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Defence Procurement

I rise with some trepidation at the end of a long and well-informed debate, typified by the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace), who speaks with a level of knowledge, understanding and wisdom on defence matters that is hardly paralleled across the House. It is a joy to listen to him. He manages to express complex and difficult ideas in remarkably simple, straightforward and understandable language, which you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, called for earlier. My hon. Friend achieves that with huge ability. For fear of being shown up for my own lack of expertise in these matters, and also for fear of repeating many of the arguments that have been made during this interesting debate, I propose to take a slightly different approach to the subject of defence procurement. Those who have spoken have fallen into one of three broad categories, as I shall explain in a moment. The reason that they have done so is the structure of the defence debates that we have in the House. I commented on that when I spoke both in the last debate, on defence in the UK, and in the one before that, on defence in the world. It is an entirely artificial and false structure for a series of debates. I am not certain that the issues that we have been debating on procurement can be detached from the issue of defence in the world, and in any case, what is defence in the UK if it is not interlinked with defence in the world? Those who are in charge of these matters, whether that is the Leader of the House, Defence Ministers or others, might like to consider whether, instead of those three separate debates that we have traditionally had for a number of years, the structure might be changed to a series of more general debates linking defence capabilities and foreign policy much more closely, covering defence in the world, and allowing debate to range reasonably widely over procurement matters, manpower matters and welfare matters, and crucially, if possible, resulting in a vote. It is all very well having these debates as general debates. That means that turnout is poor, by and large. The same gang turns up on each occasion. We tell each other the things that we knew we were going to tell each other before we even started. It is all very useful but it does not achieve very much, whereas if there were a vote on the matter—on the motion that this House supports what the Government are doing on a particular thing, for example—that would be much more useful, and the Government could be assured of a majority. The reason why I think that the structure produces three kinds of topical speeches in the procurement debate is that there are three ways of approaching procurement. First, many hon. Members, particularly on the Labour Benches, but to a degree on the Opposition Benches as well, are, perfectly legitimately and sensibly, fixated by constituency issues. Their approach to defence procurement is to say, "In my constituency there is a factory that makes X tanks"—or whatever it might be—"and I want you, Mr. Government, not to change what you are doing about this because thousands of jobs in my constituency depend on it." Those hon. Members do not argue that the tank is better or worse than a tank made somewhere else. They do not necessarily argue that it is a question of whether it is British, American, Chinese or anything else. The hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle), who represents a town that has been mentioned in the House more often than any other in the past 12 years, typified that by saying, "We want British uniforms to be made in Chorley, not in China", not necessarily because they were better uniforms, but because he thought it was patriotic in one way or another to have them made in Chorley.