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Armed Forces

My Lords, I am well aware of the great Duke of Wellington’s view on bean counters offering an opinion on anything to do with war. His first reaction was that they should be used as target practice before they got to be any danger—and quite right too. But I am unashamedly a bean counter; I think that numbers are wonderful and beautiful things and, if you make friends with them, they can guide you to some very interesting insights. I shall give noble Lords three numbers that I shall use as a framework for what I want to say today. They are 11, seven and 10. Eleven is the value in pounds paid to every member of the British Army on the frontline per hour for every active hour that he serves. Seven is the value in pounds per hour of service of the equipment purchased by the MoD for the British Army last year, which was written off because it did not work. That comes to a total of £3.1 billion. I assure the Minister that I shall tread very carefully to not use this as an opportunity to embarrass or make fun of the MoD’s figures, as the ministry has an extremely difficult job. However, I want to see what pattern emerges from this and what lessons we can learn about what is going wrong that we should have that amount of misspent money, and whether anything can be done about it for the future. The £3.1 billion that is spent on equipment that did not work—and I mean that it seriously did not work; it was not just mildly but totally useless—arises from the NAO’s report. When I got this figure, I went to the NAO and asked people there if they could reconstruct the £3.1 billion, so that I could understand what it was. Frankly, if you go to the NAO and talk to people who work in the department dealing with the MoD, cases just jump out at you from the filing cabinets to be looked at—there are so many of them. This does not add up precisely to £3.1 billion—I am not sure whether it is more or less—but if I run through the10 or 11 I have got, some sort of pattern emerges. The most regular factor in each of these cases—you can mark your cards on this—is that we did not do something for ourselves but relied very heavily on the participation of some foreign country in some part of the project. In each such case it seems that something goes wrong. I am very mindful that back in 1938—there is a huge precedent for this—when the war department of the day was putting togetherthe component-sourcing plans for the Hurricane and the Spitfire, it had not occurred to anybody that the mechanical device for aiming and firing the machine guns on the wings of those aircraft via remote control could be obtained only from Siemens in Munich. The slight flaw in that battle plan was not too obvious at the time. If we had not been so fortunate as to havea German-Jewish refugee of immortal, but now forgotten, memory called Dr Budd incarcerated in the Hampstead Heath internment camp at the time, and if he had not had the design for this mechanism in his briefcase, the war might have gone rather differently. We seem not to be immune to this mistake today. In my assessment of the actual hours I should be accused by the MoD of having cheated on my number just now, but in the actual hours of service to get to the £11 per hour I have not included the new pay rise but I have included the hours in which soldiers remain on duty when at rest where they are also on call-out. That produces 47.3 working hours per week for the average soldier, which is quite a lot. The aggregate value of MoD equipment purchases last year which were unfit for purpose at £3.1 billion is almost exactly the 10 per cent of the entire procurement budget. It is, I also agree—this is a bit of a cheat—spread across all three fighting forces. This therefore involves not wholly the Army but the bulk of it is the Army. t I have not included in that figure the additional £2.3 billion, which was written off last and appears to be almost an annual feature of the written off overrun cost of getting the Typhoon fighter into an operational mode, which would take the whole write-off of non-deliverable equipment to £5 billion per year. Incidentally, the £3.1 billion would have been enough to buy, at a cost of £167.50 each, 151 complete sets of body armament for every member of the Army. As they have not all got a set of body armament, that focuses our minds on where we are coming from. Secondly, they have been ordered but they have not arrived yet—that is the second factor that runs through nearly all of these examples. The ideas are right, the plan is right and the equipment is right, but the delivery programme on so much of this has just failed. I turn to the other reasons why the costs havebeen so bad. GCHQ relocation has gone up from £1.07 billion to £1.62 billion because it has now been decided that it is not safe to rely on the new computer until it has operated until at least 2012, so they have built in an additional £450 million of cost to cover the dual-running of the old computer with full staffing until that time. We all know about the problems with the Snatch vehicles, to which the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, referred this morning. Some 162 new Vectors, which are much better suited for Afghanistan, are on the way, as are 124 upgraded FV 430s. These were scheduled to be delivered in batches starting at the end of 2006 but that date has been put back to the end of the summer 2007. The underslung grenade launchers were despatched to the Army on 14 April 2003. A minimal amount of ammunition was made available by the manufacturers just to prove that that equipment was working. The core supply of 10,000 was not delivered until 7 May 2003 because the Swiss Government—the Government of the country in which they were being manufactured—withdrew the export licence at the last moment and would not let them come into Britain. What on Earth were we doing placing an order with a Government who were not going to allow the export to go through anyway? Nuclear, biological and chemical detection and protection equipment has not been provided in sufficient numbers and those that were available were defective as the respirators did not function as well as expected and have not done so yet. Bowman—the essential radio link for command and control—should have been in service by the 1990s for an estimated total cost of £1.9 billion. Five years after the contract was re-entered to a new consortium in 2000, the director of infantry reportedly told his military staff that he must now accept this equipment with all its faults ““for political reasons”” despite the fact that at some settings, it delivers radiation burns to personnel in the field and the set weight is15 pounds, which is three times the weight of its predecessor, the Clansman. It also cannot work in any armoured vehicle and the weight of the control unit regular breaks the Land Rover axels of the vehicles that carry them. One store of these items achieved the unique feat of internal combustion and burning down the barracks in which it was housed. The future rapid effect system soared in cost from £6 billion to £14 billion on what was to have been a joint project with the United States—another connection—until it was diverted to a more politically acceptable footing with European Union partners on the grounds that they were the people with whom we more likely to be fighting alongside; if only! Unfortunately, the new non-US technology is second rate and will not function adequately if or when British troops again work alongside United States forces. It will be a wonderful example of what Churchill called two nations divided by a common language. The auxiliary landing ships, of which a pair was ordered at an estimated £100 million, are now years overdue and running at an estimated £309 million and rising. There 20 items at the top of the MoD procurement list which together are aggregating 31 years overdue. My last example—I ask noble Lords please not to laugh at this; it sounds like an episode from ““Minder”” and definitely has the hand of Arthur Daley in it—is that of the all-terrain six-wheeled mobility platforms, which are essential for tackling sand dunes. The MoD has 65 mark III versions procured at a cost of £67,000 each. The MoD identified that more were needed due to the need to cover desert terrain when approaching Iraq from the south because sand is particularly soft there. Unfortunately, it had already sold their 30 mark IIs for £3,000 each to a dealer. Some bright spark in the MoD recognised that he had not sold them yet so he managed to buy them back for £17,000—