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Defence Procurement

I welcome the Minister to his first debate in his new role. I appreciate that it is a difficult baptism for him; procurement is principally the responsibility of another Minister. However, we welcome him here today. Our debates are sometimes robust, but he will be relieved that, thus far at least, they have not been as robust as Mr. Jeremy Paxman can be when interviewing on ““Newsnight””. It is good that we have the opportunity today to have this debate about defence procurement. It comes at a time when there is increasing concern on the part of the public, the media, parliamentarians and the armed forces themselves about the critical degree of overstretch that we are experiencing. That takes its toll not only on the men and women who serve in the armed services, but, as has been said, on the equipment that they have in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in many cases is also suffering from overuse. In many cases, its life expectancy will be shortened as a result of the extra burdens placed upon it. It is intriguing that we are having this debate on the same day that we have had the comprehensive spending review, confirming as it did the defence spending figures for the next three years. Having had the opportunity to look at those, we can see that, from this year, expenditure of £32.6 billion will go up over three years to £36.9 billion, an increase of £4.3 billion. The Government were spinning that in July as £7.7 billion. The hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) and I have memories of such Government accounting from when we served our parties on health: increases in health spending were accounted in the same way. As we have heard, it all boils down to an increase year on year averaging 1.5 per cent. above inflation. Incidentally, most of it, if we look closely, is in the third of the three years. For the first and second year, we will barely even keep up with inflation. That means that the pattern of increases that has obtained in recent years will continue. The message seems to be business as usual. In the light of the concerns that I alluded to a moment ago about the problems that overstretch is creating, I have to ask whether that is going to be good enough. When the Ministry of Defence looks at the settlements that some other Government Departments have been given, I think that it will breathe a sigh of relief, as things could have been even worse. However, when we look at the scale of the challenges, we will have to probe over the years how things are going to work. The MOD has a real-terms increase. I welcome the priority that it is giving to certain areas: it has said this afternoon that it is going to pay more attention to the armed forces, armed forces welfare, housing and the conditions in which individual men and women are working. However, if it is going to do that sincerely, and I believe that it will, many of the programmes that we see looming on the horizon are going to stretch further to the right or to be scaled down.