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5.16 pm
Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury): I begin by declaring several interests to the House. First, I am very pleased to see that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the Member for Amber Valley (Mr. Oppenheim), is in charge of the Chemical Weapons Bill. I had the great pleasure of teaching him his A-levels some years ago. I got on my bike and left the Front Bench, but I am delighted to see him there today and I congratulate him on his achievement in putting the Bill together. I hope that it will enjoy a speedy passage through the House.
Secondly, I reiterate what is already recorded in the Register of Members' Interest: I am connected with a company called Hortichem, which helps our lettuces to grow better and ensures that our top fruit is better than the French varieties. The company is involved entirely with horticultural chemicals and I have done my best to ascertain that it has nothing whatever to do with the schedules that appear at the back of the Bill. However, I declare my interest to the House just in case.
Thirdly, I have enormous pride in declaring my interest as the Member of Parliament representing Porton Down and both establishments there. Today we are discussing only the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment, which employs 620 wonderful people. They form part of this country's important scientific base and they have helped to put us at the forefront of the field internationally. We should also mention the support staff, without whom the facility could not operate. They are crucial members of my constituency community and I am proud to represent them.
When I became the Member of Parliament for Salisbury in 1983 my predecessor, Sir Michael Hamilton, destroyed his files, leaving me only two: one on Stonehenge, and one on Porton Down and the reorganisation that the Porton Down communities had endured over the past 30 years.
I welcome the support that the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) gave to Porton Down. He asked what would safeguard Porton Down, and I can best answer that question by reminding him of the 620 employees at Porton Down who are indispensable to the future well-being of our nation's defence and to that of
the international community. During the past 12 years, they have taken the trouble to educate their Member of Parliament pretty thoroughly about operations at Porton Down. I thank the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Health for allowing me the degree of access to that facility that I have enjoyed over the years.
The Bill was introduced jointly by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence. My right hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling) was absolutely right. The Bill has much wider significance than might at first appear, and I share his view that it is one of the most important Bills before the House this Session.
The staff at the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down welcome the Chemical Weapons Convention as an important part in the web of measures which includes export controls and chemical defence equipment designed to deter the use of chemical weapons worldwide.
The mission of the CBDE has already been described by a number of Members, but the context within which the Bill is now before the House is not so widely appreciated. The threat of chemical and biological weapons is not a specific issue involving a number of chemical substances in the schedule to a particular Bill; it is a spectrum ranging from the classic warfare agents that we have heard about, such as first world war mustard gases, nerve agents and cyanide, through agricultural and pharmaceutical chemicals to bioregulators, toxins and biological agents such as bacteria, rickettsia and viruses-- the designer molecules about which we have been hearing. So Porton Down has a huge amount of work, not only looking forward, but also looking backwards, as the hon. Member for East Kilbride (Mr. Ingram) well knows.
It was no accident that the Gulf war benefited considerably from the work of the CBDE. The Defence Select Committee recently produced a report on Gulf war syndrome. In all the froth that flows from such reports, perhaps we lost sight of the fact that we totally endorsed the Ministry of Defence in providing NAPS--nerve agent pre-treatment sets--tablets and inoculations and that any quarrel we had concerned the methodology and after-care involved. That work was carried out at the CBDE. The scientists there were right to do what they did, and without that work we would have been worse placed.
It is a supreme irony that however well equipped and trained a nation's troops are and wherever in the world they are fighting, they can be wiped out by a whiff of a chemical or biological agent. That is why chemical defence is so important; it is all part of deterrence.
The work at Porton Down is probably as important as any other part of the nation's deterrence, including its nuclear capability, and the Government recognise that. I refer the House to the comments of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence in his excellent speech to the Tri-Service conference earlier this month:
We also saw quite recently in Japan the terror that the threat of chemical weapons can create on a major city's underground transport system. I have every confidence that our nation will have planned for such a civil event should it happen in Britain. I suspect that that is not the case in some other countries. Such issues now mean that the Secretary of State for Defence has wider responsibilities. Perhaps we should also hear from the Home Office during the passage of the Bill.
A number of Members have referred to what the CBDE has or has not done. It is important to remember that its connection with the Bill goes back a long way. The CBDE has been working closely with the Ministry of Defence proliferation and arms control secretariat and in co-operation with the Foreign and Commonwealth office to support the preparatory commission for the Organisation of the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international body established to implement the convention. The CBDE has sent technical representatives from Porton Down to the experts group and specialist task forces in The Hague working on establishing the structure of the OPCW and developing the technical and administrative requirements in preparation for the convention's entry into force. In other words, my constituents have been at the base of the entire international effort. It is indeed the world's best effort and many of my constituents have helped to make it possible.
