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Defence Policy

I have two fairly brief points to make, but, first, I want to make a brief subsidiary point, having listened to the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie). His defence planning is based not on capabilities and resources, but on what badges and tam o’shanters personnel will wear; having done that, one is then supposed to work out how to build force levels and configurations. I do not know whether the Scottish National party still plans simply to line up people up and down the east and west coast of Scotland, looking outwards, but it does rather sound like that. That is all rather hilarious. The two issues that I want to raise have been mentioned by a number of speakers, but it does no harm to reiterate them. The first issue is housing. Perhaps I might swing the lamp for a bit. In the 1980s, I lived in a military house that had an outside toilet. In retrospect, I swear that it was a cunning plan by the then Conservative Government to toughen the troops by making them run through the winter cold every time that they went for their ablutions. Every time that we went to the toilet, it was like an SAS selection course. A number of things have been said tonight about what the Government are doing about single living accommodation, and to emphasise how much we need to spend on this issue, on which we need to spend the most at the moment. It is important to remember and to reflect on how we got to where we are now. We need to spend billions—as I understand it, £5 billion is planned to be spent over the next 10 years—to bring service personnel accommodation up to standard. We arrived at this point in a particular way, and I remember what happened rather well. In 1996—this has probably been said before in this place, but it is good to get it back in Hansard from time to time—the then Tory Government sold off 56,700 MOD homes. It was described as the single largest transfer of residential property in the UK, which it was. According to some accounts, the receipts totalled £2.6 billion, but my recollection is that they totalled £1.9 billion. All the financial press agreed that the property was preposterously under-priced. It was sold fast, so that the then Tory Government could throw a wager—a rather hopeless one—on their winning the following year’s election. The then right hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, Michael Portillo, whom we see doing political analysis on television, had a number of good jobs in government, and he was a very senior politician in his own right. However, I am not sure, when he looks back on his career, that he will regard his time at the MOD as the best time of his life in politics. In fact, I believe that I have heard him say that on television in relation to a different matter that we need not mention at the moment. The transaction to which I refer was undertaken in return for a contract that involved the MOD retaining responsibility for maintaining the 56,700 homes. Some 11 years later, I still ask myself why the MOD is still this huge landlord with a huge maintenance bill. The then Government tied themselves to this arrangement in 1996, which has had the obvious knock-on effect of a contractual obligation that today’s Government still have to honour.