---

Strategic Defence and Security Review

I know the hon. Gentleman is very interested in the welfare of the armed forces. All we are trying to do is solicit an answer. Everyone needs to know whether the armed forces pension scheme is part of the review or not, but we cannot get an answer. We need an answer and we certainly cannot wait until the summer recess for one. While I am talking about welfare issues, let me address what the Secretary of State said about the non-existence of a tri-service Government document. May I recommend to him the preamble in the Command Paper and suggest that he should consider seriously whether he can improve on it? Will he continue with the commitments in that paper and will he, as part of the strategic defence review, look seriously at something that was in the Labour party manifesto—the introduction of a service charter? Many members of our armed forces whom I have met—I am sure that he will have had the same—recognise some of the improvements that have been made to many aspects of their service and support in the past few years, but want them to be entrenched in law. Is he prepared to make such a commitment? The Secretary of State seems to have said that a process to examine the value for money of alternatives to Trident has already started and will be all over before the summer. We are only five weeks away from that and from the future successor, but we have heard nothing about it from him or his coalition partners. If we hear nothing at all on this before a final decision is taken, it will only increase the cynicism that many of us had about the Liberal Democrats' position in the first place—that it was about them trailing their coats in the direction of unilateralism without actually going there. They never had, as I think the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) effectively exposed in his paper, a sensible alternative to Trident. Is there going to be a process and will we be told anything about it, or is this just a way of getting a rather embarrassing chapter in the coalition's creation off the agenda as quickly as possible? I understand as well as anyone the very difficult decisions with which the Secretary of State is confronted. I appreciate and totally agree that salami-slicing is not the way to go. I agree that a step change is probably needed and that some difficult decisions will therefore need to be taken. I am sure he regrets some of the rhetoric that he used in opposition and some of the promises he made, such as those about a bigger Army and a bigger fleet. Now he is in government, he will need not just to say those things but to deliver them. I hope he will do that in an open manner in which we can all engage, and I think it would be in his interests to do so.