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Defence Procurement

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which adds to my point. I was reporting the opinion that I had picked up on the front line, and other people will back up what I am saying. I know that the Government are always keen to highlight the fact that we have had a decade of sustained growth in defence spending. That is correct in purely arithmetical terms, but it ignores the true cost of defence inflation. As we know, that runs way ahead of the retail prices index. We have had a succession of procurement disasters, and they have not been unique in the past decade. We have an appalling history of procurement mishaps over several decades, such as Eurofighter, Nimrod, the Chinook embarrassment that we have heard about today and even, frankly, the A400M. Things have invariably taken far longer than they should have, cost far more and ended up being supplied in smaller quantities than had been imagined.