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Defence Procurement

I will abide by your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and keep my remarks as brief as possible. I welcome the opportunity to take part in this afternoon's debate and begin by associating myself with the remarks of all the Front-Bench speakers who have paid tribute to the work of our armed forces and to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in recent days. I have the honour and privilege of having the Special Forces support unit in my constituency. According to long tradition and protocol, we do not draw attention in the Chamber to the work that it does, but the House needs to be reminded of the sacrifices that are made, and the courage that is shown, by the men and women of the Special Forces every day. Their acts of selflessness are almost indescribable, and I would like to place that on record. Defence procurement has been one of the most difficult issues facing any Government for as long as we can remember, but successive Governments over the years have done their best to try to improve the procurement system. I remember that when this Government entered into the strategic defence review, one of the first things that the Defence Minister responsible did was to call all the previous Defence Ministers into his office for unofficial private meetings. He asked them what they would do if they wanted to achieve greater efficiencies and improvements to the procurement system. The irony was that most of them said exactly the same thing; they said what they would like to happen. However, the problem lies in getting from the wish to the reality, and the Government have tried with varying degrees of success over the last decade to improve the procurement system. I will confine my remarks in my brief contribution to what I believe is one of the Government's most important procurement initiatives in an area that is often underestimated and undervalued. When we talk about procurement in these annual debates, we tend to talk exclusively about kit—tanks, planes and ships—and sophisticated technology. However, if we do not train our servicemen and women in the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art methods so that they can use this equipment, quite frankly, we will not get the benefits and our service personnel will not get the security that they have a right to demand. The British armed forces have a problem in that much of their training is 20th-century training provided for 21st-century challenges and technologies. That has got to change. I am delighted that the Government have bitten the bullet, as the House well knows, and decided to undertake a massive transformation in this country's provision of military training. The defence procurement project to which I refer is, of course, the £11 billion military training academy proposed for St. Athan, which is going to modernise, update and completely transform how training is delivered. It will move away from chalk and talk, which has served us well in the past, towards student-centred and task-oriented training that uses the most modern technology available. Members on both sides of the House have referred to the sophistication and changing nature of the threat we face. We have to procure equipment, whether it be Snatch vehicles or anything else, to meet those changes. At the same time and in many respects more important, we also need to be quick in changing how we train our personnel to use the new equipment and face the new threats that they are up against. The older methods of providing such training served us hugely well in the past, but they are antiquated and out of date now. By integrating new technologies, we can have a step change or a quantum leap in the training of our personnel. They should be trained to the highest possible standards and we need the maximum flexibility to train and retrain them in how to use the new equipment and face the new challenges. We cannot do that under the existing system. It is more than seven years since the Government published their report on modernising defence training as part of the strategic defence review and we have seen a radical and incredibly successful transformation of how we train our officer corps. The creation of the idea for a military academy for training our officers in leadership and management on a tri-service integrated basis is important and nobody questions the success of it. Seven years on, however, we are still waiting for this academy to be provided, although the key decisions have now thankfully been taken so that we can provide the rest of our service personnel with the same modern futuristic training in phase 2 and phase 3, which is effectively technical skills training. The Government have already made the decision that two thirds of that training—in aeronautics, mechanics, electrical engineering, information and communications technology—will be provided at the new huge military training academy on a 500-acre site in my constituency. That will have a dramatic effect on the efficiency and security of our armed forces, but we need to move ahead with it quickly. The Government announced in January that the so-called package 1 of the defence training rationalisation programme will continue apace under the auspices and leadership of the Metrix consortium. We have been expecting an announcement—it was due in the spring, I believe—on Main Gate 2, which is the next stage in this sophisticated procurement process. That decision has not arrived yet. Will the Minister give notice of when he thinks it will, because the sooner we get the project moving forward, the more our services will benefit? This, however, is a question not just of capability or of providing 21st century training for 21st-century challenges, rather than 20th-century training methods for 21st-century challenges, but of meeting our commitment to our servicemen and women under the military covenant and with regard to the relationship with the rest of society. We train our military personnel to a high standard, but more often than not the skills we give them are not recognised when they finish their military career and move into civvy street. Often, there is a delay in their finding work, although about 70 per cent. of service personnel find a job within a month of finishing service life, which is very good and a tribute to their calibre. About 94 per cent. find a job within six months. I understand that the main reason for that six-month delay is that many of our servicemen and women, even though they are highly trained in skills such as engineering, have to retrain to do in civvy street the same job that they were doing in the military. There are a number of such examples in my constituency, where large numbers of military personnel retire from the forces and seek work. The other great attraction of the defence training rationalisation programme is the fact that all the qualifications provided in engineering, computing and all those other areas will be recognised civilian qualifications. We will be able to say to our servicemen and women, ““We will not only train you in the military to the highest standard, but you will be able to use that training when you finish your service.””