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Defence Procurement

I am coming on to that. As a matter of fact, Defence Equipment and Support—the new version of the Defence Procurement Agency, merged with the Defence Logistics Organisation—has an extremely good and improving record of dealing with these issues. I am afraid to say that the Conservative party, in simply saying that it can identify and reverse a lot of waste, will have no credibility unless it is prepared to be specific about how it is going to save the money. It is no good the Conservatives saying that if the commitments are too great they will cut them back, unless they are prepared to answer the question that they have never answered, as they have not answered this afternoon: what specific commitments are they going to cut in the present context? They can see the challenges that the country faces as well as Labour Members can, so which particular commitments are they going to cut? There is always a silence on that. There is a fundamental hollowness in this matter, as in other matters at the heart of the Conservative party. I am not making a personal attack on the hon. Member for Woodspring, as this is a generalised phenomenon. It is all about the way the Conservative party has been managed and been directed. It is focused entirely on pretence and the creation of image. When it comes to the difficult and responsible task of costing tax promises or defence promises and looking at the hard questions and difficult dilemmas that real Governments face, the Conservative party shies away from it. As I said, the Government have a fine record on defence procurement and I want to pay tribute to my Front-Bench colleagues this afternoon. I base my judgment on the findings of the Select Committee on Defence, an entirely objective body, which found that the Defence Procurement Agency achieved 100 per cent. of its targets in its last year before the merger. Those targets are rigorous; I will not go through them as I do not have time, but anyone with any background in the subject knows how extremely difficult it is to achieve those targets. Yet 100 per cent. achievement was reached, against the background of appalling cost and time overruns in the past. Some of us thought that we would never get the operation to succeed as it has. I would also like to congratulate the Minister on the introduction of the urgent operational requirements system, which has proved splendid in practice and has resulted in Mastiffs being delivered in fewer than six months from contract to operation. Those are fine achievements and I am sorry that the Opposition were too churlish to recognise them.