing people and equipment to bring Force Elements up to sufficient strength to deploy on operations and expects to continue to do so".
The NAO report is clear that military activity levels have consistently exceeded defence planning assumptions, and that that will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Inevitably, this brings into question the very assumptions themselves and the sustainability of the current, unexpected levels of commitment. We will doubtless hear more on this issue during the wind-ups, but a detailed MOD response to the report is surely needed as a matter of urgency.
Echoing the conclusions of the NAO report, recently published figures reveal shortages of essential personnel across the services. Answers to parliamentary questions have highlighted that the Army is short of more than 600 medical personnel— including nurses, surgeons and anaesthetists—400 intelligence personnel, 900 logisticians and more than 1,300 engineers. The Royal Marines are short of more than 600 engineers. These are essential personnel. Our armed forces' ability to carry out demanding operations rapidly, effectively and safely must surely be put in jeopardy without these essential specialist and support personnel. Again, we need to know what action has been taken to address these shortfalls.
It is not just the specialists who are under strength. The MOD's own figures show that the Army has at least 1,600 fewer soldiers than the target strength, and it has been suggested that the shortfall figure is expected to increase. The Army's full-time fighting strength, as of 1 April, was some 102,000, yet the official training requirement is for more than 104,000. The Army's size is being cut by the regimental restructuring announced last year, and it is now short of well over 1,000 soldiers.
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the restructuring of the battalions is intended to deal with precisely the problems that he referred to, and in two ways? First, it will free up more skilled personnel to support infantry battalions and, secondly, having larger congregations of military bases will make it easier to recruit personnel with specialised skills.
I fully understand the objectives of the Government's policy and realise that there may be a time lag between setting out those objectives and achieving them. However, the discrepancies are worrying, and I hope that the Minister can offer the House some reassurance about what is going on when he winds up.
The peacekeeping or peace-enforcement tasks that the Army is increasingly required to undertake are manpower-intensive and will surely prove increasingly difficult to carry out without sufficient troops. Fewer troops are being asked to do more and, as a result, some battalions have had only months at home between demanding operational tours—far less than the two-year interval target. That has substantially restricted essential rest and recuperation time, time spent with families, and training time. If that continues in the medium term, it will inevitably undermine the Army's effectiveness. As has already been pointed out, in the Navy there is an equally serious shortage of more than 1,700 personnel.
At the moment, it does not appear that recruitment will be the answer to some of these problems. In each year since 2002, there has been a significant fall in the number of civilian applications to join the United Kingdom regular forces—in each service, whether for officer or other ranks. Civilian applications to join the Army outside the officer ranks fell from nearly 37,000 in 2002 to just over 28,000 in 2004–05. Non-officer civilian applications in the same period in the RAF and the Navy fell by more than 4,000 and 2,000 respectively.
That is a picture of dramatic decline in interest in joining the services, which is reflected in similar problems in attracting reservists. If we add to the mix the difficulties with fitness, regimental restructuring and changes in terms for redundancy, it makes for a serious list of problems that need urgent attention in the Ministry of Defence.
The future replacement of the nuclear deterrent is reappearing on the national agenda, as the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) highlighted. Given the long lead times in any decision-making process, that is understandable. However, we must not lose sight of the overwhelming responsibility on all the nuclear powers to seek ways of achieving multilateral disarmament.
The Secretary of State rightly drew attention to the Government's significant reductions in nuclear weapons since 1997. We applaud that, but internationally, there is still a long way to go. In the aftermath of the failure of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference in New York a few weeks ago, we are in a worrying position.
We know that some countries such as India and Pakistan have obtained nuclear weapons and that others, for example, North Korea, are trying to acquire them. There is therefore a pressing need to create the international political climate in which multilateral disarmament can take place. We must also not lose sight of the danger of proliferation through the passing of expertise and materials from the former Soviet Union. Those should be our first priorities.
Although we must not lose our focus on those issues, we will in due course have to consider any future replacement of Trident. On Monday, the Secretary of State said:
"Decisions on any replacement of the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent are likely to be necessary in the lifetime of the current Parliament".—[Official Report, 4 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 5.]
That echoes the wording of the White Paper in the previous Parliament. He repeated those sentiments today. He went on to give an assurance that the Government had not started considering, far less making decisions, on the details. We accept that assurance but it is vital that, in due course, the Government set out their intentions in a new White Paper so that we can hold a proper public debate about those matters.
As the Secretary of State made clear, there is a range of challenging matters to consider, not least the future strategic security context, the deterrence capability of any new system and the cost of the replacement. Those issues must all be properly thought through.
Today, the events elsewhere in London rightly dominate our thoughts. We cannot know yet whose evil plan it was, although we will all have our suspicious. However, we know that the emergency services, assisted by the armed forces as necessary, are dealing with the situation to the highest professional standards. Our ability to rely on those men and women should never be taken for granted and support for them must unite us all.
I begin by endorsing the final comments of the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore). It is usually a great pleasure to speak in our less frequent defence debates in the House, but anything we discuss today is bound to be overshadowed by the dreadful events taking place around us. Although we emphatically accept the Home Secretary's earlier comments that we should not prejudge matters or speculate about what has happened, the events are a sign of the changing nature of the threat that we face. The country now faces an asymmetric threat, with which it has probably never seriously been confronted in the past. That has an impact on Government defence policy and our defence in the world.
The Government were right in their early years to produce the strategic defence review to deal with the changing threats and subsequently to add a further chapter and a new White Paper, focusing especially on the new sorts of threat that we face, especially from international terrorism. I, for one, am a great supporter of the Government's policy in that area. Their defence review has proved to be one of the best in the world, and it has stood the test of time. It is used by other countries, especially in NATO, as a model for reforming the old cold war structures of our armed forces to meet new challenges and the changed security environment. I am, however, the first to recognise that there is a difference between introducing a new policy and deciding where we want to be in future and actually getting there. The hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk made some valid points, as he acknowledged the dangers that we face in trying to achieve our goals. The Government are undertaking a major and necessary restructuring of our armed forces to meet the challenges and make sure that we are more responsive and flexible. That will enable us to address concurrent threats, travel to places quickly in smaller groups, and achieve a bigger impact when we arrive.
No one in the House would disagree with those objectives, but some of us are concerned about how we will get from A to B, so I shall spend most of my time on the excellent fourth report by the Select Committee on Defence, on the future capabilities of the British armed forces. If we do not get that right, we cannot deliver any of our future objectives or meet the challenges that we face. The Select Committee did the House a service in questioning the Executive about their ability to deliver future capabilities through their defence policy. I do not intend to address all the matters covered in the report, but I recommend that hon. Members read it. I shall address three of its recommendations on a crucial area of future defence policy—the maintenance of our front-line fast jet capability.
In any new scenario that we face, whether it is ship-based, or involves infantry battalions or battle groups, we are dependent on the availability of front-line jets. For the foreseeable future, we will not be dependent on multi-role jets but on the good old Harrier GR9 and the Tornado GR4. That will certainly be the case for the next 12, 15, 18 years and, who knows, possibly even longer. They constitute a reliable platform that has served our military exceptionally well in many of the recent conflicts that have been mentioned. It is the policy of Her Majesty's Government to change the way in which they maintain that fast jet capability. We will no longer use the tried and tested services of highly skilled civilian engineers based in the Defence Aviation Repair Agency, the successor organisation to the military agencies that used to do that work. DERA was created by the Government only three or four years ago to meet the demanding need to maintain our aircraft effectively so that those jets are available when we need them in times of crisis. Her Majesty's Government have decided completely to ignore their previous policy, which was also scrutinised by the Defence Committee, and they support the creation of a special agency of civilian engineers working in a commercial environment to provide all militarily non-essential jet repair and maintenance.
Some work on our jets has to be carried out on the battlefield or the front line—jets have to be kept in the air and filled with petrol, and the tyres have to be kicked now and then—but there is no military requirement for the factory maintenance of fast jets to be carried out by military personnel. Under the original SDR, which I greatly supported, it was made clear that, for reasons of value for money and the maintenance of maximum efficiency, the military would not be required to carry out non-essential military tasks, and that we would seek other, more cost-effective means of carrying out those tasks either in the competitive private sector or, in DARA's case, by commercialising a department of the Ministry of Defence, so that it would operate in precisely the same way as a commercial company, dependent on customer revenue for its income and acting as a trading fund not dependent on vote money from this House.
In the past three years, DARA has performed tremendously well. It has achieved every one of the targets set for it, including its targets for customer income. DARA has transformed the way in which it does business, and by the middle of last year it could compete with anyone in the world, private or public sector, in the maintenance of the front-line fleet of fast jets. However, in March last year, the Government, in their wisdom, decided to take Harrier jet maintenance from DARA and transfer it to RAF Cottesmore, where that task would be carried out by military personnel, in the belief—I accept that Ministers believe this—that military personnel operating in a military environment are more productive, more efficient and more cost-effective than civilians working in a commercial environment.
There are hon. Members on both sides of the House who, like me, have had military experience—my experience happens to have been in the Royal Air Force. All will know what utter nonsense that view is. There is no doubt that military personnel are quite capable of repairing aircraft to the highest standards and doing the job that is required of them. Ours is one of the best air forces in the world, even though it is comparatively small, and its personnel will deliver when asked to deliver—the examples given of the way in which they have operated in difficult circumstances as far as resources are concerned prove that. However, that is a military function; it is utter nonsense to argue that they can carry out factory maintenance and repair of aircraft more competitively and provide better value for money—that they are more efficient—than civilians working in commercial environment.
None the less, in March last year the Harrier jet was transferred to RAF Cottesmore. I share the view of the 150 skilled engineers who lobbied the House this morning, many of whom are ex-RAF technicians, that the work being done on the Harrier jet at RAF Cottesmore is a disaster. Not only is it costing the British taxpayer money, but—more worrying to me—it could be undermining front-line capability. I have put the evidence to the Minister of State and asked him to investigate independently, but he has gone to the MOD and RAF for reports on my complaints and told me and others in writing that the transfer has been a huge success—that a production line in a hangar in an air base somewhere in the middle of England is out-competing the world's greatest. But we know that that is utter nonsense. The turnaround time for a Harrier jet at that facility is now twice what it was when this work was being carried out by skilled civilian engineers at DARA, St. Athan at the beginning of last year. The average turnaround time is now 200 days per aircraft.
What is more, aircraft of the front-line fleet of Harrier jets of our Royal Air Force are being damaged. At least one was damaged to such an extent that it has not been used since December 2002. That aircraft is ZD507. Furthermore, ZD402, ZD376, ZD470, ZD472, ZD408, ZD404 and ZD466 have all been so seriously damaged that they are now having to be repaired by contractors outside the base at RAF Cottesmore.
It is not my wish to attack the Minister or to reveal these problems just for the sake of it. Nor is it my wish to speak in defence of my civilian workers—who have done a tremendous job and met every target set by the Government over a five-year period—out of spite. I am not trying to say, "I told you so". The reason I am drawing this matter to the House's attention is that if we carry on at this rate, we shall continue to lose flying time for our Harrier jets. They are running out of flying time and they will shortly be grounded and unable to do the job that they have been tasked to do.
This debate is on the Defence White Paper, "Future Capabilities", and the matter that I have raised relates to an essential future capability for the effectiveness of our forces. There are dire problems at the facility at Cottesmore. I want to place it on record that I am asking the Minister, as I have done before, for goodness' sake to carry out an independent evaluation of what has happened since the Harrier jets were taken from DARA, St. Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales, where our jets had been repaired for 50 years, and given to a military operational base at RAF Cottesmore. I do not think that that is an unreasonable request. For goodness' sake, let us get someone in to evaluate the project.
