Royal Assent – in the House of Commons at 1:12 pm on 26 March 2009.
May I add my condolences and those of my colleagues to those expressed by the Minister? Our thoughts and prayers are with the families, not only of those killed in action but of those who have been injured, in their ongoing suffering. The House should remember the sacrifices that they, too, have made.
It has been a privilege for me, like the Minister, to visit our armed forces in different parts of the UK, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and to share the pride in and enthusiasm for what they do in our name. It is because of the esteem in which we hold our armed forces that so many of us were outraged by the events mentioned by the Minister involving those who chose to protest against the bravery and professionalism of our troops returning home from operations. I am sure that the whole House agrees that those returning from overseas deserve the full support of the British public, and nothing less. I think that decent-minded people were appalled and disgusted by the actions of unrepresentative extremists at the welcome home parade in Luton. It is, after all, thanks to the bravery and commitment of the men and women in our armed forces over many years that we have the freedom of speech that those nasty individuals were abusing, and they should be reminded of that fact.
The best way for us, as a society, to show our contempt for those people and our support for our troops is not to ban protests, as some have suggested, but to outnumber the protesters and drown them out. What could be a better response to what we saw in Luton than to see huge supportive crowds cheering home our returning forces? Our deeds, not our words, will show what we really stand for. That fact was demonstrated a few days after the Luton parade, in Watford, where a parade by the Royal Anglian Regiment drew out thousands of people cheering as the troops marched through the town centre. The crowed was supportive, appreciative and, in some ways, defiant—a complete contrast to those ungrateful, unrepresentative extremists in Luton. Too often we allow minority voices to hijack the debate. The British public, the Government and Parliament must do all we can to encourage public support for the armed forces.
As we debate the subject of defence in the United Kingdom, we would be negligent if we overlooked two major elements underpinning our nation's defence and, indeed, our role in the world: our nuclear deterrent and our ability to project power with aircraft carriers. I shall discuss the carriers first.
An argument is made in some quarters that the carriers are useless because they will be of no help in the sort of conflict we face in Afghanistan. As things stand in the deserts of Helmand province, that is true, but it is beside the point. Nobody has ever tried to make an argument for the carriers on the basis that we needed them for current operations in Afghanistan, but I remind sceptics that there was a time, in the early days of the conflict in Afghanistan, when aircraft carriers were vital. For example, HMS Illustrious, with its 16 Harriers, which took part in the initial attack in October 2001, when there was no regional airbase that could quickly and easily be used.
The argument against the carriers is also based on the false assumption that state-on-state conflict is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, history shows differently. Possessing the aircraft carriers in the 21st century will allow us to project power, influence and force in a way that would not otherwise be possible. In an era of globalisation, Britain's economic, trade and security interests are not only to be found here at home, in Gibraltar or in the Falklands, but around the globe, from the strait of Hormuz to the Malacca strait and most everywhere in between. In this complex world, British interests and the defence of the UK have no geographical boundaries, in the way that perhaps they did in the past. Because of that, we must have the ability to project power, influence and, if necessary, military force around the world.
It is unfortunate that the Government have presided over delay after delay in the two carriers. They have now been in planning and design for twice the duration of the second world war. In December, right before the Christmas recess, we learned from a written statement that we can expect a further delay of up to two years. That was initially blamed on the joint strike fighter's entry into service, but we have since learned that that was not the main reason at all. I welcome the carriers as an important addition to the fleet and call on the Government to do everything they can to ensure their timely entry into service. However, we might ask why, when the Government are talking about bringing forward spending projects as part of the fiscal stimulus, major defence projects are being put back. But the current delay is only the tip of the iceberg in this Government's treatment of the Royal Navy. The journey that has led us to where our Navy is today has been one of serial betrayal by the Government.
