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Defence Procurement

I must first draw the attention of the House to my entry in the register. The last defence procurement debate was on 19 June. Since then, the UK economy has declined further in relation to its peer group, the MOD has continued to fight wars on a peacetime budget, and the Treasury has refined the art of squaring the books by mortgaging the future. Its "spend now, pay later" approach relies on "later" being somebody else’s problem—an expedient that Ministers can be sure will be flagged up from now until election day, and well beyond that. We have had an excellent and authoritative debate, with 13 contributions from Back-Bench Members. The right hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) praised the British aerospace industry; of course, he was right to do so. He spoke specifically about the Typhoon Eurofighter and hoped that there would not be the weakening of support from the Government that he perceives. The hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Willie Rennie) talked largely about jobs in defence manufacturing. He said that delays were about casting off things into the future and increasing costs, which I did not fully understand. Rather bizarrely, he prayed in aid Denmark as evidence that EU defence is a good thing. I would ever so gently remind him that Denmark is exempted from the European security and defence policy, so perhaps it was not the best example to choose. When the Liberal Democrats are in a hole, they should stop digging. The National Audit Office has made it clear that we cannot delay the decision on Trident. I would have thought that the Liberal Democrats would have hoisted that on board by now and would not continually volunteer it as a unique and rather strange element of their slate of policy proposals, such as they are. The hon. Gentleman wants, in effect, to go into the non-proliferation treaty talks in 2010 with the locker bare. He said that he was an idealist, and today we had evidence of that in spade-loads. Does he really think that our unilateral disarmament would convince other countries to do the same? I suspect probably not. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), who is not in her place, brought us FRES as the French strawberry. We will never think of FRES in quite the same way again. She talked a great deal about Plymouth, a city that I know very well, and she will have been as distressed as I have by the BBC news from Plymouth, which has led today with the story that the naval base there is to be a "nuclear dustbin". She was rather pointed with the Minister for the Armed Forces in suggesting that he should get his finger out. I wonder whether that is precisely what he has been doing in relation to the future of Devonport. I suggest ever so gently that digits are sometimes best left in situ. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) spoke magisterially as ever and said that we must reconcile ourselves to the almost irreconcilable—the need to fight today’s wars and to prepare for tomorrow’s. He said that FRES as a brand was now meaningless, with which I certainly agree, and that the Scout vehicle was unlikely to reach main gate in 10 months, as the Minister has suggested. The hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) mentioned cut and sew in connection with the camouflage uniform and put in a bid for Chorley in referring to that contract’s renewal. I assume that that will be favourably entertained, since the Prime Minister wants British jobs for British workers. The hon. Gentleman mounted a defence of the beleaguered A400M and hoped that tranche 3 would go ahead, and he called for a "marinised" Typhoon. His remarks may well be prescient. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) highlighted problems with kit in the early stages of Operation Telic. I know that he was right, because I wore and dealt with some of that kit during Operation Telic II. I am happy to say that matters have improved since then, but we have to admit that it was from a low base. My hon. Friend and I might have to differ ever so slightly on aircraft carriers, but I appreciate the perspective of a cavalry officer and am confident that there will always be a place for the main battle tank, although I fear possibly not for horses. He was right, of course, that we have to fight today’s wars, but it would be imprudent to sign up completely to the Rupert Smith thesis. State-on-state warfare needs resources that cannot simply be turned on and off. If we admit it as a catastrophic possibility, we must prepare for it now. Ministers have used facts and figures with flair and imagination to suggest, with ever-decreasing conviction, that defence is safe in their hands. For example, there is the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies). We have heard a lot from him already this evening, and I hope that he will not mind if I gently pull his leg a little and revisit his claim last month that in displacement terms, our warship building programme is the most substantial since the great war. In his dreams, apparently, he is trying to out-Dreadnought Jackie Fisher. We had another look through the looking glass on 24 November in European Committee B, when the Under-Secretary sought to downplay the threat from the European Union to the doctrine of appropriate sovereignty given in the defence industrial strategy and implicit in EC article 296. European security and defence policy and the Lisbon treaty will, of course, degrade our ability to operate autonomously in the national interest by promoting supranational decision making, the European Defence Agency and the scope of qualified majority voting. To the bewilderment of European Committee B and the press, who sadly do not normally take an interest in what happens on the Committee corridor, the Under-Secretary, who is apparently a historian, offered in support of the EU’s defence ambitions the assertion that it had put a stop to bloodshed in Transylvania. Why he chose Transylvania I will have to leave to the imagination of others, but there is more than a touch of the Bram Stokers in the horror story of this Administration’s stewardship of the equipment programme. On 23 February the Under-Secretary told us that the delay in the carrier programme was not the result of the non-availability of the joint strike fighter, which by any reasonable interpretation contradicted his boss’s written statement of 11 December. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin made it clear that JSF could be available, if we wanted it, as early as 2014. In the midst of all that confusion, we were denied the opportunity to debate the aircraft carrier programme in a timely fashion. The House needs to know definitively why the programme has shifted right, and why, especially towards the end of their lifespan, six Type 45s, three deployable at any one time, are now reckoned to be enough for the safe deployment of high-value assets, contrary to the strategic defence review. The most important bit of kit is, of course, the men and women who serve in our armed forces. Their procurement and the promotion of their through-life capabilities must be our first consideration. We have heard much today about force protection—as well we might, because maintaining public support for distant conflicts, which appear to deliver body bags and little else, will be a challenge for any Administration. History tells us that wars are lost when the home front loses heart. For that reason, if for no other, as we face the long haul in Afghanistan, it behoves us to review our position and