---

Defence Procurement

I am grateful, but my understanding of the Mastiff project is that it has been delivered because we put some of the assembly and final production in the UK. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich objected earlier that we should not manufacture or produce in the UK unless necessary. Mastiff has been a successful procurement, delivered on time, but that was partly because the US had the force level required at the time in Afghanistan. Another example is the FRES programme. Production of serious and complicated large bits of equipment does not happen every day. Production lines are not running all the time all over the world, churning out armoured personnel carriers. In fact, I believe that at the moment there are only two production lines in the west where armoured vehicles are being made. One is in Switzerland—General Dynamics—and there is another plant in Canada. The Vickers plant in Newcastle is not doing that job. This is not like buying a mini or a car from Volkswagen. There are no production lines that just carry on through the years and the decades. They come together, produce the order, and very often, if the export sales cannot be found, they stop. People should remember that when they say, ““We don't need a FRES. Let's just buy them off the shelf.”” There are only two production lines capable of producing what we want; they are not in our possession at the moment and we do not have the ability to deliver. Secondly, there are no alternatives to what we want to fit into our military doctrine, so pulling off the shelf would not solve that problem. If we do not sometimes—not necessarily always—develop and make our own weapons systems, we do not have the ability to resell them or to generate income to share the development costs and perhaps profit from them. One of the most successful artillery pieces in the world is made by BAE Systems in Barrow. The British do not buy it, but it is incredibly profitable because it spreads the cost across the world. Should we decide to buy it, the unit cost would be very cheap. What is more, our defence no longer uses the technology of 1945; its technology is highly complex. One of the reasons why we have smaller forces is the punch that our platforms can now give. They need source codes, for example, and the ability to service and upgrade throughout their lives. That means that we need control. Those who buy off the shelf may get their equipment cheap up-front, but the equipment must last for 30 or 40 years, and when it comes to an urgent operational requirement, Boeing will be waiting with a big fat invoice, and we will not have a skills base. It is misleading to suggest that security of supply is protectionism. I am slightly older than I look, and I remember when the Belgians did not want to give us ammunition during the 1982 Falklands conflict.