I know that the Minister intends to carry out a post-project evaluation, but not for another five years. I am afraid that it will be too damned late in five years' time. We will have lost the capacity in the Ministry of Defence, and we might have difficulty meeting our requirements for airworthiness and air availability for our Harrier jets. We might also see jets grounded and withdrawn from service, with no way of putting them back in the air. Of course, we have made similar mistakes in the past. The famous Airworks contract on the Tornado and the Hercules air transport planes cost the previous Conservative Government an enormous amount of money.
I ask all hon. Members to listen to my argument. The reason I am putting this case to the House is that we are about to move the entire Tornado GR4 fleet—the premier front-line fleet of the Royal Air Force—to another military operational base at Marham, and to ask RAF personnel in blue uniforms to do the maintenance work that should be carried out in a factory environment by skilled engineers, not in an operational environment. My primary concern is that that could seriously damage our future capability. If we do not have an effective air force with front-line fighting capacity, we can forget all our other commitments to the defence of this nation in the world and to the threats that we face across the globe.
Once again, in the interests of our country's defence and our future capabilities, I ask that the Minister consider conducting an independent assessment of the effectiveness of the roll forward of the Harrier before the roll forward of the Tornado even begins. I do not mind who undertakes that assessment, the NAO or independent consultants, as long as they are genuinely independent.
Any reading of the recommendations of the Defence Committee supports my argument. At DARA St. Athan, £80 million was invested in the most advanced purpose-built military aviation facility in Europe, which opened only in April this year. It is the size of three football pitches, with 47 bays, so it can repair 47 jets at any one time. The Committee stated:
"We find it surprising, given the substantial investment to create a state-of-the-art aircraft repair facility at DARA St. Athan, that MoD has announced that support of Tornado GR4 aircraft will be moved to the Main Operating Base at RAF Marham."
I, too, am surprised that the Ministry of Defence decided to waste £80 million worth of taxpayers' money and, more important, 350 of the most skilled aero-engineers in the world, with a proven track record, and to give that work to the facility at RAF Marham, which is untried and untested in such deep repair and maintenance.
We are told that there will be "partnering" with BAE Systems, which has been awarded a prime contract for the Tornado GR4 after no competition. BAE Systems is the design authority for that aircraft, so if it becomes the mainstay in support for the RAF on a front-line base for the repair and maintenance of the GR4, Her Majesty's Government will be in the unenviable position of being dependent on a monopoly supplier for keeping our front-line fleet in service. That is an extremely dangerous step, and it should not be taken before the Government properly evaluate the effects of moving the much smaller fleet of Harriers to Cottesmore.
Recommendation 37 of the Defence Committee states:
"We are aware that the revision and concentration of Tornado maintenance in the RAF was driven by a need to reduce both costs and manpower, as well as to improve procedural efficiency. If these drivers are not to have an adverse impact on operational effectiveness, the new arrangements at RAF Marham will need to match . . . the high standards set by the skilled workers at DARA St. Athan. We expect MoD to monitor this closely."
If RAF Marham has to match the high standards of DARA St. Athan, why are the Government moving the facility to an operational base that is untried and untested?
Recommendation 38 states:
"We find it of real concern that if problems are experienced at RAF Marham, MoD may be dependent upon the original manufacturer of the aircraft to undertake repairs."
There is no "may be" about it—we will be entirely dependent on a sole supplier for the whole of our fleet.
Those were the recommendations of the excellent Defence Committee. I hope that a new Committee will be formed shortly. Members on both sides of the House, who are in the Chamber today, were distinguished members of the previous Committee and I am sure that there will be members of equal distinction in this Parliament.
I know that the fleet is being reduced, and I know that there is an argument—I support it—for reducing and rationalising logistical support if one has fewer aircraft. However, with fewer aircraft one needs more availability, which means greater reliability on service repair and support. We are entering untried, untested and dangerous waters by relying on this military capability.
The hon. Gentleman is arguing very effectively, as he always does. Has he seen the Ministry of Defence's response to recommendation 38, which is about how the RAF will handle surge workloads? It says:
"Those options include, in the short-term, increasing RAF labour productivity through reprioritisation of tasks, reduction of leave or training or an increase in working hours."
Is the hon. Gentleman as completely unreassured by that as I am?
Absolutely, partly because I, like the hon. Gentleman, have had military experience. We know, to use a good old-fashioned military term, that it is bull, and we are going to get a lot more of it.
The Minister is told that the turnaround time for the Harrier at Cottesmore has been reduced from 200 days to 45 days. So he writes to everybody in good faith—he is a good friend of mine who is absolutely committed to our front-line forces—saying that this is working wonderfully. What he does not say, possibly because he is not aware of it, is that it is achieved by a few commanders on the front-line station telling people to work seven days a week on double shifts for a few weeks, so two shifts of six work endless hours with no breaks because under Queen's regulations they are obliged to do so. The turnaround time of 60 days at DARA St. Athan would be achieved by six workers in a team working a 37-hour week on a single shift.
I am not reassured by the Ministry's response to recommendation 38, and I am certainly not reassured by its other responses. On recommendation 37, it says:
"The Department acknowledges the Committee's recommendation"—
that is, about the adverse impact on operational effectiveness—but
"the high standards set by RAF tradesmen at both RAF Marham and those transferring in from RAF Lossiemouth will remain subject to exacting Quality control measures. As part of the . . . DLO transformation process, the Tornado project team is trying to agree a series of partnered support solutions with two prime contractors".
Surprise, surprise—one of the prime contractors, BAE Systems, will move in, without any competition, with a joint upgrade and maintenance programme to do the work of the RAF and oversee the work that is carried out.
This is a dangerous step, and I would prefer that the Government did not take it. They should sit back, take a deep breath, and carefully and independently review what they have already done before taking this huge step into the unknown. We owe that to our brave servicemen and women in Her Majesty's Royal Air Force. The Secretary of State said—I agree with him 100 per cent., in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon)—that when we consider such matters our prime consideration is to ensure that our military personnel have the equipment that they want, when they want it, in the place they want it: in other words, that they can depend on those support facilities at a cost that is acceptable to the British taxpayer. I have no doubt that applying the criteria of military importance and value for money will expose the policy to be the utter nonsense that it is. I am afraid that waiting five years to see the effect of the decision will mean that it is too late to do anything about it.
I am a friend of the Government, and an ardent supporter of their defence policy. They started very well in respect of logistical support for front-line troops, and offered what might be called a new Labour interpretation of the "Frontline First" approach. I support them entirely, but hope that they will think again about this matter; otherwise, they could undermine the RAF's future capability.
rose—
Order. Before I call the next speaker, many hon. Members are seeking catch my eye this afternoon. Unless contributions are reasonably concise, I am afraid that quite a few are going to be disappointed.
Today's events have reminded all of us that our defence forces include all the emergency services. I join in paying tribute to them.
This debate gives us an opportunity to take a strategic look at the threats that exist around the world. I shall not speak about the work of the armed forces in areas such as Darfur, or in other places where there are problems with famine or welfare, but I will consider the nature of the threats that exist world wide. The armed forces define threat as military capacity combined with hostile intent. I shall examine those areas from which threat may emerge. After all, on the whole we can choose our friends, but our enemies tend to choose us. I believe that the intelligence services still regard the IRA as a more immediate threat in this country than al-Qaeda. However, the ground in Northern Ireland has been well harrowed, so I shall not speak about the experience there.
Both world wars started in Europe. Those who criticise aspects of the EU may forget that the way in which European countries have drawn together has made it impossible for another war to start in Europe. Trade, travel, the media and inter-marriage have all contributed to that. These days, we talk less about manufacturing than about assembly, and car manufacturers get components from all over Europe and the world. That globalisation means that there is no longer a risk of war starting in Europe.
Similarly, the cold war has moved on. The Soviet Union is no more. Russia remains a former imperial power with enormous resources, but its economy is roughly the same size as Belgium's or Denmark's. Ukraine has shown how Russia may evolve in due course. The forces of democracy triumphed there and we wish that country well. The old attitudes are still evident in Russia and visitors who talk to politicians there will hear as much. A member of the Duma told me recently that Russia has the most free press in the world. Many people there continue to delude themselves in that respect. The old attitudes exist side by side with new ones, and the oligarchs take advantage of both.
I think that we can tick the box in respect of Japan. We are able to maintain a dialogue with that country and its strong links with the US mean that there is no problem there. China has a population of 1.3 billion people—a fifth of the world's total of 6.4 billion. It is, of course, a nuclear power and it is growing at a dizzy speed, with internal stresses as a result. It is stretching out to Taiwan and has massively increased the size of its armed forces. There is a great need for an understanding of China, and I regret very much the fact that the BBC did not replace the programme "Letter from America" after Alistair Cooke died with a weekly programme called "Letter from China". I can think of no better way of promoting an understanding of that country. I pay tribute, in a small way, to the parliamentary group on China, which encourages understanding of that country. We must develop that understanding lest China fails to understand our own aspirations. Korea—which I suspect may well be a nuclear power already—is not permeable to western information channels. Our entry to Korea is through China, which acts as an intermediary, and it is clear that there are serious problems there.
I want to talk about Islam. Islamic society has a devotion and a commitment that we in this country do not have. The five pillars of Islam—the shahadah, the creed:
"There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet";
the salat, the five obligatory prayers each day; the zakat, the alms to the poor; the sawm, the fasting from sunrise to sunset during the period of Ramadan; and the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca by those who are physically and financially capable of undertaking it—mean that there is in the fabric of Islamic society a strength that western civilisation does not have.
Islam is a different kind of religion from Christianity. A Muslim has to redeem history. That means that state affairs are not a distraction from spirituality, but the stuff of religion itself. I quote from a book on Islam:
"If state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative, or if their community was humiliated by apparently irreligious enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life's ultimate purpose and value was in jeopardy."
We have here the background fabric from which extreme views and determination can flow. Muslims look around the world and some see in the west people who do not live up to their own beliefs and ideals. In particular, in the United States and Europe we are lacking in the standards that they have; we are not devout, as they are; we eat food that they think unclean; we drink alcohol; we allow our women to walk around in a manner that they regard as half-naked; and many of us support the Zionist cause, which is their ultimate enemy.
There are two extreme elements within Islam, the first of which is Wahhabism, which derives from the Hambali school of jurisprudence. The strength of Wahhabism derives from the agreement between Abd al Wahhab and Mohammed ibn Saud, the leader of Saudi Arabia. It was an alliance that unified the disparate tribes on the Arabian peninsula and it means that the Saudi royal family is indebted to Wahhabism and linked to it. The royal family is pledged to return to the fundamentals of Islam and regards others as dissident heretics. The Saudi Arabian royal family significantly funds Wahhabism.
The other sect of significance is Hezbollah, which derives from the teaching of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the Shi'ites, who make up 10 to 15 per cent. of Muslims. Many known acts of terror can be attributed to the sect and its alliance with Iran. It is thought by some to be a greater threat than al-Qaeda because Hezbollah is more sophisticated.
So much for the people who might pose a threat. The way to deal with it is through diplomatic and political review, promoting understanding and democracy. It poses difficult problems when we as a democracy face a nation such as Uzbekistan, where democracy is not invoked at all. We sometimes find ourselves with strange allies.
The possibility of intent exists in some people. As to the means, globalisation has meant that chemical, biological and nuclear weapons are so much more readily available and so much easier to deliver. Since 9/11, the introduction of the concept of the suicide bomber has completely changed the nature of terrorism and the manner in which we deal with the threat of terrorism. We need to wage a war on terrorism, but we also need understanding and mutual respect. There is not enough emphasis on hearts and minds. The United Kingdom, with a strong tradition in the greater middle east, has a great role to play. Earlier, we heard criticism of the CIA. My own experience of the CIA does not lead me to believe that it is an entirely reliable body.
