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Defence Procurement

It is a pleasure to follow previous contributors, who have quoted extensively from the Defence Committee report on equipment. I want to mention a few good things that the Committee found, before highlighting some of our criticisms, and then I shall talk about what some of that means for my constituency. Not everything that we had to say about the Ministry of Defence’s procurement policy was bad, by any means. We remarked on the delivery of equipment and supplies to Iraq and Afghanistan in very challenging circumstances. In particular, our report commends the urgent operational requirements system as "highly effective" in meeting rapidly changing threats. One example is Jackal, a highly mobile weapons platform, manufactured in Devonport, which was introduced in Operation Herrick in 2008 in response to such an urgent operational requirement. The report also praises Defence Equipment and Support for its achievements to date, stating that the operation is heading in the right direction and has made good progress in improving the skills of its staff across a range of key acquisition disciplines. I think that I am right in saying that the MOD is the only Department to have published its innovation procurement plan—something that all Departments have been asked to come up with to improve public procurement from the private sector, including the important small business sector. The hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth), who spoke for Her Majesty’s Opposition, seemed to be saying that procurement was still something of a basket case—those are my words, not his—but that cannot be so, because the Department’s approach to strategic management and performance continues to attract interest from wider audiences, including other Departments, local authorities and indeed other nations’ ministries or departments of defence. In addition, MOD performance managers are regularly invited to address and take part in international strategic and performance management symposiums. We need to be careful to get the balance right; there are some people in MOD defence procurement working very hard to get the right equipment to our front line in the theatres. It is important that somebody, apart from Ministers, stands up and says that. The Defence Committee’s third report of the Session on defence equipment did, of course, make some cogent criticisms, some of which have already been quoted. There is one that I particularly want to highlight, because I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) will, in responding, elaborate on what he said about the defence industrial strategy when he was before the Committee. It was originally expected that there would be a second DIS in December 2007, and there was a further deadline in the spring of 2008. When the Under-Secretary came before us, he said that he was "open-minded" about whether it made sense to have an updated version of the defence industrial strategy. My fellow Committee members could not understand that. The strategy is all about protecting the industrial skills bases, having identified the sovereign capabilities that we need. I look forward to his elaborating a bit, in front of the whole House, on what exactly he meant. However, it is of course true that the defence industrial strategy continues to inform the Government’s procurement decisions in an important way that helps to maintain the skills base. The part of the defence industrial strategy that exercises me and other Members of Parliament from in and around Plymouth and Devonport is the maritime change programme. I want to come back to that and how it affects Devonport at the conclusion of my speech. First, I want to say a bit about the Select Committee programme. Having concluded our work considering the equipment programme, we decided to set out the current state of the armed forces, in terms of readiness and capability, in a series of related areas of MOD policy and activity. We set out how the MOD must act to ensure that the armed forces have the proper training, organisation and capabilities for future challenges, drawing on the MOD’s balanced scorecard, which was issued with the defence plan for 2008 to 2012. We hoped that using the MOD’s own balanced scorecard would guide us to look in an appropriate way at the matters that are most important to ensuring that the men and women on the front line have the capability to meet the great challenges that we face in Iraq—although to a lesser extent now—and continue to face in Afghanistan. Following through on that, we currently have an inquiry on readiness and recuperation for the tasks of today. It looks at preparedness, with regard to equipment in particular. It also considers procuring, training, and the sustainability of the interplay between the two for any new and immediate challenges. We are just setting out on a helicopter capability inquiry, and will then move on to look at an assessment of the intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance—ISTAR—issues, with a focus on network-enabled capability. A further new inquiry—the comprehensive approach—will include consideration of the lessons that can be learned from experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan and, as part of that, will consider what equipment is necessary for such situations. Last week, Plymouth again woke to find stories in the media predicting doom and gloom for its defence sector. This time, they concerned the future base-porting arrangements for our 11 frigates. I understand that tomorrow’s local papers contain further doom and gloom with the predicted move away from Plymouth of our submarines. There is a group of people who seem to thrive on talking Plymouth down and the rest of us are not always as vocal as we should be—or as supported by the MOD—in setting out how much Devonport remains at the heart of the MOD and, in particular, the naval service. There is considerable—and understandable —apprehension in the city as we