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Defence Procurement

The hon. Gentleman says, ““Without going into too much detail,”” and then asks me a highly technical question that can be answered only in time, after investigation. We have to use every incident as an opportunity to learn lessons, if we are to minimise the tragedies that will inevitably occur from time to time and minimise the impact on our people. Those issues will need to be considered. Equipment procured from our core budget has played a critical role in current operations. Platforms such as Harrier, Tornado, Warrior, Bulldog and Viking were procured with very different operational circumstances in mind, but they continue to prove their worth on current operations, giving the lie to the accusation that such high-end capability has no value in the complex operational situations that we face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those platforms can be used across a range of operational scenarios; that has been proven in combat in the past few years. There will continue to be a place for such high-end capability in our future procurement plans. UOR procurement is rightly designed to deliver capability to meet the threats that we face in current operations, but we have to use our core budget to ensure that our armed forces are properly equipped for every eventuality, not just current operations. We need to strike a balance between the concrete needs of operations today and the risks that we might face tomorrow. Used properly, those two funding streams should complement each other. Whereas our core budget provides an equipment package that will act as a national insurance policy, the UOR process allows us to tailor and supplement that equipment package to meet immediate and unforeseen threats. Our last planning round focused on the near-term issues facing the core equipment programme. We now need to take a closer look at our medium-term plans and concentrate them further on supporting operations, in line with our commitment in the national security strategy. That is why we are undertaking a short examination of the equipment programme to look at our planning assumptions over the next 10 years. The examination will take in the whole equipment programme, within the context of our basic defence policy. We are doing that because priorities can change, particularly as a result of our experience on operations. Our estimates of the cost and phasing of expenditure change, too. That is why we have set ourselves the following key objectives: to adapt to rising costs, to shift the balance more towards support for current operations, and to do more for our people. It is simply sensible planning to re-examine our priorities in the light of operational experience and changing spending profiles. The examination will be an important input into the next planning round.