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Strategic Defence and Security Review

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in the debate. As a new Member, I have to say that there have been a number of distinguished and knowledgeable contributions from both sides of the House. Along with every other Member, I would like to place on record my admiration for the work of our armed forces and for those who work for the Ministry of Defence, particularly at this time. Since being elected in May, I have had the privilege of meeting constituents who have served, or are serving, in the armed forces. A number of constituents work for the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces in a civilian capacity. Too often—although not this afternoon, I am pleased to say—they are dismissed with pejorative labels, when the reality is that they often do important work of great value to the armed forces, and some do so in dangerous circumstances. As the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) said, the previous Government announced the first ever strategic defence review within a month of taking office in 1997 to determine the future of the UK's defence policy. At the time, the then Defence Secretary, now Lord Robertson, who is one of my predecessors in the Hamilton part of my constituency, said:"““Hundreds of experts from within the MOD, the Armed Forces and elsewhere have given a great deal of time over the past year to produce the most significant reshaping of our Armed Forces in a generation…It is absolutely right that we should have consulted so widely””." As the right hon. Gentleman noted earlier, that review took 13 months. It was comprehensive in its scope, forensic in its detail and rooted in the needs and priorities of our defence. It would obviously be foolhardy to measure such exercises by such shallow criteria alone, but the strategic defence review in 1998 ran to 390 pages. Given the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) at the start of the debate, I should say that I am not sure how many of those pages were blank, but I am sure there were at lot fewer of them, proportionately, than in the recent strategic defence and security review. There is a real contrast between the two exercises, not only in the time taken and the depth of content in the reports, but in the detail and the consultation undertaken, which leads many of us to express real concerns about aspects of the current review and the consequences that we will all have to face as a result.