RT HON GEOFFREY HOON MP, MR NICK WITNEY AND MR PAUL TAYLOR

WEDNESDAY 15 JANUARY 2003

  239. Secretary of State, thank you for coming. After only giving us your name, rank and serial number for a number of years, we are now being overwhelmed with statements in the House and your appearance here. I will ask you to make a statement first but I must say the questions we give you will not have any surprise element about them, they will be basically the ones we asked you a few months ago.

  (Mr Hoon) I am grateful, Chairman, for the warmth of your welcome and for inviting me here today. I have with me Nick Witney, who is the Director General for International Security Policy at the Ministry of Defence, and Paul Taylor, who is the Director of Strategic Technologies. As your kind and thoughtful comments have indicated, this is a good way to follow up my oral statement to the House earlier this afternoon setting out the Government's preliminary conclusion that we should agree to the request from the United States to upgrade RAF Fylingdales for missile defence purposes. I do not propose to use up the time of the Committee by repeating that statement, except to emphasise that we have not yet formally communicated a final decision to the US administration. Our aim today was to set out current thinking on the upgrade request as a basis for discussion, but I doubt that I could have got through questioning in the House nor indeed your questioning this afternoon without indicating our view on the way forward. It seems therefore sensible to do that. There is an opportunity for further parliamentary discussion on 22 January and I am particularly keen to understand any remaining issues which we may not yet have taken into account in our analysis. The views of this Committee will, as ever, be of vital important. As you have indicated, Chairman, when we last discussed this issue in March, I did somehow get the impression that you felt that I was being less than forthcoming. If that was an accurate sense that I had, I make no apology for it whatsoever! It was simply impossible for me to offer at that stage a useful comment until the shape and context of the US request for the use of UK facilities became clear. It may be necessary for me to be equally reticent if you invite me to gaze into a crystal ball about what may happen in subsequent, undetermined phases of the evolving proposals, but for now we have the Presidential decision on initial missile defence deployments and a specific request to upgrade Fylingdales. As I made clear to the House this afternoon, I believe that agreeing to the upgrading of RAF Fylingdales is in the UK's interests. It enables the United Kingdom at minimal cost to ensure that we keep the option open to defend ourselves against a potentially catastrophic threat in the future, and I am certainly willing to discuss our thinking on that matter with you today.

  240. Thank you very much. The discussion paper was published on 9 December and then you received the US request to upgrade Fylingdales on 17 December, four weeks ago. You told the House recently that you were keen for the Government to be informed by public and parliamentary discussion. I think many of us have our own views on what the Government should do but most of us—certainly I have—are waiting until all the evidence is presented before commenting. Can you give us the background as to why you have said what you wish the end product to be, before a parliamentary and public consultation which you are now going through? You have clearly made your mind up and now you are asking the rest of us for our observations? Did you consider it the other way round of beginning a parliamentary debate, a public debate, and then making a decision afterwards?
  (Mr Hoon) I can understand that argument and, if I may say so, that was the debate that we had in the Ministry of Defence as to what was the right way of proceeding, whether it was better for me to make the statement I made today indicating my preliminary thinking, or whether it was better to wait and have the debate and then make a statement setting out the conclusions informed by that debate. I simply felt from some experience now of this issue that it was almost impossible to be able to debate this in the abstract without indicating the way in which the Government thought this debate should go. I felt that was a more open, straightforward way of dealing with it. It leaves open the opportunity to honourable and right honourable Members in the debate next week[1] to set out their concerns, if they have them, and indeed to raise new issues if there are new issues to be raised. But had I adopted a different approach today and said that the Government had not yet reached a position, I felt that you, Chairman, in particular but other honourable and right honourable Members would have decried that as being somehow disingenuous and less than open with the House, so I felt it was much better to deal with this issue in the way that I did.

  241. When will you reply to the US request? Have you been given some sort of indication by the United States that they would like a response by a certain point in time?
  (Mr Hoon) The timing of any response is entirely a matter for the government of the United Kingdom. Clearly it is in the interests of United States—I assume, although they have not said this specifically—to have an early response to their request, but it is not driven by any specific deadline. It is driven by the process which I set out some time ago to the House and I believe has given people and Members of Parliament the opportunity of engaging in a debate.

