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Defence Procurement

As I go through my remarks, I will look at the various procurements that are stretched out before us and we will have to address which of them are likely to be the casualties and what the implications of any delays and stretches to the right will be. Something or other has to give. The Government have not as yet cancelled any of the big procurements that we await. They have not as yet announced any downscaling of them. It is not simply the Liberal Democrats saying that we cannot get all that out of the budget on the scale that has been laid out. Many independent observers are making the same point, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies. From memory, Dr. Lee Willett, director of the Royal United Services Institute, was saying the same thing. We already have a seriously overheated equipment plan. The costs—the military inflation—grow year on year, so we see a shift of those programmes to the right. They get delivered in stages, or—this is all too common—the numbers, the size and the capability get scaled back. Eventually, having been state-of-the-art technology at the outset, they arrive years out of date. A good example of that would be the Eurofighter or Typhoon programme, which from memory was signed off by John Nott when he was Secretary of State. It has only come into service in the past couple of years.