Time and again since the 1998 strategic defence review, our Navy has been blackmailed into accepting cuts to its fleet to ensure the eventual addition of the two new carriers that are so desperately needed. Back then, our Navy agreed to cut its fleet of 12 attack submarines to 10 and its fleet of 35 destroyers and frigates to 32, in return for the promise of the two carriers. A decade later, we find our Navy with only eight attack submarines, with a probable future reduction to six or seven, and an astonishingly low number—22—of destroyers and frigates. Maritime commitments have not decreased since 1998—in fact, they have risen at a time when our Navy has been slashed, mothballed or, in some cases, sold off. Having an aircraft carrier capability allows us better to protect our global interests, but it cannot be used as an excuse for any further cuts to the capabilities of our Navy.
Surely the hon. Gentleman recognises that the biggest recent peacetime naval building programme is going on in the country.
Yes, and as I will say later, that programme is over schedule and over budget, and it comes in a period when the Navy has suffered unprecedented cuts but is still being asked to carry out a wide range of functions. The Navy was told that it needed a certain number of frigates and destroyers to carry out the tasks set out in the strategic defence review, but year on year, the Government cut back on those. It is only the astonishing professionalism of the Royal Navy that has enabled us to carry out so many of the tasks so well during that difficult period.
Many of the same arguments for supporting the carrier programme are applicable to the nuclear deterrent. The Minister began by asking about the commitment of my party to a nuclear deterrent. If hon. Members think back, they will remember that my party has always been committed to such a deterrent. It was those on the left who tried throughout the 1980s to go for unilateral nuclear disarmament and who did not support the nuclear deterrent. There are three reasons why we must have a nuclear deterrent. The first is the unpredictable nature of the post-cold war era. The harsh reality is that in many ways we had it easy with the bipolarity and general predictability of the cold war. As opposed to the concept of east versus west, or democracy versus communism, the global security environment in which we are now forced to operate more closely resembles the multipolarity of the 19th century—not the 20th century, for which our instruments of national defence are structured. No one can accurately predict the threats that the UK will face between 2025 and 2055, when the next generation of the deterrent will be in service, just as no one 20 years ago could have predicted the speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union or the nature of the conflicts in which we are involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Secondly, nuclear weapons simply cannot be uninvented; they will remain part of the international security picture in the future. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea and their attempted acquisition by Iran are real threats to our security. We do not have the right to gamble with the security of future generations. Thirdly, the United Kingdom has traditionally played a bigger role in acting on a number of global security-related issues than many of our medium-sized allies, especially in Europe. Consequently, we are more susceptible to future nuclear blackmail by rogue states in possession of nuclear arms.
I am listening closely to the hon. Gentleman. Do I understand the logic of his argument to be that there are no circumstances in which it would ever be possible for the UK to renounce its nuclear weapons?
If, in the improbable event that we were able to technically uninvent nuclear weapons, they did not exist in any other part of the globe and there was no chance of them coming into existence in any other part of the globe, that might be a realistic suggestion, but while they do exist and while this country may be threatened with or subjected to nuclear blackmail, we must maintain a minimum nuclear deterrent. There are strong arguments for big reductions in the number of warheads held globally. There is a strong economic, moral, political and military argument for big reductions in the stockpiles of Russia and America, and I can see no strong argument against such reductions, but we in the United Kingdom have to be the arbiters of our own destiny. We have to be able to determine our own security, and while nuclear weapons exist, we in the UK are prudent and wise to retain and maintain a minimum effective nuclear deterrent.
In the light of what the hon. Gentleman said, what does he make of the letter of
They are perfectly entitled to their opinion. I happen to think that it is wrong. The nature of the threats that we face has changed quickly from the relative symmetry of the cold war to a range of other asymmetric and complex threats, and it could very well change again. Ultimately, the onus of explanation is not on those of us who wish to retain a deterrent, but on those who want to scrap it. They must tell us why they believe that they can predict the risks that we will face in half a century's time. The Government's White Paper, published in 2006, described the independent British nuclear deterrent as
"an essential part of our insurance against the uncertainties and risks of the future".
