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Defence Policy

I welcome the opportunity to speak, albeit briefly, in this afternoon's defence debate. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on his new appointment, which I think is somewhat inspired—I am sure that prediction will be proved right in future. The fact that this is the second full defence debate in almost as many weeks is a sign of what a powerful influence he will be in the Cabinet; two Thursdays out of the past three or four have been set aside for defence, and I hope that sets a pattern for the future. I also congratulate the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), on giving a well-balanced speech, and I hope it points to what we can expect in future defence debates. I wish to speak on three defence policy items that I consider to be of major importance: the first is a big defence policy success; the second, unfortunately, is a defence policy failure, which I think could end up being a catastrophic one; and the third is a policy issue that I hope we can resolve this afternoon. The first issue is defence training. I congratulate the Government on their policy of completely transforming and rationalising defence training across all three services through the defence training rationalisation programme. I was delighted with the Department's statement three weeks ago that phase 2 and phase 3 transformation of technical training—so-called package 1—is on track and progressing well. We should get an investment decision in a few months and the final contracts signed approximately a year after that. This major and radical transformation of training will ensure that British servicemen and women have the best technical training in the world—aeronautical, electro-mechanical engineering, computer science and information technology. People will all be trained under one roof. They will be using 21st century technology and training methods, and they will be the best in the world. However, that is taking some time; 10 years will have passed by the time the scheme is up and running. We have already been through the same process for the officer corps, at the tri-service training academy for leadership and management training. We on the Select Committee on Defence had the privilege of visiting the defence academy at Shrivenham just the other week, and we saw at first hand the superb training that is being offered to our officers—the best in the world. It has been a huge success and an important part of the defence training rationalisation programme. We look forward to the follow-up, which is the technical training of other ranks being transformed in the same way. The project is so big that the construction programme alone is on a par with the London Olympic project. It is a 600-acre development programme and something like 4,500 servicemen and women will be trained there at any one time. The construction programme will create almost 2,000 jobs in the local community. The facility will provide not only the best training in the world for our servicemen and women, but because the qualifications will be civilian-recognised, it will provide a skills base for this country in some of the most prized and sought-after skills in the world. Once those men and women have been trained, they will always be in the British economy, and could be called upon in future. The project will amount to a huge saving in the defence training budget over the next few years. Yes, it is a £12 billion private finance initiative project over the next 25 years, and a complex and very large project on which we are well advanced, but the payback is that it will rationalise the delivery of all training across the services, avoiding duplication and creating huge economies of scale. We will actually save money for investment on the defence front line, which is where we want all the spare money to go. In the current difficult economic times, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer is looking for a public sector project to provide jobs, stability in the economy and investment in training for the future of this country, and to save money, I can think of none better than the defence technical academy at MOD St. Athan. [Hon. Members: ““Hooray!””] I can tell that everyone agrees with me, and I would like to place that on record. I congratulate the Government on their approach to training and their rationalisation programme, but I now wish to raise a subject on which I do not congratulate this Government or previous Governments. It is a huge defence policy failure that could store up serious problems for us in future. We on the Defence Committee have just published our 14th report, on recruitment and training, which draws attention to the problem. Our policy of recruiting British ethnic minorities into the armed forces has been a complete and utter failure. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the situation is getting worse, not better. As the Defence Committee found, the official statistics tell us that the recruitment of ethnic minorities has risen from a baseline of 1 per cent. in 1999, which is a highly suspect figure, to 6.1 per cent. by January 2008. The problem is that those figures have been fiddled. The MOD counted British ethnic minorities in 1999, but then counted Commonwealth recruits into the armed forces by 2008. Those Commonwealth recruits were already there, but they were not counted in the figure that was given in 1999. The official figure for the recruitment of ethnic minorities in this country's forces is 4.8 per cent., but I must tell the House that the more accurate figure across the three services is about 2.3 per cent. Why do I think that is a problem? As an ex-servicemen who will always support our armed forces, I am concerned about the effect on their reputation. As the Defence Committee pointed out, our armed forces need to reflect the society that they serve, but a bigger and bigger gap is growing between the armed forces and the society that is out there in the community, and that is dangerous. When I was a serviceman, in the 1960s, the armed forces did represent the society in which we lived—unfortunately, that meant that the forces were homophobic, by and large, class-ridden and overtly racist—but that is not the case in the 21st century. We ignore at our peril the need for the armed forces to reflect the community that they serve.