My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister appears to have come under fire from the Opposition Front Bench. That is rather unfair. Page 7 of the annual report of the CBDE for 1994-95, to which a number of Members have referred, makes it pretty clear that the CBDE has encountered some difficulty in moving forward sufficiently fast. It states:
The CBDE has made a major effort to prepare for the legislation and it is not accurate to blame my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, a former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, for the delay. It means simply that we have been doing our homework better than other nations might have done and that was correct.
It is important that MOD units around the country and their facilities are fully prepared for the challenge inspections that are planned under the legislation. Accordingly, the CBDE has taken part in the United Kingdom series of practice challenge inspections. It has also provided lecturers to assist in the Dutch-sponsored pilot training courses for inspectors and national authority personnel from all over the world.
The CBDE has developed, produced and had certified a toxic material transport container which will make an important practical contribution to the safe transport of samples taken by OPCW inspectors. In the aftermath of the Sarin attack in Tokyo, I recall seeing on television people carrying extraordinary jars of substances. I am delighted that the CBDE has taken matters further.
Airlines have strict rules governing the transport of hazardous materials and the new container has been designed to provide compliance with all existing
packaging criteria. It has now been granted a certificate of packaging issued on behalf of the Department of Transport, the Civil Aviation Authority and the Health and Safety Executive. A container with small samples was taken from London Heathrow to Washington Dulles on 15 February this year in co-operation with the US Army Edgewood research development and engineering center.
A number of Opposition Members referred to Iraq and of course the international effort there depended almost entirely on the work at Porton Down. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Linlithgow for recognising the importance of that work.
As for the continuing question of hazard assessment, I should underline to my hon. Friend the Minister how important it is that we do not stop now. We are at the start of a process that will continue into the future.
Reference has been made to the Soviet disclosures of the nerve agent VX. The hon. Member for East Kilbride was absolutely right to refer to that and other disclosures. If I may pre-empt my hon. Friend the Minister, the answer to his question is quite simple. It is exactly why the CBDE argues that it must continue to research those products. That means looking backwards as well as forwards.
It is ironic that the chemical substances originally used and stockpiled in large numbers in the first world war-- and still stockpiled in large numbers, particularly in Russia--were produced because they had a stable existence and a long storage life. Now that we can make designer products very quickly, the most popular chemicals are the very ones that were previously rejected. The CBDE is going back in time to look at things rejected in the 1950s and 1960s, to make sure that we have not missed a single trick in Britain's effort to ensure a slowing, if not cessation, of a wicked trade.
I read the compliance cost assessment produced by my hon. Friend's Department, for which I am grateful to him, but was alarmed by the cost to British industry. I was relieved when I read the details and realised that we are talking about a small number of firms and small commitments by them. Nevertheless, compliance is a burden on British industry and my hon. Friend the Minister should not for one moment blush at being a deregulation Minister who finds himself imposing regulations. Perhaps the firms have been operating under the wrong regulations and that while we have been too obsessed with implementing ridiculous regulations from Brussels all these years, our eye has not been on the ball. Let us abolish a few more regulations from Brussels and make sure that we enforce by regulation things that matter. I urge my hon. Friend not to be embarrassed. He was never embarrassed even when I was teaching him A-level economics, so I do not imagine that he is embarrassed now. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said, we must get it absolutely right and not waste any effort in ensuring security and safety.
"Our concept of security in 2010 will undoubtedly be broader than that which dominated our thinking and posture for the 45 years which followed the end of World War II. As Sir Michael Howard memorably described it, we are emerging from the rigidities of the Cold War. We will see, and have to respond to, a much more diverse range of challenges: terrorism; weapons proliferation, including weapons of mass destruction; competition over natural resources; religious and ethnic disputes; drugs; organised crime; and refugees."
"CBDE has now completed collation of the information needed for the UK declaration of former chemical weapons related activities required by the CWC. Preparation of declarations of present activities has commenced. These activities include details of the United Kingdom Single Small Scale Facility sited at CBDE where small quantities of chemical weapons agents to be used for permitted purposes may be prepared and details of destruction of old CW munitions which are occasionally found at various UK sites as well as on the Range at CBDE.".
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