Select Committee on Defence Second Report


SECOND REPORT


The Defence Committee has agreed to the following Report:

ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2002

Introduction

1. This Report covers the calendar year 2002. It was an extremely busy year for the Defence Committee, dominated by the aftermath of the appalling events of 11 September 2001. Other developments in the policy environment also played a key role in determining our programme for the year, notably preparations for the NATO Prague Summit held in November 2002, preparations for a possible war in Iraq, and the development and acceptance by the US establishment of a new concept of missile defence, and the likelihood that British facilities would be requested to help implement this concept.

2. The format of this Report follows the guidance from the Liaison Committee on Core Tasks for Select Committees.[1] Statistical information on the Committee's activities during calendar year 2002 will be published in the Sessional Returns for Sessions 2001-02 and 2002-03.[2]

Inquiries carried out into Government policy proposals

Armed Forces Pension and Compensation Arrangements

3. Our inquiry into the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) reviews of Armed Forces pension and compensation arrangements arose from the publication of two consultation documents in March 2001. These documents made proposals for new schemes, following separate reviews of the current pension and compensation arrangements conducted over three years. We decided, at our first meeting in the new Parliament in July 2001, to look at the review findings. In our Report, published in May 2002, we were extremely critical of the MoD: we described the review process as "dogged by delay and incompetence" and the proposed schemes as "at best inadequately thought-through and at worst fundamentally flawed".[3]

4. The Report was very well received by pensioners' representatives and interest groups, including the two organisations from which we took oral evidence, the Royal British Legion and the Forces' Pension Society. The MoD's response, published in July, was combative and rejected many of the Committee's conclusions, but the Ministry did undertake to give further consideration, as recommended by the Committee, to issues such as making the pension scheme contributory, the option of commutation on retirement and time limits for compensation claims.[4] We followed up this inquiry in an evidence session with the Minister for Veterans in December 2002, a session which also investigated 'legacy' pension and compensation issues.[5] These included 'Gulf War Syndrome', which the previous Defence Committee had taken a continuing interest in.[6]

Future of NATO

5. Our Report on the Future of NATO was published in July 2002, in advance of the Prague Summit held in November of that year.[7] We focussed on the agenda items for the Prague Summit: NATO's future role in the changed strategic context; the ways in which it needs to change to meet new challenges; and the prospects for and implications of enlargement. The Report was well-received by the Government, which in its reply thanked the Committee for its "constructive and positive approach" which "generally mirrors the views of the Government".[8] Many of our assessments were borne out by the Prague Summit in late November, including our recommendation that all seven principal applicant countries should be invited to join NATO.

6. We began and rounded off our inquiry by visiting NATO Headquarters in Brussels. In January we called on the Secretary-General of NATO, the UK Delegation to NATO, and the permanent representatives of the USA, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, as well as calling on EU military staff, and we also visited Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). In July a smaller delegation of Members visited NATO HQ again, to assess progress towards the Prague Summit, and to ask further questions which had arisen in the course of our inquiry. Meanwhile, in May groups of Members travelled to seven of the countries which had applied to join the organisation: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We ensured that we not only called on politicians, including the heads of state of most of the countries, but also saw the armed forces which, in the event of membership, would be committed to NATO operations. One group of Members was fortunate enough to be able to celebrate Slovenian Armed Forces Day with much of the Slovenian army. In June the Committee visited Moscow, shortly after the first meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.

7. In the course of 2002, we also held informal meetings at Westminster with the President of Lithuania, Ministers from Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia, parliamentarians from Lithuania and Romania, the British permanent representative to NATO (twice), General Sir Jack Deverell (CINCNORTH), the Special Adviser on Central and Eastern Europe to the Secretary General of NATO, and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly Sub­Committee on Proliferation of Military Technology.

SDR New Chapter

8. Towards the end of 2002 we began an inquiry into the New Chapter of the Strategic Defence Review published by the Government in July. This inquiry will be a major part of our work programme in 2003. One of our more groundbreaking activities during the year was our decision early in the inquiry to hold a seminar at King's College, London on 30 October, attended by academics from King's College, Bradford and Oxford Universities, and the Royal United Services Institute, several of whom had been closely involved in the MoD's work on the original SDR and on the New Chapter itself. We then held evidence sessions with the Policy Director at the MoD in October, and with the Chief of the Defence Staff in November, the first time that he had appeared before the present Committee.[9]

Inquiries into areas seen by the Committee as requiring examination because of deficiencies

Defence and Security in the UK

9. In December 2001 we published a Report on the Threat from Terrorism, which sought to characterise the threat faced by the United Kingdom, its interests and the world more widely following the events of 11 September 2001.[10] Early in 2002 we followed up this work, as we had promised to do, by initiating an inquiry into Defence and Security in the UK, with the aim of monitoring how the Government, and other responsible agencies and organisations, had been taking forward and implementing their responses to those terrible attacks. We concluded in our Report, published in July 2002, that, although the United Kingdom was to some extent better placed to respond to the threat from terrorism than it had been before 11 September 2001, there had nonetheless been inadequate central co-ordination and direction, and no proper and comprehensive examination of how the UK would manage the consequences of a disaster on the scale of 11 September. In many areas the Government had confused activity with achievement. We pointed to the need for a strong central authority to lay down clear criteria for the work of individual government departments and to co-ordinate the efforts of other agencies.[11]