How are we shaping ourselves to cope with these random threats? I turn to the practical and the immediate, and matters relating to the Ministry of Defence. Our reserve forces have always had two roles. One is to reinforce the regular forces when the regular forces need that reinforcement. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) argued that the use and overuse of reserve forces had placed a tremendous strain on the reserve Army, Air Force and Navy, especially the reserve Army and the Territorial Army. People simply will not volunteer if they think that they will be called up on a regular basis. The reinforcement element represented by the reserves is being overstretched.
The second main role of the reserve forces is as a framework for regeneration and expansion of the armed forces. During the last war, units formed from reserve units were hugely superior in quality to units formed without that framework. We may need to expand our armed forces with reserves, not to repel an invasion in the traditional sense but to provide a structure for civil defence. I think that the Government are letting us down by not placing enough emphasis on reserve forces.
The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) referred to the Select Committee report published on 17 March, which made a number of trenchant criticisms of Government defence policy. I wonder whether I am carrying cynicism too far if I say that I was a little surprised that the Government's response to the report was embargoed:
"Not to be published in full, or in part, in any form before 12 noon on Wednesday 6 July"—
46 minutes before the announcement of the Olympic bid. It could perhaps say that the Government's response was buried.
In recommendation 2, the Select Committee said that we must have flexibility, and criticised
"a lack of resilience in the face of changing operational demands and too narrow a focus on the range of operational demands which the Armed Forces of the future may face."
In recommendation 5, the Government are severely criticised for reducing the naval presence. There were six naval standing commitments, but that was reduced to four. The commitment to the north Atlantic and Caribbean area by a frigate or destroyer is now to be confined to the period between July and October. My question to the Minister is this: if the destroyer or frigate on patrol in the Caribbean area, which plays a significant part in combating the drugs trade in that area, has been useful in the past, why can we spare it now?
There have been two ships, one in the Arabian gulf and the other in the Indian ocean. The plan now is to have just one ship combining the two roles. As with boots on the ground, we really do need ships on the site. It is wrong to think that the roles of two ships in disparate areas can be combined.
Recommendation 6 deals with the purchase of aircraft carriers. The Committee was critical of the manner in which the orders were dealt with. I cannot think of a worse way to organise anything than to arrange a competition to appoint the builder of the carriers, to force the competitors to merge and work together, to form a troika with the Ministry of Defence as the third partner, and on top of all that to appoint a fiscal integrator. It worries me that although ever since their announcement of the purchase of the two aircraft carriers the Government have been boasting about the size of their aircraft-carrier and other surface ship procurement programmes, seven years later the order has still not been placed and is now seriously behind time.
Recommendation 13 says:
"We are concerned that if the size of the Army is only just enough to man the proposed force structure a similar lack of resilience, to that experienced by the Army in the past, may be experienced in the future."
It goes on to say that the operational and training cycle is so intense that it is
"unsustainable over the longer term."
There is also a capability gap. Recommendation 44 says:
"The Future Capabilities proposals have been driven by a particular vision of future operational requirements. It may take another decade before the capabilities to deliver those requirements are in place. In the meantime equipment withdrawals and personnel reductions may leave gaps in capability. Those gaps, in turn, may create risks. Some of those risks, in our, need not have been taken."
When we went to war in Iraq, the armed forces were seriously short of much equipment, which had to be obtained through UORs—urgent operational requirements. An example is the Minimi submachine gun, which was acquired as needed by the armed forces, but they did not have time to practise with the guns. They had never fired the guns before they went into action. That is deplorable.
We face serious threats world wide. I urge the Government to give a high priority to defence and ensure that the gaps identified by the Defence Committee are met.
It is a privilege to contribute to this debate in a week when we respect and remember the veterans who fought for the freedoms of this country in the second world war. They fought fascism so that we could have the democratic freedoms that we take for granted today. It is also apt that we should this week remember the members of armed forces and the civilians who have died in the countless other conflicts since the second world war.
It would be remiss of me not to refer to the tragic events that are happening around us today in the capital city. I add my sentiments to those of the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore), who said that our thoughts are with the families—but we must remember the dedicated and hard-working emergency workers who are, as we speak, working selflessly on behalf of their fellow citizens.
The threat that we face now is very different from the bipolar world and the threat that we faced in the cold war. That threat was predictable, and I was very interested in the history lesson that we had from my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) about that bipolar world. We knew who the enemy was and we could ensure that we had the appropriate response. As my hon. Friend said, there were different views on how to respond to the threat, but at least we knew what it was. The threat we face today is, as we have tragically seen, unpredictable.
In the last Parliament, I had the privilege of sitting on the Defence Committee. One of the first reports we produced after the tragic events of 11 September was published in December 2001, and it was on the threat of terrorism. I thought that it would be interesting to revisit what we said. We stated:
"Our conclusion is that the threat from terrorism has become more pressing and more dangerous. A threshold has been crossed in terms of scale and level of casualties."
That is one thing that we need to remember about 11 September. The number of casualties that day changed terrorism across the world forever.
We also said that our response to such terrorism had to be very different, and not only rely on a military solution. We said that the response needed to be three-pronged, including military, intelligence and diplomatic means. We also said that it must include a humanitarian response to root out the causes of terrorism in various parts of the world, which are the poverty and tragic conditions that allow terrorism to breed. The report states:
"We must not lose our sense of the urgency and importance of this task in the months ahead. We must not hesitate to take the necessary steps to protect the UK and our interests overseas."
Our response must be measured and purposeful, but it must ensure that the democracy that we take for granted and the freedom of movement that we enjoy continue.
As I said, I served on the Defence Committee in the last Parliament and that gave me a great opportunity to meet many members of our armed forces in different parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. I echo the comments of other Members about the professionalism and dedication that our armed forces show in their duties across the world. In addition to the work that they do in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight terrorism, I saw good examples of the reconstruction work that they carry out. For example, the projects at Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan involve military doctors working with local hospital doctors to bring health care to parts of Afghanistan that had never had it. We must bear in mind the fact that our armed forces are involved in a lot of humanitarian work in which they have expertise. We should be grateful to them for that.
If we are to ask our armed forces to undertake the necessary and sometimes dangerous tasks that they face, they must have the best equipment possible and the funding to go with it. I am pleased that the Government have committed extra expenditure to the defence budget—£3.7 billion over the next three years. That is the longest sustainable growth in the defence budget for more than 20 years. The Government can be proud of that. It is also important that the armed forces get the equipment that they need on time.
I welcome the publication of the defence industrial policy. We should not forget the jobs that the defence industry sustains and the skills that it maintains. The policy was welcomed by industry and it set out clearly how the record expenditure that the Government are putting into defence could also benefit large and small industrial companies in this country. It also gave a clear commitment to deal with some of the legacy issues that were left over from the previous Conservative Government. The right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) reeled off a long list of what this Government had got wrong or had overspent on, but it is interesting that he seemed to forget the £900 million hole that they left at Rosyth when they took the clear political decision to move Trident submarine refit work to Devonport.
I also refer to the legacy issues that we had to take on, such as the Astute and other projects. They went way over budget and were unrealistically framed in the first place. We have done good work, but that has meant putting more money into those projects. I visited Barrow a few months ago, and the Astute project is now back on schedule. I pay credit to the work force there who have put in a tremendous amount of hard work.
I have criticisms, however, of the Defence Procurement Agency. I know that the Defence Committee was very critical of the way the organisation operates. It was interesting to hear the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) refer to urgent operational requirements. I want more of them, because they seem to get equipment on to the battlefield or into people's hands a lot quicker. They ensured that the equipment arrived. The problem with the system, however, is that it is over-burdensome and so-called smart procurement does not deliver equipment to the front line or ensure that it represents better value for money.
The other problem with the Defence Procurement Agency and smart procurement is the effect on small and medium-sized enterprises. I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister is aware of the organisation Northern Defence Industries, that has done sterling work trying to put supply chains together to ensure that small and medium-sized enterprises can get into defence work. That is paying dividends because many companies in the north-east are for the first time getting into projects in which they would not have participated in the past.
There is a bar, however, because under the prime contractor route the problem is that the prime contractor is selected, but the supply chain is somehow thought about afterwards. We need to sharpen up procedures so that we ensure not only that we know the position of prime contractors when they are appointed, but that we have a locally sourced supply chain in place, because many companies will happily participate in such projects if they are given the opportunity to do so.
A further criticism that I make of the Defence Procurement Agency is its turnover of staff. The Defence Committee discovered that the turnover rate is some 30 per cent. of its staff, which leads to inefficient procurement for new projects. If Lord Drayson, the new defence procurement Minister, has the legendary business expertise about which I am told, he needs to take a clear, hard look at the way in which simple projects can sometimes take far too long after they get stuck in the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol.
I have already mentioned urgent operational requirements. The Defence Committee examined lessons that could be learned from our operations in Iraq during Operation Telic. The urgent operational requirements worked well—the hon. Member for Gosport referred to the Minimi machine guns. However, other problems that we have raised have, alas, not been addressed. I am worried that although the Defence Committee and others highlight such problems, we seem to have to wait the gestation period of several African elephants before any action is taken. For example, logistics supply is even more important now that we have a style of warfare that is more expeditionary, which will be reflected in future projects. It is thus important to get the logistics chain right, but it was clear that there were problems during Operation Telic when trying to find out where things were in the supply chain.
One of the Committee's conclusions was that such problems were not new because they had been highlighted after the first Gulf war of 1991. The lack of an asset-tracking system in Operation Telic caused numerous serious problems in theatre, including problems with the distribution of critical items such as body armour and nuclear, biological and chemical equipment. The Committee's report said we needed to urge the Ministry of Defence to come up with a solution to the problem as a top priority.
We also heard evidence that an off-the-shelf solution had been bought to take a lot of equipment back to the UK. The American system allows containers to be asset-tracked throughout the supply chain, so people know not only where they are, but what is in them. However, lo and behold, the Ministry of Defence and the DPA want to reinvent the wheel by trying to wed together the three existing Army, Navy and Air Force systems, which do not talk to each other. I sometimes wonder whether we should just buy equipment off the shelf, instead of thinking that we need a home-grown solution for such complex systems. That solution would take a long time to develop, which would not only delay equipment from getting to a vital theatre, but mean that it would take a long time before new developments occurred. Overall, we should be proud of the men and women of our armed forces and their commitment. Given the community that I represent, it is rewarding to see the opportunity that the armed forces give young men and women from deprived backgrounds to fulfil their potential. When I meet those men and women, wherever they are throughout the world, I never cease to be amazed by their dedication and the large responsibility that rests on some very young shoulders.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), who dealt with some problems that have been around—it is a shame to say—for a long time. The Government must face the problem that the slow procedures of defence procurement—the hon. Gentleman compared them to the gestation period of several African elephants—take such a long time to run their course that the equipment being bought has been superseded and is out of date by the end of the process. The hon. Gentleman suggested that it would be helpful to have more urgent operational requirements and I believe that the Government solved many problems in Iraq by following precisely that procedure, though they created new problems as well. The Government's moves towards increasing the speed of procurement started about 15 years ago with Peter Levene: they have improved things a little, but not solved all the problems.
I am delighted to hear that the Bowman project—it was greatly delayed when I was Minister of State for Procurement, when most hon. Members here today were in short trousers—is at last beginning to produce some tangible results for the armed forces. The Government deserve to be congratulated on that.
