17
Examination of witnesses
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins, Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths and Damian Johnson.
Q78 The Chair: Good morning and thank you very much for joining us for this important oral evidence session for our inquiry into national resilience. I remind you that this is a public session that is being broadcast live. In a couple of days, you will receive a transcript of what is said during the meeting, so if anything comes out inaccurately, you will have a chance to correct it. Please feel free to follow up in writing if you suddenly remember something that you should or could have said but did not.
Please do not be put off if members come and go. Awkwardly, this meeting coincides with the defence and international relations part of the debate on the King’s Speech, which will begin in our Chamber just after 11.30 am, and I know that some people will be somewhere on the speakers’ list. There will be a bit of coming and going, and I am sorry for the disruption, but it should not stop the flow of questions and answers.
Obviously, we have a lot of questions to ask you. I will start with the first one. When you give your first answer, perhaps you would be kind enough to introduce yourselves, for the record.
I kick off by asking each of you to say something about what you believe is or could or should be the practical role of the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces in implementing a whole-of-society approach to national resilience, both in peace and at war. Perhaps you could incorporate in your answer how far you think we have got so far, if we have got anywhere at all, in implementing the seven baseline requirements for civilian resilience that I believe the UK signed up to as far back as 2016, in Warsaw. I know that the Defence Committee in the House of Commons has commented in one of its recent reports that not a lot appears to have been done, and I would like to know why. Perhaps we could start with Mr Johnson from the MoD and then turn to the two generals.
Damian Johnson: Thank you and good morning. I am the policy director in the MoD responsible for homeland defence. For the context of this committee, in practice that means that I am responsible for helping the department deliver a number of SDR commitments, including, with my military colleagues, the overall effort within defence on homeland defence planning and our war-fighting readiness, developing proposals for future defence readiness legislation, and helping the whole department to support the Government’s centre-led national conversation. Within that context, everything we are doing is supporting the Cabinet Office-led home defence programme.
In answer to your question, it might be helpful to set out a bit of context about the Cabinet Office programme, because all our answers fit within that. For the record, in broad terms, the Cabinet Office home defence programme is a cross-government programme to enhance national resilience and preparedness so that the UK is even better able to withstand the sub-threshold attacks that we are under now, and is better prepared to deter crisis and conflict in the future. It is a direct response to the threats we face, set out in the national security strategy and the SDR. As you mentioned, Chair, it is fully in line with our NATO Article 3 commitment to enhance our national ability to resist an armed attack. It is to take a whole-of-society approach, working across national, devolved and local government, first responders, industry, academia, civil society and the public. It is in line with what all our NATO allies are doing to strengthen deterrence and defence of the Euro-Atlantic area, and the programme is overseen by the National Security Council.
In practical terms, that means that the MoD, as part of its effort, is updating its defence plans as part of the cross-government national defence plan, in NATO terminology. Other departments across Government have been directed to do the same. We will test and exercise those plans next year as part of NATO’s planned Steadfast Defender exercise, which will be the largest mobilisation exercise since the Cold War. Then we will refine those plans, bring forward any legislation required and invest in capabilities to strengthen the cross-government response, including to protect critical national infrastructure. While doing that, we all have to play our part, in defence and across Government, to support a deliberate national conversation and engagement campaign.
What have we achieved so far? My colleagues can go into more detail on this but, in broad terms, we have been reconnecting defence with society. The SDR is very clear that we need to do more on that front. It involves working with cadets, outreach from the Armed Forces to the community—General Griffiths does a lot of work in local communities—working with our education partners and industry engagement.
We are also doing a lot of work on how defence meets the SDR commitment to consider the “new deal” and does more to protect critical national infrastructure in the country. Work is going on across Government to understand where defence can and should help.
We are taking forward civilian-military planning at the national, regional and local levels. As you would understand from an all-hazard approach, we are looking at all the risks in the national security risk assessment and working with national to local-level responders on those plans.
Finally, we are strengthening readiness and, as I mentioned, will test and exercise those plans both in the UK and with our NATO allies, bringing forward legislative powers—you will have seen that there are quite a few bits in the King’s Speech on security and resilience—and thinking much more about how we mobilise our people, including our strategic reserves, and work with our industry colleagues.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: I am currently the deputy chief of defence staff for military strategy and operations—essentially, director- general of operations for the MoD. I take the political into policy, and I take the policy advice and turn it into military direction for the commands, the main one of whom, for homeland resilience, is General Griffiths, sitting to my right.
