Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)

My Lords, tempted as I am to intervene in this debate to answer some of the points that have been made—or even to endorse the concept of me putting on my Islay boots and doing something violent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—I am going to restrain myself, because this was designed as a listening exercise. It was an opportunity for Members of the House of Lords to have a say and to have those views then incorporated into the process that we are undertaking at present. As I said, 14,500 submissions have already been made, some of them very substantial and a lot of them coming from organisations with different views. They will be considered properly and so will the outcome of this Grand Committee. During the last review that I did, as part of the consultations that took place we had a dinner in Admiralty House for former Defence Ministers. I had the privilege of sitting around the table with Denis Healey, Peter Carington, George Younger and a number of other Ministers who had served in the Ministry of Defence in order to hear their views about defence. It was a very rich experience and a very entertaining evening, which largely involved anecdotes about gifts that people had received—always an entertaining subject for Ministers and former Ministers, it has to be said. At the end of it, Lord Carrington got up and said: “We thank you very much for the opportunity of coming along this evening. We’ve all enjoyed the dinner and the conversations about it but frankly, in terms of the defence review, you’re much closer to the subject than we are, so we’re going to leave it to you—and once you’ve reported, we’ll attack it”. To avoid that fate, I thought it would be useful to have this debate in the Grand Committee. Much has been gained from it and members of the review will certainly be reading the debate with enormous interest. I beg to move.