bear down further on force attrition. To do that, we must reconsider kit. The Minister is right to point out, as he did on 19 June, that vehicles such as the Mastiff tear up the tarmac and alienate the locals. It is right to say that 6x6 wheeled and tracked vehicles look belligerent to a host population. However, the British public expect us to minimise casualties, and those of us who represent large numbers of servicemen demand it. If the Minister is worried about the impact of heavy vehicles on the mission, he must tackle his Administration’s attitude to in-theatre air transport. I know that Ministers feel each loss as keenly as any of us, but what are we to make of Chinooks mothballed in Wiltshire for years, while commanders grit their teeth and muddle through with what their men call "coffins on wheels"? What is going on when the traffic collision avoidance system—TCAS—anti-collision technology on the Merlin helicopters belatedly leased from the Danes—I raised the matter in June—is considered an optional extra? What are we to make of the continued intransigence about Snatch and the demise of FRES, which was meant to deliver the best in force protection? What happened to the future integrated soldier technology—FIST—that was meant to network fire teams with the command? The US is to operate in that way, but we learn that we are not. The hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) spoke expertly about OCCAR and commonality with the European Union on kit. We must be careful not to reinvent the wheel, since NATO stock numbers already exist in the common NATO stock catalogue, which was hard won. I am not sure that we need a duplicate parallel system, which can lead only to confusion. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton) has been described as a military vehicle anorak, in the nicest possible way. She demonstrated her mastery of the subject today. My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) reiterated the central point that, since 2001, the armed forces have been operating well beyond defence assumptions. In the light of that, he was right to say that there has been no fiscal stimulus for defence. I recently had the pleasure of sharing a parliamentary trip to Iraq with the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who spoke today about his party’s attitude to defence. I learned many of the points that he made in the debate during that visit in September, and they have not changed much since then. I hope that he will not mind if I disagree with most of them. It is always a great pleasure to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace), who spoke with much authority about the highly technical subject of defence economics. I share his concerns about and analysis of PFIs. Like him, I am worried about the eventual redeeming of mortgages. I appreciated his references to dealing with worn-out troops as well as worn-out kit. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) followed my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre, so they could agree about the A400M. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire said that we should attempt not to argue from a narrow constituency perspective and we all try to do that in such debates. However, it would be wrong not to mark his tireless advocacy for RAF Lyneham, which has been most effective, and appreciated by people in Wiltshire. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) spoke. In February, Ministers kindly arranged for me to visit Afghanistan. The full experience involves a trooping flight out of Brize Norton, knowing full well that departure and arrival times are purely aspirational. My flight did not happen. Nobody will shed any tears over a politician being messed about, but when that becomes the common experience among men and women who are forced to kip down on the floors of airport terminals for days on end waiting for return flights, it behoves those who represent them to ask what is going on. My letter to the Secretary of State for Defence seeking clarification on that point remains unanswered, but a better solution than the RAF’s fleet of flying antiques struggling to operate from an airbase that has become notorious must be found. Last week, the chief executive of Airbus made an impassioned plea to save the A400M, citing the jobs under threat. He asked rhetorically what alternatives to his aircraft exist, while Boeing prepares to step in with C-17s that are already under active consideration as replacements for the A400M in France and South Africa. Perhaps the Minister might like to comment on that in his winding-up speech and outline his criteria for any new deal that the Government might be hatching with EADS or Boeing. I am very sorry that the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) is not here, because we have to cover the defence training review. It is one of the biggest items of defence procurement before us, but it is limping towards main gate. Before covering that, however, perhaps we should pause to draw a discreet veil over project Red Dragon and the so-called super hangar. As the National Audit Office reported last month, this spectacular has tipped £134 million down the drain with very little to show for it. In relation to the DTR, Land Securities Trillium walked away from the Metrix consortium in December, when the bottom dropped out of the property market on which the financial case for the St. Athan project depends. I find that deeply worrying and I am not reassured by the replacement partner, the French catering firm Sodexo. The MOD’s website says that contracts will be signed with the newly constituted Metrix for the DTR phase 1 in the summer. Is that the case? Will the Minister let us in on the DTR contingency plan that the MOD commissioned last year for use in the event of Metrix disintegrating? Will he ditch the fig leaf of "commercial in confidence" and say what cuts to training deliverables we can expect as a result of rising project costs? Can we assume that the DTR second package is now dead in the water? What does the Minister say to the main trade union involved, which has pointed out that large numbers of civilian trainers, who are already in short supply, will not relocate to south Wales and that that will impact on the quality of training produced at St. Athan, at least in the short to medium term? Although he is not here, I commend the Veterans Minister, who I know takes a close interest in mental health, for his bravery in taking on his opposite number at Richmond House over the Easter break. It would be wrong of me to trespass too much into that territory, because this is a debate about procurement. However, procurement inevitably crosses departmental boundaries. In the current climate, it beggars belief that a Government who truly prioritised the welfare of our servicemen could produce something that they are pleased to call the "new horizons" strategy for improving mental health that does not carry any mention at all of servicemen, service charities or veterans. I hope very much that that situation will be remedied as soon as possible. We have heard today that Bernard Gray will report early, having curtailed his consultation. Why is that and why was that issue not covered in the opening remarks of the Minister for the Armed Forces? Finally, in his written ministerial statement of 11 December, the Secretary of State said quite specifically that at the end of the MOD planning round in March, we would have a proper and comprehensive announcement on the future of the equipment programme. March has been and gone, but there has been no announcement. Why not?