We are on a journey of improvement for UK defence and national resilience. Are we better than we were in 2016? Absolutely. Can we get better? Absolutely.
First, as my colleague Mr Johnson said, this is a cross-Whitehall effort. We realise that the military leader lever is only one part of that. That is important, and I would say that, but we are moving ahead on that and will dock into it.
The second contextual factor is NATO. Our concept of defence has traditionally been expeditionary: you defend at range. But, of course, that no longer fully applies because long-range systems, hybrid warfare et cetera mean that we are in danger at home. Under NATO, we also have not only an Article 5 response—an attack on one is an attack on all—but an Article 3 response. We have to be responsible for looking after ourselves in terms of crisis. Those are the driving factors as we look at it from a military angle.
We are also now part of a regional plan: north-west, which will be commanded out of Norfolk by a British four-star by the end of the year. We are now part of a NATO plan where homeland defence is, of course, our primary concern, but it is a concern that is part of a wider NATO plan, especially force flow into Europe and the NATO assets we hold here.
Ballistic missile protection is another area where we are reliant on NATO at the moment as we build our integrated air missile defence system, as promised in the SDR. That will link into the NATO plan and back to the United States.
Under NATO, we are already rehearsing our homeland defence. In fact, we have just finished an exercise called Steadfast Deterrence. The UK had a fulsome role in rehearsing what part of the NATO plan we would play in terms of our own resilience. But to turn more to home turf, at the moment we are drawing up military war plans that are part of the national plans and, as I said, we are doing that concurrently with the national plans. We have a command and control system in place whereby we have the wider multi-domain effects—missile defence, maritime, air, space, et cetera—which will come, as the SDR directed, under the Permanent Joint Headquarters, leaving General Griffiths to deal with security and national resilience, which is probably the more important bit for society. You have got that sort of layered approach, and I would say, before I hand over to General Griffiths, that our command, control and coherence throughout society is probably the USP of the military—but more of that from him.
Where are we? We are okay at the moment, given that we are on a journey, as I said at the beginning. We have the concept and now ready defence across all domains. Can it get better? Yes, it can. We have the planning into NATO and the military. Where we need to improve is to build on the integrated air missile defence and the over £1 billion that is promised for that and build that out. We have a plan for it. We need to rehearse it, and Steadfast Defender 27 is where we fully rehearse all levers, including cross-Government as well. That is the NATO exercise, but it will be rehearsed on our own terms. The specifics of workforce, which we might come on to in later questions, is where we also need to do some work.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: Moving on from where General Collins left off, we end up with a strategic outcome which is then given to me as the operational commander, and I have to turn that into real plans. I am currently the commander of defence’s Standing Joint Command, also called the Homeland Joint Commander. I was appointed by the chiefs of staff in July. My responsibilities are to cover off and support those baseline obligations from NATO that you referred to earlier: the seven things that other departments of state are responsible for—my job is to help with those. In July of last year, I was given 10 tasks to get after, and I needed to design a way of doing that: a set of plans to chase them. So, you have the Article 3 obligations—those seven baseline tasks. The department gave me 10 things to do to try and match those off, and I have come up with a plan to try and deliver those as four things.
The plan is called Fortitude, and it has four elements to it. The first is our resilience into society, and the plan is called Reliance. We use the joint military commands. There are eight of those in the UK and they are connected with the local resilience forum at the very bottom—right down at low-level government: councils, police and fire services. They are the ones who connect us to society, and they are the joint military commands. There are only eight of those and there are 57 LRS. That is quite a task, so we have lots of liaison officers. They help us to understand what civil powers require us to do now in competition, then into crisis and then conflict. That is the baseline.
Then we have a plan called Sentinel, which is how we defend defence, and that is a starting enterprise which we are now building the plans for. We now understand what our critical national and military infrastructures are, and what NATO demands of us. We are working out the plans as to how we could defend all that in times of crisis, and into conflict. It is quite a lot for us to get our heads round. It is held centrally by Government. They pass us our part in that plan and, of course, it is not only a military outcome. There are certainly other parts of society that will need to protect themselves.