I fully endorse that sentiment.
It is an interesting element of the political debate that many of the opponents of the carrier programme and our nuclear deterrent are the same individuals who at other times claim that Britain is already too dependent on, and too close to, American foreign and defence policy. In fact, not having the aircraft carriers or a nuclear deterrent would make us even more dependent on the United States for our security. While British and American interests are likely to coincide in the future, and the Anglo-American relationship remains our most important strategic alliance, the UK must ultimately be able to guarantee its own security.
It has been widely reported in the media and written answers that Russia has once again taken up its cold war habit of probing UK airspace. I understand, as we all do, that for operational security reasons the Government are unable to comment in detail on the Floor of the House on what actions have been taken to deal with Russia's actions, but I hope that in his winding-up speech this evening, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, Mr. Jones, will be able to give us an idea of the number and frequency of incursions and offer the House assurances that procedures are fully in place to deal with them.
In addition, will the Minister say whether his Department has seen an increase in Russian submarine incursions into British territorial waters? We hear often about Russian planes challenging the integrity of our airspace, but seldom, if ever, about what is going on below the surface. There is good reason to believe that such incursions are occurring, and as we are an island nation with only three naval bases, it is an important matter. I hope that he will address it.
Those who think that state-on-state warfare is a thing of the past need only look at the recent invasion of Georgia by Russia and the build-up of Russian armed forces to have a sense of foreboding. One thing is certain: the global economic downturn has not deterred Russia from driving ahead with vast military reforms, requiring huge sums of money. On the contrary, it looks like it is spending at an ever-increasing rate. Russia may be building up from a low base, given the degraded state of its conventional forces, and it may not pose a direct threat to the security of this country, but the Russian leadership has shown in Georgia how it could destabilise our allies and threaten our security indirectly through a stranglehold on energy supplies. The cyber-attacks in Estonia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, for which the finger points at Russia, mean that we must maintain our vigilance and invest in the technology to deal with threats that could in future occur in this country.
Our armed forces have seen a lot of combat in recent years, in the Gulf war, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. Improvements in body armour and vehicles have meant that many injuries that were once fatal are now survivable. We will see many disabled young veterans, and our society will have to adjust to that. However, that is only the visible damage: what is invisible must concern us as well. I would like the topic of mental health in the armed forces to be much higher up this country's political agenda.
The Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for North Durham, told GMTV earlier this week that a study had shown that
"the actual number of people presenting with mental health problems is less than 2 per cent.", yet even if that is correct, it represents just under 4,000 people. That is a lot of individuals requiring a lot of care. The hon. Gentleman went on to claim that the study showed that those who had not been deployed on operations suffered more than those who had. There was something unclear about that, as it is true only of those suffering from mood disorders and depressive episodes. In fact, the report clearly states that the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder was higher among those deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan than among those not deployed there.
The Minister says that he said that, which I accept. However, PTSD often takes a long time to manifest itself. I fear that, with deployment after deployment, year after year, the mental health problems we face now, if unchecked, could become a mental health crisis, partly because our armed forces are operating at a tempo for which they are neither fully resourced nor fully manned.
I recognise the problem of PTSD, but does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that the number of people involved is small? It is higher among those deployed, as we would expect, but the important thing is to ensure that we do not confuse the broader issue of the mental health disorders that members of the armed forces face by concentrating overmuch on PTSD.
Clearly they are separate, if related, issues, but the point about PTSD is that the number of people affected now are, almost by definition, the tip of the iceberg, because of the late presentation of the condition. We can expect to see more cases in future, and we as a society have a moral duty to prepare for that. We cannot look after only the physical injuries of those who fight in our name. We must place equal importance on those who suffer mental trauma.
My hon. Friend makes a very powerful point about this problem, which affects very damaged people, albeit a small number, who need help. Does he agree that perhaps the most disadvantaged group of all is those who have served in the reserves and cannot go back to a unit that is there full-time to look after them? Does he agree also that we could make far more use of reserve medical officers, who know what it is like to serve in uniform but are already embedded in the NHS, in solving the problem?
