RT HON DES BROWNE MP, MR ANDREW MATHEWSON AND MR HUGH POWELL

8 JANUARY 2008

  Q320  Mr Hancock: We should be quite clear of what we are saying here. The name is a misnomer, is it not, it is a battlegroup which can only be used in peacekeeping?

  Mr Mathewson: They can do the Petersberg Tasks which can extend from humanitarian—

  Q321  Mr Hancock: They cannot stop a war though, can they?

  Mr Mathewson: You would not deploy a force of 1,500 people to try to stop a war.

  Q322  Mr Hancock: All right, stop a civil war.

  Mr Mathewson: They can do the full range of peacekeeping operations from peacekeeping to the robust end, including separation of parties by force, but if you are thinking of an operation which is at that robust end of peacekeeping you would want to be planning what came after the battlegroup.

  Q323  Mr Hancock: From the Committee's report point of view, if you could write us a note on what caveats the Nordic Battlegroup has that would be helpful.

  Mr Mathewson: I am not aware of any caveats.

  Q324  Mr Hancock: That is fine.

  Mr Mathewson: They are capable of mounting the full range of missions implied by the Petersberg Tasks.

  Q325  Mr Hancock: Can I just go back, Secretary of State, when you answered Mr Jenkin's question about the EU Treaty and he asked whether or not it was possible for them to sign a defence treaty, you immediately said no but at that time Mr Mathewson and Mr Powell looked rather differently to that. I would be interested to know if they share your absolute conviction that the EU Treaty prevents the reformed EU from signing a defence treaty. Both of them looked rather taken aback by the speed of your "no". I hope I am wrong.

  Mr Powell: As I understand it, the position is and remains that under the existing Treaty it is already possible, with the unanimous agreement of the Council, for the EU to enter into Treaty arrangements, including in the defence sphere. That has not changed with this new Treaty. With the unanimous agreement of the Council, ie all the Member States, as the Secretary of State said, we can still do that. The Treaty does not change that.

  Q326  Mr Hancock: But the Treaty says specifically—

  Des Browne: The question I was asked was was this a function—

  Q327  Mr Jenkin: I did not use the word "function"; I said "could".

  Des Browne: We will go back and read the question. The question as I understood it was as a consequence of the European Union assuming this legal identity—

  Q328  Mr Hancock: But under Article 11.3—you asked us to be specific—it says that there is a negative obligation which means that a Member State who might not have signed up to something cannot get in the way of the overall collective good of the EU. I am interested in this concept of if there is one vote against, meaning they cannot go ahead, but if all the Member States believe it is in their collective interests under Article 11.3 there is an obligation on that renegade state not to be negative and try to prevent it if it was seen to be in the collective interests of the Union.

  Des Browne: Excuse me Mr Hancock, we will defer to the lawyer who we have brought with us who understands this Treaty in some complex detail.

  Mr Powell: The key point I can report is that that requirement is in the existing Treaty; it is not introduced by the new Treaty.

  Q329  Mr Jenkin: But legal personality is a new feature.

  Des Browne: That is very important. That is why the premise that underpinned your question was what I answered.

  Q330  Chairman: I would like to move on.

  Des Browne: Can I just say, Chairman, that it is clear to me from what I have seen of question-and-answer sessions before that there are members of this Committee who are exercised by some of the legal detail of the interpretation of provisions of the Reform Treaty and its interaction with others. I am quite prepared to get definitive answers to these questions but it would be better if we were given some notice of these questions in complex detail. If they could be provided to us in writing, I will do what I have done in the past and I will give specific legal answers to legal questions.

  Mr Jenkin: We cannot ask for more than that.

  Chairman: That is very helpful. We will now move on.

  Q331  Mr Hancock: I am sorry for that distraction. I was just nervous about your two colleagues either side and I wanted to give them a chance to answer. I am interested to know what you believe the EU Battlegroups are actually for. Are they intended to generate deployable European forces? With the exception of the Nordic Battlegroup, do they not by their very creation mean that the same troops that NATO would want to deploy at the front-line from many Member States are the same troops? Consequently there could be a conflict, could there not?

  Mr Mathewson: It is clearly the case that each country has only one set of forces and it is for each country when it is managing its own battlegroup and NATO commitments to make sure that it is not double committing its forces. What are EU Battlegroups for? They are to allow the EU to respond very rapidly with forces which are on stand-by and pre-formed to a range of contingencies. They are there to conduct a rapid response to the sort of Petersberg-type Tasks which are set out in the old Treaty and the new Treaty. They are there to respond quickly to improve the EU's ability to respond to that sort of operation from humanitarian through to the full range of peacekeeping operations.

