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Defence Procurement

My nails are not long enough to scratch the hon. Gentleman, but I can work it out without undertaking such a painful search. The hon. Gentleman spoke about a disastrous state of affairs. Any serious-minded person—there are some—would see more than a glimmer of hope that a Labour Government had behaved incredibly responsibly for 10 years. I find it deeply insulting that the endeavours of a Government who have been successful are somehow deliberately misconstrued to try to give the impression that Michael Foot has been Secretary of State for Defence and Tony Benn the Minister for Defence Procurement for the last 10 years. It has not been that way at all. If the hon. Gentleman thinks that, I feel some concern. I shall try to be even-handed. When I was Chairman of the Defence Committee, we kicked the hell out of the Government, whoever were the Government of the day. That was part of our role and no mercy was shown. I reached the conclusion, rather painfully, that despite the immense endeavours of Governments of whatever political hue over the years, defence procurement has proved to be immensely complicated. The best minds and organisations, with the best will in the world, have not yet led us to produce the weapons and the equipment required for our armed forces within the original budget that actually works. It has not happened. From the strategic defence review onwards, I cannot think of any area of Government policy that has been subject to more close analysis, investigations, inquiries, changes, adjustments and readjustments, all seeking that ultimate goal of producing the equipment required in time and of the right quality at an acceptable cost. Whatever Government are in office will pursue that totally elusive goal. I spent many hours, before the hours of the House were altered, in the Library looking at the history of defence procurement. I found it quite interesting because so many lessons can be learned. Every single war in which our armed forces have engaged was either just about won, or even lost, not just because of poor leadership but because of poor procurement. Poor equipment has existed as long as warfare. In recent years, the subject has been treated seriously. I recall reading stories—I was not there at the time—of how infantrymen's bayonets were snapping in the 19th century and of new ships sinking on contact with water. So one finds that this is not a recent development. When the Defence Committee produced the first of its many very good reports under this Government in 1998, I commissioned an analysis of the history of the examinations of defence procurement, and what we came up with was not earth-shattering: the 1961 Gibb-Zuckerman inquiry was followed a few years later by the Downey report; then there was the Mr. Peter Levene appointment, which brought many changes between 1985 and 1991 and many critical reports after his departure by the Defence Committee, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, internal MOD inquiries and Defence Evaluation and Research Agency inquiries. The industry, academics and consultants made criticisms and proposed how procurement should be improved. There was then the very important strategic defence review process, which was epochal in its approach, and the smart procurement and smart acquisition initiative and so on. I am as guilty as the hon. Member for Aldershot, in that it is very difficult to put all the blame on one Government—in fairness, he alluded to that fact. Time scales are such that the programmes are begun by one Government, but are later cancelled or persisted with until the towel is thrown in when people say that they must be cancelled because they are not redeemable. Alternatively, something else could happen. I suspect that the SA80 is a great example of that, because it originated under Labour, somehow survived 17 years of the Conservative Government and then became a half-decent gun when Labour came back into office. The problem is that if one is going to take the hon. Gentleman's approach or the one that I am just about to take, that is not entirely fair, because blame can be fairly evenly distributed. The National Audit Office report gives many reasons why projects fail: inflation, cost estimating, changes in specification, quantity audit variation and cost variation. There are also equally long explanations of failure on in-service dates. One could go on almost endlessly. I have said in previous debates of this kind that I should not go into the history too much unless provoked, and I have been provoked once again, this time by the hon. Member for Aldershot. I have found my infamous A to Z of Tory procurement failures. I shall just remind him of those, although I was not going to do so. If we see before us the team, with a few additions, that will be setting up as the new decision makers in procurement, we want to know what they are, what they are doing, what they are saying and what the genesis of their evolution is. I must therefore remind him about Bowman, among other things—I shall not cover the whole of my alphabet. C stands for the cancelled common new generation frigate; for CACS, on which the Defence Committee reported in 1986-87—that system was rubbish; for HMS Challenger, which was a sea bed operation vehicle that was flogged off because it did not work; and for the Chinook Mark 2, which was originated in 1995 and with which we have not done much until recently, but we know where it began. D stands for DROPS—the Demountable Rack Offload and Pickup System—which I am sure the hon. Gentleman will remember, as everyone on the Defence Committee does. F stands for Foxhunter. I recall, as will he, that the Defence Committee was persuaded to close its eyes to the fact that when a Tornado was flying with its radar, there was no radar there—it was concrete put into the nose. We tried to sell it on the basis of concrete and not on the basis of a proper radar system. F also stands for the Fearless-Intrepid change, which took so long. I could add the Hercules replacement, the C130J; JSTARS, the joint surveillance targets attack radar system, which we should have bought for ASTOR, the airborne stand-off radar; Law 80, a wonderful weapons system except that it bounced off Russian tanks; Nimrod 2000; QinetiQ, which was appalling; the Rapier field service C; the SA-80 rifle; the Upholder class submarine, which was flogged off to the Canadians; Westland; and Zircon. The list goes on and on. I am prepared to accept criticism of procurement failures. In a debate two years after we came into office, the then Opposition Defence spokesman criticised our record—it was my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who has since wisely defected to the Labour party, no doubt immediately after one of my critiques—and I told him to wait, because we had only been in office for two years and we had not had time to have any failures. I said that if he came back in 10 years, there would be a lot, and there are. But that is endemic. Despite all our efforts, defence procurement is an attempt to do the undoable. Other countries have failed equally miserably, and some far worse.