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend. Indeed, our servicemen and women in the Territorial Army experience a further, unique set of problems. When a member of the TA returns home from operations, there is little or no formal support group or structure to fall back on, or camaraderie with fellow troops who have had similar experiences. There are no familiar faces on a base and no friends to meet for a pint to talk about what they have gone through. More often than not, TA service members simply return to their civilian jobs and go back to family life without the safety net apparatus that is provided by being a member of the regular forces. They are at particular risk. We have a duty to recognise that and put in place mechanisms to guarantee their safety.
The important point that my hon. Friend raises is that the increased use of the TA means that there is likely to be an increasing rate of growth of those problems in future. We are developing a problem for our forces as a whole, but the TA in particular represents a potential mental health time bomb that, in many ways, we are not prepared to deal with.
Is my hon. Friend aware that Combat Stress, the mental welfare charity for ex-servicemen and women, has reported that whereas in 2005 only 5 per cent. of those presenting with PTSD were unfunded by Government help, that figure has now risen to 43 per cent. and is continuing to rise? That is putting great strain on the charity's resources. Given that the disorder arises directly from employment in Her Majesty's armed forces, is that not something that we really have to address?
Indeed it is. Mental health services are the Cinderella service in the NHS, and as a society we must re-evaluate whether the way in which we treat those with mental health problems represents the social values that we would like to see in the world's fifth richest country in the 21st century. I met representatives of Combat Stress yesterday. Such charities do a wonderful job, but we will have to do a lot more if we are properly to fulfil our obligations to those who, as my hon. Friend says, suffer as a consequence of fighting for our security.
They way in which we deal with the welfare of our armed forces is integral to dealing not only with the issues that we have mentioned but with our recruitment and retention problems. One thing that we need to consider is how we treat our armed forces compared with other public servants. I shall give one tiny example of mismatch that I was unaware of until my most recent visit to Iraq.
As many Members will know, our troops returning from Afghanistan get a maximum of 48 hours' decompression, at the discretion of their commanding officer. It often occurs in unattractive surroundings in Cyprus, and we have all heard many tales of lengthy periods spent sleeping on airport floors—not much respite for those who have faced bombings and shootings in our name. By contrast, the House might be interested to know that Foreign Office officials in Afghanistan get two weeks' compulsory decompression for every six to seven weeks in theatre. Even better, Department for International Development officials are entitled to the same two-week break away from post for every six weeks in theatre, but they can take a break anywhere in the world on condition that the cost is equal to or less than that of a flight back to the UK. That is not to say that we are treating our officials over-generously, but those in the armed forces will compare their treatment to that of people in other parts of the public service. That will have an impact on recruitment and retention.
I end by giving the House a snapshot of what a decade of Labour's neglect has done to our armed forces. In procurement, the top 19 major procurement projects have gone over budget by a total of £2.95 billion. The Nimrod MRA4 project, which is delayed by 92 months, is £789 million over budget, and the order size has been reduced from 21 to 12. The Astute class submarine, which is delayed by 47 months, is £1.228 billion over budget. The Type 45 destroyer is delayed by 42 months and is £989 million over budget.
Despite an almost unprecedented use of our armed forces in conflict since Labour came into office, Army numbers are down by nearly 2,500, the Royal Navy by nearly 7,000, the RAF by over 14,000 and the Territorial Army by 22,000. Our attack submarines are down by four, our frigates and destroyers by 12, our aircraft carriers by one, fixed-wing aircraft by 168, infantry battalions by four, and armoured fighting vehicles by 479. According to the Government's own figures, 31 out of 36 infantry battalions are under-strength, the shortage being equivalent to four battalions of soldiers. Twelve out of 14 TA infantry battalions are under-strength.
