Ukraine Update — House of Commons, 2022-04-25
Topic: Defense
Robert Ben Lobban Wallace (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. We spoke last week about the timing of this statement, which I had hoped to make tomorrow, but the United States has called a 40-nation meeting in Germany and I will therefore not be here. I took the opportunity to make this statement when I could. I am sorry if he has cut short his trip, and I would be delighted to arrange with the Navy for him to return to the headquarters, without his phone, for longer in custody As I said, I promised to keep the House updated, and I have not only briefed a number of colleagues from this House, from across parties, on a number of occasions, but given Members access to our intelligence officials and senior generals in order that they can get the latest throughout. My hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces has responded to two debates and answered one urgent question—I will not take the credit for the UQ; Governments get asked UQs, but they provide an opportunity. We will continue to update all Members, and I am happy to have another cross-House dial-in for all Members on the subject—it is incredibly important that we do so. Just as it is important that we calibrate our response to Russia, it is important that the Government calibrate their response within the House, so that we make sure that everything is not a surprise to Members and that we consult as we go along. The right hon. Gentleman asked about NLAWs and Starstreaks. We have an ongoing relationship with the industry, and we will be replacing them or are replacing them. Not surprisingly, there is now a lot of interest in those British-made products, but it is very important that we replenish our stocks. Obviously, we are in that line to do so. The Treasury has agreed to fund the new-for-old replacement of those, but it is very important, given the state of the Russian Government, that we make sure we replenish as soon as we can. There is a daily relationship with our industry; the Minister for Defence Procurement speaks to those in the industry at least once a week, and the Prime Minister will soon convene a meeting with all the leads to make sure that we are doing everything we can, not just for ourselves but for Ukraine and others. Sometimes there is a bit of juggling whereby I release something that we do not yet need, so that another country can have it first or it goes to where the threat is more pressing, or we persuade a friendly country to divert its order so that it can come to us or to Ukraine. We are often involved in that basic defence diplomacy, whereby we know a country is buying something such as an NLAW, it does not need it right now and we see whether we can take it off its hands and it then delays its order. We try to make sure we do that as much as possible I am delighted to place in the House the international update on how much has been donated. Obviously, some countries are more open than others about what they have done, so I will place in the Library a table showing those things. It is not for me to let another country’s identity be known if it wishes to keep that secret, but what we can publish, we shall I can inform the House that in the past week alone we have supplied 1,000 anti-tank weapons, 14 Wolfhound armoured vehicles and 4,000 night-vision goggles. I can update further that to date we have also supplied 5,361 NLAWs—up from the original 2,000; more than 200 Javelins; and 104 high-velocity and low-velocity anti-air missiles—this will grow to more than 250. Obviously, if we supply any more new weapon types, I will inform the House as we do so On NATO, one of the discussions we will have on the sidelines tomorrow is, obviously, the future for NATO. A few weeks ago in Brussels, NATO Defence Ministers tasked NATO to go away and come back with its long-term plans. The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that we are in crisis management and the short-term response, but we need a long-term plan. We need to know what NATO will look like and how western Europe—or Europe, including many of its new members—will contain Putin after all this has passed. We are dealing with a man who has clearly been involved in an illegal invasion of a country and war crimes against the Ukrainian people. We need to know how we are going to live with that neighbour in Europe, should he still remain. That is an important consideration for all of us and it goes to the heart of defence reform and our spending. Of course, as I have always said, as the threat changes, so must our defence posture, which includes funding. As I have said publicly, in the here and now we are getting the spending we need, but he is right to raise the issue of medium-term and long-term funding, which we will definitely be looking at. The right hon. Gentleman made a point about how we are now "the only country", but that is because we were the first country; when we had our £24 billion settlement, no one else in NATO had yet gone there. Sweden had gone there but it was not in NATO, and so had Australia. So his comments are slightly punishing Britain for being the first, because we did this way before the invasion of Ukraine and a lot of the increases he is talking about have been afterwards. That is not to say that we should not look at what more we can all do and how that knocks into other areas.