Lord Garden: My Lords, this has been an excellent debate with a number of common themes: the centrality of the Middle East peace process, the despair over Iraq, questions over British foreign policy and the wish for Europe to do more have been recurrent issues. We have been fortunate to have four outstanding maiden speeches from noble Lords, Lord Patel, Lord Leach, Lord Browne and Lord Jay. Your Lordships' House will be further strengthened by the addition of their different worlds of expertise.

I start with Iraq—the “disruptive epicentre”, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, described it, because it is the most difficult and urgent foreign and defence policy issue facing Britain. Few of us, when we opposed the 2003 intervention, imagined the strategic incompetence which has followed over three and a half years. We have tried to offer constructive ways forward at each turn of the screw. Internationalising and engaging regional powers is not a new idea. It would have been easier if done in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, or even a year later, but now it is much more difficult. As my noble friend Lord Chidgey said, there are few incentives for Iran to dig the United States out of its hole. Indeed, the mixed messages to Iran fromMr Bush and Mr Blair over the past week can have done little to make Iran feel that the approaches are serious in any case. But, as my noble friend Lord Ashdown argued, we must try to engage all the neighbouring states.

We do not know whether the United States is thinking of ramping up the number of its troops or drawing it down. The President, in the wake ofMr Rumsfeld's departure, seems to have three different study groups to advise him. I will not even ask the Minister what the UK Government’s position is, because it is of absolutely no relevance. As my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire explained, we know that Downing Street will wait to be told what to do by the White House. If America says “stay”, we stay; if America says “go”, we go. The noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, was right when he said foreign policy is in limbo.

The noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, graphically described the tragedy of Iraq. Transparency International has reported that Iraq has slipped this year to 160 out of 163 in the list of corrupt states in the world. Government agencies now kidnap, torture and murder other government employees. The United States has put no serious funding forward for next year for aid and reconstruction. The situation with the electricity, water, and sewage infrastructure remains desperate. The Government remit in Iraq operates little beyond the Green Zone. Despite many Lords speaking against it, partition is now in effect being arranged on the ground. Our own Chief of the General Staff wonders whether we are doing more harm than good.

Our other major operational commitment is in Afghanistan. My noble friend Lady Northover described the problems of reconstruction. At the same time the head of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency, General Maples, told a Congressional hearing last week,

“Violence this year is likely to be twice as high as the violence level seen in 2005... In 2007, insurgents are likely to sustain their use of more visible, aggressive and lethal tactics”.

We have seen that in the casualties sustained by our own forces and our allies in recent months. I trust the Minister will update us on the UK intelligence assessment of the outlook for the next year, and whether we can still expect a draw-down of UK personnel in Afghanistan when our headquarters function is handed over in the spring.

We have touched on other important areas of conflict and potential conflict during this debate.My noble friend Lord Ashdown reminded us of unfinished business in the Balkans. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, reminded us of Africa and the problems there. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, focused on the continuing tragedy of Darfur. Do the Government support the establishment of a no-fly zone there as one possible answer? The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester also reminded us of the possibility of conflict again in the DRC.
Many noble Lords reminded us of the other unresolved key issue: that of Israel and its neighbours. The events in Lebanon have not made the region more secure, and the task for peacekeepers is not an easy one. My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby described the terrible plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. Tensions are rising, and the rumours of large-scale Israeli military action in Gaza in the near future must add to our concerns.

I find it depressing that the United Kingdom is now seen as so flawed in its foreign policy that France, Spain and Italy did not even feel it necessary to inform the FCO of their new peace initiative. In this area we would do well to heed the view of my noble friend Lady Northover and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, that we need to be prepared to talk with Hamas and Hezbollah.

This debate has been a bleak litany of global security problems. As the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, said, hope is in short supply. The gracious Speech singled out concerns over North Korea and Iran. The North Korean nuclear test and the continuing concerns about the Iranian direction in their nuclear programme both indicate a need to re-energise the international non-proliferation regime. As the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, argued, the answer will not be through the use of military pre-emptive attack. However, there are still those in the US and in Israel who argue that the situation in Iran may come to require a military solution. I trust that the United Kingdom will not support such a strategy, which would serve only to destabilise the region further and deepen the divide between the West and the Islamic world.

The gracious Speech was strong on domestic security issues, but light on defence policy. However, it said that the Government would work to strengthen NATO. The alliance is holding a summit in Riga at the end of the month. With my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, I shall look forward to hearing what the United Kingdom Government expect to achieve at this summit, in their new quest to strengthen NATO. Certainly it will not be about a new strategic concept, much overdue though that may be, or even about further enlargement. I imagine there will be a celebration of the operational status of the 20,000-strong NATO response force—although that sits slightly oddly with NATO’s inability to provide 2,000 troops to bolster forces in Afghanistan. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, talked about the importance of NATO and EU co-operation, which provoked a little murmur of excitement from the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert. I hope we will also hear how the continuing difficulties between the EU and NATO are to be resolved.