The Government abolished the Defence Export Services Organisation, to the delight of those who oppose the arms trade. In 2004, when we were already involved in two wars, the Government cut the helicopter budget in 2004 by £1.4 billion, and we are still suffering from the consequences. Despite the two wars, this year's defence spending, at 2.2 per cent. of GDP, is the lowest since the 1930s. To cap it all, the Government have not conducted a strategic defence review for this country in 12 years. It is a desperately sorry record, which will take a very different Government a long time to put right.
I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to speak in this afternoon's debate. I pay tribute to the magnificence of our armed forces and their daily heroism, which we witness across the world. They are engaged on a number of fronts that nobody predicted or imagined. The House is aware of the tremendous job that they do in every part of the world where they represent the defence of this country.
I shall concentrate on what might appear a narrow area of UK defence policy, but, as many will know, I have thought for some time that it is probably one of the most important areas, although it is often neglected and not fully discussed in the House: armed forces training. We can only have the best armed forces in the world—I happen to think that we have—if we provide them with the best possible training in the world.
Since the end of the cold war, UK defence policy has gone through major changes, to which Dr. Fox referred. Through a series of defence reviews, we have reconfigured our force structures and armed forces to meet the new challenges resulting from the great unpredictability in the world. We need the ability to respond, which we have had in the past eight years, to unexpected challenges, to be flexible, to have much greater reach, and to be much more effective all round in different scenarios. The predictable scenarios of the cold war no longer exist, so we have, by and large, reconfigured our forces. Although there is some debate over that, it is generally agreed that it was necessary.
We have reconfigured our kit to meet some of the new challenges. The aircraft carriers are on-stream to give us power projection worldwide. The one area that we have not reconfigured, however, is arguably the most important: the training of our enlisted men, ratings and NCOs. The training of the officer corps in the British forces in leadership and management has been successfully modernised and transformed, as the Select Committee on Defence saw on its visit to the defence academy at Shrivenham.
The big challenge is modernising and transforming the rest of the services, particularly the skills and technical training of our armed forces. Eight years after the Government published a report stating that our training regime had to be modernised, we are nearing the end of delivering that for our armed forces. The defence training rationalisation programme is well advanced. The Minister made a statement recently in which he said that progress on that vital and radical project is on track and progressing well. Two weeks ago, a minute before the House extended the contingent liability to £40 million for the biggest Government PFI undertaken in any Department, to allow advanced design work and preparation for the scheme to continue.
The project will completely transform and modernise our delivery of training. It will compress all our training in engineering, mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, electro-engineering, computer science and information technology, into one site in my constituency, at St. Athan. It will be the largest technical college by far in the United Kingdom, and one of the largest technical colleges and centres for technical excellence in the world. It will offer British armed forces, especially new, young recruits, the best technical training in the world. Nothing will compare with it anywhere else.
All that training will be recognised in the civilian community, because qualifications will be civilian as well as military. I learned a skill in the armed forces in the 1960s, but it was no good to me when I finished, and I had to retrain. Many of our servicemen and women still have to do that today, despite the fact that 90 per cent. of them get civilian occupations within 28 days of leaving the forces, which is a tribute to their calibre and quality. However, the new training regime, at the defence technical college at St. Athan, will ensure that all our military personnel will leave with civilian qualifications. That is good for recruitment, because it will make a career in the armed forces much more attractive. It is also good for society, because the engineers who will be turned out over the next 30 years—the duration of the PFI—will serve the community at large. They will be provided with the most modern training environment in the world, using modern, computer-based equipment, virtual training techniques, and student-based and task-oriented training, not the traditional chalk and talk, which has served us well for many years but is out of date for the 21st century and the challenges that we face.
The most important challenge is working in a much more integrated fashion, through jointery involving the three armed forces, and working much more closely with allies. We need a training regime that reflects the challenges that we face daily.
The hon. Gentleman is doing a brilliant marketing job, but I am not sure that the instructors at the Defence College of Communications and Information Systems in Blandford would accept his description of the current CIS training regime as "chalk and talk".