  Q332  Mr Hancock: One of the witnesses who gave evidence at a previous meeting said on European battlegroups: "They have an important function in signalling political will but they are unlikely to be a military solution by themselves." How would you respond to that?

  Mr Mathewson: The battlegroup is a small group. It is up to around 1,500 people. There are contingencies where you could foresee—

  Q333  Mr Hancock: So where would the support for them come from—NATO?

  Mr Mathewson: There are contingencies where the battlegroup itself could make a decisive difference if deployed quickly and at the right time. We have seen that in The Congo. There are clearly contingencies which would be beyond the scope of the battlegroup to resolve and in those circumstance the battlegroup could be, as it were, the first foot on the ground but the EU would then need to generate the forces which filled it out and, as it were, came behind.

  Mr Powell: I can give a concrete example which was a precursor to the creation of the battlegroup concept, and that is the EU operation in The Congo in 2003, known as Operation Artemis. That sent in what was in effect a battlegroup led by the French to help the UN operation that was getting into trouble in Eastern Congo. For a relatively short period of time that had to take on a serious local threat, and take on a combat function. It succeeded in stabilising that particular region of The Congo to the benefit of the wider UN mission. On your question about compatibility between battlegroups and NRF, I think I would say three things. First of all, as Andrew Mathewson said, you already have in place EU-NATO arrangements to de-conflict the two forces, in other words to ensure that the same force is not on stand-by for both organisations. That is another way of saying that in practice we have ensured that there are more capabilities/resources on stand-by than there otherwise would have been in Europe.

  Q334  Mr Hancock: But that is not the case, is it, because the EU set up a mission to Chad, they get the 4,000 troops, but they need 23 helicopters and they get two and so they cannot go. How can there be a proper mix of capabilities?

  Mr Powell: Both NRF and battlegroups are set up for rapid reaction and the Chad mission was not a rapid reaction so it had been force generated separately from any of the stand-by forces. The third point, just to complete what I was going to say, it was accepted by NATO and indeed by the United States at the time the EU Battlegroups were being set up that the battlegroups were in support of the NRF, in the sense that they would encourage smaller Member States to develop in packages in a multi-lateral framework the larger force packages that then over time would also be available to the NRF.

  Chairman: The final set of questions I want to be asked is about the European Defence Agency. Robert Key?

  Q335  Robert Key: Secretary of State, in your memorandum to the Committee there was hardly a ringing endorsement of the European Defence Agency. It was more of a footnote really and it said that the Headline Goal 2010 process will identify any shortfalls but then you say that the EDA will not actually be able to correct the shortfalls. Has the EDA developed in the way the British Government would have envisaged or wished?

  Des Browne: It has produced some good work, for example the Code of Conduct in Defence Procurement, but we think it has lacked structure and orientation. We are working with Member States to refocus the efforts and the key priorities and to mitigate these shortfalls.[6]

  Q336  Robert Key: Is that why the British Government recently blocked the EDA's three-year budget?

  Des Browne: We were part of a small group of Member States who asked for the justification of the planned year-on-year increases in the budget and the level of growth that was anticipated. We were unable to reach agreement on an acceptable level of growth so therefore we were not in a position to agree the budget.

  Q337  Robert Key: Do you think there is very little contact between the EDA and NATO itself? Is that part of the problem?

  Des Browne: I might need to defer to one of my colleagues to talk about the level of contact that there is between the EDA and NATO.

  Mr Mathewson: I think there is increasing contact. They are starting to go to each other's meetings. Meetings of the National Armaments Directorate in NATO will see an EDA representative. I do not think that is the real problem. The EDA exists to bring countries together and to identify the opportunities for them to work together. It still requires countries to want to invest and develop the capabilities.

  Q338  Robert Key: If the EDA is designed to bring countries together, why is Turkey excluded from the EDA?

  Mr Mathewson: Turkey is not eligible for membership of the EDA since it is not a member of the European Union. It is permitted to have an association arrangement with the EDA. Norway has one and Turkey is entitled to have one.

  Q339  Robert Key: But Turkey was a member of the predecessor body of the EDA, was it not?

  Mr Mathewson: It is our policy that Turkey, like Norway, should have an association arrangement with the EDA. That has been blocked by another Member State.

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