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Defence Procurement

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall now move on. The MARS or military afloat reach and sustainability project has been punted to the right, and the super-aircraft carriers—finally commissioned in Rosyth in my constituency, and a great, iconic project for the Forth—face a further two-year delay. Rather than securing a firm grip on defence procurement, the Government have simply added to the chaos. We have now been told that the delays, including the delay in producing the carriers, are not really delays but have more to do with "stretching" the process, with no real impact, in order to assist the industrial base. While flattening the peaks and troughs will undoubtedly yield benefits, the motives for the decision were first and foremost financial, but the delay will not help the Government. As we have heard this afternoon, it will result in significant cost increases, in terms not just of the procurement or construction of the carriers but of the work that will have to be done on the current fleet to ensure that it lasts longer. When the Secretary of State for Defence made his announcement, he made no reference to the additional cost. If he had been a wee bit more frank, he would have made clear that this was not simply about saving but was about punting the cost into the future and, in fact, increasing it. The urgent operational requirement budget has provided our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with the equipment that the traditional defence procurement regime has markedly failed to provide over the last decade and more. However, the Government have decided to slash it by a third, from £900 million to about £635 million, at a time when we still have insufficient equipment, including helicopters, in Afghanistan. Given that the Prime Minister himself has indicated that we will be sending more troops to Afghanistan, there is clearly a longer-term commitment. Does the Minister believe that we now have enough equipment in Iraq for him to be able to slash the budget—it would be incredible if he did—or is this another example of the military covenant’s being stretched to breaking point, and the Government’s not backing up the military commitments that our troops are required to deliver with the necessary equipment to support them in conflict? The world has changed significantly in the last 11 years. Asymmetric warfare now dominates, posing challenges to our armed forces, which are still configured like a cold war territorial defence. We need a strategic defence review so that we can engage in an open debate about what kind of armed forces we need for tomorrow’s challenges. As part of that review, the Government need to look more fundamentally at European defence co-operation. The latest Defence Committee report on equipment made a conservative estimate of defence inflation—around 3 per cent. a year in real terms—but others have put it much higher, at about 8 per cent. That is well above the increases in the last comprehensive spending review. At this rate, even without procurement disasters, the salami slicing will continue, and will wear our capability down even further.