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Defence Acquisition (Independent Review)

On the Secretary of State's answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence, and on the Secretary of State's point when he said that "we will work to adjust our equipment programme to bring it into balance with future requirements and the likely availability of resources," I must say that that is a great step back to the past. We used to do that in the mid-1990s. The long-term costings programme was fought over inside the Department and then reported on annually in the Defence White Paper, when the consequences of the scheme became clear. We would never end up in a situation where we had a £35 billion overrun, so when did we stop doing that second point exactly?