The next part of the plan is called Genesis. This is our mass mobilisation and how we would go ahead with increasing the size of the military workforce, perhaps with civilian volunteers to support us in times of crisis and conflict. We use the joint military commands at the very bottom of the organisation to connect us to society, generate the inclination to serve and then pull them in as required. The Genesis plan is on its way now, lined up against all that you are hearing in Parliament on the Bill that we are pushing forward and how we could generate mass through the strategic reserve, which we might touch on later.
The final part of my role links with what NATO expects of us, which is to ensure the out-load and in-load of US and Canadian forces, and our own forces, into harm’s way. This part is called Forge, and it is about how we liaise with local government to protect our military assets as we move from crisis into conflict, and perhaps the out-load of our forces. It is linked to a police operation called Barfish, which supports the out-load of military forces on to the continent.
That is my role in this; I take the political and the military into operation and deliver the plan.
Q79 Lord Oates: Can you tell us a little bit about how increased spending on defence and resilience is planned to be allocated following the 2025 strategic defence review?
Damian Johnson: You will all be aware of the figures, in terms of increased spending, which is the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War. It should take us to 2.6% by 2027, with an ambition to reach 3% in the next Parliament. Then there is the wider commitment to NATO of 5% by 2035, with 3.5% on defence and 1.5% on resilience and security.
In terms of how that is being allocated, all the recommendations in the SDR were accepted and pushed forward to the development of the defence investment plan. That involved taking those priorities, and a root and branch look at all the budget lines in defence, to ensure that there is a fully costed deliverable programme. I know that it has not been published yet. The work is continuing across Government, and it will be published as soon as possible. That work takes the allocation of all the priorities in the SDR to build up our resilience and deterrents in the plan, and you will see the details when it is published.
In advance of that, we are taking all those SDR signals and making sure that they inform the day-to-day decisions on money in the year. When it comes to broader resilience and security, across Government they are taking up the priorities in the national security strategy, the SDR and the resilience action plan. That sets the overall strategy on how you allocate and prioritise money on resilience across Government against the action plan.
The home defence programme, which I set out earlier, will inform that right across Government, and looking at those plans as we refresh them, then test and exercise. This will inform future decisions and choices for Ministers about where to prioritise and reallocate money and investment.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: Wider stuff that has been marked down and definitely plays into homeland defence is the integrated air missile defence at £1 billion. As I have said, we have a plan for that. There is also space, at £6.5 billion, which, although it is space, has a homeland protection element about how you protect your assets in space. Some £1.5 billion of that £6.5 billion is on protecting our space assets.[1]
Q80 Baroness Mobarik: Given the increasing importance of space and satellite communications to modern military operations—I think the SDR devoted four pages to this—what steps are being taken to reduce the UK’s dependence on allied systems? What investment is being made in sovereign capability in space and the control of satellite communications?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: You all know this, but it is worth stressing that space is, for us, a domain that is as equal as the others—land, air and sea. We treat it as seriously in defence, with a new National Space Operations Centre and we see operations going on in space all the time. We are definitely having to protect ourselves.
Secondly, I get the point about sovereign assets, but within that there has to be interoperability with our allies, especially NATO, and our programme does that, under our strict “NATO First” policy.
Finally, before I go into a bit more detail, there has to be a high/low capability mix: a bit of money on the high-end stuff, and then more money on the plug-and-play low-earth-orbit architecture as well. The MoD is spending £6.5 billion. As I said, £5 billion is for that core investment, mainly the SKYNET 6 Programme, and then £1.4 billion is for what I would call protect and defend—assets that can allow us to look at what is happening in space; we call it space domain awareness. Then there is space control, where we invest directly into electronic warfare assets capable of protecting UK comms from adversarial jamming and interference. Lastly, under that is the Protector’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR in the vernacular, at £970 million, which gives us high-resolution operational imagery, directly helping commanders on the ground. Of course, that would also be available to home authorities on the ground in times of national crisis.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: From an operational perspective, it is about having assured access to guaranteed C2 and therefore thinking through what resilient methods we have. It is not just about space; we need to think really hard about how we connect into the police service and have an interoperable system of command and control in the UK. That is the part I would stress: when you come to balancing your investment, you have to make sure that you do that part of the stack as well.
Q81 Baroness Northover: I wonder if you could comment on soft attacks, as it were, using space and satellites. We know that cyber attacks have been undermining democracies across the world, so how are you approaching that kind of attack?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: On the defence side, we have an organisation that now sits in the National Armaments Directorate. It was called Defence Digital; it is now digital and data. It is always on, out of caution, and is monitoring all MoD digital assets. We have a number of attacks per day, reported in our operational updates. As ever with cyber and any effect, it is a constant game of cat and mouse, learning from each attack and getting better. Importantly, they also link into other wider threats against not only the Government but the private sector. The MoD is part of a tight network. That is how we look at it—physically, although I know it is digital.
