---

Nimrod Review

My Lords, I thank the noble and gallant Lord for his comments but he will forgive me if I do not respond to them because he seems to have made some general remarks on costs and on the present funding of the Armed Forces. The essence of the issue before us today is flight safety, and the Ministry of Defence has secured the appropriate money to ensure proper funding for flight safety standards over the years. I have spent some time being briefed and I have talked to people about the flight safety standard aspired to. I have also talked about the concept of ALARP and about the catastrophe rate that one aims to prevent. I do not believe that there is a money problem there. For a series of technical reasons, a catastrophic event was caused by errors in the design of the aircraft over a number of decades. We acknowledge that in the safety review, which was instituted by the DLO in a commitment to look at its ageing assets and make sure that they were satisfactory, there was an opportunity to find those design defects. If they had been found, the catastrophe would not have occurred. However, while the pressure to change and become more efficient may have had some distracting effect, the accident did not occur for the want of appropriate investment. Indeed, we have put sufficient money into the Nimrod so as to maintain appropriate safety standards.