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Defence Procurement

My premise is the testimony of various witnesses who have appeared in front of the right hon. Gentleman's Committee. If he has been unable to pin them down any more specifically at first hand, I fear that I have not been able to at second hand. Whatever the cause of the perception that defence inflation runs faster than the RPI—I would hesitate to hazard a guess—the evidence seems to be the fact that every procurement project ends up costing far more than was originally envisaged. That is rather like every significant, big public infrastructure project, of which the 2012 Olympics seems a current example. I take the right hon. Gentleman's point that the assertion is perhaps bandied about without any empirical evidence or data to back it up, but it seems to be essentially true. I have made visits to various companies, including QinetiQ, BMT Defence Services in Bath and others that are at the pioneering, research end of the process, and it is clear that some interesting ideas are being developed. In some cases, those companies have to proceed at their own risk, because the clunking way in which we procure things means that there is no market as yet and no public money available for them. I listened to the Government slipping out the announcement that the number of Type 45s would stop at six. We greatly missed the presence of the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis). Although the hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth), who is a fine man and a great champion of RAF, did his best in absentia, he could not quite match the explosion that we would have heard from the hon. Member for New Forest, East. I am not convinced that the Government have made the wrong decision. The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) intervened to make the point, quite rightly, that no matter what the Type 45's capabilities are, it cannot be in two places at once, and pointed to the general principle that there is a danger of running down the number of vessels in the Royal Navy fleet. I confess that I agree with the Conservative critique, but I am more sceptical about the idea that the vessels have to be Type 45 destroyers. The key question is whether two aircraft carriers can be defended with six destroyers. That, rather than any industrial consideration, should be the basis on which we judge whether the decision was right.