The other strand of this is education, given that most attacks are done through human beings—phishing, et cetera. We need to educate our civil servants and servicepeople so that they are alive to these attacks. There is a constant education programme through our email system, warning about attacks and what recent attacks there have been, and a place to report it when you think you have been spammed, et cetera, on our systems.
Q82 Baroness Mobarik: I want to come back on space and ask specifically about our sovereign launch capability—not just one spaceport but a number of them, as part of our critical national infrastructure. I am talking about our sovereign capability rather than reliance on allied facilities.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: First and foremost, we look after our own. The point I was trying to make is that we need to be able to share effects primarily with the NATO alliance, including with the United States, for example, as part of NATO. But we primarily look after our own first and foremost, if that answers the question.
Baroness Mobarik: So you agree that we need to invest in our own sovereign launch facilities in spaceports; that is where the investment is required.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: We can get back to you on that.
Q83 Lord Farmer: We always hear about defence after attack. I am not sure how much you can say about what our response would be—in other words, our ability to attack back. Are you active in that? We always hear that we are on the defence, but are we on the attack, in response?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: I will comment in the general sense. Of course, the best form of deterrence is proactive. This is done through NATO as well, especially against our adversaries. It is all through NATO, and it is monitored not only by NATO on our behalf—we have strong linkages with that—but through our suggestions into NATO. The closer to our own shores it comes, we have our own response mechanisms. This plays to our overall deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic area, so that it does not happen in the first place. But I can assure you that, 24/7, soldiers, sailors and airmen, not only in their domains but as important people in command and control centres, are watching the indicators and water warnings and moving accordingly.
Damian Johnson: If I may, I will add a point on the resilience side. In the national security risk assessment and the national risk register, which is the public version, we have been working across Government with lots of other departments on the capabilities and response plans, so that, whether it is space weather, disruption of satellite communications or hostile action against our satellite communications, we have those response plans in place. From a resilience perspective, which goes back to sovereign capability, there are live ongoing discussions right across Whitehall between industry, defence and other departments.
Q84 Lord Spellar: That leads very nicely into the question about relations with industry and the private sector. How does—and should—defence and indeed the wider Government collaborate with the private sector, including to develop the long-term resilience of the UK’s industrial base and ensure a sustainable trained workforce, which has a longer lead time than physical capacity?
Damian Johnson: This Government set out, in both the modern industrial strategy and the defence industrial strategy, the importance of building a better partnership with industry—not a supplier-customer relationship but a much more trusted, integrated relationship with industry partners so that they can help us be better able to adapt to the threat environment we face, and we can tell them more about the issues so that we can be more adaptable and quicker. We have seen that in Ukraine and the way in which it has innovated at speed to support its armed forces. As the CDS has said, deterrence depends on our ability to sustain ourselves under pressure: “we cannot deter if we cannot produce”. It is all about our relationship with industry.
The defence industrial strategy made some commitments; I will give you a few examples of what we are doing. We are increasing the partnerships. We have a strategic partnering programme that provides a structured account management approach with 19 strategic suppliers—this is just for defence—so that we can provide a clear road map aligned to defence priorities and so that industry can plan better for how we collaborate with it and innovate.
We have the Defence Industrial Joint Council to improve our engagement with industry, which is co-chaired by the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, and the chief executive of BAE Systems. It meets on a regular basis, with lots of working groups, to ensure that we have an ongoing dialogue about implementing the SDR.
There is a lot in resilience around what the pandemic told us about supply chain security. We have the defence supply chain capability programme, which is focused on how we understand our supply chains at different tiers and understanding what our vulnerabilities are, where our replenishment challenges might be and how, with industry, we would be able to scale up production and manufacturing in times of crisis.
All those things are helping, along with our testing and exercising and the war-gaming we are doing jointly with industry, to have a better understanding of what we might face and how industry could help.
Lord Spellar: Do you put into specifications for contracts, and indeed more widely across Government, requirements for companies and their supply chain to have sufficient training capacity to ensure the trained workforce of the future? For those who are in reserves, do you include the release of their personnel to undertake reserve training? Is it seen as whole of Government? To what extent have we moved away from the Treasury’s view that cheapest is best, and we cannot take into account previous performance?
