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Defence in the UK

These debates always produce well informed and interesting speeches from well informed and interesting people, but the speech by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson) was one of the best speeches in a defence debate that I have ever heard in this House, and we should be grateful to him for what he said. I should like to echo the expressions of sympathy to the families of people who have died in Afghanistan. It is always an individual tragedy when any one soldier dies. There is, however, a degree of comfort in something that right hon. and hon. Members will have noticed—that it was in only one theatre of war that we had those casualties over the summer. That suggests that those who had previously died in Iraq on our behalf had achieved a real measure of success. Let us hope that those who have recently died in Afghanistan will eventually achieve, through their sacrifice, the same degree of success as those who have previously died in Iraq. We are very grateful to them and to their families. I would like to echo the congratulations to the new members of the Ministry of Defence Front-Bench team. As I have said, what the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), said about the armed forces in his recent report achieved a real effect in the transformation of the way in which the armed forces are regarded in this country. I hope that we can achieve more, but I pay tribute to him, and he will no doubt have a great deal of work to do following on from the noble Baroness Taylor in the equipment and support role. It is a real pleasure, though, to see the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), removed from the Select Committee on Defence. That may not sound entirely right, but he brings to the Ministry of Defence a feisty—some might say verging on the belligerent—approach that is necessary. He has long experience of the Defence Committee, where he built up a huge degree of knowledge and asked some valuable questions. We will miss him; he performed a very valuable role. The Defence Committee has carried out several inquiries recently. It recently produced a recruitment and retention report, and one of the things it concentrated on was the difficulty the armed forces have with manning balance. It was a worry to us that the Army will not find itself in manning balance until 2011, and that the armed forces have now identified 73 pinch-point trades where there is a shortage of personnel. We welcome the Command Paper produced by the Government, which the Minister of State mentioned at the opening of the debate. Who it was that produced some of these brilliant ideas, the Government or the Opposition, we do not need to fuss too much about. We should, as my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) said, welcome such ideas from wherever they come. Another report we recently produced was on medical care for the armed forces. I want to echo something said about the excellence of care provided at Birmingham Selly Oak. There have been a lot of newspaper stories about shortcomings at Birmingham Selly Oak, which we found were not borne out by our inquiries. The people who provide care there are to be congratulated and commended for the work that they do, unstintingly, for our armed forces. In September, I went to Israel in my role as chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel, and I visited the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. In Birmingham Selly Oak, we had found that the excellence of trauma care in our country was to be commended. However, I found that such care was even better in the Hadassah hospital, and by a considerable margin. I have just written a letter to the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for North Durham, to ask whether we can learn any lessons from the way in which other countries deal with trauma care, and I hope that some interesting ideas will come out of that. We are just about to begin the public evidence sessions of an inquiry into national security and resilience. Last week, we had a valuable visit to the counter-terrorism science and technology centre at Porton Down. We were very impressed by the wide range of work that is done there, from all sorts of disciplines, to counter terrorism. As we left, we felt that some improvements in communication between Departments could mean more joined-up government, so that more Departments could take advantage of the excellence of the work that is done in Porton Down. However, overall, we felt that it did a good job. Parliament needs to consider a further matter—the parliamentary scrutiny of national security and resilience. As my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East said, it is a cross-cutting issue, and it needs proper parliamentary scrutiny. I hope that the Government will move ahead more quickly in getting some sort of Select Committee scrutiny of the matter—I know that they have had that in mind for a long time. Let us consider military bases. The super-garrisons will come on stream from 1 April next year. There are benefits to super-garrisons, including much more stability in the populations that are based in them. For example, there will be much less turbulence in service children's education, about which we did a report last year. Such benefits will be real. However, super-garrisons mean that members of the armed forces will find it increasingly tempting to buy their own houses, especially if house prices drop sufficiently to be within their reach. The trouble is that that will reduce the cohesion of the patch. As parliamentarians, we must be aware of that when introducing some of the changes. However, overall, I believe that the super-garrisons will prove beneficial to the armed forces.