In his customary very knowledgeable way, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) went through some of the recommendations of the Defence Committee. I would particularly like to follow up his point about recommendation 5, which is for a destroyer or frigate to be made available in the Caribbean only during the higher-risk hurricane months. My hon. Friend is right that that will leave a serious gap. In 2003, I visited Key West with the Intelligence and Security Committee. People were hugely complimentary there about the work that our ships do in the Caribbean on drugs interdiction. They wanted not less, but significantly more of that contribution, as we did the job so well. It is a shame that the Government's decision announced in their response to the Defence Committee report was not the subject of a statement on which they could be properly questioned. I am not at all sure that it is the right decision.
Today in London, we know how vital it is to have security and defence forces of which we are proud. It is good to know that they are well resourced and able to take on the unpredictable challenges that we all face nowadays. Let us not forget, however, that the incidents that have occurred today in London are the sort of events that have happened on a regular basis in Iraq and that our troops are working with courage and persistence to restore order in that country in sometimes difficult and extraordinarily unusual circumstances.
The Secretary of State drew attention on Monday to a crucial matter. He said that it was a pity that the praise and gratitude showered on our forces in Iraq for trying to maintain normality there is not always echoed by the media at home. He is right about that. It is not in the least surprising that the work of our troops in Iraq is not news, because it is the media's role to report "news" in the sense of something unusual. The fact that—day in, day out—8,500 of our servicemen and women are working hard to help the Iraqis to lead a normal life is not news. They do not receive publicity for doing that simply because it is not remarkable that they do their jobs so well. They always have, and if we politicians treat them right, I suspect that they always will. They have been well trained in the difficult circumstances of Northern Ireland, winning the hearts and minds of the people who live there, and it is not surprising that they do the job so well in Iraq.
At the weekend, I met a squaddie who had just returned from Basra and I had a drink with him. He told me quite clearly that the Iraqi people are kind, friendly and welcoming, and that they are very appreciative of the excellent work that the armed forces are doing out there. That is certainly no surprise to me, as someone who has regularly met members of the Queen's Lancaster Regiment; but I simply wish, as the right hon. Gentleman says, that it was more widely known among people in this country. It is not more widely known because of the way in which the press distort what is actually happening.
I agree with the general thrust of what the hon. Gentleman says. I am not sure whether it is right to say that the press distort what is happening; it is just that the press inevitably concentrate on the news. We can all be proud of the sort of work that our armed forces are doing in Iraq, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for what he has just said.
Our armed forces will continue to do a good job for this country, so long as the politicians treat them right, and I worry sometimes that we politicians do not treat our armed forces right. We sometimes take for granted what they do, and we sometimes make their lives more difficult. The conditions under which they work—the recruitment and retention conditions—are often exacerbated by pay and terms of employment that are extremely complicated and do not match the world outside.
I should like to hear from the Minister when he responds to the debate how he believes that recruitment to the armed forces is going. What does he believe is the structure of the recruitment process? There are suggestions that the process has been stripped out to provide people and equipment to the front line. That may be a short-term answer to what is a medium and long-term problem. I should like reassurance from the Minister when he responds.
Similarly, the Armed Forces Pay Review Body is important and needs to preserve its independence in everything that it does—independence not only from the Executive, but from the Treasury. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) has often suggested that the Treasury is working for the Russians, and the Ministry of Defence is inevitably accused of making decisions that are Treasury-driven. Given the expense of defence, that is hardly surprising.
Yesterday in Trafalgar square, as the Red Arrows flew over, we realised quite what a source of pride not just the Red Arrows, but everything that our armed forces do, is to the whole country. I was delighted to hear from the Minister on Monday that the Ministry of Defence will increase pilots' flying time. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) said, 16 and a half hours' flying time a month is not enough to maintain the capabilities of our fast-jet pilots. When the Minister said that those hours would be increased next year, that was good to hear, but by how much? Will the increase be enough to improve the capability of our pilots, so that we can continue to produce the Red Arrow pilots that we all find so inspiring? The aircraft also need to be available, rather than being cannibalised, as has been suggested and discussed in some of the Defence Committee's very good reports.
Finally, this is an appropriate day on which to hold this debate because it falls in veterans awareness week. We can remind ourselves of how essential to our future are the well-maintained, well-resourced armed forces that we have come to rely on, but let us never forget how essential the veterans were to our past and to our present. They stood shoulder to shoulder to defend our world, our country, our values and our principles, and we will remember them.
As we remember all those who have been personally affected by today's tragedy, the overriding message must be one of calm and of avoiding knee-jerk reactions. I say this as someone who lived in Italy in 1978, when terrorist acts included the kidnapping and murdering of the then Italian Prime Minister. I know that Members will agree that we must be determined not to give in to terrorism.
As we remember this weekend the end of the second world war, I want to turn our thoughts to the immense bravery and sacrifice of so many of our citizens. It is indeed a very fitting time to be debating defence in the world. At the end of the first world war, there was a determination that such slaughter should never happen again, and the League of Nations was set up. As we all know, in spite of idealism and optimism, the League of Nations did not live up to the great expectations of it.
The United Nations was set up at the end of the second world war and in a mood of optimism. Its history has not been easy, and there have been many setbacks. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war, it is vital that we again recognise the importance of international collaboration, and that we rededicate our efforts to working at a European and a global level. We are a major world player. We are influential and with that influence comes responsibility—a responsibility to use that influence effectively.
It is so heartening that vital issues such as tackling poverty and climate change and promoting fair trade, which were once the cries only of minority groups and the Churches, are now mainstream issues that are being discussed at the highest level—at the G8. That is due in no small measure to this Government's conviction and activities. Too often, however, efforts to eradicate poverty are thwarted by armed conflict. We now need to use our influence to strengthen the United Nations, and to work at a global level to eliminate pointless massacre. We know that in dealing with some bullies and tyrants, talking is unfortunately not enough. We need a strong deterrent force, and to show that we are prepared to use it. Given our influential position in the world, we need to work with a broad range of countries. We must maintain and develop our defence capacity not just for our own defence, but as part of our contribution to global peace.
Technology is advancing at such a pace that we need to invest in the appropriate research and design. We must recognise the wide-ranging expertise and skills of our defence forces—both those in active service and those working on the design, manufacture and maintenance of equipment. We owe it to all those who fought for us in the second world war to develop and maintain the appropriate technology to safeguard our defence capacity.
The second world war was a struggle to defend the values that our generation now takes for granted. This week, we remember the sacrifices of men and women in the first and second world wars and in the many wars since. Many of us will attend commemorative events, but it is important that we do not forget as soon as the razzamatazz and publicity are over. For that reason, I welcome this Government's decision to introduce the veteran's badge, which can be worn with civilian dress. It will serve as a permanent reminder of the service of our veterans and of our gratitude to them. Let us never forget.
The hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said that it is a funny old world, and that is certainly true with regard to the issue that he raised. I am, I think, a longer-serving Member of this House than he is, and I remember when the Labour Benches were littered with members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Indeed, Members who wear different badges today used then to sport daily the badges of CND.
Some of them are in the Cabinet.
Indeed; the Cabinet is full of them. That was a time when Britain was facing a Soviet Union and an eastern Europe bristling with thousands upon thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, all aimed at us. Now that there is no such adversary, those same Members have swapped their badges. I have no doubt that they will comprehensively vote down the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Pendle at the parliamentary Labour party meeting. As he is a gentle soul, I fear for his safety on that occasion if the reports I hear of the PLP are anything like accurate.
I have been sitting through the debate feeling not that it is a funny old world but that it is another world. The sort of complacent consensus that has crept by osmosis through the Chamber as the hours have passed is so utterly different from, and in contradiction to, the attitude outside in the country and around the world that I became more persuaded than ever that the House of Commons is out of touch with reality.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) is no longer in his place. He may well be an expert on defence procurement matters but, in his mini discourse on Islam, he reminded us of the universal truth that a little knowledge is dangerous. His "Reader's Digest" analysis of Islam and the people of the Muslim world—more than 1,000 million strong—illustrated the chasm between the east and the powerful here in the west.
At least one, perhaps two of the explosions this morning took place in my constituency. Many of those caught up in the events were my constituents, heading to work in the City and the west end. I spent four hours or so this morning at the Royal London hospital in my constituency where the medical staff are toiling, without a break, to deal with the casualties who are being brought in in their scores—perhaps, by now, in their hundreds.
I walked among the emergency workers, including the fire brigade staff, in the very stations that have in the past few weeks had fire engines taken away from them as economy measures. I refer to the fire station at Bethnal Green in my constituency and the fire station in the King's Cross-Euston area—the two places where the fire services are stretched almost to breaking point in dealing with the consequences of this morning's events. The people of the east end and the emergency workers are going about their business calmly and stoically in the way for which our country is famous.
I condemn the act that was committed this morning. I have no need to speculate about its authorship. It is absolutely clear that Islamist extremists, inspired by the al-Qaeda world outlook, are responsible. I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses. Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning's bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts.
However, it would be crass to do other than what the Secretary of State for Defence in a way invited us to do. We cannot separate the acts from the political backdrop. They did not come out of a clear blue sky, any more than those monstrous mosquitoes that struck the twin towers and other buildings in the United States on 9/11 2001. The Defence Secretary said that we must look at the causal circumstances behind the problems of security and defence in the world. I insist that we do so.
If Members examine our debate tomorrow in the cold light of day they will discover a self-evident truth: many Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death. When the US armed forces, their backs guarded, as a result of a decision by our politicians, by our armed forces, systematically reduced Falluja, a city the size of Coventry, brick by brick and killed an unknown number of people—probably the number runs to thousands, if not tens of thousands—not a whisper found its way into the Chamber. I have grown used to that. I know that for many people in the House and in power in this country the blood of some people is worth more than the blood of others.
Will the hon. Gentleman clarify a whisper that has come to the House? Did he say elsewhere today that Londoners had this coming? Is it true that he said that?
That is a despicable smear.
Order. I remind all hon. Members that we are debating the fourth report of the Defence Committee.
The Minister of State says from a sedentary position that it is more or less right. I take it that that means that it is not right. I have never uttered any such words. The words that I am speaking now are my words. If the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) would care to listen, he can disagree with me, but he should not attempt to put into my mouth words that I have never spoken. Madam Deputy Speaker, I ask for your protection. [Hon. Members: "Oh!"] It is either that, or I shall keep speaking and no one else will—
Order. I have already asked hon. Members to debate the motion on the Order Paper. Perhaps we would all do well to confine our remarks to that.
The exchanges that we have just heard are further evidence of my point that in this bubble people just do not get it. If I cannot touch the heart of the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead with what happened to the people in Falluja, I shall move on to firmer ground.
Does the House not believe that hatred and bitterness have been engendered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes, by the construction of the great apartheid wall in Palestine and by the occupation of Afghanistan? Does it understand that the bitterness and enmity generated by those great events feed the terrorism of bin Laden and the other Islamists? Is that such a controversial point? Is it not obvious? When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. The difference is that I have always despised him. I did so when the Government, in this very House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in Afghanistan. I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand.
There are more people in the world today who hate us more intently than they did before as a result of the actions that we have taken. Does this House understand that the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed and deepened that sense of hatred around the world and made our position more dangerous? Do Members of this House not understand that Guantanamo Bay has contributed to the sense of bitterness and hatred against us around the world? Does nobody in this House understand that when Palestinians' houses are knocked down, their olive trees cut down and their children shot by Israeli marksmen, an army of people who want to harm us is created? To say that is not to hope that they succeed—I started by making clear, I hope, my utter rejection and condemnation of the events in London this morning.
