---

Defence in the UK

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), and I pay tribute to him for his leadership of the all-party group on the reserve forces, which I may say a little more about in a moment. The hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) mentioned the deployment from in and around his constituency to Helmand, Afghanistan. From Plymouth and the surrounding area, too, there is a major deployment to Helmand, involving 29 Commando Regiment, 3 Commando Brigade and a lot of reserves, particularly medical reserves—people who in their normal lives work as medics at Plymouth's Derriford hospital and other hospitals in Devon and Cornwall. I am pleased that our lord mayor, Councillor Brian Vincent, is recognising the role of those people at the beginning of, throughout and at the end of that deployment. That is very much in accord with the recognition study undertaken by the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), whom I welcome to his new position on the Front Bench. The lord mayor and his lady mayoress, Pauline, got up at 3 am to see the personnel off from the Royal Citadel, as they have done on a number of other occasions. Pauline has a son-in-law who is deploying, and events are planned for the many families who share the interests and concerns that go along with having military personnel in the family. The personnel will also be welcomed back with a parade, which should happen just before the end of the mayoral year. I look forward to working with the new defence team, and I am very glad that my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces remains part of that team. I welcome its new members, particularly the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), part of whose period of service on the Defence Select Committee I shared. Reference was made earlier to his robust and trenchant contributions, which we will certainly miss. He made many special efforts, including a visit to our dockyard in Plymouth when he had been unable to join the original Defence Committee delegation. He also made particular efforts to ensure that the needs and interests of new recruits and the ranks were well represented in our deliberations in Committee. I trust that he will continue to take that approach in his very different role as Minister. I want also to pay tribute to the former Secretary of State, whom I always felt positively welcomed scrutiny. He had a listening ear and engaged with us fully—sometimes a little too fully for our liking—but he also took away ideas and put them into practice. When his period of office is examined, it will go down in history as one during which, with the assistance of my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford and his recognition study, the various strands of personnel, families and service conditions that needed to be brought together were brought together, and were entrenched by making the external framework group permanent, so that it can ensure that such issues are not lost sight of. I also welcome the new Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton). As the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) said, my right hon. Friend brings to the post a depth of experience and an industrial background, and he represents a constituency in which submarines and defence matter. I hope that he and his team will engage with the Defence Committee and with constituency Members of Parliament in the same measure as the previous team did. The Chairman of the Defence Committee, who spoke earlier, discussed a number of the inquiries that we have been doing and that we have in hand. The recruitment and retention report was comprehensive, and we await the Government response, which is to be published next week. The report dealt with the important role that families play as gatekeepers to recruitment, and with the reserves. I should add to the points made by the hon. Member for Canterbury only by saying that in a world in which people's lives have changed out of all recognition and people do not expect to have one job for life, the reserves have a much wider and bigger role to play, as he indicated is the case in other countries. The Committee has also been examining national security and resilience, following the Prime Minister's publication of ““The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an interdependent world”” in March. We are looking into the contribution that the Ministry of Defence makes to security and resilience, what it understands the nature and scale of the threat to be, how that threat affects the defence planning assumptions and what capabilities—maritime, land, air and personnel—we need to provide as a result. The Committee will continue to undertake number of inquiries into the MOD's performance and expenditure plans. A persistent theme of those has been the concerns about how the Government should resolve the tensions between supporting the high tempo of current operations, especially given the urgent operational requirements, and addressing how priority given to those has an impact on force structure and the forward equipment programme. Most commentators expect cost pressures to result in cuts and delays to the forward programme, and perhaps the cancellation of a major programme. The Chief of Defence Materiel told the Committee that he suspected that that would be so, and the ongoing speculation on the matter is inevitable until we learn the outcome of the review that the MOD is undertaking in order better to prioritise its spending plans. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck) discussed the concerns about the size and make-up of the fleet. They tend to preoccupy those of us who live, work in and represent big naval communities in a way that does not take account of the equally strong rumour mill that deals with similar scenarios for land and air forces, particularly the Eurofighter—reference has been made to that. Admiral Sir Jonathon Band's warning that the fleet could lose its flexibility if the Government cut back too far on warships and manpower needs to be heeded. Huge cost savings could be found across the naval and other procurement programmes. Their implementation across the activity that forms the maritime change programme is extremely complex, involving the terms of business agreement for the joint ventures with BAE Systems and VT Group, as well as the Babcock purchase of my local dockyard, and the surface ship support programme and the submarine enterprise collaboration arrangement. They are all taking an extremely long time to dot the i's and cross the t's, and that is proving particularly difficult for those who want to see and understand the shape of the naval defence sector in Plymouth and Devonport. Since the end of the naval base review, which concluded that all three naval bases were required, I have met the Minister for the Armed Forces numerous times, often with trade union and council representatives, to discuss the long-term future of the dockyard and naval base. Each time, he has gone to great lengths to assure us of Devonport's future and to give as much information as he can. The last meeting was followed by a letter, in which he stated:"““Our overarching strategy is to effectively smooth work across our three bases, to ensure that industry have a steady drumbeat of orders and that each base remains a viable hub for the future. This will inevitably involve optimisation at each location, in order to best deliver the most effective solution. This is not a threat, but an opportunity—in all of the scenarios that we are currently considering Plymouth is a net gainer in jobs.””" I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to confirm that we are still on track to deliver that commitment in Devonport. I thank the Minister of State for all his patience in understanding the many representations that we have made in recent months on that matter. We will continue to make them, as the issue is so important to us in Devonport. We have accepted his reassurances and waited patiently, but that has not been easy, not least because we have watched the Government invest in orders for carriers, destroyers and submarines with high profile and immediate benefits for shipbuilding dockyards elsewhere in the country, but not—at least as obviously and directly—for Devonport. That has led to a vacuum in which all sorts of stories can flourish. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport did mention the 57 per cent. increase in the revenue accounts, which suggests that Babcock is doing fairly well at the moment, and we hope that that continues long into the future. Talk about confidence being sapped from our community, and the death of the dockyard and the naval base—the two are often confused—by a thousand cuts, will continue until we have greater clarity. Such talk thrives on recent decisions such as the one to switch the forthcoming refit of HMS Campbeltown from Devonport, its base port, to Rosyth. Such decisions are taken as symptomatic. I know that HMS Albion, HMS Westminster and HMS Monmouth will keep the yard busy for the next three years, but fears continue to abound about the strategic role for our naval base and the yard in the future. Devonport is already of course home to the Navy's three amphibious ships, the helicopter carrier Ocean and assault ships Albion and Bulwark. We want to become an amphibious centre of excellence, and the defence estates development plan, published earlier this year, said that a case could be made for regionalisation of the Royal Marines in the south-west, with closer proximity to the amphibious shipping. That has been costed, but is presently unfunded. The long-planned but unfunded aspiration to co-locate landing craft units from RM Poole and RM Turnchapel to Devonport naval base remains on hold. I hope that we will see some forward movement on that in the near future. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister understands that the background is not only about uncertainty or complexity, because it is also about the stories of disregard of, and decline in, the Royal Navy that are rehashed so often by the Opposition and the media. Such stories ignore the changing strategic environment in which the Navy operates and fly in the face of decisions taken by this Government, who ordered the two largest aircraft carriers ever sailed by the Navy. This Government are continuing the modernisation of our amphibious shipping so that it is now stronger than it has been for many decades. This Government equipped our attack submarines with land-attack missiles and are building the Type 45 destroyers and the Astute class submarines—[Interruption.] Yes, the Government are building fewer Type 45 destroyers, but they cost £1 billion each. Those investments are not modest. Indeed, they are part of the biggest shipbuilding programme for one or more generations. That is not to say that there are no issues that need to be addressed. Of course sophisticated anti-submarine and air defence frigates and destroyers will inevitably be built in smaller numbers as they become more expensive, but the Royal Navy still requires sufficient escorts to carry out the numerous and often unsung duties that it undertakes worldwide every day. When the Minister announced the recent cancellation of the seventh and eighth Type 45 destroyers, he also talked about bringing forward work on the future surface combatant programme, which will succeed the Type 22 and Type 23 frigates, most of which are currently based at Devonport. He was not able to give any detail then, but I hope that it will begin to emerge soon. I look forward to working with our defence team to ensure that they take the right long-term decisions for our country, both through continuing to scrutinise their work on the Defence Committee and lobbying to ensure a full and proper role for the defence sector, especially for the naval defence sector in Plymouth, Devonport for years to come.