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Defence Procurement

Let us never forget that. It is the soldiers who need to be protected. What they are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are doing for us—not for politicians but for this country and the stability of the world. We should pay them a great tribute for that. I echo what the Minister said at the beginning about the success of urgent operational requirements. These have been very successful. There is always the question of how, when some equipment comes into the MOD's inventory as the result of a UOR, the subsequent maintenance costs will be paid for. Will they continue to be paid from the contingency reserve? I also echo the words of the hon. Member for North Devon who said that the Future Lynx was an urgent matter. We are generally short of helicopters. I hope that Ministers will be able to provide more details once they have read the report of this debate, but it looks as though the number of helicopters owned by this country will be dramatically reduced over the next 10 to 15 years. However, this is the time when the number should be dramatically increased. Because of the roadside bombs and other threats in Afghanistan, it will be necessary for more work to be done by helicopter as opposed to by vehicle, so we need more helicopters. In that connection, I want to comment on the partnering arrangements, which seem to have worked very well, between the Ministry of Defence and Finmeccanica. They are a mechanism whereby the MOD can save a lot of money and can introduce the integrated operational systems that will really help it as well as bring in some of the industrial skills that it desperately needs. I hope that we can hear more about where partnering is going. It seems to have worked in the helicopter division and it ought to work in other divisions, too. On individual programmes, when a coroner makes strong remarks such as those that the coroner made recently on the tragic Nimrod crash, the whole country wants answers to the questions about whether those aircraft are airworthy. I am sure that there are answers to those questions, and we want them to be given so that the public can have confidence in what our men and women who are still flying those aircraft are doing. I turn now to the method of procurement. The threats that we face change constantly. There is no point in our trying to decide 15 years beforehand what needs to be the answer to a question that we do not yet fully understand. We need a series of platforms that are flexible and have the connections to allow us to evolve them. We need a procurement system that allows for precisely that change in procurement. In order to achieve that procurement system, we need personnel in the MOD who are well trained and have the commercial and industrial skills and the commitment to different programmes to deliver those procurements. We know that there will be a vast reduction in the number of people at Abbey Wood. We also know, because we have been told, that because of the operational tempo many of the people at Abbey Wood cannot be sent out for the training that they desperately need on current procurements. That strikes the Defence Committee as seriously short-sighted. The operational tempo should not mean that people are not trained to do properly the jobs that they need to do. That training should be absolutely essential in getting that important work done. Finally, we need skills not merely in the MOD but in the industry and the country as a whole. Unless we improve our science base in this country, and unless we can commit some of that science base to the sort of research that QinetiQ has been telling us leads to battle-winning capability, we will not have that capability. If we do not have that, we will be in real trouble.