  242. As far as the Committee is concerned, we are very pleased that most of us have been to Fylingdales and that we are talking to you today, and we would like to talk to other people who have a wide variety of views and we need time to have a report presented to us and then to consider the report and publish the report, with whatever conclusions we reach. Can you give us some indication whether that is going to be very difficult if there is going to be a date which you may or may not have in mind? Do you think that you will say in one month, six weeks, two months, "Look, now I have listened to all the debates, I have been and talked to people, the Committee has produced this report, I am going to make a decision"? I know you do not run your department simply on what is convenient to the Defence Committee, but if we are going to have an informed investigation we do need at least a month before we can publish our report. Do you anticipate that we are going to be caught by surprise by the decision of acquiescence or rejection, if that is what is going to happen, before we have had the opportunity of consulting and producing a report?
  (Mr Hoon) Perhaps we could discuss that further. I am perfectly well aware of the work that the Committee is proposing to undertake. I do not particularly want to close off our options at this stage by giving an open-ended commitment to await the outcome of the Committee's deliberations, although I would prefer to be able to do that. Equally, it is not my responsibility to ask you questions but I think it would be helpful if we could have a further discussion about the timescale that you are proposing.

  243. I am sorry I was not in the House for your statement but I was travelling back from an OSCE meeting in Vienna, and I heard on the radio that you draw a distinction between this decision and a wider decision on whether or not we commit ourselves in one way or another to the programme. What we propose, Secretary of State, is to produce a report hopefully in a month which will relate just to the issue that we are talking about today and then we will resume our inquiry which we began some nine months ago, with a report in due course. Perhaps if we can talk about that, that would be helpful to both parties. The last question that I have concerns whether you have had any dialogue with Denmark because they, too, I presume, had a request around the same time to upgrade the radar at Thule in Greenland. Can you tell us if there has been any consultation with our main European partners on the missile defence programme on what the US now proposes?
  (Mr Hoon) I have certainly discussed this issue with my Danish counterpart. As you will be aware, Denmark received a parallel request from the United States at the same time as a request was made to the United Kingdom. I anticipate that they are going through the same sort of processes that we have gone through in recent times. I have not had a conversation with my Danish colleague since the parliamentary recess.

  Chairman: Okay, thank you. I will now move on to Mr Hancock.

  244. When you came before us last year you and your officials made great play of the relevance of missile defence based on the axis of evil around Iraq and North Korea. What has changed since then and where, since then, have the threats increased or maybe even decreased?
  (Mr Hoon) I think the specific change—if I can go back to the slight admonishment given by the Chairman of the Committee in his introductory remarks—is that we were made aware towards the end of last year, as a result of the Presidential directive announcing the deployment of the initial missile defence capability for 2004-05, of the preliminary shape of US thinking and that is why the request to the United Kingdom was made and why I made the statement today, so there is a proper time sequence and events sequence dating from the US decision and the US request. The reason I was unable to satisfy the Committee previously was because in the absence of a specific US decision I was not prepared, nor did I judge it sensible, to make a decision in the abstract before any specific decision or request was made by the United States.

  245. Has the threat or the potential threat of a rogue state being able to launch a missile that could threaten either Western Europe or the North American continent got any more real than it was six months ago when you were here?
  (Mr Hoon) I think that recent concerns about North Korea, both in terms of its development of missiles for its own use and, indeed, its continuing willingness to sell complete ballistic missile systems to anyone who has the hard currency and is prepared to buy them, is a continuing issue to which we have to have very careful regard. Although North Korea has not yet flight tested its systems it could certainly do so in a matter of if not days certainly weeks, if it abandoned its recent moratorium. There are certain indications very recently in North Korea that North Korea no longer believes that it is bound by its previous undertakings and in those circumstances North Korea does pose a very real threat to the United Kingdom, to other members of the alliance, and indeed there is a threat of proliferation to which I think we need to have very clear regard.

  246. In your statement today and previously you talked again about North Korea and you said that it could flight test missiles with the potential to reach Europe or the United States within weeks. Whilst I can accept the possibility of it reaching the US, are you suggesting that you now have evidence in your possession to suggest that the North Koreans have a missile system which is capable of flying (even if it went over the Pole) some 4,000 miles?
  (Mr Hoon) Yes, I am.

  247. That is an existing system that they have not flight-tested but they have built?
  (Mr Taylor) The Taepo-Dong II is the missile system you are describing.