10. The Government's response to our Report was relatively positive, particularly in the light of the criticisms that we had levelled. The response described our Report as "an important contribution to the continuing effort to strengthen the UK's defence and security against the terrorist threat" and accepted a number of our recommendations.[12] We received a positive response to our concerns about the vulnerability of communications systems to be used in an emergency.[13] As is often the case with select committee reports, some of our recommendations which the Government did not accept in its response have also since been acted on to some degree. For example, although the Government rejected our recommendations that the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) should take on a more dynamic role as central government's one­stop shop for emergency planning issues, the appointments of Sir David Omand as Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator and of Susan Scholefield as new head of the CCS are hopeful signs that the Government intends to raise the Secretariat's profile and strengthen its relationships with local agencies.

11. We are pursuing our recommendations on the use of the Reserve Forces in home defence and of military support for civilian emergency operations in our inquiry into the New Chapter of the SDR. We followed up our comments in the Report on Quick Reaction Alert Aircraft with a visit to RAF Marham in November 2002. We have a continuing interest in seeing civil contingencies legislation brought before Parliament soon. Our Chairman wrote to Lord Macdonald of Tradeston in November, expressing our disappointment that there was no mention of a civil contingencies bill in the Queen's Speech, and restating the continuing and urgent need for such legislation. We will continue to press for its early introduction and hope to have the opportunity to scrutinise such legislation in draft.

12. Our inquiry into Defence and Security in the UK was on a much larger scale than those usually carried out by the Defence Committee, and it ranged well outside the usual purview of the Ministry of Defence. We were grateful for the consent and co-operation of those select committees on whose territory we were trespassing. We held in total twelve formal evidence sessions, and held numerous informal meetings, either where we lacked the time and opportunity to take formal evidence, or where the subject matter was too sensitive for formal evidence to be proceeded with. We also carried out visits within the United Kingdom, to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, to HM Naval Base Clyde, Rosyth Dockyard and the Scottish Executive, and to RAF Coningsby. The witnesses at our final evidence session were three ministers from three different Government Departments: an unprecedented occurrence, to the best of our knowledge. Our Report was by far the most substantial produced by us during the current Parliament.

Missile Defence

13. We held two evidence sessions on the subject of Missile Defence in February and March 2002, the first with officials from the MoD, the second with the Secretary of State.[14] These sessions were prompted in part by our concern that the Government was failing to initiate a public debate on the virtues or otherwise of a missile defence system at a time when, as it was being widely speculated, the US authorities were likely to request the use of British facilities for just such a system. We had visited Washington in February 2002, and had clearly seen the determination of the US Administration to press ahead with its missile defence development programmes. During our evidence session with the Secretary of State on 20 March, we tried, without success, to persuade him that it was time to encourage a public debate on the issues surrounding missile defence in the UK, including how we should respond to the inevitable request from the USA to use British bases for their programme. This was particularly urgent in our view in the context of having been told in the USA that the upgrading of RAF Fylingdales would have to begin in 2003 if the US Administration was to meet its interim missile defence capability for 2004-08. The Secretary of State stuck to the line that in the absence of a specific request from the Americans, there was in effect nothing to talk about. It was not our most constructive session.

14. However, in December the MoD published a discussion paper, which explored whether the UK itself had a need for missile defence as well as how we might respond to any US request to use our facilities. And later in the same month the Secretary of State announced in a written statement to the House that a request had been received.[15] We are therefore now returning to the issues, as we announced in a press notice of 18 December. We believe that the MoD was wrong to let the best part of a year go by without engaging with this very important and very sensitive subject. There is a risk now that the debate will suffer from being rushed and also that positions will have become more entrenched.


1   As approved by the Liaison Committee on 20 June 2002, pursuant to the Resolution of the House of Commons of 14 May 2002 on Modernisation of the House of Commons. Back

2  Once published, these will be available online at the parliamentary website, www.parliament.uk Back

3  Third Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02, Ministry of Defence Reviews of Armed Forces' Pension and Compensation Arrangements (HC 666), Summary. Back

4  Fifth Special Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02 (HC 1115). Back

5  HC 188-i (2002-03). Back

6  eg. Seventh Report from the Committee, Session 1999-2000, Gulf Veterans' Illnesses (HC 125). Back

7  Seventh Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02, The Future of NATO (HC 914). Back

8  Eighth Special Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02 (HC 1231). Back

9  HC 1232-i and -ii (2001-02). Back

10  Second Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02, The Threat from Terrorism (HC 348). Back

11  Sixth Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02, Defence and Security in the UK (HC 518), Summary. Back

12  Seventh Special Report from the Committee, Session 2001-02 (HC 1230), paragraph 1. Back

13  HC 1230 (2001-02), paragraph 38. Back

14  HC 644-i and -ii (2001-02). Back

15  HC Deb, 17 December 2002, Col. 45-46WS. Back


 
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