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Defence Procurement

Indeed. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her valuable intervention and I hope to amplify her remarks. I will acknowledge that there is some good news around—it is important that we produce a degree of objectivity in these debates. I will make a number of critical remarks about the Government and end with some positive proposals, but I say at the outset that the order for 700 armoured vehicles is right and essential. The Minister made some important points about how the threat is constantly evolving and the need for us to be very agile in our response to these changing threats. I welcome that. I also welcome the decision to proceed with the Trident replacement. Set against those bits of good news, however, the overall position is absolutely desperate—so desperate that the chairman of the Defence Industries Council, Mike Turner, said in his evidence session before the Defence Committee:""The future equipment programme is paralysed."" He is a senior figure in the defence industry, well known to the Government, and his words sit gravely at odds with what the Minister has said. The fact is, as the Minister knows, that the Ministry of Defence is in a state of chaos. The Royal Air Force and the Army are each short of about 2,500 people, equipment in theatre is being hammered at a rate never originally envisaged, and the Treasury is clamouring for more cuts even as the nation contemplates committing nearly 1,000 more hard-pressed servicemen and women to Afghanistan. So dire is the position that the Ministry of Defence has been forced to agree that some UOR—urgent operational requirements—costs, until recently met wholly from the Treasury’s contingency reserve fund, will in future have to be accounted for in the main MOD core budget, but not, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) pointed out, until after 2010.