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Defence in the World

The hon. Gentleman is correct. That is enough Defence Committee anecdotes, but that story is an example of the right hon. Gentleman's courage and tenacity, and all Committee members will want to put it on record that his chairmanship of the Committee has been of great value. The right hon. Gentleman remarked on each area of the MOD and made a point about the Department overall, but I make it clear that when the Committee has remarked on the MOD, we have not meant the individuals who make up the Ministry. A lot of courageous people work there, many as civilians. Indeed, people in the Ministry are not trying deliberately to get questions wrong; that in itself is wrong. However, there are deficiencies in how it performs and how it is organised. The Gray report was of great importance in evaluating some of those deficiencies, and the question of how we spend money is crucial, because we are clearly spending it inefficiently. Everyone knows and agrees about that but Parliament's job is to find out how we can avoid it, stop it and put it right. Like all Defence Committee members, I think it is for us to try to find out what is really happening. Party politics does not reside in the Committee in that sense, because it is in no one's interest to develop a false analysis of the situation. The prescription for what one might do next is where the politics comes in, and that is different, but if one does not understand where one really is, whatever decisions one makes, they are likely to be deficient, because they will have been based on a false premise. There is a problem with obtaining the information that the Committee requires to undertake such inquiries. We conducted an inquiry about the renewal of Trident that went against the MOD's wishes. It did not want to do that inquiry then, but we did not ask the MOD's permission to start it. To start a debate, we thought it important that Parliament obtained important information on what the MOD was going to do about Trident; it was not for the MOD to dictate to us that we should not start an inquiry, so we carried on and conducted an inquiry without any co-operation. That changed as we went along. Currently, there is a difficult question about ex-chiefs of staff who make statements that they did not make when they were in uniform. They sat in front of me and I asked them directly, "What was the condition? When will FRES be available?" I remember Michael Jackson telling me, "Its first in-service date is 2009." The programme was a shambles. It was not that the chiefs of staff did not have the money; they could not decide among themselves how best to spend the money. That is what they are paid for—that is their job—and it is no good saying to me after the fact that in some way or another, "It was very difficult, Dai, and we did not have the money." If they had come to me at the time, and I had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, heaven forfend, I would have said, "When you can properly spend the money I am already giving you, and you can show me you are, I might give you some more." That is the guts of the argument. Bernard Gray makes the same point in his report when he says that there is no magic bullet. Nobody has got this process right, whether it is the Americans, us, the French, or anybody else. We will probably never get it arithmetically and perfectly correct, but we can try to make it as efficient as possible. For some time, I have been asking questions about how to do this because process is important, and I am disappointed. A document called "The Defence Strategy for Acquisition Reform" has recently been published, alongside the Green Paper. It contains a lot of initials and acronyms, as one would expect, and has at the back lots of descriptions of various programmes, with something called "PACE", and the so-called terms of business agreement process, and this, that and the other. It looks like more McKinsey to me—more management-speak and buzzwords. I spent 25 years as a trade union official and I went into numerous companies. I would ask simple questions such as, "Your company's in trouble and you want to make redundancies—who in this company is given the responsibility for maximising profit out the door?", and be told, "We don't know." I would respond, "There we are then—it is obvious why you're not making money, isn't it? It's because you've got all these fancy consultants coming in, they're giving you all these fancy descriptions and programmes, and all your little workers are beavering away filling in all the boxes and giving you the forms, and the system is not working." Of course it was not working—such an approach will not solve that sort of problem. We need a different way of looking at it, and the Gray report suggests how that might be done. The strategy document sets out a mechanistic process that, frankly, will not do the job that the Minister and everyone else wants done. Whatever happens as regards kit, what is important is the people. We all know that; everyone will nod and say that it is absolutely correct. We have everyone from reservists, who do a fantastic job and are often not properly recognised, through to young people—teenagers—whom we are trying to equip while asking them to do hugely sophisticated jobs. I have spoken to young guardsmen 19 or 20 years of age: boys from the valleys who were probably not the best academic students at school. They have gone into the military and had really good training, but now we expect them to exercise heroic or courageous restraint—whatever the new doctrine is called—in deciding whether to shoot the bandit in front of them on the basis of whether there would be an effect on the associated civilian population. That is a highly sophisticated, graded decision for them to make, especially when somebody is throwing rocks at them. That is the level of what we are asking these people to do, as well as physically carrying round all the kit and running about in the warm or the cold. Training is crucial for that purpose, and that is where the investment has to go. I hope that the training academy in St. Athan comes off, not because it is on my patch—it is not, although there would be an associated effect on my local economy—but because there needs to be a process that trains these people in all the different skills as will be required for the future. In deciding what to do about defence expenditure, let us not lose the people in the discussion about the toys. It is obviously important to discuss some of the big-ticket items because they cost so much, but it should be possible to put a lot of investment into training the people, because at the end of the day they will operate the hardware and have the material effect. More importantly, they are the people who engage with the enemy—not just in a kinetic way, but directly, face to face, in talking to them and trying to win them over to a different position. How we do all this in the next Parliament is an issue that has popped up in several speeches, probably because we are all thinking about it. Whether hon. Members have decided to leave Parliament or not, they have an affinity with it, and they know that it needs to reform itself and do things better. As regards scrutiny, we need, for example, a way of dealing with previous chiefs of staff. If we could get better answers at the time, we would not need to deal with the problem later on. There are ways in which we could do that. The Defence Committee could take evidence in private: not everything has to be revealed to the enemy. Parliament had the confidence to do that before, when it gave the Defence Committee the responsibility of conducting a review about the capture of our boats on the river between Iraq and Iran. There are different ways in which we could do this as a Parliament, and that is the debate that we need to have. It is possible for these people, when they are in the job, and without being disloyal to Ministers or to the chain of command, to give a graded response so that Parliament can know where it really stands, because unless it knows that, it will make a mistake about where it goes afterwards.