Damian Johnson: On the point about workforce, that is a live and ongoing discussion with industry. We recognise that, in times of crisis and war, reservists in industry may well be playing the important part that they need to play in industry, and we would not necessarily activate them to a different role. That is an ongoing conversation between our reserves team and industry players, and it comes out in a lot of the joint war-gaming we have been doing with industry.
In terms of contracts, the National Armaments Director Group, now in the MoD, as and part of Defence Reform, is focused on procurement reform. It is looking at how it can improve contracting and, in response to your point, it is looking at how you can put more resilience into our contracts. We also committed in the SDR that we would look at bringing forward, if necessary, legislation through the defence readiness Bill to enhance our ability to improve the resilience of our supply chain.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: From a military and Ministry of Defence view, we do not just look at the pointy end; we now look straight back into the true resilience of any nation. That is, as you say, into the workforce and factories available. There is a cliché, so it must be true, that says amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics, and this is that on a strategic scale.
We learnt loads of lessons from Ukraine on this—for example, how you now need to have factories forward and connected with the front line. As my colleague Mr Johnson has said, one of the main purposes of the National Armaments Directorate under Defence Reform is to operationalise it to be able to be always on. You will be aware of the 13 factory sites that the Government are in the process of identifying, and they have given £1.5 billion for those “always on” six factories, but there are 13 candidate sites at the moment. In support of Mr Johnson, we are also looking at defence skills, with £182 million spent on those, including £80 million, for example, on STEM, nuclear skills, education and technical colleges, with five around the country. We are trying to get the workforce ready from a young age to either come in straight into government service or into private sector defence service.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: From a practical perspective, what we are also doing for part of our plans for the four things I described earlier is to ensure that industry is baked in at the very beginning, so that we do not go through the kind of contracting, post-event problems that we had through Covid and on Rescript. They are on tap, ready to go and we are contracting for capability in the future and surge capability so that they can lean in when we require them. Doing that free and having them as part of a plan is how we get to the capacity we require.
Q85 Baroness Curran: Thank you for your work and your service. What processes are in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to make sure the wider economies benefit from such investment? I know in Scotland particularly the defence industry is vital. On Lord Spellar’s point, how does it benefit jobs? If people see the benefit of effective procurement and investment, that helps us connect to society.
Damian Johnson: We spend over £30 billion a year with UK industries—so point one for the economy. Central to the defence industrial strategy was the fact that we needed to also focus on local economies. We wanted to boost that through a £250 million fund for defence growth deals, and that focuses on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with targeted investment to improve industry and defence capability in those areas. For example, in Scotland, there is a £50 million investment to strengthen the Scottish defence capability in advanced manufacturing, marine sectors, innovation for digital systems and data science. There is also £10 million earmarked for defence technical excellence colleges. I have examples of other areas of the United Kingdom where we are targeting investments specifically to bring forward and reduce barriers where previously small and medium-sized enterprises cannot get into the defence sector without going through the primes. This is about reducing those barriers, and allowing them access to more classified information so that they can bid directly to us. It is all part of a drive to innovate.
Baroness Curran: So you have an ongoing relationship with industry across the UK, and you make sure that you are clear about the skills and jobs that are developed, and future needs for the service?
Damian Johnson: Yes.
Q86 Lord Peach: On the same theme, the UK’s regional structures are not quite as strong as in other European countries, perhaps. Do you see, in what you are describing, particularly for the Standing Joint Command, a potential for regional clusters or approaches to bring industry and capability, and the joint commands and the local resilience forums, into some form of structure?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: The devolved nations are the perfect models because they have a joint military command that covers the individual areas, so they are quite coterminous in their boundaries. The more difficult part of the United Kingdom is England, in terms of the different bands, and it is really quite difficult. However, the work that the police are doing to re-evaluate their boundaries is a good step forward. We are never going to be able to emulate our European colleagues, but the example of Northern Ireland is pretty powerful in terms of the link between the police, the military and the Government because of the coterminous boundary. It is a problem that we have to resolve, and I am hoping that, as the police change their boundaries, we can alter ours as well, because you need alignment to be effective.
