Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bridges on bringing forward this debate—he probably had to do a bit of pushing and shoving—and for his crystal-clear demonstration, which will be hard to

My Lords, the Minister mentioned the private finance initiative. As he will probably be aware, many countries now, in many jurisdictions, are adopting new risk allocation systems built on PFI. These i

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this debate and bringing out into the open so many issues that we ought to discuss much more than we do. I will fill my

One of the problems is that we do not know where these hundreds of ghost ships are at any one time or where they are going. There is a need to identify that. We should have a better system of internat

My Lords, might not the Government find it a bit easier to deal with their problems explaining defence spending if they distinguished much more clearly between the overall defence of the nation—where

My Lords, given the completely new structure and formation of the modern battlefield and the way war is being conducted, which is changing very quickly indeed, does the Minister or her colleague, the