  248. Stacking one on top of the other.
  (Mr Taylor) Taepo-Dong II is essentially a collection of No-Dong motors and a No-Dong front end. It has that range that you are talking about and they could test one of those within weeks, although we believe that the capability to deploy them will take possibly to the end of the decade.

  249. That is extraordinarily helpful. If we look then at the other component of the situation at the moment, the Fylingdales initiative is really targeting the possibility of missiles coming in via the Middle East to America and Europe, and if the situation in the next few months meant that the Iraqi regime was changed and Iraq was disarmed, what would that do to the need to build the extension of Fylingdales and to upgrade the radars at Fylingdales, when that specifically was seeming to prevent a missile coming in from that part of the world? Would the need still be there in your opinion?
  (Mr Hoon) I believe it would, not least because of the reference I made a few moments ago to North Korea's willingness to proliferate its ballistic missile systems to anyone with the hard currency willing to buy them. I do not believe that we should simply base all of our decisions on Iraq, important though that threat is. There are other threats that are either current or are emerging and the whole point of taking a decision at this stage is to allow us the timescale in which to properly protect allies should that protection prove necessary in years to come.
  (Mr Witney) Perhaps I could just add that Fylingdales' radar does have the capability of looking all around. Its immediate interest to the US and thus the upgrade is that it is so much closer to a Middle Eastern threat than anything they can put in the United States, but it can look all around.

  250. To make that really effective, would it have to rely solely on Fylingdales or would they need another station somewhere in Europe, maybe further south, to enable that to be truly effective and offer us some protection as pay-back for allowing Fylingdales to be upgraded? Would the UK need to be covered by a similar installation elsewhere in south west Europe?
  (Mr Witney) We believe that the Fylingdales's radar coupled with some form of interceptor system, ground based or sea based, somewhere around north western Europe would provide a capability to protect the United Kingdom. If you want a more robust, more layered system and one which is capable of defending a larger tranche of the European continent, then further installations would probably be necessary (whether radars or interceptors) in other parts of the continent.

  251. Fylingdales alone has the capability, if properly integrated into the American missile defence system, of giving a missile defence system to the United Kingdom?
  (Mr Witney) If complemented with some form of interceptors somewhere in the north west European area.

  Mr Hancock: Which has to be located in Europe to defend us? Fine, thank you very much.

  252. First of all, Secretary of State, can I apologise if it seems like Groundhog Day. Can I ask about the concerns that have been raised, certainly locally and also by some organisations, concerning the upgrade which some people think is the thin end of the wedge in terms of further down stream asking for the x-band radar. Does the request cover the possibility of x-band radar and would such a development in future need a further request from the United States? Just finally, in such circumstances as the x-band radar was developed, is there a compelling reason why such a new radar in the United Kingdom would be based at Fylingdales rather than somewhere else?
  (Mr Hoon) Can I make it absolutely clear, as I made it clear to the House this afternoon, that the request is solely and specifically concerned with the upgrade of the radar and related communications facilities in RAF Fylingdales. There is no request at all about siting an x-band radar and, indeed, again as I indicated to the House, American thinking on the development and location of x-band radar, should that be necessary, is still evolving and current thinking clearly indicates moving away from a fixed installation towards something that could be located at sea. Certainly there is no necessity nor any assumption that an x-band radar would be located at Fylingdales, and in any event there is no particular thinking at the present time that there would be any requirement for x-band radar to be located anywhere in the United Kingdom. But, as I said, the issue is still being looked at, I hope consistently with the way in which I have approached these matters. Members of the Committee will forgive me if I do not go further than that at this stage because if I say at present I see no necessity for an x-band radar to be located in the United Kingdom that is the current state of ours and, as far as I am aware, United States' thinking.

  253. Can I clarify the point although I think you have made it quite clear. This upgrade has got nothing at all to do with x-band radar and if at any future date x-band or anything else changed at Fylingdales there would have to be another request from the United States; is that correct?
  (Mr Hoon) I am tempted to agree with your point about "nothing to do with", but I think that is probably over-egging the pudding in the sense that I have sought to make it clear that the United States is engaged in what they describe as a test bed, that is testing different assumptions, different models, different means of providing a layered missile defence system and therefore clearly it is assumed that such a system will evolve. If you will forgive me, I will try and explain it and I am perfectly willing to try to answer your further questions. That evolution may well lead to the development and use of x-band radars, but the assumptions that have been made in the past that they would be required to be located, say, in the United Kingdom by those who have speculated—and I have met some of them who say they might have to be located at Fylingdales—are certainly to my understanding today wrong. I do not want to mislead the Committee in any way. Clearly the idea in the United States is to develop a system. That system almost certainly would involve the use of x-band radar but perhaps not in the way it was previously thought of by some commentators who assumed that that meant somehow the construction of an 18-storey facility in a National Park in North Yorkshire. I do not see that as being a very likely development today.

