MINISTER "CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS" ON SGT ROBERTS FAILURES - TYLER

Liberal Democrat Peer and former North Cornwall MP, Lord (Paul) Tyler, has told the House of Lords that the MoD has come to stand for the ‘Ministry of Dither, Delay and Deceit’ in the minds of many bereaved service families.

In a special debate on the lessons learned from the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts, the first British casualty in Iraq, Lord Tyler called Peers’ attention to two contradictory answers that Government Ministers had given within a month of each other, when trying to explain away the MoD’s failure to order sufficient Enhanced Combat Body Armour to protect troops deployed in advance of the invasion.

In the first answer on 10th January 2007, a Defence Minister claimed that the MoD had made a judgement that to place orders for equipment which would have indicated preparations for the deployment of a large land force would have risked undermining diplomatic efforts to avert war. On the 8th February, the Minister said that the then Secretary of State, Geoff Hoon, had been advised that there were enough ECBA sets in stock already.

Speaking in the Chamber, Lord Tyler said:

“The Minister cannot have it both ways.  Either there was a deliberate delay so as not to send the wrong signals and therefore, although the Ministry of Defence knew that it needed the order, it delayed it, or, as the Minister said, it knew that it did not need it and was confident that it had enough.”

The Defence Minister, responding for the Government, Lord Drayson, said Lord Tyler had “pursued these issues on behalf of Steven Roberts’s family, to his great credit”.  But Drayson failed adequately to explain the discrepancy between the two answers, saying only that they related “to a misunderstanding about the causes of the lack of a set of body armour in Sergeant Roberts’s case” and that there had been enough sets of ECBA for “the troops potentially to be deployed on active operations”.

The Minister went on to assert that “The Government made a judgement, taking into account the diplomatic situation.  Our prime objective was to avoid having to use military operations, and our judgment at the time was that it would not be helpful to what we were trying to achieve to indicate to Saddam Hussein, or any members of the international community, that we were preparing to go to war.”

Commenting afterwards, Lord Tyler said:

“I don’t know what constitutes ‘active operations’ if Sergeant Roberts was not deployed on them.  The Government’s twisting and turning on this only lends to service families’ sense that the Ministry has not been straightforward with them where relatives have paid for Ministers’ incompetence with their lives.

“Each of these – quite contradictory– answers is as unsatisfactory as the other.  Clearly any advice that there were sufficient ECBA sets in stock was a dangerous mistake.  Equally clearly, it is a nonsense to suggest either that ordering ECBA sets would have alerted Saddam to the Bush / Blair consensus for war, or that he, along with the rest of the international community was somehow unaware of negotiations going on between the Labour and Conservative frontbenches to secure support for the conflict.”

ENDS

Note to Editors:  The full exchange can be found in the Official Report (Lords Hansard), col. 388, 17th May 2007, online at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70517-0015.htm#07051791000002