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Defence Procurement

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. He should read the report, because it is a priceless exchange. I commend the hon. Member for North Durham on not losing any of his edge since we served on that Committee together. The people responsible for putting the programme together have told us that it will be ready in 2017. However, in 2003 the Chief of the General Staff gave evidence to the Defence Committee in which he suggested that it would be ready in 2009. Four years later, the programme has slid eight years to the right. At that rate of progress, in four years' time we will be told that the programme will not be ready for another 12 years. All the time, the soldiers of the Light Dragoons—my former colleagues—are invited to continue to fight and work with the CVRT system in service. We owe them a great deal better than that, and I sincerely hope that the Department can address that. I have no confidence, however, that that will be the case. This is an enormous programme, and the whole future of the Army is bet on it. If we cannot put our Army in the field with the 3,000 vehicles that will be produced as a result, we are in trouble as a country. What is the context in which the Department was invited to fund the programme? The MOD has a budget settlement of 1.5 per cent. in real terms, which was produced at the same time as the Defence Secretary came to the House to trumpet the acquisition of aircraft carriers and the aircraft that will go on them. If I remember the exchange at the time, he was not prepared to put a price on the whole programme, but what is absolutely clear to anyone who understands even a limited amount about defence economics is that the current position is completely unsustainable. The Government came to office in 1997. In 1998, after a strategic defence review, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted to take £1 billion a year out of the defence programme. That was reduced, after the intervention of the Chief of the Defence Staff, to £0.5 billion a year. In the charming way in which the now Prime Minister counts these things, £4.5 has been stripped from the defence budget as a result of that decision in 1998. It does not behove Ministers—I cite the Minister for the Armed Forces as yet another example—to criticise the Conservatives for their defence expenditure. Those Ministers inherited the defence expenditure plans of the Conservative Government in 1997, and they chose to cut that budget. Since then, they have been driven by operational requirements that have smashed any set of defence assumptions made in 1998. Ten years later, the armed forces are exhausted, and warrant officers do not take up commissions in regiments, because they do not want to go back to Iraq and Afghanistan yet another time. Young NCOs who have got married have been there, got their medal and been through an amount of military contact that puts most second world war veterans in the shade. There is a limit to their endurance, and to the endurance of their equipment. CVRT is one illustration of good kit that has been well maintained by dedicated people. I am sure my former colleagues would want me to put on record a tribute to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers who are out there fighting alongside them, keeping that equipment in the field and doing a magnificent job in fitter sections alongside the fighting echelon. The House votes on the defence estimates, as the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) pointed out earlier, and we can put them up if we so wish. We should have a proper debate on whether our defence policy is sustainable with the defence budget, and therefore with the equipment that we are providing to our armed forces. Commitments and capability are not in balance in the burden that we are placing on our soldiers, sailors and airmen. I am familiar with one small example from my former regiment, and I sincerely hope that the Government will attend to the matter immediately.