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Defence Procurement

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), who speaks with inimitable knowledge, determination and commitment. His remarks stand in stark contrast to those of the Minister, who said that he had waited four years to speak. We might have had a more coherent presentation of the Government's procurement policy if he had waited a little longer. He meandered through a sort of shopping list of what was being bought but, as the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) noted, without any sort of context. I mention that because, when I speak in these debates, I normally launch straight into a series of points relating to the aerospace industry and to the BAE Systems plant at Wharton in my constituency. However, the importance of identifying the threats that face us and, therefore, what we should procure to deal with them was brought home to me when I spoke recently to officers from 2nd Battalion the Rifles. They had recently returned from Iraq, and they told me that what had struck them was the paucity of the basics. For example, when those officers left Iraq, the tourniquets used by soldiers to treat field injuries had to be handed in, and they described how a man held a box for their collection. One officer told me that his body armour, sweaty after six months of brave service, also had to be handed in so that somebody else could use it. If equipment is to be handed on in that way—it is almost like hot-bedding—it is clear that something is wrong, and that there are serious pressures on some of the basics. When one speaks to brave soldiers who have faced sophisticated roadside bombs which might have emanated from countries such as Iran, one wonders why the Government have said nothing about the investment made in defence technologies aimed at dealing with that very real threat to our soldiers every hour of every day. The debate will be the poorer for the lack of a wider context for the shopping list enunciated by the Minister, because we must be certain that we have got our procurement priorities right. The programmes are very long term, but the correct balance must be struck between the short-term interests of the infantry soldier on the ground and the longer-term strategic interests of force deployment and the ability to provide minute-by-minute air defence capability. The importance of that capability was demonstrated by the recent resumption of Russian military flights over the UK. I turn to an article published in the October edition of the magazine Aerospace International. It said:"““To bolster his military, President Putin has announced plans to boost…military spending with a $200 billion injection up to 2015.””" All of a sudden, the sleeping giant that was the Soviet Union has been reincarnated by the arrival of petrochemical funding in Russia. It is worth looking at the sort of equipment produced there, as it includes the SU35—an aircraft that is not dissimilar to the joint strike fighter. The same article says that an element of commercialism is creeping into the Russian aerospace industry, which is using its export arm to develop markets for affordable but high-performance modern aircraft. Those markets include India, and one cannot but wonder what we might be up against if such equipment were to be deployed.