Lord Peach: I declare my interest as president of the reserves. Reserves are important for resilience and the consequence of the SDR and its implementation. To put it simply, how is it going to grow the reserves? How do we bring it to life through exercises such as Steadfast Defender and the lessons that we may generate from that sort of exercise? Have we got the right structures in place in Government to feed those to the nation, not just in tiny circles within defence?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: I will kick off, sir, then I will hand over to General Griffiths to talk about Genesis, which he outlined earlier.
We have our reserves in three buckets. You will remember the operational reserve is the normal reserve, up to 32,000 at the moment. Then there is a reinforcement reserve of specialists, some of whom are already in industry and will mainly fill specialist roles in the Cyber & Specialist Operations Command: intelligence, signals, et cetera. Then, importantly, there is the strategic reserve of leavers of about 35,000. Under the Bill, we are proposing to lift that recall liability to age 65, and that is the bit that we need to exercise in Steadfast Defender, in terms of having a robust recall system in place. People feel that once they have left service but are still liable, they are part of the force, which we have not exercised in the past.
In terms of the growth of the reserve, it is making the reserve fit for the purpose we need now. In the times of Iraq and Afghanistan, as you will remember, it was backfilling the regulars for those operations. It is now obviously very different. It is not only backfilling the expeditionary force, but it is growing it rapidly, including the second and third wave, and what we need at home as well. There is a conversation to be had on how much homeland resilience is reserve as opposed to a volunteer force, and what flavour of that might be cheaper, et cetera. But you are absolutely right in terms of Steadfast Defender 27: that is our aiming mark to test this reserve concept across those buckets.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: To echo General Collins’s point, this is about purpose, and I do not think we have been as clear as we could be, now that things have changed. We have an Article 3 demand and an Article 5 demand, and being super clear to the reserve about what we need will help with recruitment and retention. It will also help with our ability to train and equip. I see the SJC as augmenting the regular force in order to war-fight and provide support to homeland resilience tasks. Its local knowledge and community linkages are really important. It gives you a hyper local perspective and can join you directly in local communities. It is powerful and responsive if there is a challenge at the local level. We need to rethink the way that we use the reserve.
As General Collins said, over the next year we are going to test that. We have two sets of exercises: the Steadfast Defender exercise, which is what we are going to do overseas, and the Brave Defender series, which is what we are going to do at home. We are running them in parallel so that we can see the Article 3 homeland bit and the Article 5 bit, and how the tensions between the two are played through. Genesis is our way of mobilising, and that is where we will start putting an awful lot of effort this year—into reconnecting with the strategic reserve, which is our regular cohort of people who have left and who have the training and skills that we probably need immediately. We need to think about how we can reconnect with them and how we would possibly mobilise and activate them in a time of crisis. That is the work of Genesis this year. I see it as an exciting time for the reserve. If you are part of the reserve, that complete focus on the purpose is what has been missing—the key ingredient.
Q87 Lord Farmer: The Royal United Services Institute recommended resilience training for teenagers aged 16 to 18, which would include crisis preparedness, emergency response and information literacy, but not the handling of weapons. Society needs to improve its resilience, and part of that could certainly be a youth reserve training programme. Do you have any thoughts on that?
The Chair: Let us hear from Baroness Helic on the same area, and then you can answer both questions together.
Baroness Helic: Thank you for your thoughts and presentation. I hear a lot about reconnecting and connecting to society and local areas. Following on from Lord Farmer’s question, how do you feel about national service? Do you not think that the introduction of national service would bring quite a lot of what we are trying to do in terms of connecting to people and bringing defence and homeland defence home to those who should be defending the country as well as you do?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: Thank you for both those questions; I will answer the national service one first. The UK relies on a voluntary specialised model. We have not adopted the total defence model that the Finns have, with 280,000 reservists, probably due to the fact that we are an island and we do not feel it as a society. That is not something we are pursuing at the moment, but we absolutely can get better on the reserves—a broader form of reserve service, as I mentioned before, especially when it comes to doing resilience at home. We saw how effectively the country mobilised itself under Covid, for example.
On the education point, that may be one for Parliament and the Department for Education, but where the military can and does help is with the cadet movement. You will know that, under the SDR, the Government made a promise to increase cadets by 30%, which reaches over the past 10 to 15 years, with a proactive approach to get into places where there is not as much opportunity, and others. The cadet movement is certainly a great leveller for the youth of this country. It is not there to make the military better but to improve life skills among our youth. That is a great way of embedding resilience into society.