I want to focus on the problem that we have in sustaining our Armed Forces for the future to meet all the challenges that we have been talking about, and others, such as the humanitarian assistance needs of which the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, reminded us. We had a very useful debate on the defence industrial strategy on 17 October, and for that reason I shall not dwell on equipment issues, but I support the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Luke, raised on various equipment issues. I will instead highlight our real concerns about the people who serve us so loyally and courageously in the Armed Forces.

In Answers, Ministers always assure us that the Armed Forces are stretched but not overstretched. Yet the Chief of the General Staff has warned us of the risk of breaking the Army. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, thought that the Minister was overoptimistic on this, and I agree. On 1 November, the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, told us not to worry because soldiers’ morale was up by 14 per cent since April of this year. That provoked a number of exchanges about spin, and a subsequent letter to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, in which the Minister corrected his figure from a 14 per cent to a 16.7 per cent increase in morale. In fact, I have examined the relevant attitude surveys from which this data was gathered, and it is clear that at the 95 per cent confidence level the difference between the two results may be as small as 2 per cent. I am quite happy to exchange my calculations with the Minister. How much more honest it would have been to say that the latest survey—these very figures—shows that only half the soldiers reported their morale as high or very high. That is the proper figure that we need to know.

These attitude surveys paint a detailed picture of sentiment in the three services. They show, for example, that more than a third of respondents in the Army do not feel valued by the Army. That confirms the view of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, that the services feel that they are being taken for granted.
That brings me to the report of 3 November by the National Audit Office on recruitment and retention in the Armed Forces. The newspaper headlines following the publication of the report focused on the 5,170 shortfall between the requirement and the trained strength for all three services. However, that figure is a gross understatement of the scale of the problem. The report also shows that every year, without respite,

• “the armed forces have consistently operated at or above the most demanding combination of operations envisaged by the defence planning assumptions”.

The chart it shows goes back to 2001, but the problem is older than that. These assumptions are clearly wrong, and this means that the defence programme is based on assumptions that are wrong and have been wrong for at least the past six years. No wonder we are short of people, that harmony guidelines are broken, that there are—as the NAO reports—88 operational pinch points, that logistic support is fraught with difficulty and that equipment is showing its age. I urge the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, to pin up the NAO chart in his office, and use it to argue for a recasting of the defence planning assumptions to reflect reality rather than hopeless optimism.

Although personnel issues are not part of the portfolio of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, he perhaps needs to look at his equipment programme as a complete system. He procures extraordinarily expensive capabilities, each and every one of which needs specialist trained personnel to operate them. The National Audit Office survey of pinch point trades reports that 60 per cent cited dissatisfaction with inadequate resources to do the job, and 45 per cent of our Armed Forces in these trades cited dissatisfaction over the quality of their equipment, both of which are in the Minister’s area of responsibility.

I draw your Lordships’ attention to just two of the 11 case studies by the NAO. One is naval and the other is air force, as our debate has been, as always perhaps, predominantly army-centric. The first is on Royal Navy nuclear watchkeepers. At April 2006, there was a shortfall of 29 per cent in this category. This is the specialisation essential to the operation of our nuclear-powered submarines—we have no other sort of submarine. They take years to train and gain sufficient experience at more junior levels at sea. The NAO report shows how the problem can be tracked back to recruitment and redundancy following Options for Change in the early 1990s. The situation cannot be recovered before 2014—and that is if everything goes well. At the same time, we are procuring expensive Astute submarines that will depend on having enough of those people.

Similarly, in the Air Force, the Nimrod R1 is a key intelligence-gathering platform, but it needs enough linguists in the air. Their strength in April was just 35, a 50 per cent shortfall. The NAO demonstrates that only because those people are continuously working twice as hard as they should be in very difficult circumstances do we manage to sustain operational capability.

There are no easy answers to these manning problems. We are, however, seeing a progressive reduction in the effectiveness of our Armed Forces as a result. In some cases, money cannot buy experience, time is also needed; but if the money is not available to support the level of tasking which has now become normal, some difficult decisions need to be taken about how to reduce the number of commitments. We have talked about the large commitments in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But whatever the geopolitical arguments, the manpower problems of the Armed Forces are not sustainable in the long term if we continue our current commitments. If we do not match our commitments more closely to our force size, we may find that we have an equipment programme that is buying capabilities that we shall not be able to use because the experienced specialists needed have left for a better life elsewhere.

The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, in his opening speech reminded us of what we owe the members of the Armed Forces, and paid tribute to them. From these Benches we also pay tribute, particularly to those who have died in the service of their country. But, after today’s debate the Government need to reflect on the strength of feeling around the House and make sure that these are not just fine words to be said on Remembrance Sunday.