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Defence in the United Kingdom

I agree with much of what the hon. Member for Telford (David Wright) has just said. I share fully in his praise for the armed forces parliamentary scheme, and I will come on to recruitment and the community connection that he talked about. I think that a great deal of benefit would be achieved by naming a ship HMS Hampshire, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I? I must begin, and it is a huge pleasure to do so, by paying tribute to my predecessor as Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence, the right hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George). He truly believes in defence and in this country. He has served the House and the Defence Committee very well over the past two Parliaments and his shoes are difficult to fill—indeed, everything is difficult to fill because he is larger than life. It is a new Committee. It has outstanding support from its staff; we are very lucky in that regard. From what I can see of the way it is working so far, it will be an extremely good Committee. It is larger than before: the number of members has increased from 11 to 14. It was over-subscribed. A lot of people who would have liked to be on it are not. We are working very hard, as the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore) kindly said. We have a full programme. We have started investigating the carriers and the joint combat aircraft. We have already had some interesting evidence sessions on that. We have also started an inquiry into delivering future capability for the Royal Air Force. Yesterday, we were at RAF Marham and saw some dedicated and enthusiastic people there working to do exactly that. I asked the Minister of State earlier what the repair arrangements were going to be for the joint combat aircraft and for the Nimrods. That was with a view to discovering whether there was a principle behind his move of the repair facilities from, for example, DARA St. Athan to RAF Marham. I was disappointed in his reply in that he said that he simply did not know the answer. Therefore, it did not strike me that there was much principle behind the move. We will have to go into that. The Defence Committee is beginning an inquiry in relation to Afghanistan, where the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps will deploy next year. We have already had some interesting discussions about the difficult circumstances that it will face when it gets there. We have had informal briefings at the MOD and taken introductory evidence from the Secretary of State for Defence. The Defence Committee will move on to discuss the topic that is increasingly coming up in this debate: the independent nuclear deterrent. I echo the comments made by hon. Members on both sides of the House. When the Secretary of State said that we needed a debate about that subject, he was absolutely right but, for heaven’s sake, when is it going to begin? The Committee will play its part in making sure that there is a debate on that matter, but we will need to encourage the MOD to be open, as it was when Trident was first introduced. Perhaps we will need to encourage the MOD to an openness that it has previously resisted, but which would greatly strengthen its hand.