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Defence Policy

When the Government have the courage to face the voters and call an election, we will know what spending years we are talking about and we will set out our plans in the appropriate way. At the moment, we have no idea what budget or public finances we will inherit. The reason I started with the GDP figure was that it was not our choice of measurement, but that of Tony Blair, back in 1997. He chose to make that figure the measure of Labour’s success in dealing with armed forces expenditure. Ministers have been trumpeting the generosity of the settlement. However, as with all the Government’s announcements, it pays to look at the small print. The settlement requires the MOD to find £2.7 billion worth of ““cashable efficiency savings”” on top of the £2.4 billion served up to the Treasury in the 2004 spending review. Perhaps the Secretary of State, or the Minister for the Armed Forces when he winds up later, can give us some idea where those savings will come from in the current budget. I also note that the MOD will be required to sell off £1.5 billion worth of assets and ““a significant proportion”” of its electromagnetic spectrum holdings. Will the Government give us a firm commitment that all the receipts from that fire sale will be retained by the MOD? Will the Minister of State today tell us how much of the receipts will be appropriated in aid for the defence budget and how much will be returned to the Treasury? Those figures are very important in working out how much of the new procurement programmes can be afforded in the years that have been mentioned in the figures.