wait for clarity, and that is set against the local backdrop of a 300-year-old relationship with the Navy and a national outlook of very challenging economic circumstances. I know that Ministers have visited Plymouth, including my right hon. Friend who opened the debate—he is not in his place at the moment—and the Secretary of State. On more than one occasion my right hon. Friend the Minister of State has come to speak to the strategy group that I set up three years ago and now chair. He has also been generous in ensuring that if he cannot be present, he sends a senior civil servant to almost all our meetings to help to guide our thinking. We have also discussed this subject at length in numerous debates and many uncertainties have already been clarified on the record. The Minister has previously stated—and repeated at the strategy group meeting earlier this year—that there will be no changes to base-porting arrangements for the next five years. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary can confirm when he winds up that that guarantee still stands. Our unique and unsupplantable role as the only location capable of refitting and refuelling nuclear submarines remains, and was recently demonstrated by the signing of the refit contract for HMS Vigilant by the Secretary of State when he visited my constituency. The Defence Estates review earmarked Devonport to become the centre of excellence for all deep maintenance—the long, complex refits and overhauls of ship and submarines that are lucrative in terms of money and jobs. Devonport will therefore remain home to the Navy’s three large amphibious vessels, together with the relocation of Royal Marine landing craft to create an amphibious warfare cluster. Given the nature of the threats we currently face, and the uncertainty surrounding the threats that may emerge in the future, that is an exciting area of capability at the heart of the defence of our country in the 21st century. We also remain the headquarters of Flag Officer Sea Training—a world-class establishment for the Royal Navy and other navies, bringing as many as 50 Royal Navy and foreign warships to Plymouth every year. We are successfully diversifying into other defence markets, notably the production of Jackal armoured vehicles, the relevance of which colleagues and I have seen demonstrated in our visits to Afghanistan. I hope that we will hear an announcement on further orders for those vehicles in the very near future, including variants of the initial model. As the MOD struggles to make financial ends meet, I recommend that the Minister remembers certain points in relation to the maritime change programme, which has reached a crucial stage. Devonport dockyard and naval base—and the wider city of Plymouth—have assets and skills that are unique and indispensable. The people of Plymouth and Devonport show a depth of support for defence and the armed forces that is an unrivalled asset in itself and it would be extremely foolish to undermine it. We saw that on Friday when Plymouth people turned out in their thousands to welcome our commandos, especially 29 Commando, home. The Minister, who wrote a recognition report, would surely have been very impressed. There was a service of thanksgiving and a medal ceremony, and the returning troops were greeted with great warmth, dignity and respect for their service over the past six months on deployment in Afghanistan. As the maintenance work on submarines and frigates reduces, we have played, and continue to be willing to play, a role in the end-of-life submarine disposal, but in return we expect and deserve the clear and continued support of the Ministry of Defence and a mutually beneficial relationship with the Royal Navy. The Minister and his colleagues have to understand that that willingness comes at a price. That price is that we remain a naval base that is not a pinned-on extra, but the naval base and dockyard that provides the centre of gravity for the Navy. Supposedly, we live in the days of joined-up government in which—given that all things are equal between the dockyards in terms of quality of assets and of skills—the Treasury and the Government will expect the MOD to look to wider issues. The issue in which the Treasury and the Government will be interested in above all else is whether they will be handed a hospital pass when it comes to picking up the cost of shrinking the naval bases, which will be higher and more challenging than it need be if Devonport experiences greater shrinkage than the other naval bases. What we do in Devonport provides value for money, and it relies on men and women who are highly skilled—the equivalent of the proverbial rocket scientists—which is something that any sensible Government should value. That is not just because Devonport’s facilities, assets and skills base are also flexible and future-proof—two terms that the Minister will have heard applied to warships, but are equally true of the people that built, maintain and man them—but because Plymouth’s prosperity has for the best part of several centuries depended on the dockyard and naval base. The lamentable do nothing approach towards the dockyard of the Tories from the 1980s and 1990s, and the subsequent dole queues and run-down, are remembered with great fear. In those days, the dockyard employed some 17,000 people. We are now down to 3,500 or 4,000, and that is roughly where it should stay. We need clarity. My right hon. Friend the Minister of State confirmed today some of what he had said to us before, but it is time to get a grip on these issues and give us the clarity we deserve. I said in a debate such as this in February 2004 that we were confident that what we had to offer at our naval base provided value for money. We did not want the opportunity that the review offered to be fudged. Nor should the decision be open to challenge. We want fairness, not favour, and I hope that that is what we will hear soon in clear announcements about the maritime change programme and the way ahead for Devonport.