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Nimrod Review

Does my noble friend agree that General Sir Sam Cowan and Air Chief Marshal Sir Malcolm Pledger have in fact been traduced by the Haddon-Cave report? I speak in this case from personal knowledge. I was invited by Sir Sam to be his senior independent director on the board of the Defence Logistics Organisation in 1999, and to continue in the same role by Sir Malcolm Pledger in 2003 until his retirement in 2005. As the Statement acknowledges, Mr Haddon-Cave took no evidence to support either his general conclusion that the Defence Logistics Organisation was in disarray or his specific conclusion that further damage was done by the arbitrary imposition of a 20 per cent cut in costs. Mr Haddon-Cave could have asked me. It was not chaotic, and there was no sense that the Ministry of Defence’s traditional commitment to safety was being threatened. I think that I would have been in a position to know. I chaired, and indeed had set up, the defence logistics audit and risk committee, which consisted entirely of other independent non-executive directors, like myself, who were on board throughout the Defence Logistics Organisation. In that forum anyone worried about safety could readily have said so, and they did not. It is quite wrong to say that a 20 per cent target for cuts was imposed. There was an aspiration, fully supported by Ministers, of reducing costs by 20 per cent over four years—a goal which should have been well within our reach in the course of putting together three organisations that were fundamentally doing the same thing. I would ask the Minister to accept that no matter how dreadful and how tragic the accident, and how much our sympathy goes to the families of the dead, it cannot be right wrongly to blame honourable men.