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Defence Policy

I accept that the amounts required to bring all the housing stock up to scratch over a long period will be substantial. My point is that spending relatively small amounts of money on the accommodation of individual servicemen can make a big difference to their lives. I wish to address in all seriousness the other point that the Minister raised, by asking him to address the defence planning assumptions. The Defence Committee is conducting an inquiry into commitments and resources. I understand that there has not been an inquiry into defence commitments and resources since the mid-1980s—again, I stand to be corrected if I am wrong—because it is an extremely difficult task for the Defence Committee to undertake. We do not have a Rand Corporation in this country or the same scale of think tanks that the United States does. We rely very much on the Ministry of Defence to provide us with the sort of information that we need to make a judgment on the matter. One of the inquiries that we have made of the Ministry of Defence is: knowing historically exactly what the commitments have been over the past 10 years, what would the size of the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force need to have been in manpower terms to satisfy the harmony guidelines? I suppose I should not be that surprised that the MOD finds it difficult to answer that question. Will the Minister of State, perhaps not tonight but within the next few days, ask his civil servants to apply their minds to that? As the Secretary of State confirmed in his speech, the 1998 defence review proposed that we should be able to sustain, in addition to our ongoing commitments in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and so on, one major deployment and one minor deployment long-term commitment at any one time. For the past five years we have sustained two major deployments, which have thrown the harmony guidelines right out of kilter. I submit to the House that to satisfy the harmony guidelines for the Army alone, at the present level of commitment, the Army would have to increase not by 5,000 for the infantry, as the Chief of the General Staff proposed, but probably by about 30,000. We all know that soldiers like to be busy and challenged, and most do not need or want the full gap between tours. That figure, however, indicates how far short we are from matching our manpower and capabilities to our present commitments. Extraordinarily, we heard from the Secretary of State another bit of wishful thinking that somehow the draw down from Iraq and Northern Ireland will at last create some slack in the system. Ever since the strategic defence review took place, the Government have looked forward two or three years to the time when the harmony guidelines would be met and equilibrium restored. Surely by now we have learned that we cannot opt out of all the global strategic challenges around the word, and that there simply are not enough countries alongside France and the United States—and possibly Russia and India—that can deploy and sustain an expeditionary capability at the scale to deal with the modern security challenges that we face. Therefore, the question that the Government face, and that an incoming Conservative Government would also have to face, is whether to bulk up our armed forces to meet the modern security challenges or to opt out of those global security challenges, on which our security and that of our allies depend. We should be prepared to contemplate the kind of step change in expenditure seen in other public services: the Government have managed to find large sums for health, education, transport and overseas aid. Why has defence been the Cinderella of our public services when much of the country’s freedom and prosperity ultimately depends on the hard power that we deploy to intervene in crisis situations around the world, for our own national interests as well as for the good of the international community?