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Defence Procurement

I want to leave that question to the Under-Secretary, because there is an enormous amount of detail about how one should conduct defence procurement and procurement projects in the Ministry of Defence—[Interruption.]—much of it extremely well covered by the Defence Committee, as the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) suggests. I want to come on to the FRES programme in a moment. We should remember that soldiers in Afghanistan are frequently on patrol in those vehicles for 12 hours at a time, then spend all night ensuring that they are ready for action the following morning. Imbalances emerge as vehicles originally designed in the 1950s undergo such development. They have been uparmoured to deal with the threats in Afghanistan 50 years later, and we wonder why the engine, the gear box, suspension and weight ratio no longer work. I understand that there is a significant problem with the gearboxes and suspension in particular, because the thing has got out of balance with the original design of the vehicle.