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Defence in the UK

I want to start by echoing the words of tribute and condolence to those who have lost their lives or been seriously injured since we last debated defence matters in this House in July. In also paying tribute to the Ministers who have left their post, I should like to welcome the two who are with us today. I am glad that manpower shortages and overstretch in the rest of the military family is not going to extend as far as the Government Front Bench. It will be useful to us to have the two of them here; both have been active participants in defence debates. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) produced a very worthwhile report on the relationships between the armed forces and the wider community. I hope that he will now have the chance to follow through some of the recommendations that he made in that report. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) is a very welcome addition to the Government Front Bench—one that is richly deserved and long overdue. As others have said, he brings with him a long list of past observations, which I hope he will be able to follow through. I do not know what the new Secretary of State can have thought when the phone call came inviting him to take up his post. Despite the admirable researches that have been reported to us, he has not recently been a participant in these debates. However, I should think by now—six days on—he must have a pretty clear idea of the immensity of the headaches that he has inherited and taken on. I put those as being principally a financial crisis in his Department, a lack of strategic framework—or at any rate, a confused one—for Britain's defence policy, and some decisions desperately needed on big procurement items. I do not know whether the MOD still bothers denying that it is in a state of financial crisis; if so, it is largely wasting its breath. It is a wide open secret that it faces a very serious financial problem. The budget for the three years of the comprehensive spending review will have to go an awful long way, and various estimates reckon that there is a funding black hole. Some say that it is about £2 billion; others say that it is as much as £5 billion. It is certainly going to be a very difficult 18 months for the ministerial team in trying to make sense out of that situation. Of course, we have the ongoing demands of two so-called medium-scale operations, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have urgent operational requirements to meet the immediate needs there. There is also an enormous procurement shopping list looming, including carriers; the future rapid effect system; Astute submarines, the replacement, ultimately, of the Trident system; surface vessels; the joint strike fighter; another tranche of Eurofighters; and a new generation of helicopters. The list goes on and on. It is clear to all observers that the budgets, as formulated, are not adequate to meet all those requirements; one does not have to be a mathematician of any great strength to realise that things simply do not add up. There is a tension between the immediate needs of our armed forces in theatre and longer-term needs, which must be planned for now if we are to avoid further problems building up in a relatively small number of years' time. I applaud the work, reported to us by the Minister of State, in getting armoured vehicles out into theatre as quickly as possible. I am not clear exactly where the acquisition of a further 600 vehicles fits in the envisaged framework for the future rapid effect system, and I do not know whether anybody else is either. That matter is raised with me by industrialists and members of the armed forces, and it will be interesting to know how it is reckoned to fit strategically into what is planned. Equally, we read worrying newspaper reports that the joint strike fighter project is unravelling, and it is a mystery to me where that leaves our aircraft carriers, given that the joint strike fighters were what we were anticipating would fly from them. I do not know whether anyone views the idea of a marine version of Eurofighter as a serious plan B. Such a version would be costly, slow and, judging by the answers given in previous sittings of the Defence Committee, I doubt it is viewed as a realistic alternative. Some of these issues can be postponed a bit longer, but given that an election may still be 18 months away, the Government will struggle to maintain that it is business as usual and that all these thorny issues can be put off until after one. The alternative is the tried-and-tested formula to which the Ministry of Defence has resorted again and again over the years: salami-slicing. That is the worst of all worlds, because things end up taking far longer than was anticipated, costing far more, and there are far fewer of them and they have less capability than was originally planned. We must avoid continuing a Heath Robinson approach to defence: adding things on and adapting them in a haphazard manner. The new ministerial team will have to struggle with these thorny issues, and I believe that they will have to do so within some sort of renewed, or at least re-expressed, strategic framework. I have spoken before in this House of the crying need for a new strategic defence review. I accept that it would not be possible to conclude such a review this side of an election—it is debatable whether it would be wise to commence one this side of an election—but at the very least some of the initial groundwork for such a review should be taking place. If it were possible to secure any sort of all-party consensus on the questions that such a review needed to ask, they could be debated. If a consensus could not be arrived at, at the very least we should debate what questions the review needs to ask. I believe that those questions are: what kind of forces should we build and maintain in the next 20 or 30 years? Are we committed to maintaining premier league forces in all three forces on our own account? What do we want from defence? What part will be played by our allies in NATO, including its European countries, and by the rest of the UN? How will we work together to achieve the aims and objectives that I hope such a strategic defence review would identify?