---

Royal Navy

These are not my figures but those that the Government produced as a result of the SDR. This is the number of ships that the Government said that they required in the armed forces to carry out their policy, as a result of their own defence review. My question is, what has changed? According to the defence planning assumptions arising from the SDR analysis, the Government required a certain number of ships. They did not change those assumptions, and I imagine that that they are not changing now. Why, therefore, has the number of ships required to carry out those assumptions gone down? It is not me who has said that we are taking ““risk on risk””; rather, it was the former First Sea Lord. I am simply putting it to the Government that those carrying out the policy described by the Government in the SDR believe that they are not being given the tools to do the job that they need to do. When we take office, we will look at the defence planning assumptions and we might conclude that a different foreign policy would require a different shape of defence, and if so, we will set it out. However, discussing that is not the purpose of today’s debate; its purpose is to hold the Government to account for their stewardship of the Royal Navy, which, in the words of those in it, seems to be failing very badly.