The Chair: There was an announcement a few months ago about a gap year scheme proposal. Where has that got to?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: That has been announced and the military commanders are now working out how they will deliver it. I think I can say that, in the Army, we are we are starting it in September this year.
Q88 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Thank you very much for everything you have said so far; it has been fascinating. I circle back a bit to the issue of overall recruitment and retention, which you touched on slightly. It felt as though you were describing things such as the cadet force and improving the civilian reserve as ways of improving overall recruitment, perhaps as a kind of gateway, but are there other things that you think should be done to improve recruitment and retention, especially in light of the situation in Europe and the Middle East?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: There is really quite positive news at the moment. For the first time in four years, I think, fewer people have left than joined, so we are at a really good point. I am sure there are a number of reasons for that, and I would not wish to talk about them all, but they include things such as reduced friction in the pipeline, really positive branding and a positive message, purpose and offer.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: What do you mean by friction in the pipeline?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: The pipelines for recruitment have been reduced—we have removed many of the bars so that it is easier to come through. The offer is in a good place, and we have childcare—
Lord Spellar: They have improved their performance, is that right?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: Yes, everybody has improved their performance. We are in a positive place. We now need to gain the momentum of that. For the first time in my 10 or so years of being involved in recruitment, that message is coming through, and it is something we should be saying more about.
Lord Farmer: I hear that you—or the British Army—are sponsoring premiership football commentaries. Is that a way of recruiting? It seems quite good.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: Yes, we are. It gets to the part of the audience that would wish to apply to the Army.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: In terms of the civilian support, we have talked about Genesis but, in the integrated review, there was talk of expanding the civilian reserve and of “a civilian reservist cadre for support in times of crisis”. Where are we on that?
Damian Johnson: In the SDR, the newer review that looked through all this, as well as what had already been said about the active reserve and the strategic reserve there was a recommendation, which we accepted, for us to explore options for a new reserve force to support protection of critical national infrastructure across the UK. That is under active consideration at the moment within the Ministry of Defence, and we are due to provide advice to Ministers.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: Are you saying that that looks different from all the others in the sense of being specifically geared towards protecting infrastructure?
Damian Johnson: Yes. The SDR said that defence should actively look at what its role is, not just traditionally, in that we have always looked after defence critical national infrastructure, but recognising that we have niche capabilities at times of national crisis. The SDR said that defence should look at a new deal for what else it can do to support other government departments and industry on critical national infrastructure. That is a live conversation being scoped out now. The SDR also said to consider the people element of that and what that looks like—is it part of our reserve mix? We are looking at that at the moment.
Baroness Northover: You mentioned childcare assistance, which is very interesting for recruitment and retention. Do you see that having a beneficial effect on the recruitment of women or men, or both?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: Most of our women are part of dual-serving couples, so it is a bit of both. It is at the time of life when people are trying to develop their careers and that burden of childcare is significant, so matching that off helps us with a part of our demographic that is super important to us because they are well trained and experienced and the people we want to hold on to. It is an appropriate application of resource.
Q89 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: Thank you for coming. I am a relatively new member of the House of Lords, and this is my first committee. I find it very humbling that people of such eminence come along and try to help us, so thank you very much indeed for that. I am also a great admirer of Lord Robertson, who made a brilliant speech last week. I do not know if you have read it, but if not, I recommend it. I know that you worked with him on the SDR.
I think you will all be aware of the defence readiness Bill and will have worked on it. I am not sure whether that is its name or whether it is the national resilience and defence readiness Bill, but I know that it is not ready yet. We were expecting it this year, and now they have kicked it into next year. Will you comment on that and say what influence you think it will have on the whole-of-society approach?
Damian Johnson: I am leading the work within the department to look at a whole range of measures that we believe, as we develop these plans, defence might need to better face the threats that we face now and in the future. You would expect us to take our time on that. It is not late. I have dozens of teams across the department working on this right now. The important point is to make sure that we are clear about what we think we need, what would be effective and what we can then bring forward to Parliament as part of a conversation with the public and Parliament about what powers they would support.
The SDR, and the defence industrial strategy, mentioned defence legislative powers. It talks much more about considering the powers we need to help us mobilise wider defence, including industry and reserves; powers to ensure sufficient supply of services and access to critical national infrastructure and resources for defence, because the way that our industry is configured now is very different from previous times; powers to improve our resilience and defence’s war-fighting infrastructure; and powers to ensure that the UK can operate in a NATO framework, including some of the host nation support requirements that General Griffiths mentioned earlier.