It does not matter whether Britain replaces the Trident submarine system with another. The threat now, as the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) made clear, is not the intercontinental ballistic missiles of other countries but the asymmetrical threat of angry people who hate us and who are ready to exchange their lives for several of ours, or hundreds of ours, or thousands of ours, if they can do so. Is that really so hard to grasp?
Given that one cannot defend oneself against every angry man among the enragés of the earth, it follows that the only thing we can do is address what the Secretary of State called the causal circumstances that lie behind these events. That means trying to reduce the hatred in the world and trying to deal with the political crises out of which these events have flowed. If, instead of doing that, we remain in this consensual bubble in which we have placed ourselves, we will go on making the same mistakes over and over again. We will go on with Guantanamo Bay. We will go on as we are doing, making Abu Ghraib not smaller as we were told would happen after the photographs were published, but bigger. We will go on with occupation and war as the principal instruments of our foreign and defence policy. If we do that, some people will get through and hurt us as they have hurt us here today, and if we still do not learn the lesson, that dismal, melancholic cycle will continue.
It ought to be common sense that people start from the standpoint that the only thing that matters is whether what we plan to do will make things better or worse. I listened to the Secretary of State lay out the success story of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his account bore no relationship to the truth or reality. He talked about Afghanistan as a success story and about the President of Afghanistan, when everyone knows that Karzai is the president of the congestion charge area of downtown Kabul and no more. He talked about an Afghan army—it is a fantasy. Afghanistan is a patchwork quilt of warlordism, where the warlords' armies dwarf the so-called Afghan national army. He talked about drugs and narcotics: before we invaded the country those lunatics of the Taliban were reducing heroin production in Afghanistan, but the people whom we have put into power there have increased production by 800 per cent. Our armed forces are in Afghanistan and our taxes are being used to support a political structure that is producing 90 per cent. of the junk that ends up in the veins of our young people in Glasgow, east London and many other places in the world.
The Secretary of State talked about Iraq—as if Iraq were any kind of success story. I could not believe my ears as he described, in that complacent, orotund manner, progress over 12 months, 18 months or two years. Iraq is going backwards, not forwards. It is impossible for the Secretary of State to say we shall withdraw in any given time frame, because Iraq is getting worse, not better. There are more people being killed in Iraq now than there were before. More military operations are being conducted by the Iraqi resistance than before. Last Saturday alone, 175 military operations were mounted by the Iraqi resistance on one day.
American soldiers are dying in such numbers that there is now more appreciation of the mistake of the war in Iraq over the pond in the United States than there appears to be here in the British House of Commons. The kind of debate that we have had today would not happen in the US Congress, because US politicians understand the scale of this disaster far better than the politicians in this Chamber appear even to have begun to do.
One thousand, eight hundred American boys, conscripted by poverty, unemployment and poor opportunities, have lost their lives as a result of the pack of lies that was the case for the invasion of Iraq, and 17,000 American boys have been wounded. Ten per cent. of them are amputees, who will have to go around with no legs for the rest of their lives as a result of the pack of lies on which we went to war in Iraq.
Eighty-nine of our own boys, including the son of Rose Gentle from Glasgow, 19-year-old Gordon, were sent to die in Iraq on a pack of lies. The Prime Minister will not even meet Gordon's mother. He will not meet the mother of a 19-year-old boy who was sent to die in Iraq. Last Monday, I was on a television programme and a call came through from the mother of a 17-year-old soldier who was leaving for Iraq the following Monday. He is 17 years old, and he is being sent to Iraq, into that quagmire. The 19-year-old Gordon Gentle is dead. Eighty-eight other young men from this country are dead as a result of this, yet our Ministers roll out their jokes and their cod philosophy here today. They have absolutely no grasp of the gravity of the situation, or of how unpopular their stand has become outside these walls. They have learned nothing from the fact that they lost a million votes as a result of what they did in Iraq, or from the fact that millions in Britain marched against them and begged them not to do this.
The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), in an otherwise fine speech, described today's events as "unpredictable". They were not remotely unpredictable. Our own security services predicted them and warned the Government that if we did this we would be at greater risk from terrorist attacks such as the one that we have suffered this morning.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
I have to finish; I have gone on for too long.
The experts in our own Foreign Office whom we pay to know the middle east better than the Ministers in Downing street told us in leaked documents—carefully leaked, no doubt, for the historical record—that we would be placing ourselves in greater danger if we did this. So there was nothing unpredictable about this morning's attack. Despicable, yes; but not unpredictable. It was entirely predictable and, I predict, it will not be the last.
Madam Deputy Speaker, thank you—I think—for calling me to speak after the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway). I sense that, in the circumstances, I should make an early declaration that I continue to serve as a bomb disposal officer in the Territorial Army. Perhaps I can attempt to defuse this situation, although I should probably steer clear of commenting on many of his remarks.
I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman's observation that today's events were tragic and despicable. That was brought home to me today when I received a phone call from my wife. She left our house in King's Cross at 8.50 this morning and went down to the tube platform, only to leave it again to go and buy herself a pair of tights. Had she not done so, I believe that she would have been on the train that the bomb was on. From that point of view at least, I am grateful that she bought her tights today.
I would like to pick up on some of the comments made by other hon. Members about the veterans' days coming up this weekend. I play an active part in our Royal British Legion in Olney and I hope the House will forgive me for giving a shameless plug for its events on Sunday. Comments were made about the Trafalgar day celebrations last Tuesday. I thought they were excellent, not least the fireworks display—but I would say that, as the family firm put it on.
I have been told that an author's first book tends to be based on personal experience, so as this is my first speech in a Defence debate, I shall concentrate on what I know. To that end, I shall explore two main topics: the overstretch of the armed forces and the balance between our commitments and capabilities and, specifically, its impact on our reserve forces. I am sorry that the Secretary of State made no mention of our reserve forces in his opening remarks, although I realise that he was pressed for time. I shall consider in some detail the ongoing TA future army structure review.
The Government have repeatedly tried to maintain that our armed forces do not suffer from overstretch, yet by their own definition, according to the 1998 strategic defence review, overstretch is
"trying to do too much with too little manpower".
It is blindingly obvious that our armed forces are working under those conditions. The two accepted measures for dealing with overstretch are to increase recruitment and retention and/or to reduce overseas commitments. Instead, the Government's defence policy includes cutting existing numbers, freezing recruitment and increasing our commitments, be it in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor or elsewhere.
Our armed forces also have UK commitments, such as the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, flooding or Operation Fresco, the reaction to the firefighters strike. Although our armed forces have always risen to those challenges with the professionalism for which they are renowned, they highlight in no uncertain terms the pressures under which our armed services are working.
The imbalance between commitments and capabilities has led to an unfair over-reliance on reservists. The Defence White Paper in 2003 examined in one of its supporting essays, "developing the reserves". In that paper, the Government claim that they look to reservists to provide
"forces (for both contingent and enduring operations) which cannot always be justified as full-time parts of the Regular establishment on grounds of cost or the need for specialised transferable skills".
That is an awful lot of pressure for reservists.
We have already seen that operations in theatres such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq could not have been undertaken without the use of reserve forces. About 8,500 personnel are currently deployed in Iraq, down from 46,000 at the peak of the fighting phase. About 6,170 TA personnel were mobilised on Operation Telic. I accept that that may seem only a small percentage of the total TA force, but we must remember that only TA soldiers deemed fit for role can be mobilised—those who have been trained in their proper profession and who are suitable for the job that they are being held against. As there is a high turnover of TA personnel—it can be up to 25 per cent. in any one unit in any one year—the pool of TA servicemen who can be called on at any one time for operational service is much smaller than the overall figure that is given.
I have recently left a bomb disposal regiment and I know that the soldiers available to fill the slots required in Iraq are very few indeed. The same people are called again and again. I have been mobilised for operational service twice in the past four years. The TA is a shotgun that can be fired, but I am not convinced that the Secretary of State is fully addressing the regeneration issues caused by the constant mobilisation of the same personnel.
With that in mind, it is perhaps unfortunate that, last December, the Government announced plans to increase the total number of part-time servicemen deployed in Iraq to 1,000 by May 2005. According to the MOD, under the SDR, TA personnel will be considered for service in Iraq for as long as that conflict continues. The Iraq war has created a few problems for TA members. Many did not receive any pay in the first weeks after mobilisation. It was appalling that, while they were at war, they had to arrange finance to cover loans and mortgages, adding unnecessary work and anxiety, and that £40 million in additional retention bounties due to be paid out March 2004 was retained by the MOD because of computer problems. There are also concerns about insurance, especially as many reservists had little notice of their mobilisation.
A survey of TA personnel sent to the Gulf found that 80 per cent. did not expect their employer to support any future development, 63 per cent. of medical and technical staff said that they were thinking of resigning from the TA, 73 per cent. said that the NHS would lose vital skills because of deployments and 39 per cent. were worried about the effect on their job security.
That said, on a positive note, I am encouraged that much has been learned from the experience of Operation Telic and the attitude surveys of soldiers returning from deployed operations. That has led to a progressive overhaul of, and gradual improvements to, TA conditions of service and employer and welfare support. The MOD's support for reservists is improving—I give credit to the Government for that—and includes providing demobilising reservists with information regarding their legal rights. Another step in the right direction is the SaBRE—supporting Britain's reservists and employers—campaign. However, more needs to be done, as two independent reports commissioned by the Government show that employers' awareness of SaBRE in the first year of its existence was very low.
Although reservists are given statutory protection under the provisions of the Reserve Forces (Safeguard of Employment) Act 1985, some reservists have problems in retaining their jobs while serving in the armed forces. The Reserve Forces Act 1996 states that, if a reservist loses their job, they can take their employer to an industrial tribunal, but crucially the MOD does not act on their behalf. Also, although that Act rightly gives reservists safeguard of employment, it does not give safeguard of promotion.
From a practical point of view, many employers now look at returning reservists and say, "Under the current climate you may well be mobilised again, and while I have to give your job back, I am not necessarily going to promote you." That is a vital element that the Government must consider. Reservists are being mobilised once, coming back, realising that they must give priority to their primary career, not to the Territorial Army, and resigning. That is putting even greater pressure on current members of the reserve forces because the pool from which people can be drawn is getting smaller and smaller.
I think that under the circumstances I have probably gone on for too long. Since other Members want to speak, I will not proceed to my second point. I merely ask the Secretary of State to look beyond what is currently happening to the Territorial Army, because the undue pressure that the imbalance between commitments and capabilities is putting on the TA and other reserve forces is almost at breaking point.
Like many colleagues in the House today, I thought long and hard before deciding to contribute to the debate. With the rising toll of deaths in the terrible tragedy this morning, it was difficult to decide whether to speak. I understand that constituents of mine are involved. Perhaps we should all think about our constituents today.
Unlike some Members, I did not see this afternoon as an opportunity to destroy the morale of our armed forces but to work with Ministers in explaining to them some of the concerns and problems that I experienced personally when I visited our troops during the most recent Gulf war and subsequently in the last few weeks before the general election. In the light of the tone of the debate, or most of it, I do not want to attack the Government over what has gone wrong or what has gone right. I want to highlight some of the problems that troops in the field made me aware of.
It may not be a politically correct term, but I was a boy soldier. I joined the armed forces at 16, and after one year was promoted to guardsman, at which level I stayed for the rest of my military career. I am proud to be the voice of the lower ranks in the House.
Just before the general election, I was with the brilliant Scots Guards in al-Amarah in Iraq. I served with the Grenadier Guards, and the Scots Guards is nearly as good a regiment. In my time, the Guards formed a very self-contained unit, with its own medics, paras and signallers. It was very proud of its ability to deploy fully and integrally by itself.