  254. I want to nail this down because some of the documents we have seen contain some comments about what this permission actually involves, which is around the threat, for example, of increased radiation from x-band radar, etcetera. This permission is not going to be on x-band radar and if there were a future request for Fylingdales or anywhere else in the UK for the siting of x-band radar—and I accept the point you made about sea-based systems—that would have to be another request from the United States; is that correct?
  (Mr Hoon) That is absolutely right and, indeed, given the size, complexity and sophistication of such a facility would have to be dealt with through the then usual planning arrangements.

  Mr Jones: Thank you.

  255. Secretary of State, the US plans for an interim missile defence capability "in the 2004 time-frame" centred on sensors and interceptors around the Pacific, and designed primarily to face North Korea. If the intention of the upgrade of Fylingdales is to protect against Middle Eastern threats rather than that from North Korea, why the urgency for Fylingdales?
  (Mr Hoon) Because it is important, as Nick Witney indicated earlier, that the all round view that Fylingdales provides should be available to the United States, not least because it is looking at development of the system. The United States is not simply trying to develop a system that protects the United States against North Korea, it is looking at how that system would develop and evolve to deal with a number of different threats, including, as members of the Committee have already pointed out, the threat and emerging threats from the Middle East region, so the idea is to have available to them the information that is required in order to achieve that ultimate objective.

  256. The United States is looking at both sensors and interceptors in the Pacific and the two seem to be inextricably linked and, indeed, Mr Witney referred a minute or two ago to protection from the radar being coupled with the interceptors. Is it a realistic prospect for the United Kingdom to say, yes, we agree to the upgrade but, no, we do not yet agree to the interceptors because, frankly, without the interceptors based in Europe we are not going to achieve the objective about which you spoke so eloquently this afternoon, namely to provide the people of these islands with the protection they need?
  (Mr Hoon) I did indicate to the House this afternoon that what is important is that we consider the request stages in the light of our knowledge and understanding at the time. I do not believe it is necessary at this stage, nor particularly useful, to talk about developments that have not reached any kind of practical reality as far as the United Kingdom is concerned. What I can say as part of the request that the United States has made is that the system, consistent with the President of the United States' earlier declaration, specifically indicates the possibility of the United Kingdom being covered by a missile defence arrangement, subject obviously to technological developments and our willingness to participate in such a system. It does seem to me, as I indicated to the House today, that that is a matter for the future once we are at the point of requiring that decision, which is not needed today.

  257. You do give the impression, Secretary of State, of being dragged to each decision. I warmly welcome the decision you announced to the House and country this afternoon but if you reflect back on the position we had less than a year ago where no decision had been made, no requests had been received—and my colleague, James Cran, referred to your "fig leaf" which happily has now been thrown away in respect of the decision on Fylingdales but it looks as though the fig leaf is still in place with regard to the interceptors—can I suggest that it is not in the British national interest for us to be perceived to be dragged to a decision, nor is it in your interests, given the robust way in which you articulated the case today, to be seen to be somewhat sceptical and surely a whole-hearted embracing of this philosophy, including the participation of British companies in interceptors, ought to be part of your policy?
  (Mr Hoon) I accept that there is a range of opinions on the timescale. I have seen the phrase "indecent haste" used to describe the process of our decision making. I accept that different commentators, perhaps for different reasons and different motivations, will ascribe different adjectives to the pace of the decision making. I am content that we have taken the decision at an appropriate pace and in an appropriate way.

  258. Since the leader of the Opposition showed the way in 1995 I am bound to say that I cannot see any undue haste—
  (Mr Hoon) The leader of the Opposition in 1995 was a Labour leader so I entirely consent to that!

  259. Iain Duncan-Smith in 1995 pointed the way, so I could not possibly describe your conversion as having been taken with undue haste.
  (Mr Hoon) I think we will leave that to the realms of party politics.

  Chairman: There are no politics in here, Secretary of State, just good questions. Any more questions, Mr Howarth?

  Mr Howarth: No.