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Future Defence Programme

Increased costs on specific defence projects can come about for a number of reasons, partly because some of the projects are extremely ambitious and it is not always clear at the beginning exactly what the end product will be, not least because the pace of change is so great. There are often many upgrades during the lifetime of a project, which might be over several years. The capability of the end product has often been significantly enhanced compared with what was originally envisaged. As for pooling projects and working more with Europe, or indeed with other potential partners, there is scope for pooling projects, but it is not always easy. You have to have the same requirement as whoever you are working with, you have to have the same budgetary availability and you have to be working to the same timescale—that is assuming that there are no other difficulties involved. So far as Europe is concerned, there are some projects within the European Defence Agency that we are working on and that we think could help in, for example, certification of airworthiness, which could bring benefits across the board to a number of countries. On specific projects, it is often a lot more difficult than people think to get a proper alignment of the needs and requirements of all the countries involved, but this is something that we always look at, especially on some of the larger projects.