I was enormously proud to see the Royal Gibraltar Regiment serving with the Scots Guards in al-Amarah. The people from Gibraltar can be very proud of their work, but I had to ask the colonel in charge why the Scots Guards had to deploy with other detachments. He told me that the regiment was no longer able to deploy on its own and that it now had to work with other units. There is a severe shortage of guardsmen and especially of experienced NCOs. The Secretary of State must address that problem, to which I shall return later.
As I walked around the camp, I noticed the fantastic Warrior armoured vehicles, of which the Scots Guards are very proud. As we know, they have saved an awful lot of lives, but it was disturbing to learn that every vehicle had to be taken out of operation on the regiment's return to Germany at the end of the tour of duty. That was because the new Bowman radio system, for which we waited for what seemed like a decade, does not fit into the Warrior's turret. That is why all the vehicles had to be adapted, and could not be used while the adaptation was carried out.
I cannot believe that that was not foreseen. The Bowman equipment is only a little box. Earlier, the Secretary of State used the phrase "not rocket science";. It is not rocket science to realise that a little box needs a little hole, but this little hole was too little. That was demoralising for the very brave troops trying to do their job in the field.
As for accommodation, it was hard to remember that we are in the 21st century. Our troops were deployed with troops from all over the world and accommodated in very nice tents whose air conditioning does not always work. When that happens, troops open both ends of the tent and let the wind blow through. In the middle of a desert, the British Army has to live in tents: just 400 yards up the road, the American armed forces have deployable pods with air conditioning, showers and other facilities.
We have air conditioning.
I agree, but it does not always work. It did not work very well when I was there. The British troops told me that the best air conditioning is achieved by opening both ends of the tent and hoping that God blows really hard.
I accept that operational problems occur, but this is the 21st century. The American pods were brought in by contractors. When I was in Germany in the 1970s, the Americans came off exercises and went for showers in massive articulated lorries. We stood and watched, as proud as punch and smelling like anything because we had not had a shower for nearly two weeks.
I accept that that is how the British Army works, and it is why we have the best soldiers in the world. However, on such a long-term deployment as the one in Iraq, it cannot be right that the problem with the tent that I have set out should have occurred.
When I was in the military, we were all very proud of the NAAFI, which has done a wonderful job of looking after our troops for many years. I asked the guys in al-Amarah how much they used the NAAFI shop there. They told me that they tried not to use it at all, because the locals sold goods such as CDs, batteries—or even drink—more cheaply. I know that a parliamentary question on this matter was tabled before the Secretary of State came to office, but why are the goods that we sell to our troops more expensive than the ones that they can obtain privately from local sources? It is ridiculous. The NAAFI is there not to rip off our troops, but to serve them in the field.
Probably the biggest bugbear in the British Army since the time that I joined in 1974 and still today is the personal webbing and kit of a soldier in the field. We had the debacle of the SA80 and whether it would be refurbished or not. The new SA80 A2 is a damn good weapon. We accept that. The troops said to me, "The first one was a heap of rubbish, sir. This one actually works." That is fantastic news, but we should have got it right at the start. There were other issues, such as whether the guys out there had proper food, loo rolls and so on.
When I returned to Iraq just before the general election, we still had troops in olive green webbing in the middle of a desert. "Why?", I asked the commanding officer. "The webbing hasn't come through, sir." Then I commented to the commanding officer that a lot of the webbing and equipment the soldiers were wearing was not Army issue. I asked why that was. When I served in the Guards, I could not even put a pair of bootlaces into my boots without my sergeant major saying, "That's not issue, lad. You're not having it in there." When I asked the commanding officer in Iraq what was going on, he replied, "Our decision is now, sir, if the soldiers can buy it and are willing to buy it, and it's better than what they get on issue, we'll let them wear it."
I was astounded. The Guards, of all the regiments, would never have let that happen. The reason it is happening is that the kit that the taxpayer is buying and that we are procuring for our troops is not suitable for use. We need a full review. I know the Minister disagrees, but we need a review of personal kit. Before the election, I met a mother whose son had just joined the Royal Engineers. She had spent £1,000 out of her own money buying kit for him. The average sum spent, the soldiers in Iraq told me, was £750. That cannot be right. Taxpayers' money is being spent, yet these guys and girls are still going off and buying equipment.
The units that I was with in Iraq were men-only units. I then went to the field hospital, where I was told that everything was fine except that there was a slight shortage of nurses. I suggested that lots of nurses must have been called up through the Territorial Army. "We've called up all we can, Mr. Penning," they said, "but we are still desperately short of nurses." I asked how they were filling the gap. "Well, Mr. Penning, I mustn't tell you this, but we are using a company called Frontier Medical. That's an agency. We have agency nurses here in al-Amarah, supporting our troops in the field." I praise the agency nurses for having the guts and determination to go out there, but they are on £600 a day. Our junior troops do not earn £300 a week. There is something wrong with such an imbalance.
Another imbalance was alluded to in earlier comments. Some of our troops are leaving as soon as they return to the UK We must ask ourselves why they are leaving. Is it because their time is up and they have done their service—their three, six or nine years? No. Most of them are leaving by purchasing. They are going before their commanding officer and asking to purchase their discharge from the armed forces. Why are senior NCOs leaving the armed forces after six, seven, eight or nine years? The answer is that they are going back to Iraq, Minister. They are going back to be part of the security services out there because they can earn in a day what our guys are earning in a fortnight. That must be wrong. We must assess why that is happening.
One reason why there are so many security guards out there is that we do not have enough troops to supply. I shall give an example. When I was in Baghdad, I was kindly put up at the ambassador's residence. We were met and taken around brilliantly by plainclothes Royal Military Police—some of the best trained soldiers I have ever worked with. They were fantastic. The ambassador's residence is guarded by private security companies. The embassy in Baghdad is guarded by private security companies. When the Royal Military Police are asked, "Isn't it slightly embarrassing that you can't guard our ambassador in a conflict situation?", they say, "With what, sir? The Royal Military Police isn't big enough to do this any more."
I do not want to hark back to the days when the armed forces would not have fitted inside Wembley stadium, when it is eventually built. Now, the whole of the British Army would fit inside Wembley stadium once it is built. I do not want to hark back to the fact that we have tremendous problems with recruitment, even though it is plain why we have such problems. Our biggest problem is retention. The Minister knows that, as it has come up time and again. Our experienced servicemen are going back home. The Scots Guards have gone back to Munster. Even before they have left the area, it is known that most of the senior and middle-ranking NCOs will leave the armed forces. Something must be done to encourage them to stay. They joined the armed forces because they wanted to be in the armed forces, but they are being undermined while they are out there serving.
I may have spoken for slightly too long, and I apologise. Let me finally say that the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) said something that worried me. I fear—I am not saying this just because he is not present—that his comments will probably have caused even more problems for morale in the armed forces. They are the last thing that our troops need to hear. What really worried me, though, was his saying that a 17-year-old soldier had been deployed to Iraq. I was a boy soldier, but could not be deployed even to Northern Ireland until I was 18. If what the hon. Gentleman said was incorrect, I hope that the Minister will let us know. Soldiers must be 18, and that is how it should be. Boy soldiers should not be deployed, and God forbid that they ever will be.
Young soldiers need to be trained. That helped me enormously to get on to the straight and narrow when I was a young man of 16. I am proud to have served, and I was proud to go and visit our troops. Nevertheless, I hope that the Minister will consider some of their problems and concerns, which I promised them I would raise in the House if I was elected.
Today's debate is all about defence in the world. The fact that Britain is a major military power means that we have a tremendous amount of responsibility in regard to where we deploy our armed forces. Obviously, there are parts of the world that we must protect. Places such as the Falkland islands and Gibraltar depend on us, and the British public understands why we are sending our troops to those places. In fact, they support us. They support the Government wholeheartedly, and approve of the spending of money and other resources on protecting the places where we send our troops.
Other areas, such as Belize, depend on us. If there were not British soldiers there, the neighbouring country, Guatemala, would devour Belize. We are playing a critical role in supporting that small country.
Our Navy does a great deal in the Caribbean to stop the flow of drugs.
Not for long.
Well, it does at the moment.
Then there are places such as Iraq. No matter what people's views are on the war in Iraq—we have heard some very different opinions here today—I feel that our allies in NATO have responsibilities to help us, whether or not they agreed with the war. Some of our NATO allies are helping. Countries such as Poland and Italy have sent troops. They are with us there, supporting us in bringing democracy and stability to the country. However, I disagree with the Secretary of State for Defence, who assured me that all NATO members were doing their bit. I do not believe that they are. I think that NATO is meant to be a bloc of total solidarity between nations. If we do something, all the member countries in that bloc should participate, but I believe that some NATO allies have not done as much as they could to support us in Iraq.
There are some extremely wealthy countries in the European Union, with relatively large defence budgets, but they have played almost no part in the post-war development of Iraq. Then there are other countries around the world such as India, Pakistan and China. Those are growing military powers, but—it is somewhat controversial to say this—they currently seem to be focusing on their own local back yards rather than recognising that with their increased economic and military power, they too should start to take responsibility for dealing with trouble hotspots around the world.
What I am trying to say is that we are making too many interventions around the world. It is easy to demand that we help this country or that country, but we are already doing a great deal. The Secretary of State and the Government should make other countries around the world take responsibility and shoulder some of the hard work and effort that we are putting in.
I cannot understand our intervention in Sierra Leone. I do not understand why we have troops in Sierra Leone, but not in Darfur or other trouble spots in Africa. Why are our troops in Sierra Leone? Nor do members of the public fully understand the matter. In preparation for the debate, I asked some people in Shrewsbury whether they knew that we have troops in Sierra Leone. They did not, so I asked them whether they supported that deployment. They said that they did not, because they did not understand why our troops were there.
If I may, I shall explain briefly why we have troops in Sierra Leone and what they are doing there. They are part of an international military training team, of which they form the greatest number. Their purpose is to train the Sierra Leone forces so that they can take on the problems internally in that country to maintain stability and to enable them to work with neighbouring countries to try to bring stability to that region. Without question, our troops do a superb job and we will continue to maintain them there.
I am sure that they do a superb job, but the question remains: why Sierra Leone and not other parts of the world? I raise the question only because I believe that the British public need greater clarification when Governments take decisions to deploy troops. The public need to understand why they have been sent to Sierra Leone and not another African country. There are so many trouble spots around the world that the Government have a responsibility to explain why they will intervene in one place and not another.
We need to be able to say, "No, we cannot commit troops to that particular problem, because we are already overstretched." We need to focus more on some of our own interests. Today has been a very painful day for Members on both sides of the House. For me, homeland security is very important and that brings me back to what my speech has been about. We do a great deal around the world, but it is now the time—when we are under threat from terrorism—to start to focus more on Great Britain, on protecting our borders and our country, instead of spreading ourselves so thinly across the world.
I apologise for not being present for the start of the debate. My understanding is that the closing speeches are scheduled for 5.25—
In that case, I have seven minutes.
I share the concerns expressed by Conservative Members about the treatment of the troops and the failure to provide adequate kit for them. I have several contacts in the Territorial Army and a branch is based in my constituency. Considerable concern has been expressed to me about those issues. The wider issue is the policy of the Government and how they approach matters throughout the world.
If the Government are to take action without wider acceptance of the justice of their case for doing so, as arguably happened in Iraq, that will cause difficulties. We have seen such difficulties in Iraq. Although the British troops have lots of experience of dealing with difficult situations in Northern Ireland, the actions of the American troops and the anger that they cause have an impact on the British troops and put them in a difficult situation. When we find ourselves, as we do now, with great constraints on resources throughout the world, we end up stretching our troops very thinly and facing difficulties with kit. As a result of the Government's defence policy, we put the troops in a situation that is unacceptable in many ways. The knock-on effects cause massive difficulties for the United Kingdom in many countries throughout the world.
