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Defence Acquisition (Independent Review)

Listening to the silken prose of the Secretary of State as he read his statement, one could barely believe that what he was describing was the report that we have all seen, and that stands as a damning indictment of procurement processes. One would hardly recognise it. I congratulate his wordsmiths—I think that he has secured better value for money on that budget than he has on procurement. What the report actually tells us about is a gaping £35 billion black hole; too many types of equipment being ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification; average overruns of five years or 40 per cent. financially; and frictional costs to the Department of £1 billion to £2 billion a year. The Secretary of State may not have chosen to say that the problems go back for decades, but I will do so, because some of the things that are coming on stream now were signed off decades ago—in one instance, by John Nott, when he was Defence Secretary. I do not think that the present generation of Ministers are, in all fairness, to blame for all this. In fact, on urgent operational requirement procurements, some ministerial decisions in the past couple of years were brave and commendable. We need a radical shake-up, and some of the solutions that we have heard in this statement sound altogether far too familiar, which is more than can be said of the explanation from the Secretary of State about the justification for delaying the carrier programme, as it bears absolutely no resemblance to what we were told at the time. I thought that the logic that was squeezed out at the time was to get the programme to dovetail with the availability of the joint strike fighter, and certainly nothing to do with helicopters. If we are talking about a "Santa's wish list" model of procurement, not only must Ministers get on top of procurement, but so must the defence chiefs, because sometimes their unrealistic expectations of procurement cause the pursuit of something absolutely perfect to get in the way of the achievement of something that would really be very good. The armed forces themselves must be more realistic about their expectations in future. In today's statement from the Secretary of State, there are references to transparency. If those can become a reality, that will be very welcome and not a moment too soon. One of the impediments to proper scrutiny of procurement processes in recent years has been the extraordinary extent to which those processes are opaque by comparison with anything that goes on in other countries. What is the time frame for the implementation of the changes that he spoke about today? I hope they will not all be put off to a strategic defence review. I understand that that is imperative, but how many of these changes can we look forward to in the forthcoming Green Paper?