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Mr. George Foulkes (Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley): On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. "Erskine May" describes certain words and phrases as unparliamentary. Hon. Members sometimes use such words in the heat of the moment and it is difficult for Mr. Speaker, you and your colleagues to keep track of that.
Earlier today, the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) used the term "hypocritical sophistry". I think that that is pretty near to something that would be ruled out by "Erskine May". In Prime Minister's Question Time, I have heard the Prime Minister use the words "deceit" and "lies"—rather, I have heard the Leader of the Opposition use the words "deceit" and "lies" in relation to what the Prime Minister has been doing. It would be useful to go over those exchanges to ensure that the "Erskine May" rules are being upheld. I am in no way criticising Mr. Speaker or you and your colleagues, but it is very important that we—in particular, the Leader of the Opposition—do not use unparliamentary terms.
Madam Deputy Speaker: It is important that all Members think carefully about their use of language. The comments to which the right hon. Gentleman referred were not directed at particular hon. Members. I am right in saying that Mr. Speaker would always ensure that the customs and traditions of the House are upheld.
Orders of the DayArms Control and Disarmament (Inspections) Bill [Lords]
[Relevant document: Third Report from the Defence Committee, Session 2002-03, Arms Control and Disarmament Inspections Bill (HC 321), and the Government response thereto, Second Special Report from the Committee, Session 2002–03, HC 754 .]
Order for Second Reading read.
2.28 pm
The Minister for Europe (Mr. Denis MacShane): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The Bill concerns the adapted version of the conventional armed forces in Europe treaty—the CFE treaty—signed in Paris on 19 November 1990. The agreement on adaptation of the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe, known more familiarly as the adapted CFE treaty, was signed by all states parties to the CFE treaty at Istanbul on 19 November 1999.
The CFE treaty limits the holdings of five categories of heavy weapons—tanks, armoured combat vehicles, artillery, combat aircraft and attack helicopters—by the 30 member states of NATO and the former Warsaw pact. It applies to the land territory of states parties in Europe. The treaty includes an important transparency and verification regime. It is seen as a cornerstone of European security and has resulted in the destruction of more than 50,000 heavy weapons in Europe. However, the treaty was negotiated at the end of the cold war and needed adaptation to reflect the break-up of the Warsaw pact and NATO enlargement.
The adapted CFE treaty was therefore negotiated and signed by states parties to the CFE treaty at Istanbul in 1999. It replaces the old Warsaw pact-NATO bloc-to-bloc system with national and territorial ceilings for heavy weapons. The adapted CFE treaty provides for greater transparency than the present CFE treaty through a substantially enhanced system of information provision. In particular, it increases the amount of military information that each of the 30 states parties to the treaty exchanges, and enhances the regime of inspection. The adapted CFE treaty includes provisions for new European states to join, and also has an enhanced inspection regime, including a new type of inspection that could involve a large area and would not necessarily be limited to military bases. Together with the fact that some parts of military sites are increasingly owned and operated by private companies, that means that we need additional legislation to allow access to non-Ministry of Defence-owned property.
The main provisions of this short, technical Bill amend the Arms Control and Disarmament (Inspections) Act 1991 to provide for the additional rights of entry to private land that are required to implement the additional inspection requirements of the protocol on inspection in the agreement on adaptation. On 3 February, the Secretary of State signed a memorandum confirming that the Bill's provisions are compatible with the European convention on human rights. That was subsequently confirmed by my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), who was then Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
The Bill also confers a power on Her Majesty to make further amendments to the 1991 Act relating to inspections by Order in Council, should they be needed to implement future amendments to the CFE treaty relating to inspections. During the Bill's passage through the House of Lords, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee agreed that that level of delegation and control was appropriate. The Bill thus provides the legislation necessary for the UK to ratify the adapted CFE treaty quickly when the time is right. While the UK is committed to the treaty's earliest possible entry into force, our position and that of our NATO allies remains that ratification can only be envisaged in the context of full compliance by all states parties with agreed treaty limits, consistent with commitments in the CFE Final Act. As right hon. and hon. Members will be aware, those commitments are those agreed between Russia, Georgia and Moldova on the closure of Russian bases and the withdrawal of Russian troops and equipment from the territory of the other two states, which have not yet been fulfilled. We and other NATO allies continue to urge Russia to work with Georgia and Moldova to resolve the outstanding issues on the basis of the principle of host nation consent.
