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Defence in the UK

I shall be brief because I know that two of my hon. Friends are keen to speak before the winding-up speeches. It has been a wide-ranging and well informed debate. When one thinks of these debates, one thinks slightly of groundhog day, of a fly buzzing quietly in the corner and the same old defence people turning up and saying the same things. Today has been a remarkably well informed and interesting debate, involving a variety of people who have tested one particular thesis. The thesis is that there is some kind of contract or covenant between the nation and our armed services. In each of our different ways, we have tried in the debate to assess the degree to which the covenant between the Government or the nation has been fulfilled on our side. As Lieutenant-General Freddie Viggers has said the issue is about"““giving our soldiers and their families what they deserve in return what they do for us.?" After all, all of us in the House must acknowledge that what they do for us is not something that we could possibly contemplate doing, or at least not at our advanced stage in life. The covenant between the nation and the armed services seems to be multi-faceted. It covers the whole question of resources in general. I wish that I could stand here and say that I was confident that an incoming Conservative Government would give the resources that I would like them to give to the armed services, but the issue involves the resources that Governments of any complexion give to the armed services. Part of that involves manpower. Is it right that we have an Army of about 100,000 people, the smallest since Waterloo? Can a tiny Army of that kind do the things that the Prime Minister and the Government are asking it to do? Can we live with 18 ships in the Royal Navy doing the work of at least 30? Can we live with the deep cuts that have been made to the Royal Air Force? I speak with feeling on that latter issue, because of the upcoming closure of the base at RAF Lyneham in my constituency. Can we do what we are supposed to be doing given the inadequacies of the equipment? We have heard about the tragedies of the deaths of servicemen because they did not have body armour or had the wrong kind of body armour or other equipment. Can we really ask our people to go to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and do awful tasks under difficult circumstances if they know that 46 per cent. of their families are at home living in substandard accommodation? I acknowledge the fact that a lot of money has been spent recently on improving housing, and I welcome that very much. However, some 46,000 armed service homes are still substandard. That will not do. If we ask our boys on the front line what concerns them, they do not talk about the fact that there are not enough of them or that they have not got the right equipment. As someone has just said, by and large, their morale is extremely high. The thing that they talk to us about is what is happening at home. They are deeply concerned by the fact that their families live in conditions that they would not have to live in if they were in civilian life. People often come to my surgery in Chippenham and they might say, ““I’m a mechanic in the Royal Army Service Corps and I’m getting £14,000 a year. I’m sent abroad for six or eight months of the year and my wife lives in terrible conditions at home. If I left the Army and became a mechanic in Chippenham, I would get £25,000 or £30,000 a year and I’d be at home all the year round. Why shouldn’t I do that?? That is a very difficult question to answer. Why should a fully trained private soldier in the British Army get something like £14,000 or £15,000 a year? A fully trained nurse gets about £18,000 a year and a fully trained police constable gets something of the order of £24,000 a year. Are we as a nation fulfilling our side of the covenant by putting people up in poor accommodation and paying them badly? I suspect that we are not. I shall touch on a few other points very briefly. Spending of 2.2 per cent. of GDP is the lowest since 1930. An Army of 100,000 is the smallest since Waterloo, and the Territorial Army is the smallest it has been since it was founded in 1906, but it is being asked to do so much more than it ever has been. As General Sir Michael Rose said:"““In the past six years, the Prime Minister has presided over near-catastrophic decline in defence spending which has put our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at considerable and quite unnecessary risk.?" Admiral Sir Alan West said:"““The resources…don’t allow us to do the things we need to do. Over time, we don’t have the forces available should there suddenly be a strategic shock…like the Falklands?—" to which several hon. Members have referred so passionately today. We simply do not have the resources required to do those jobs; we are breaching the resources covenant as we are breaching the housing and welfare covenant. We are not doing all the things that we should be doing for our people. I am not blaming the Government, or saying that if we were in government it would necessarily be different. We as a nation are not fulfilling the covenant, and it is vital that we should find ways of doing precisely that. No hon. Gentleman or hon. Lady in the House today would foresee any diminution in the amount that we do in the years to come. It is likely that we will ask our services to carry out more and more operations, perhaps in different parts of the world, in increasingly difficult circumstances. If so, I ask the Minister to take away from the debate this message, if no other. For goodness’ sake, please try to remember the important covenant between us as a nation and our armed services. Give the services what they need to do the job and give the families at home what they need to be proud of their men and women out in the front doing the work that they have to do.