The Government must think about the way in which they address the issues of defence. I refer not just to the detailed issue of the treatment of the troops, but to their policies and whether they receive wider acceptance in the world. They have not done so to date, and that is causing substantial problems in this and other countries. The Government must recognise the need to address that problem.
I have come in at the end of this debate and recognise that the winding-up speeches are about to start. However, I conclude by saying that the Government really need to think about what they are doing with their defence policy throughout the world. It has a large number of problems.
I wish to start with a quotation from that great public servant, the late Lord Ismay. He served as Churchill's representative on the Chiefs of Staff committee throughout world war two and later became the first Secretary-General of NATO. He therefore spanned a great deal of the history of the 20th century, and in his active service as a young officer, he had something to do with insurgencies as well. When he was looking back on this unparalleled career, he wrote:
"It is easy to criticise peaceful democracies for their habitual lack of preparedness when a war breaks out, but it is only fair to recognise that the dice are loaded against them. Dictators, bent on aggression . . . are masters of their own timetable. They are free to decide when to strike, where to strike and how to strike, and to arrange their armament programmes accordingly. Their potential victims, the democracies . . . with their inherent hatred of war, do not know when or where the blow will fall, or what manner of blow it will be."
If Lord Ismay were alive, well and living in these times, I think that he would say something similar about the problems that we face today.
A threat is at large in the world that is beginning to manifest itself on a small scale domestically in the homelands of the principal democratic countries. We saw it in America in September 2001; we saw it in Spain on the eve of its general election; and we have seen it today; and of course, it is no coincidence that the G8 summit is currently under way.
I will not wander from the subject of the debate, which is "Defence in the World", but I agree with the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) to the extent that there would be an air of unreality about a defence debate taking place on such a day if it did not in any way allude at least to the type of conflict of which we have seen such a terrible and despicable manifestation in the streets and on the tube network of London today.
I will not speculate about who did this, but I will make a prediction. My prediction is that it will be found in the end that very small numbers of people indeed were involved in carrying out these atrocities, just as very small numbers were involved in carrying out the atrocities that we have seen in a variety of countries since September 2001. I do not know whether the people carrying out these atrocities have a real understanding of the resilience of democratic societies under such circumstances. Again, I agree with the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow to the extent that, from the point of view of the victim, it makes very little difference whether they are killed by a suicide bomber on a bus or by a high explosive dropped from an aircraft. That is not to say, however, that the two activities are comparable.
Certain methods of war are recognised as legal. Certain methods of killing people are widely recognised as totally unacceptable. No matter how volubly, with what degree of articulation, or at what volume the hon. Gentleman may speak—I am sorry that he has not seen fit to come back to the Chamber now that he has caught his headlines—he nevertheless cannot conceal the basic difference between casualties who get caught up in conventional warfare and casualties who get caught up in acts of terrorism. There are laws of war, but what happened today was not part of any recognised law of war.
I am sorry that there is still a Member of this House who is willing to try to justify, or empathise with, people who behave illegally when fighting their cause, no matter how strongly he happens to believe the grievances that they imagine they have. What is it that people of this sort really expect us to do? Do they really expect us to hand over a country such as Iraq to people, for the most part foreigners, who would destroy any chance of freedom for the millions of people who make up that society? Did they expect us to have done nothing in Afghanistan? I remember that a Member in the last Parliament said that we should have bombed Afghanistan with bread, not bombs, and subsequently identified with, and empathised with, suicide terrorists in the middle east. She has gone to a well deserved fate in the House of Lords and I am glad to say that her outlook is not widely shared.
When we consider the defence in the world that we have to undertake, we must recognise that the people who are mounting these campaigns fully understand the importance of having maximum impact for minimum effort. We must fight on the ground where we are strongest, not where they are strongest. The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow said that some of those people are prepared to sacrifice their lives if they can take thousands of people with them. Yes, indeed they are, which is why there is only one threat about which we really must worry as a nation, as opposed to as individuals, families and people who may get caught up in random or planned acts of terrorism: people of that sort must never be allowed to get their hands on weapons that could possibly kill thousands or tens of thousands because we know that they would unhesitatingly use them if they could get hold of them. That is why the threshold has been lowered for intervention internationally. That is why one cannot take the chance of allowing other countries with dictatorial regimes that might think it in their interests to make such weapons available to such terrorists to continue to have the possibility of owning those weapons, unless they can satisfy the international community that they absolutely have renounced them.
We heard several hon. Members pleading the cause, even now, of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said that we should not be thinking of Trident, but rushing round the world trying to scoop up the loose fissile material that has gone missing from the former Soviet Union. However, I say to him that those two propositions have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Whether or not we have a successor to Trident will of course not diminish the problem of terrorists getting their hands on fissile material, but it would certainly add to our dangers if we got into a situation in which other countries continued to possess nuclear weapons while we renounced ours.
The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith), in a typically thoughtful speech that became typically emotional, did everything that he could to argue the case for the Defence Aviation Repair Agency workers who formerly did such an excellent job in his constituency for the RAF.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) gave an account of the basis of the more extreme factions of militant Islam and said that there was not enough emphasis on winning hearts and minds. Here there is a role for our Defence Secretary and Prime Minister to do a little more in carrying over to our American allies the successful techniques that have been used by British forces over the post-war decades in defeating long-term insurgencies. The most obvious role model is the long campaign in Malaya. At the end of that campaign, the insurgency was defeated. Insurgencies have to be defeated by a number of means. They have to be resisted militarily; they have to be fought at source; they have to be infiltrated at home; and one must never give the slightest evidence of weakness of purpose.
There, I take issue with one or two Members such as the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), who suggested for the Liberal Democrats that it was important to set some sort of date for withdrawal. Nothing could be better calculated to increase the dangers to our troops working in Iraq than the knowledge that the insurgents had to hold on only for so long and those troops would be gone. If we are to fight a campaign of this sort, the message has to be that there will be no withdrawal until the enemy are defeated, so they may as well give up now because they are not going to win. Anything less than that message and we may as well not have got involved in the first place; otherwise, we will be heading for unnecessary casualties and ultimate costly failure.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) made the point that the sort of incidents that we have seen in London today have been happening for a long time and on a much heavier scale in Iraq. I could add that they are also similar to events in Israel. Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of the Arab-Israeli dispute, one must recognise that the incidents that have happened on such a heavy scale in Israel have no chance whatever of overthrowing the Israeli state. The sooner terrorists and their apologists realise that they will have no chance of overthrowing the democratic system of the United Kingdom, the sooner this sort of strife and atrocious behaviour can be brought to an end.
The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) remarked on the role of international organisations and sensibly backed up her point with a hard-headed realisation of the necessity from time to time to use military force. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes (Mr. Lancaster) concentrated on the use of our reservists, who are put under excessive pressure at a time when we are dependent on them as well as on our regular forces.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) brought to our debate knowledge that can be gained only as a highly professional former regular soldier by talking about what it really means to the troops on the ground not to have the adequate equipment and adequate communications on which their lives may well depend.
Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) suggested that we were intervening too often. I do not entirely accept what he said about Sierra Leone per se. I visited the country with the Defence Committee and I can tell my hon. Friend that people were stopping us in the street and thanking us simply for being there, because a relatively small military investment had had a relatively large effect on the security of many people living there. I venture to add that it brought a beneficial effect on the area as a whole. I agree with my hon. Friend that when we take decisive action of that sort in a country like Sierra Leone, it seems rather inconsistent that we refuse to take action in countries facing equally if not more extreme circumstances, such as the suffering of those poor people under Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
As I have a few moments left, I want to say a little more about the nuclear deterrent—something that is close to my heart because I go back on this campaign to a time in the 1980s, which included a famous long march by the then general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Monsignor Bruce Kent. He started out at Faslane and walked all the way to Burfield. At various stages en route, he was joined by people like me who disagreed with him and people like the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow who strongly agreed with him. Of course the cold war was still raging. At that time—in no way do I distort the argument—it was suggested that there was no evidence whatsoever that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact allies posed a significant or serious military threat.
In 1998, a book was published called "The Cold War: A Military History", which revealed some of the plans that the German Government discovered after the downfall of communism. This is what they said:
"since the end of the Cold War, no evidence has been found of any Warsaw Pact defensive plans, except for a few formulated in the final three years, after President Gorbachev had insisted that the General Staff prepared them. Instead, all plans concentrated on a series of massive attacks, which were aimed at securing Soviet control of the entire west-European land mass."
A campaign was planned that would overrun the central front and then France would be overrun,
"so that the leading troops arrived at the Atlantic coast and the Franco-Spanish border by the thirty-fifth day.
In these plans it was intended to use nuclear weapons as an integral part of the attacks, even if NATO did not use them first, and many targets had already been selected. The main attacks on the Central Front would have been allocated 205 Scud rockets at army level and 380 short-range missiles at divisional level, which 255 nuclear bombs carried by aircraft".
At that time, plenty of people believed that it was unwise of us to keep nuclear weapons. I should like to ask the House how many people still think that it was unwise for us to keep nuclear weapons in the light of what we now know of the Soviet attack plans if a war had broken out. Those were offensive, not defensive, plans.
It is said that article VI of the non-proliferation treaty commits us to getting rid of all our nuclear weapons. Well, yes and no. What it actually commits us to is
"to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date",
which we certainly have done,
"and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control".
In other words, what it is saying is that we should aim for both a nuclear-free world and a conventional-arms-free world as well.
I was indeed at that meeting with Robert McNamara, a gentleman who played a key role in the evolution of America's strategy in the run-up to and during the Vietnam war. I noted that he did indeed say that nuclear weapons are illegal. I then challenged him on that very point, and he showed straightaway that he did indeed know that the requirement was for worldwide nuclear and worldwide conventional disarmament, and he said that an attempt was even made to insert a comma between the two at some point to try to differentiate them, but that it had mysteriously disappeared. That did not stop that gentleman, who is a remarkable character at the age of 88, from nevertheless having conceded the point that nuclear weapons were not illegal under that provision, rounding off his speech with the peroration that was quoted by the hon. Member for Pendle, and reasserting that they were illegal after all.
I have to ask the hon. Member for Pendle and those who think like him why someone whose judgment was so flawed in the 1960s appeals to them now as having wise judgment in the 21st century. The answer is that people with a career that points them in a certain direction during its active phase sometimes, with a view to history, like to rewrite it or reshape it during their retirement.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
I am sorry but no, I am about to conclude.
This debate has taken place on a solemn day in solemn circumstances. These circumstances remind us that we have to protect ourselves, and they do not suggest that the way to protect ourselves is always to do everything that our enemies and opponents want us to do. It is not enough to say that the suicide bomber should have his cause understood. It is not enough to say that it was predictable that these events would happen. Of course it was predictable, but that does not mean to say that we could have done anything other than what we did, which was to try to take on the godfathers of, and root causes of, terrorist movements in countries far from here. If we do not take them on far away from these shores and tackle them in the way we have, on a bipartisan basis, we can expect more—not less—aggravation, atrocities, death and destruction within these shores.
All our thoughts are elsewhere at this sad time, and I certainly share the sentiments expressed by all Members about the developing tragedy outside this House. It is worth putting on the record a press release from the Muslim Council of Britain, which condemns what has happened. It states:
"Yesterday we celebrated as Londoners, euphoric that our great city had secured the Olympic Games. Today we stand aghast as we witness a series of brutal attacks upon our capital city. We were together in our celebration; we must remain together in our time of crisis".