Could the hon. Gentleman give us some idea—I alluded to this in my question to the Minister earlier—of the likely time scale? It seems to be slipping farther and farther into the distance.
I will refer specifically to the timetable, because I think that it is critical at present. As I have said, the project is on course, but Members should bear it in mind that it is one of the largest and most complex PFI projects ever tackled. The idea that no complexities, problems or challenges will arise throughout its duration is absurd. There are bound to be challenges, but I believe that there is a clear timetable.
The planning application is due to be submitted in spring this year. It is detailed planning, for a massive 600-acre new-build development. This thing is gigantic. The construction programme alone is on a par with the one for the London Olympics. It is therefore understandable that there will be some delays. However, we can reasonably expect construction to begin in August 2010, phase 1 to be completed by the beginning of 2014, and phase 2 to be completed by 2015.
We should pay tribute to the tremendous work of the defence training review integrated project team, which has been under the leadership of Brigadier Geoff Nield for the last four and a half years—an extended period—to ensure ownership of the project. Brigadier Nield will be moving on shortly, but it is important that we record our thanks for his achievement in tackling the huge challenge posed by radically transforming our training provision.
Let me return to the original point made by Mr. Walter. I apologise for possibly accentuating my argument a bit too much. The term that I used was not intended to be derogatory towards the current providers, who supply excellent training on the nine legacy sites and the three existing military technical colleges. That training has been excellent, and has served us well over the last 60 years. The problem is that it is not the training that we need to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
We need greater integration, greater jointery and greater flexibility in delivering our training. That will be possible only on a compressed site, with all our service personnel being trained side by side, and we could not wish for a better site than St Athan, which will be a purpose-built facility. I recall with horror and terror going to my first camp, as a young recruit, on a dark December evening. I thought that I had descended into hell. There was no heating. It was an old second world war barracks in Newark, for goodness' sake. It was a quite terrifying experience. These youngsters, however, will enter one of the most modern learning environments imaginable: brand new, and offering the best training—largely from the private sector—and the best trainers in the world.
Furthermore, during their stay at St Athan, the length of which will vary, men and women will have a choice. They will be able to go sailing along the beautiful heritage coast in the morning, go climbing in the Brecon Beacons in the afternoon, and at night go clubbing in Cardiff, one of the fastest-growing and most popular cities in Europe. What more could we offer them?
I have been listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman, and he must forgive me if I have forgotten, but I am not sure whether he has mentioned the overall cost of this magnificent project at St Athan, which is due to begin in 2010. What investment is required from the British taxpayer?
Very little. This is a £12 billion PFI project spread over 25 to 30 years, but much of the risk will be carried by the private sector, and in particular by the two equity partners in Metrix, QinetiQ and Sodexo. This is a PFI project with much of the risk shifted to one side.
As for the cost to the taxpayer, not only will we benefit from the most modern training in the world, but we will save money. The cost savings associated with reducing nine sites to one and getting rid of the current duplication in parts of our training provision over the next 25 years could be enormous. We win both ways. We win by securing the most modern training on offer in the most fantastic environment for learning, and we win by, over time, saving money in the defence training budget. That is what makes the project so attractive, and that is why—certainly in Wales—it has received all-party support from day one.
Progress is being made, and it is being made well. We want that progress to continue until construction starts next year. The facility will provide 1,200 courses. Up to 6,000 recruits at any one time, and up to 25,000 military personnel per year, will be trained on the purpose-built site. The MOD and the Metrix consortium have worked very closely with members of the local community, and have adapted some of their proposals after consulting them. We expect the detailed planning for this huge development to proceed relatively seamlessly in the spring because of the involvement of the community.
Until recently RAF St Athan was the largest military base in the United Kingdom, so we are used to having large numbers of military personnel in the area, but we have challenges to meet if the project is to succeed and our military personnel are to maximise the benefits that they deserve. It is sometimes forgotten that the better trained and better equipped our armed forces are, the fewer casualties result when they engage in warfare. Superior training is much more valuable than large numbers.
