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Ministry of Defence

First, I want to talk about the reasons for the debate. As a member of the Defence Committee, I think that Parliament needs to be involved in such processes. Doubtless, the Minister will find some of our proceedings uncomfortable and may tell me in the Tea Room that we have given a platform for tenuous and sometimes gratuitous general comments about Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than the main issue. But my answer to that is that Parliament needs to be involved, so that it can ventilate the issues. Although I share much of the assessment made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen) of how wrongly things have been done in Iraq, they are not being done wrongly by the British. I am not in control of that Iraqi money. I cannot spend it; other people are doing that. My hon. Friend raised interesting questions, but we are talking about the money that we spend and give. That is under our control, which is why we need to discuss it. We might consider how others could do things better, but we also need to be clear about our own position. That is what we should debate—not how other people spend their money. It is tempting to give a spanking to the argument about elected dictatorships, but I shall not go into that. The money that is being spent is supporting our troops—people who are trying to do a job. I have heard no one say that they do not want to spend that money. There may be arguments on the margins that the amount should be a little more, but the Defence Committee says that we need to support our people in their job. The money is being spent, and there are important arguments about how it is spent and about accountability, but we must be clear about the fact that we are supporting people on the ground. I have visited Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes in uniform—with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, so the House need not panic—and sometimes not. Talking to people on the street—if we can actually get on to the street—or talking to a couple of young men on the back of a donkey cart, we hear a different story. Of course, there is ambivalence about our being in Iraq, what we are doing and so on, but when we witness the day-to-day relationship of our forces with people in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is not as it is often described. Our forces want support at their elbow to do their job properly. Their motivation is clear. They are frustrated about obvious things such as being able to phone home, boots and all the usual stuff, but what they really want are the tools to do the job. Part of their frustration is about being able to engage in the civil-military interface, to provide appropriate support for civilians and the proper agencies of an emerging Government and other agencies. The people I spoke to have their own concerns, which include airlift capacity, armoured vehicles and their own protection and equipment, and they are right to raise those matters. They want a manoeuvre capability: they want to be able to get to where they need to go quickly, to be able to do the job, to be protected and to protect others, and to get away, and they need the equipment to do that. I shall concentrate my comments on how we spend our money. A lot of concern has, rightly, been expressed about equipment. The report’s comments on accelerated capital investment and spending are interesting, because that relates to the capacity to repair, supply, provide, maintain and deliver the equipment that people require to do the job. I am worried that, although we have known for some time that there are problems in some of those areas and although we have continuing conflicts in two places, we have not been able to predict requirements. The Minister has had the opportunity to do this, so he knows that ordinary people doing the job on the ground will say that that is the problem: they need more certainty and better planning. The fact that there are not enough Warrior armoured vehicles—that is what is claimed—and that there are problems maintaining and supplying them should now be able to be predicted because the problems were identified some time ago.