The Secretary of State will not bring the Bill into force in accordance with clause 3 until the Government are ready to ratify the agreement on adaptation. When the Secretary of State decides that the time is right to bring the Bill into force in accordance with clause 3, the Government are content to notify the House at least 21 days before their intention to proceed to ratification. I hope that the House will be able to support the Bill.
2.33 pm
Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire): The official Opposition certainly welcome the Bill's objective, which reflects the desire of the whole House and the country for a safer world with fewer armaments, particularly those that no longer serve any strategic purpose. Having said that, I am a little surprised by the short time that the Minister took to introduce the Bill. Good as it is, it includes a number of things that stretch the official Opposition's good will a little and the charity of my colleagues a good long way. I hope that when the Minister responds to what is likely to be a short debate he will be able to demonstrate that our charity is not misplaced by giving us more specific assurances on a number of points than he provided in his opening remarks.
Sadly, I have a strange feeling that our debate—perhaps given our limited presence in the House, colloquium would be a more appropriate phrase—will not be leading the news broadcasts later. That is a shame, because the treaty that we are effectively adapting today has by any standards been a conspicuous success and something that we should celebrate. It has played a major part in building the peace and security of our continent, which we should never take for granted. The many violent events that have convulsed Europe and cost millions of lives in the last century, most recently in the Balkans, should remind us that peace is not the natural order of our continent. One of our prime duties in the House is to work for the greater security of our constituents, and today we are considering a matter of great importance to that security.
This debate is inherently above party politics and, as was evident in the debates in the other place to which the Minister referred, there is a lot of common ground to be found. However, we will seek clarification of a number of points, and I am confident that the Minister, with his customary good humour and diligence, will be able to provide that. It is right to put on record the House's gratitude to the Select Committee on Defence for its excellent third report for the 2002–03 Session on the Bill. It was published in April, and is an excellent piece of pre-legislative scrutiny that genuinely focuses and informs our debate today. I am sure that, like me, the Minister is a strong believer in pre-legislative scrutiny, especially on technical matters such as the Bill, where some calm deliberation, ahead of the often more partisan nature of the processes involved in the Bill's passage through the House and Committee, can assist hon. Members. Such is the Defence Committee's third report, and I commend it to anyone wishing to understand the issues raised by the Bill.
I should also like to express my gratitude in preparing for this debate to the Library, for its excellent research paper. I do not know how often this has been done in the past by the Library or the Government, but the text of the Arms Control and Disarmament (Inspections) Act 1991, as amended by the Bill, is included in an extremely helpful appendix to the research document. The Government might consider incorporating such amended measures in explanatory notes to technical Bills in future. Frankly, the Bill as it stands does not make a great deal of sense. That is not a criticism of the parliamentary draftsman or the Government—the changes that the Bill will bring into effect are difficult to understand. The Library's approach of crossing out the bits in the 1991 Act that we are repealing and deleting is helpful, and assisted my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mr. Simmonds) and I as we prepared for this debate. The Library therefore deserves special thanks.
The Minister rightly put the Bill in context, and explained how the original treaty placed limits on the numbers of combat aircraft, tanks, attack helicopters, armoured vehicles and so on. In fact, he rather undersold the case for the treaty which, I think I am right in saying, is probably the most comprehensive arms control ever agreed in history. It is less inherently fascinating than the discussion about nuclear weapons that tended to dominate the news headlines at the time, but the fact is that this vital treaty has provided a means of establishing a military balance in Europe.
