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Defence in the UK

I shall move on to this country's defence industries. As the Minister of State said, we need a strong defence industry in this country and we should be proud of what it produces. The industry should be proud of that and proclaim the virtues of this country's defending itself with good, British-made defence industrial goods. It is this country's right to defend itself with proper equipment, as it is that of other countries. Since we produce some of the best equipment in the world, we should be proud of our defence exports and proclaim their virtue in the face of those who denigrate us for being arms salesmen. We give other countries the opportunity to do their duty—to defend themselves. To achieve that, we need a defence industrial base that is strong and knows what the Government are doing. Unfortunately, there is currently a sense of complete paralysis in the defence procurement world. As the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) said, people do not know what happens in the defence procurement world. There is a sense that senior officials in the Ministry of Defence are just trying, because of budgetary difficulties, to survive. Somewhere, somehow, the Government need to take control and start making some decisions. We have been given a provisional decision about FRES; it needs to consolidate into a real decision, and soon. We have been given some sort of indications about the future Lynx, but when will we have a decision about it? The Chief of the General Staff needs both of those, and needs them quickly and in proper quantities. I have been reflecting on the question that I asked the Minister of State about what the Chief of Defence Matériel said last week. On reflection, I think that I may have misreported our conversation. I would like to apologise to him and to withdraw what he said, because I do not think that it went quite like that and, anyway, it was in private and I should not have said what I did. So, I apologise to him and withdraw my remark. Having said that, I think that the defence industry in this country needs to know who is in charge of the defence industrial strategy. Of course, it is enormously reassuring to know that the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford, is in charge of these things. However, we need to know who is in charge underneath him—who is in charge in military terms and in civil service terms—because the defence industry will not, frankly, be negotiating with him. It will need to know that somebody is driving things forward, but at the moment it has no sense that anybody is. I want to make one final point, about the planning assumptions. As we know—as the Ministry of Defence tells us—the MOD has been operating at or above the levels for which it is resourced and structured for seven out of the past eight years. We can get away with that for two or three years, perhaps; we certainly cannot get away with it for seven or eight years. All that is based on planning assumptions that have been routinely wrong. So, what the Defence Committee did in April this year was to write a letter to the then Secretary of State for Defence to ask when we would have the results of his review of the planning assumptions, which he announced last year. It would be right to read what the Secretary of State said:"““Of course the Defence Planning Assumptions are a core part of our planning process. As you know, we conduct a review of these assumptions on a regular basis””." The trouble is that over the past six years or so that review has always proved to be wrong. He continued:"““Our latest thinking is that the next iteration DPAs will not present a radical departure from those issued in the last Defence White Paper.””" That is a real worry. In view of the comments in the previous speech, which I have just said was one of the best speeches we have heard in defence debates in this House, the issue is one that we have got to revisit. The planning assumptions are wrong. We cannot rely on them. We should not be sending the armed forces of this country into battle on the basis of assumptions that we know are wrong.