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Defence Procurement

It is often said and the Government always deny it, but it is impossible to imagine us firing Trident without approval from the United States. No doubt there are some areas where our national interest is so absolutely central that we could not possibly let it go. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth), from the Front-Bench team, correctly points out security of supply, which is the second caveat. Of course, we must be certain that we get the equipment that we need when we need it. I suggest to him, however, that it is predominantly a commercial matter. The defence industry makes its profits out of providing equipment and matériel to armies, air forces and navies throughout the world, and it does so on commercial and contractual bases, so the notion that an organisation with which we had a binding contract, such as BAE Systems, would at our moment of need say, "I’m awfully sorry but you can’t have that particular piece of equipment; I’ve decided not to do it because the American Government have brought pressure to bear on me", seems a little remote. There might be some occasions when that would be the case, and we should bear such points in mind when considering procurement, but I do not believe them to be a central consideration. The second category of speech in this debate has been delivered by those people who have an interest or specialism in a particular piece of equipment. There has been quite a number of them, and they are very welcome. For example, the interesting comments that we heard a moment ago on the A400M is absolutely typical of the category, and I entirely agree with the argument; I think that we should have a fleet of C-130Js based, of course, at RAF Lyneham. None the less, what seems to me to be important is detailed knowledge not of the equipment, but of what it will deliver to our troops on the ground. That is where I very much endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre said. We do not need a middleweight, heavy-lift vehicle, such as the A400M; we need more C-17s or C-130Js, and we need to deliver the stuff on the ground. We must consider very carefully how we handle our future defence procurement strategy, because with procurement we tend to reinvent the wheel. We employ a vast number of people at Abbey Wood in Bristol. There is a huge office, and huge numbers of civil servants and military people beaver away, coming up with solutions that we should have had 10 or 15 years ago. We can point at lots of procurement projects as examples of that. The Bowman radio system is a good one; it took us 15 or 20 years to produce something that could have been bought off the shelf the day before yesterday. The Eurofighter project is another example; we went through a ghastly pan-European procurement process, and ended up with something that we could have built ourselves much quicker without the interference of the Germans or the French in that cross-European co-operative venture. We say that we need to do all those things ourselves because of our paranoia about handing over any kind of sovereignty, particularly to the United States. By saying that we must be in the lead in our defence procurement, we give up the ability to pick up a catalogue and say, "We want 10 or this, 50 of that and 100 of the other tomorrow because that is what we need to deliver force on the ground." BAE Systems and the other big British defence manufacturers—not that they are that big anymore—advance an argument about research and development. They say that if we were to buy everything off the shelf and if we were merely to buy a lot more C-130Js from Boeing, we would sacrifice our ability as a nation to research. The argument goes that we would no longer have the scientific ability to come up with new inventions for defence purposes. I find that extraordinarily difficult to believe. Incidentally, the pharmaceutical industry is always saying that unless the Government continue to subsidise pharmaceuticals they will stop inventing drugs. My hat! Of course they will keep on inventing drugs—they make a huge profit from doing so and selling the drugs to Governments and peoples around the world. The same surely applies to the defence industries. If BAE Systems were not to get one penny of subsidy towards its research and development on aeroplanes, for example, it would not stop researching and developing aeroplanes. That is its job and business; it sells planes to nations everywhere, including ours. I simply do not believe that if we moved towards an off-the-shelf procurement programme, we would make a great sacrifice of research and development. If we were to do all that we would, of course, make some sacrifices. However, we would gain advantages. We would cut out vast swathes of civil servants and research and development activities, and vast quantities of committees, reports, and people sitting around talking to each other about what they wanted. We would gain because we would deliver the equipment that our people need on the ground in good time and at a good price. A fundamental rethinking of our entire approach to procurement for defence purposes would lead to better delivery of the equipment that we need, and at a better price. We would therefore have a greater ability to punch above our weight across the world.