First and foremost, it was an arms reduction treaty, which demanded that the contracting parties reduce their heavy weaponry and equipment by 50,000 items—a not insubstantial figure by any reckoning. Just as importantly, as the Minister emphasised, it was a conflict prevention treaty aimed at increasing transparency, building confidence, and reducing tension. It did that by preventing provocative and destabilising concentrations of military forces, and still does its work today, even unadapted, as it remains in force, pending the entry into force of the agreement on adaptation.
The fact such a treaty could be agreed reflected the mood of increased co-operation and good will between the two blocs towards the end of the cold war. Verification of compliance was achieved by inspections and the treaty's provisions were incorporated in UK law by the 1991 Act. The second CFE review conference was held in Vienna in May to June 2001, and made the following observations on implementation:
- "The implementation of the Treaty since its entry into force in 1992 has brought positive results including significantly reduced holdings of Treaty-limited equipment and increased confidence through transparency and predictability involving conventional armed forces. The States Parties welcomed the impressive progress that had been made in implementing the Treaty, including the reduction of more than 59,000 pieces of conventional armaments and equipment, the exchange of about 6,000 notifications per year in addition to annual exchanges of information and the conduct of more than 3,300 on-site inspections and observation visits to verify compliance with the provisions of the Treaty and its associated documents. With regard to the Concluding Act on Personnel Strength, the States Parties noted with satisfaction that the personnel strength of conventional armed forces in the area of application had been reduced significantly."
- "in general the CFE Treaty was operating and being implemented in a satisfactory manner. However, there were a number of implementation issues requiring further consideration and resolution in the Joint Consultative Group.
The States Parties noted"—
- "that certain numerical limitations established by the Treaty were being exceeded. The States Parties were informed that the excess, which had been declared to be of a temporary nature, had been decreased. They expect"
- "that the remaining excess will be eliminated as soon as it is possible. They reaffirmed the importance of transparency with regard to the elimination of any excesses over CFE Treaty limits. In this context, they reiterated their commitment to full and continued implementation of the Treaty and its associated documents and their adherence to its numerical limitations."
The rapid changes that followed the end of the cold war in 1990 could not have been envisaged at the time the treaty was originally agreed. We now know that those were of sweeping significance. I was one of the woodpeckers who attacked the Berlin wall in early 1990 with a chisel which, I remember, was, ironically, manufactured in the People's Republic of China. Little did we know what we had begun. The Warsaw pact collapsed, leaving only NATO as the military pact operating in Europe, and the USA as the single remaining superpower, which made necessary a great re-adjustment of strategic priorities and strategic thinking around the globe.
With reference to the Bill, the most important consequence of the end of the cold war was the disintegration of the USSR and the emergence of a host of new states—Czechoslovakia became the Czech and Slovak Republics, and countries such as the Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia emerged as international players in their own right. Now a total of 30 nations are parties to the treaty.
As I am sure the Minister will agree, these changes made the control and limitation of conventional weapons in Europe no less important. Indeed, in some cases it has become more so, as out-of-area or former Soviet equipment needs to be accounted for more closely. In 1999, as the Minister told us, the agreement of adaptation was signed in Istanbul, but the 1990 treaty remains valid and takes account of the demise of the blocs, setting ceilings on a national basis, rather than a bloc basis.
One learns something all the time in the House, and I was intrigued by the table in the Library document, which sets out the national ceilings under the adaptation agreement. It is perhaps no surprise to discover that the UK has, under the national ceilings, an allowance of 843 battle tanks, 3,017 armoured combat vehicles, 583 pieces of artillery, 855 combat aircraft and 350 attack helicopters. France has rather more battle tanks than we do, at 1,226, but Armenia boasts 220 battle tanks and 220 armoured combat vehicles. To my surprise, neither Luxembourg nor Iceland boasts any. They have nul points in every category—no battle tanks, no armoured combat vehicles, no pieces of artillery and no combat aircraft.
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