Phil Brickell

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I declare an interest as the Member of Parliament for Bolton West, which is the home of MBDA’s Logistics North production site. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) on securing this important debate; I particularly welcome his comments on both the lessons to be learned from Ukraine and the need to ensure that our armed forces can protect us from a diverse range of threats. All of us will have constituents who are concerned about last week’s developments between Russia and Ukraine, including Putin’s use of an advanced hypersonic missile. This is a personal issue for me. My own father was stationed in Germany throughout the 1970s as the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union loomed. The shadow cast by that period of constant existential fear is, unfortunately, a long one. The terrifying reality is that now war is not just something we read about in newspapers; it is on our doorstep. However we are not fighting on the beaches, landing grounds, fields and streets any more. The long distance missile capabilities of hostile states mean, regrettably, that war can now reach us in our own homes. All that is to say that sovereign capability for missile defences here in the UK has seldom been so important. As others have already noted, we are vulnerable to advanced missiles such as the one fired by Russia last week and the one fired by Iran on Israel earlier in the year. As our armed forces and defence infrastructure were left to crumble during the last 14 years, a serious capability gap has emerged, particularly around defence against air threats and our ability to engage targets at extended range. Only in September, the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee warned that the Government must “pay greater attention to homeland defence”, particularly to “integrated air and missile defence…in close collaboration with our European NATO allies”.