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Defence Procurement

I shall endeavour to be extremely brief and I join the tributes paid by colleagues to our armed forces. The background to this procurement debate is of course what General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue, Chief of the Defence Materiel, told the Select Committee about the difficulty he is facing in this planning round, PR08. He said that it was different from anything that had gone before and was worse than the planning round of 2007. He had to think back to the 1970s for anything comparable. The essential problem is that the Government spending increases on defence have simply not kept up with either the costs of procurement or of operations. As Lord Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said at the time, the SDR was never fully funded. It is interesting that Government Ministers are keen to take military advice when it suits them but when they were presented with that advice back in 1998, they refused to take it. We have been living with the consequences ever since. The Prime Minister likes to laud the £6 billion of urgent operational requirements that have been delivered to our front-line forces over recent years, but unfortunately UORs do not address the shortage of baseline funding. Even PR08 foresaw a mere 1.5 per cent. real-terms increase to 2011, a minute increase compared with the increases given to other Departments over the years. Defence cost inflation, and the ring-fenced spending for Trident, for housing, for pensions and for the council tax rebate pretty quickly whittle that increase down to something minimal, if it is an increase at all. The Government's failure properly to fund the main equipment programme over the past 10 years has a direct consequence on operations, a very painful one, as the exchanges on Snatch land rovers demonstrated. What capabilities do we really need? The Minister of State said on Monday, and repeated today, that the MOD now aims to"““shift the balance of defence procurement to support operations.”” —[Official Report, 16 June 2008; Vol. 477, c. 663.]" That is a highly dangerous concept to pursue and it is very unsound to premise future operations on present operations. Churchill always said that the War Office is always preparing for the last war, and it seems that nothing changes. What sort of wars will we be fighting in the next 30 years, which is the realistic time horizon on which we should be planning the major equipment programme? That is difficult to tell at the best of times, but we know that weapons proliferation will increase and that a huge shift is taking place in the distribution of power among the world's superpowers. Conflicts and crises will become increasingly complex and unpredictable. At present, the Government's interventionist foreign policy simply does not match their defence policy of limited resources. Last week, General Dannatt said that"““the Army of tomorrow must retain the capability to fight Major Combat Operations (MCO)s and Stability Ops, both simultaneously and sequentially.””" He is obviously correct in his assessment of the type of operations the British armed forces need to be able to conduct, and it is the duty of politicians to provide the armed forces with the capabilities they need and to provide best value for the taxpayer. The idea of tailoring the armed forces to short-term requirements is too short-sighted. We accept that the opposite strategy of trying to provide for every eventuality at any time is too expensive. We need to strike the balance for which the right hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) argued, between readiness for immediate operations and readiness for the longer term. In the face of that and in the current low-threat environment, we need what Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward has called a ““core force strategy””. That means that we need to spend the money on the big platforms—the expensive bits of kit—even at times of low threat, so that we are in a position to build up our armed forces at a later date should the threats change and that be necessary. The danger of transferring resources from the major equipment programme to short-term operations currently being undertaken is that we are playing poker with the future of this country. We have no idea what threats we might face in five, 10 or 15 years' time. Those were the arguments that Ministers deployed in favour of renewing the Trident missile system and the Trident submarine. Those same arguments apply to every other aspect of our defence policy, and it is short-sighted to pursue the policy that the Government are beginning to pursue. The problem with the strategic defence review is not its content or its shopping list—everyone agreed that it was a pretty good blueprint for defence policy and the armed forces; the problem is the lack of money.