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Defence Procurement

We have just heard an excellent example of why the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy) is such a valued and valuable member of the Defence Committee, although I would quibble a little with her suggestion that we did nothing for Plymouth in the 1990s. I remember spending at least £1 billion there and visiting on several occasions when I was a Defence Minister, because it was so important to entrench Plymouth’s role as the future base of our submarines. Although I would quibble with that part of what she said, I agree with almost everything else. I want to follow the structure of some of her comments. I want in particular to refer to the Select Committee on Defence’s report about defence equipment, which we produced on 26 February. It was, I think, the most damning report that the Defence Committee has produced in this Parliament, and I shall come back to it in a few minutes. Let me begin by saying that it is not all bad news. I hope that I do not breach a confidence in saying that about a month ago, along with the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and a number of colleagues from this House and the other place, I was at a function that was addressed by somebody who plays an important part in auditing the accounts of the Ministry of Defence. He drew attention to the way in which the Ministry of Defence, in some ways, is streets ahead of other Government Departments, in this country and in others, in respect of procurement. He said—I think he was right—that some of the best procurements in this country and the Department mirror the best practices in the private sector. He also pointed out that this is a field of great difficulty. If we compare the difficulty of the national health service’s rolling out across the country a computer system that can communicate with itself, or of doing the same for the many police forces in this country, with the fact that the Ministry of Defence has had to do that with the Bowman communications system, which also has to be stuck in the back of a Land Rover and driven around battlefields in Afghanistan while being jammed and shot at, we begin to understand the complexity of the operation for the Ministry of Defence. Bowman, too, has had its difficulties—I remember them only too well—but it is turning into a real success story. The Minister for the Armed Forces commented on the issue of fighting today’s wars or tomorrow’s wars, and said that in fighting today’s wars we do not want irreparably to damage our ability to fight tomorrow’s wars, wherever they may be. He is right, but Professor Hew Strachan, who is highly regarded in this field, has written articles and made speeches to suggest that on the current budget we cannot do both: we cannot afford to fight today’s wars and tomorrow’s wars, and we have to make a choice. My concern is that because of the Government’s current strategy, we might be failing to make that choice and failing to fight properly today’s wars and to prepare for future wars. That would be the worst of all worlds. The Minister moved on to talk of the fleet of urgent operational requirements—I am bearing in mind Mr. Deputy Speaker’s strictures about not using acronyms —and the number of military and armoured vehicles that are being bought under the urgent operational requirements system. Many people have already raised the difficulty that urgent operational requirements are beginning to cause. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton was right to say that the Defence Committee drew attention to the success of the UOR system and programme, but nevertheless it produces in the Ministry of Defence a huge range of vehicles that make it much more expensive and difficult logistically to maintain and repair. I visited in my constituency recently one of the military schools that is training mechanics to repair those vehicles, and they are finding it extremely difficult because they have to learn how to repair so many vehicles. The UOR system produces casualties and, frankly, I think that the FRES programme is one such casualty. It concerns the future rapid equipment—[Hon. Members: "Effects."] Yes, effects system. We are all beginning to forget what the future aspect of the acronym was meant to mean, but it has now become completely absurd. It certainly was not rapid, it was not particularly for the future, it has not been very effective and to describe it as a system would be ridiculous. In our report, we described it as a fiasco. Now we hear that the Scout variant of the FRES programme is to have priority. I do not think that anybody will have very much confidence in the notion that initial gate will be in 10 months’ time. As a brand, FRES is meaningless. The Army has never decided what it wants and seems to be attempting to fight the battles of the last century in providing equipment that is mostly aimed at Russian hordes advancing across the German plains. The Government have shilly-shallied throughout the programme and one of the main requirements of the vehicle is that it should fit into an aircraft, the A400M, which, like FRES, looks unlikely ever to exist. The programme is a complete fiasco and it ought to be dropped. To suggest that the Scout variant of whatever it is should be part of a FRES programme would belittle whatever vehicle might come out of that process. I am clearly getting into the subject of our equipment report of 2009. We were very concerned across the range. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton mentioned the defence industrial strategy, and that was a good example of one of the concerns that we raised. When the chief of defence matériel appeared before us, he said:""I am absolutely clear, the Permanent Under-Secretary has been clear that we will publish DIS 2 as soon as we are able to. Chairman, I really cannot go beyond that."" Less than a month later, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), came in front of us and said:""Whether it makes sense to have a second version of that, Defence Industrial Strategy 2, is a matter on which I am open-minded"." Of course, it is true that, as industry has told us, there is no point in having a document that is not backed up by money. It is also true that while the Government are delaying as many decisions as they can until after the general election—I was going to say "as they respectably can", but I think that we are past that point—there is no point in an updated strategy that nobody would believe. We should never have reached this point, however. The purpose of the entire defence industrial strategy was clarity, and that is what we lack and what the defence industry of this country lacks. I am afraid that I think that this is another fiasco. Some mention has been made during this debate of aircraft carriers. My main concern about the aircraft carriers is that at the time of the strategic defence review, when a much larger surface fleet and a larger submarine fleet were introduced, the carriers fitted well into the overall balance of our armed forces. Since then, we have been fighting some serious wars. Money has been sucked from the Navy so that the proposed new balance of our forces is wholly skewed. The question now arises of whether the Navy is actually viable. There is certainly a real question about whether the tiny surface fleet that we will have will be able to maintain the sort of presence around the world that this trading maritime country needs and wants. I thought that the strategic defence review, which, when I was a Minister, I wrongly categorised as being a method of putting off decisions, was a very good document, but it is now time to do it again.