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Defence in the UK

Mastiff has delivered a high level of protection for our troops and is very well thought of but as the hon. Gentleman knows, it is an extremely heavy truck that cannot go into many places, and there is a need for a lighter personnel carrier that can get to the places Mastiff cannot get to. We hope to bring Mastiff 2—yet another tranche of Mastiff vehicles—into theatre by the end of this year. We have ordered Ridgeback, which will come into theatre and is in the process of being up-armoured. However, even Ridgeback, smaller though it is than Mastiff, will not provide the size that Snatch does so what work can be done on Snatch itself is going ahead, to see whether we can get more power into the unit and therefore more speed, and more armour. That will come through in the form of a new, better-performance Snatch as soon as we are able, but I do not think that we can deprive our commanders—I know that this is a controversial issue in the House—of a vehicle the size of Snatch: not while they are telling us that they need that capability and utility in theatre. Getting the numbers of Mastiff that we need into theatre and getting Ridgeback there to provide a smaller alternative will limit the use of Snatch to those areas where it is the only vehicle that can do the job. People need to remember that there is armour in the Snatch, and we cannot go beyond a certain point in terms of the amount of armour put into a vehicle of that size—it is just not possible. There is a trade-off between size and armour capability. As I was saying, we need to get new equipment to our forces as quickly as possible, but we must not take our eye off the ball when delivering for the long term. From designing high-tech clothing to building submarines, defence creates or sustains about 305,000 jobs. It is a mark of the stature of our defence industry that the UK accounts for more than a third of the global defence market. During the last financial year, UK-based companies signed contracts for defence goods and services to a value of £10 billion. That demonstrates the amount of money that the sector brings into the UK economy, while maintaining key engineering skills here in the UK.