The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) should pay heed to those comments.
Once again, we have had a vigorous, healthy and well-informed defence debate that has shown the importance of our armed forces to us all. I may not agree with many of the points made by Opposition Members, or even with some of those made by Labour Members, but I think that we will all agree—with perhaps one exception—that the praise that we give to the armed forces is well deserved. The services deserve our thanks and admiration for their selfless efforts, in often dangerous and unpredictable circumstances, in countries throughout the world. They serve this nation well and they can take justifiable pride in all that they do as a force for good.
I thank for their contributions the right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram)—I understand that he cannot be in his place to hear the wind-ups—my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore), my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith), the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers), my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), and the hon. Members for North-East Milton Keynes (Mr. Lancaster) and for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning). I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead, and I thank him for his contribution in Iraq, along with other Members who have served in that theatre and elsewhere in recent times. I also welcomed the contributions from the hon. Members for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), and, of course, from the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis).
In opening this debate, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State referred to some of our successes in helping to make this a better and more secure world. To that end, our armed forces have served with distinction in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and west and central Africa, as well as in Northern Ireland. Our forces will remain committed in all those areas for as long as they are needed. However, it is obvious that the challenges that we face today—international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the risks posed by failed and failing states—cannot be solved solely by military solutions. An effective response to these problems requires integrated planning of military, diplomatic and economic actions at national and international levels.
My right hon. Friend made it clear that NATO and the Euro-Atlantic partnership remain a cornerstone of our defence. My right hon. Friend also made it clear that the European Union has a distinct role to play in addressing today's security challenges. Our presidency of the European Union provides us with the opportunity to continue to develop the European security and defence policy. That is an opportunity to improve European capabilities and achieve greater co-ordination between the civil and military components of the response to an emerging crisis.
The work reflects our efforts nationally to join up the activities of different Departments and improve our ability to address the threats of today and tomorrow. The Ministry of Defence is working ever closer with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development and other Departments to try to deal with threats and tensions before they escalate into conflict.
The global and Africa conflict prevention pools that were set up in 2001 provide us with a unique cross-Whitehall structure for co-ordinating military, diplomatic and development activity to tackle the long term and underlying causes of instability overseas. Our policy is to focus our engagement on those countries and regions where we believe that the United Kingdom can make a genuine difference. Through that strategy, we have achieved notable successes in several countries across the globe, from Belize to Indonesia.
Let me give some practical examples of what our people achieve through their activities. The British peace support team in east Africa has been training African Union personnel so that they can undertake peace support operations in Darfur. Following our successful support for Kenyan de-miners, operating with the United Nations in Eritrea, the Royal Engineers are assisting the Kenyans in developing the international mines action training centre in Nairobi. I had the honour of officially opening that centre last year. The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham asked why we are in certain places. I hope that he considers that activity to be beneficial and therefore justified.
The United Kingdom also leads the world in expertise on security sector reform. That work develops potentially unstable countries' security structures so that they can provide their own security and reduce their reliance on assistance from us and other nations. Let me give two examples. Our experts have supported the Jamaicans in developing their national security strategy and are training the Indonesian military in the importance of civilian oversight and the democratic accountability of the armed forces. Does the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham agree with that deployment? If not, why not?
The conflict prevention pools also fund security sector reform activities to support post-conflict stabilisation in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans. In Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence supports Afghan defence reform, demobilisation and disarmament. That work is complemented by DFID and FCO-led programmes for reintegrating its competence and reforming the police. Does the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham believe that that is a place where our commitment is worth while? [Interruption.] He questioned where we are, what we are doing and the merits of it.
Of course, we can always improve on the way in which we do things. We especially acknowledge the challenge that conflict prevention and stabilisation work presents in the period that immediately follows conflict. We are in a crucial period, when we need several Departments to react quickly and in a co-ordinated fashion to begin reconstruction activities as soon as the security situation allows. We recognise some of the weaknesses in our approach to Iraq, but as a result of our experience we decided last year to establish a cross-Government, post-conflict reconstruction unit. I could provide other examples but I want to deal with the debate.
The right hon. and learned Member for Devizes made several points that other hon. Members also mentioned. He referred to the National Audit Office report on capabilities and military readiness. He mentioned Afghanistan and our work on counter-narcotics and he asked about recruitment. The NAO report on military readiness suggested that 38 per cent. of the forces reported serious weaknesses in readiness for new operations. Critically—I emphasise that word—the report showed that only 2 per cent. of forces reported critical weaknesses that would make it impossible to deploy them on operations. Of course, those have been addressed and corrected. By the end of March, no forces were reporting critical weaknesses.
Some weaknesses are inevitable given the current operational commitments, especially in units recuperating from operational deployment. It is important to understand what is happening and to put in place measures to correct that. It is important to represent the balance of the NAO's views. The report specifically says that the MOD has a
"good understanding of risks to readiness"
and, importantly,
"good plans . . . to mitigate them".
Let us look at the impact. The armed forces are heavily committed, but the number of regular armed forces deployed on operations was reduced from 20 per cent. to 18 per cent. over the course of the year, and has gone down from the 35 per cent. peak of the war-fighting stage in Iraq. We believe that that is challenging but sustainable, and that we can do more if need to.
The impact on the Royal Navy was also examined. It has been said that in the worst-case scenario little more than half the fleet would be able to deploy within the allocated time as the result of a deliberate decision by the MOD to run down the Navy's readiness. In paragraph 2.8, however, the report makes it clear that as it continues to be likely that the greatest operational demands will be made of the Army and some parts of the RAF, the MOD has deliberately taken risk against peacetime levels of some maritime forces. I believe that that is sensible—one has to balance priorities and needs. To mitigate that risk, however, the Navy has introduced a system of reduced support periods for some ships to make sure that those that we are most likely to need are available. Again, that appears to be working well. The Navy is not currently indicating any critical weaknesses and the NAO report shows how readiness might decline if remedial action is not taken. It acknowledges in paragraph 2.11 our decision to put additional funds into the Navy to ensure that the worst-case scenario does not come to pass. Once the problem has been measured, mechanisms are put in place to address it.
On the cannibalisation of equipment, the removal of ship' fitted equipment—STOROB—is not a new concept. It is only used, however, to make high-readiness operational commitments when a donor ship is either reducing in readiness towards upkeep of disposal or is already in upkeep. Sensible STOROB management is an effective way of dealing with the problem. It becomes a matter of concern, however, if we are doing that to such an extent that we cannot deliver the Navy's requirements. Hon. Members have expressed deep concern about cannibalisation, but only 4 per cent. of requisition stores preparing ships for putting to sea used that method. It would be great to make it 0 per cent., but it is effective management.
Counter-narcotics is without question a very big issue in Afghanistan. People present the argument that it is a problem, but no one comes up with an answer about how to tackle it or what resources need to be put in place to deal with it. We understand the nature of the country and the people better, but we have only been there a short time. We have clearly identified that the best solution will be achieved through the Afghans themselves, who must take on the challenge as much as us. They must accept that they need to strengthen their resources so that they can deal with the problem specifically and effectively. That is part of the mission in which we are engaged—it is about lifting the capabilities of the Afghan army in the special anti-narcotics force and in the Army as a whole so that it can tackle the problem.
A survey of the 2004 poppy crop in Afghanistan revealed that cultivation had gone up by 64 per cent. and that production had gone up by 17 per cent., which is clearly unwelcome. There are early signs this year, however, that there may be an overall reduction in opium poppy cultivation, but we must wait for assessments later this year from the UN and the US. If people identify the problem, they must suggest mechanisms that we need to put in place to deal with it. We are trying not only to bolster the strength and ability of the Afghan Government to deal with the problem militarily, but to work across the whole civil administration in Afghanistan using measures on law enforcement, alternative livelihoods, criminal justice, eradication, demand reduction and regional co-operation. Narcotics is a big issue, but one that I believe we are beginning to tackle vigorously.
We must always pay close attention to recruitment and retention. Trends happen before we necessarily understand that they are trends, and we are always in the position of having to deal with them in terms of our best understanding of their impact. By the end of financial year 2004–05, the services had achieved 96 per cent. of their overall recruiting target. That is a significant achievement, even though the targets had been reduced because we set them in line with the size that we wanted our armed forces to be. However, we still found it hard to achieve 100 per cent. of that reduced target. Anyone who has seen the energy, effort and intensity of work that the recruiting teams put in will know that that was not for want of trying.
We are up against a range of factors. We have a problem with the gatekeepers. The economy is strong, which makes recruitment in a particular age cohort difficult. All those issues have been addressed by the armed forces and we shall continue to do the best we can on recruitment. If there is a problem of retention, we need to understand why it is happening and what remedial measures can be implemented. If those measures do not work—sometimes they do not—we will have to find other solutions. The process is sophisticated and we are making great efforts to address the problems.
The hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk mentioned the fleet review last week—a wonderful occasion. He also spoke about HMS Invincible as though something new had happened. In fact, we simply brought forward by a number of months what we were going to do anyway, and those who followed what was happening in relation to the utilisation of our carriers would have known that that was going to happen.
The hon. Gentleman called for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq; interestingly, he did not call for a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. I question why. If withdrawal is right in principle in one country, it should be right elsewhere. I do not believe that it is right to set a timetable because it simply establishes a target at which those forces that are out to do evil can aim. I do not think that they would sit around and wait for the timetabled withdrawal. Rather, they would escalate their activities to precipitate an earlier withdrawal, causing greater loss of life, not necessarily among coalition forces, but among their own people. That is what is happening in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned shortfalls in some of the key enablers—logisticians, intelligence corps and other key personnel. That is one of the reasons why we are restructuring the British Army. We are taking approximately 2,500 posts, redefining them and then reinserting them as key enablers. We recognise where the shortfalls are and we are trying to address the problem as part of the overall reorganisation.
Let me deal briefly with the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow—I just noticed the time. I mentioned the Muslim Council of Britain in my opening remarks because I believe that it speaks for the good, decent Muslim people of this country. I think that the hon. Gentleman is dipping his poisonous tongue in a pool of blood, and I think it is disgraceful.
It being Six o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.
On that point, Madam Deputy Speaker, I wonder if I might answer—
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. That foul-mouthed, deliberately timed, last-10-second smear by the thug at the Dispatch Box cannot be answered by me—
Order. May I remind all hon. Members—[Interruption.] Order. May I remind all hon. Members that good temper and moderation are the hallmarks of language in the Chamber?
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—
Order. May I ask that, on this day of all days, we bear that in mind?
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Twice this evening, first from the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) and now from the Minister, you have permitted personal attacks on me that go beyond the norm in parliamentary discourse, as I think the Clerk will advise you. If I may say so, you ought to have intervened to deal with the point made by the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead, and you ought not to allow—
Order. The hon. Gentleman is challenging my keeping of order in the Chamber. I would ask him and all other hon. Members to think very carefully about their words on this particular day. When I heard anything inappropriate, I did intervene and try to prevent it happening.
European Standing Committees (Temporary Nomination)
Ordered,
That, if any European Union Documents have been referred to a European Standing Committee which has not yet been nominated for the duration of the Parliament under paragraph (3) of Standing Order No. 119 (European Standing Committees), the Committee of Selection may nominate one or more temporary European Standing Committees to consider one or more of the documents instead; and the remaining provisions of the Standing Order (including sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) of paragraph (3)) shall apply.—[Claire Ward.]
Adjournment
Resolved,
That this House do now adjourn.—[Claire Ward.]
Adjourned accordingly at one minute past Six o'clock.