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Defence

I share in the tributes made on both sides of the House to those who have fallen during the past week. The pain and anxiety felt by their families and friends at this time is unimaginable, and it cannot adequately be addressed by a few words in the Chamber. That is why whenever the House makes a decision on defence matters, it is vital that we remember those who have fallen. That is the ultimate consequence of any decisions we take here. I, too, want to start on a note of consensus. I agreed with the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) when he said that the strategic defence review should have a foreign affairs baseline—as the one held in 1998 did—not a Treasury baseline, that 12 years is too long before repeating the SDR and that the original SDR was not fully funded. I also agreed with the Defence Secretary when he identified that the Conservatives agreed with the Government every inch of the way. They were joined at the hip throughout the past 12 or 13 years. To pretend that things were different is incorrect, because they were together throughout that period. They now wish to point out their differences with the Government's record, but it is worth remembering that they were together, joined at the hip, during that time and that we were not. [Interruption.] I will return. The competition among the Labour Government's failures is pretty tough—climate change, the mediocre education system and the huge recession—but defence must be up there among one of the biggest failures; it is the hot favourite to win that competition. That is perhaps why the numerous changes in the ministerial team have occurred almost annually. Perhaps that reflects the enormity of their task, as they see it, and the Government's failure to support their team in defence. Let us take housing as an example—something that the Conservatives, perhaps not surprisingly given the Defence Secretary's comments, failed to mention in the motion. Indeed, the speech made by the hon. Member for Woodspring contained not one word about housing. However, the Government should not be complacent about housing: a third of families moving into service properties complained that their new homes were filthy; two in five of them said that they were unhappy with the general condition of the property; and there were a massive 234,000 repair call-outs for 45,000 properties in the year to November 2009. That works out at five call-outs per property—an enormous number—and reveals the state of the accommodation. I do not know whether the Defence Secretary has a different definition of the word "urgent", but it took 23 days for the repair to be made after at least one of those call-outs, and it took two months for the repair to be made after a routine call-out. It is no surprise that service families are extremely disappointed with the accommodation that has been provided. Progress has been made—Ministers have pointed that there have been improvements to the housing stock—but at the current rate, it will take another 20 years before we can get the accommodation up to condition 1. That is simply not good enough. Meanwhile, we are spending an absolute fortune— £67 million—on substitute family and single accommodation, while other properties remain empty. I appreciate that some of those properties are in different parts of the country, but 8,000 of them are empty at any one time. More than 2,000 of them remain empty for more than a year, while the top brass are living the life of Riley. One property—a mansion—has been rented for £7,000 a month for a general. That costs £84,000 a year, which is enough to pay for five privates. I have asked Defence Ministers a series of questions, and we have found out that about 11 members of the top brass are renting properties at more than £2,000 a month. How can that be justified? Has any action been taken since those figures were made public? Are the removal vans moving in already? Have we got them booked to move those people out? Paying £7,000 a month is an absolute outrage. Some might say that that is a drop in the ocean, but it is significant. If our top brass are behaving in that way, what does it reveal about the rest of the system? Surely, action must be taken. Before the Tories get too smug about these matters, they must remember the Annington Homes fiasco. The Defence Secretary is absolutely right about the scandalous decision taken back in 1996. Since then, Annington Homes has received about £1.5 billion in rental income from those properties. To make matters worse, Annington Homes does not have to foot the bill for the repair of the properties. That amounts to another £300 million for the same period—a total of £1.8 billion directly into the pockets of Annington Homes at the stroke of a Conservative blue pen. That is an outrage. The Conservatives should be embarrassed about it, and perhaps they are. That may be why there is no reference to that matter in the Conservative motion today.