---

Defence in the UK

The Minister is being generous in giving way. May I take him back to his earlier answer, in which he made some well-judged points about the difficult trade-off between weight and protection? I draw his attention to the new, blast-resistant materials produced by companies such as Aegis, which are lightweight and work on the principle of absorbing blast rather than reflecting it, as all previous blast materials have done. The Czech army, for example, has already put it on the bottom of relatively light Land Rovers, and there have been some very successful trials, including in this country.