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Defence Procurement

We have had an interesting debate, with a lot of extremely well-informed contributions. A certain amount of egregious nonsense has been spoken as well, however, which I will deal with in a second. For me, the most memorable aspect is that this is the first time that I can recall since I have been in the House of Commons—there may have been many other such occasions—when, without fail, every single speaker put a question, and usually several questions, for the Minister to answer when he winds up. That leaves me with a large pile of notes and little chance of doing justice to all the questions that were asked, many of which were extremely pertinent. However, I shall try to do my best, at least in relation to those questions that touch on my responsibilities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) said that we must support high-tech investment in the aerospace industry. I totally agree with him on that. The series of investments that we have made in the Typhoon, the involvement of British companies in the joint strike fighter programme and our involvement in supporting a number of unmanned aerial vehicle projects, including the Mantis project, to which those on the Opposition Front Bench referred, are evidence of that. He also spoke powerfully in favour of tranche 3 of the Typhoon, and I agree with those comments. The hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Willie Rennie) talked about the defence industrial strategy. Many people raised that issue, so I shall deal with it now. I am a complete supporter of the DIS. When I said that I was open minded about whether there should be a new one, I did not mean that I was casting doubt on the principle of having a DIS, or on the existing DIS. I was simply saying that I was not clear that we needed to move beyond DIS 1 to DIS 2. It is axiomatic that, if we did that, we should do so only if it created value. In other words, we should do it only when there was not much value left in DIS 1 and it needed to be replaced by a new framework in which industry could operate and invest with confidence over the long term. It would be absurd to have a new defence industrial strategy every year or two. It might be possible after three or four years, although that is not certain. We should certainly take into account whether the industry itself felt that the present DIS was adequate or that it ought to be replaced, although that would not necessarily be a decisive point. All the signals that I am getting from the industry—including from Mike Turner, who I am sure will not mind my quoting him on this; he has been mentioned, rightly with great respect, by the Opposition on several occasions—suggest that the industry is not calling for a new DIS at the moment. So, that is the background on that matter. The hon. Gentleman accused us of slashing the urgent operational requirements budget from more than £900 million to £635 million in the new financial year. He is simply factually wrong about that, I am afraid. We always have to have a budget; it is right for us who are managing the UOR programme to take the responsibility of saying what we think we will need to spend in this area, so we always have a figure. If there were some completely unpredicted event, we would obviously have to look at the matter again and go back to the Treasury, but it is right for us to try to manage our resources in this way. We have a budget of £635 million for the new financial year, in addition to a proportion of the £700 million for protected personnel vehicles—the lighter armoured vehicles—that we announced in November, which will be drawn on in this financial year. I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman to the nearest pound how much of it will be drawn on in this financial year, but it will certainly be the majority of the amount. So, in my view, the UOR spend will be well over £1 billion in this year. I wanted to put the record straight on that.