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Defence Procurement

Forgive me, but what I do not want to give up immediately is our forces. Our forces will experience a capability gap in medium and lightweight cargo and trooping because the A400M is already two years late. It was due to be delivered in 2011 and will perhaps be delivered in 2013, and it looks likely that it will not even make its fixed cost. The only other plea to keep it going has come from EADS, the German-French conglomerate defence company, which has said, "We might go bankrupt if you don’t carry on buying it." I do not see any real long-term need for the A400M, especially as if we cut it now there will be few penalties—we have a three-month moratorium before we have to make a decision. Let us cancel it now and get some C-130Js and some C-17s. Let us get on with this, save the money and get the troops the equipment that they need. This is not anti-European, but the A400M has not worked and it is not going very far. The other programme that should be further considered—it is harder to get the figures—is the future strategic tanker aircraft. It is a £13 billion private finance initiative project over 27 years. By 2011—for our £480 million a year defence budget for those 27 years—we will get not a plane. We do not buy the planes at the end. Not only that, but from the PFI deal on which we have embarked we will get eight planes on call at any one time with a further six should we need them. Those other six will apparently operate as passenger planes for charter holidays. There are so many of them that, in an economic downturn, it will be possible for the consortium to raise the money that way. There is already a glut of Airbus airframes around the world—second hand and so on—so the consortium will manage to work out how to raise enough revenue. The worst thing is the sweetener for the PFI project from the MOD: we handed over the monopoly for all air-to-air refuelling capability for that 27-year period. Should we decide that we want to refuel our next generation of helicopters in that way, which the Americans often do, we cannot do so. Should we want to utilise, if we buy the A400M, the refuelling plumbing fitted in the aeroplane, we cannot do so. If we buy the A400M, it will be delivered from the production line with the ability to provide and receive air-to-air refuelling, but we will not be allowed to switch it on, because we have handed over that monopoly to a PFI project for 27 years. With the super-carriers, for example, the Americans refuel their fighters with something called a buddy-buddy tank—another fighter carries a fuel tank, and it piggybacks—or they use the V-22 Osprey, a peculiar-looking plane in the marine corps. It is certainly not the same as a strategic tanker, but all those options will be cut off, because we have given the monopoly to a consortium. That is extraordinary—who knows what technology will be developed in 27 years? Twenty-seven years ago, we hardly had colour televisions, so we can only imagine what will happen when we want to utilise a new way of air-to-air refuelling. We must look at that. The future strategic tanker aircraft is another aspect of the fact that our partners, whether European or from other parts of the world, are not contributing their fair share to deployments, whether it is the NATO deployment to Afghanistan or the European deployment in Kosovo, or whether it was in Bosnia or wherever. If we look at the tables on tanker-to-fighter ratios for our partner countries, we can see that Belgium has two tankers and 72 fighters. I do not know why it bothers having fighters, so let us look at France, which is the only country comparable to the UK. It has 23 tankers, and 320 fighters. It has a ratio of 13 fighters to one tanker. The Germans have 220 fighters and only four tankers. We expect our allies to share the burdens. We should not buy 14 tankers to ensure that we keep those international deployments going all the time—it is as if our allies need not worry, because the British are always there to back them up with a tanker. We must make sure that in a range of situations, whether involving troops on the ground, equipment, or logistical or strategic refuelling, our partners play their part. One of the saddest reasons for the defence budget being under pressure is that time and time again, Ministers have worked on their European colleagues to come along to produce more and contribute more to Afghanistan and Iraq, but time and time again, they have not delivered. Whether it was delivering ammunition in the Falklands or delivering troops on the ground in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a lot of talk, but seldom is there much delivery. We are expecting a lot if we not only expect our defence budget to carry some of Europe’s capability but, with the A400M and efforts to support EADS and Airbus with the FSTA, we apparently want our defence budget to carry some of European industry as well. I do not think that we have the money to do that. It is not about being anti-Europe or any other label that some people would want to use; it is about trying to make sure that our troops, and the British interest and front line, receive what they need. There are other issues that we need to look at. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) was absolutely right: what we really need is clarity in our defence strategy. We need clarity in our foreign policy, and we need clarity in what the British interest is and where it lies. The Americans are always 100 per cent. sure about what the American interest is, but I often question, certainly at the fag end of this Government, whether there is a clear definition of the British interest. Just as there was clarity in the defence industrial strategy—that strategy paper gave us great hope—if we have clarity on what we want to procure, where we want to go and what Britain’s interest is, we will go some way towards helping the defence procurement problem that every Government face.