That is all in the melting pot at the moment. I can assure you that a huge amount of work is going on both to define those and to work with our Ministers on what they are happy with, and then, of course, we will go through the normal process of securing time. From a national perspective, the King’s Speech this year had a lot on security and resilience: the cyber security and resilience Bill, the tackling state threats Bill, the national security Bill, the Armed Forces Bill. They all have security and resilience measures within them. The defence readiness Bill, if it is secured and brought forward, would build on that from a defence perspective.
Q90 Lord Peach: Can I ask about the wider narrative of defence to the nation? You have all touched on it in a positive way and said that we have to put this to the public. But surely there is another task, that falls to us all, around the subject of resilience: to point out with absolute clarity, even if we are not Scandinavia, the risks and threats we face. I am suggesting that there may be another conversation beyond the work of this committee around that narrative of defence, which has definitely shifted from where it was in the long run of defence reviews we have had since the Cold War.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: Absolutely. We face a number of threats, as you know. I have mentioned the cyber threats; the Secretary of State announced all that we had seen earlier with the Russian underwater programme. The shadow fleet is another hot topic, as is the threat that emanates from Ukraine since the invasion in 2022. Not only are the Ukrainians and the West learning but Russia is learning very rapidly from that warfare, and the bleed-out to the rest of the world, and from this new type of warfare that we see playing out in the Middle East. I agree that there is a balance with being overdramatic but, at the moment, stating that threat clearly is something that defence does do, although we take your point.
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: Our ability to respond to a shock is the point of this committee, and that shock could be a number of different things. You have to look through that lens as well, because that builds a stronger argument for a focus for society. It is difficult to just say that there is a Russian threat; there are also all sorts of other threats, including pandemic, and the response to shock is the same. It is resilience, and that is what we need to try to seek.
The seven baseline requirements, whether you call them Article 3 or just the things that a Government need to do for their society, are a useful handrail: continuity government, resilient energy suppliers, dealing effectively with uncontrolled movement of people, and resilient food and water are all important no matter what the shock is, as is the ability to then recover. As we have described, defence is part of that, but it is a bigger question. That is the framing that I would suggest is important: we need to be resilient as a society to shock and have the ability to recover so that we can get back to normal business.
Q91 The Chair: Given the level of threat that you have just touched on, how important is it that the defence readiness Bill that we have just been talking about is brought forward with much more urgency? We have heard from the MoD, but how disappointed are you, generals, that it was not in the King’s Speech?
Lieutenant General Paul Griffiths: I do not know whether I am disappointed. We need legislation in order to do the things that we used to be able to do, and as soon as we can get that, we can act accordingly. It is important. All the Bills that have been described are important because they change quite a lot of things in terms of authorities and our ability to respond. You can see why we ended up where we did, and we now need to take a fresh view and work out what legislation is required in order to do the things that we are talking about in committee today.
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: We certainly would not use that as an excuse to stop the work we have outlined in this committee. It is important to get the legislation right, and the benefit is that, as it is being discussed, we are having more of that national conversation. But I assure you that it is not delaying any activity in the MoD to get ready.
Baroness Curran: Can I probe that a little further? One of the big points we hear all the time is that you do not need to legislate for action. Perhaps sometimes we over-legislate. Given the inspirational leadership we have heard today, do we absolutely need legislation for you to continue with this? Is it fundamental to the task ahead?
Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins: It would make it more robust and make the nation realise that there is a legislative liability to answer the call when it comes, and it would better prepare us, but, as I said, not having it will not stop us getting ready. There is still a gap between where the defence readiness Bill will continue and where we are now, so we will concurrently fill that gap.
Damian Johnson: At a cross-government level, with all the threats we are facing, there is ongoing work looking at all the legislation we might need to bring forward to improve security and resilience. That includes the defence readiness legislation, but that is informed by the planning we are doing, which helps us work out what powers are needed. It is also informed by the testing and exercising that we are doing, where we specifically test for whether a legislative power is needed or whether it is a policy or process issue. On your point, we will not legislate just for the sake of it. It will be informed exactly by what we absolutely need.
The Chair: Thank you—we appear to have made it bang on time. Thank you very much for coming. As I said, you will get a transcript in the next couple of days. If you think anything is missing, please write to us.
