Scottish Affairs Committee — hearing of 9 June 2026: transcript & video

00:01 - 00:46

Speaker 1

Welcome to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee where we are looking at defence and we're delighted to have Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, to give him his full title, with us this afternoon to help us with that. Now, can I ask you firstly about the Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson? You co-authored that, as we know, and that sets out the plans for defence and the ambition that it should act as an engine for growth. To what extent is that ambition achievable in Scotland, do you think, and what are the main barriers to that ambition?

00:46 - 04:12

Speaker 2

Well, the primary role of the of the defence review, which I was asked to come and and lead this independent review, was basically to see how we could make the country safe. How we could build war readiness as a deterrent against any potential adversary, a peer adversary, and we thought might take ten years to develop. So it was a a transformative review designed essentially to do that, but at the same time we recognized that defence is inevitably a growth engine because the the more that is invested in it, the more can be produced. As it stands at the moment, there are huge numbers of jobs, about half a million jobs in the country as a whole involved with the the defence industry and indeed the the supply chain. So in in Scotland, where you've got centres like Faslane, you've got Thales, you've got Leonardo and and and plenty of others in the community, clearly there are opportunities here for both building defence and building deterrence, which is which is crucial, but at the same time harvesting a degree of growth.

For example, I I just found the other day a statistic that across the United Kingdom, Leonardo, one of the companies, used to be called Finmeccanica and now called Leonardo, Leonardo works with nearly 1,700 suppliers, 75% of whom are SMEs, the small companies. So that's just one company and it's a very important company in the in the Scottish economy on the outskirts of of Edinburgh. It's gone through a whole variety of of ownerships, but essentially doing the same thing, which is building advanced radars for for aircraft, advanced avionics. So the primary responsibility, the primary job of our defence review was to look at every aspect of defence. And we did, and we we put out a series of questions like you do in the committee to society as a whole, to think tanks, to academic life.

And we got 9,000 responses, some of them quite weighty ones as well. We used artificial intelligence to basically sort it out, otherwise we'd still be reading the stuff today. And then we had an unprecedented consultation as well with a review and challenge process with experts brought in. About 150 experts were all brought in to look at all of the material that we had. So the idea was that we have to very quickly in this country rebuild war readiness in order to be able to deter the kind of peer competitor that we are now seeing in reality on the other side of Europe.

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