The Russian invasion of Georgia was mentioned earlier. One of the reasons the Russians are considering modernising their forces is that, by and large, that invasion was a disaster. There was little control over the military personnel. They succeeded because of their overwhelming numbers, not as a result of being highly trained and highly professional.
We have a big challenge ahead of us, and we must get the infrastructure right for the project to succeed. The building programme will take three to five years, and we must ensure that the transport network is upgraded to match the large numbers of personnel.
The project is based around the super-hangar, which was part of the Red Dragon project, and an auditor's report on the matter is imminent. Whatever the report says in criticism or otherwise of the Government or of the Welsh Assembly, we should not lose sight of the fact that the hangar was a critical factor in securing the £12 billion investment to transform military training. The hangar will become the core site in the training development.
Our armed forces deserve the best, and through that project they will receive the best. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of this House will continue to support the project, as they have in the past. I hope that those who are responsible for making the decisions to improve the infrastructure—they are not necessarily in this House—will ensure not only that our youngsters benefit, but that the local community does not suffer. I also hope that they take those decisions now.
One or two critical decisions are coming up shortly. We will see a further extension of the contingent liability. Next month, the director of joint technical training for all three services will move to St. Athan. For those who doubt whether the project is on course, I point out that the director is taking a large team to oversee the transition from the existing colleges, as excellent as they are, to the brand-new, purpose-built site. The men and women who represent this country so courageously every day in some of the most difficult environments imaginable—in recent years, the Defence Committee has had the privilege of visiting some of them—deserve nothing less than the best possible training in the world. They will get that at St. Athan, and I hope that the whole House rallies to ensure that the project is delivered on time and to budget.
Like the Minister and the shadow Secretary of State, I start by expressing condolences in respect of those who have died recently not only in Afghanistan, but, as we have heard, tragically and appallingly in Northern Ireland. The Minister pointed out that that takes the count of those who have died in Afghanistan to 152. Each of those casualties is an individual tragedy not only personally, but collectively for our armed forces. In addition to those 152 deaths, we must remember those who have been seriously injured or wounded, some of whom have been wounded in life-changing ways. We do not discuss those people as often as we should. There is something rather British about that, and it is certainly conspicuous that the Americans and, I think, the Canadians often pay greater tribute to their wounded personnel than we do.
It is not easy to make this point, but I shall make it nevertheless. Although the figure of 152 deaths is shocking, if one considers the length of time that we have been in Afghanistan, the huge number of our personnel who have served there and the extraordinarily dangerous work, it is worth pausing and counting our blessings that that number is not a great deal higher. I take the view that that figure might have been higher, which would certainly have been the case in the past. Among other things, we should pay tribute to the advances in medical expertise that have prevented the situation from being a great deal worse.
Both Front Benchers rightly referred to the disgraceful scenes when the Royal Anglian Regiment paraded in Luton, and I echo the sentiments expressed by other hon. Members. It occurs to me that those who mounted those ill-judged protests shot themselves in the foot in terms of the cause that they were trying to promote. The overall effect was to give far more public attention to the home-coming parade than might otherwise have been the case and to unite public opinion in appreciation of what those troops have done on our behalf and in abhorrence at the protestors and their message. The public are now showing a greater appreciation of our armed forces; that has increased a lot in a remarkably short period of time. The regular scenes in Wootton Bassett that we have heard about are a leading example of that. In previous debates in this House, many Members have made the point that our work in Afghanistan is sometimes misunderstood by the British public, but I draw some encouragement from the fact that there is now growing appreciation of what we are trying to achieve there.
Only five months have passed since we last had a debate entitled "Defence in the UK", but a great deal has happened in that time: there has been a grave worsening of the economic crisis; there has been the decision to issue a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq; and a new US Administration have arrived, with a very different approach from their predecessor. I particularly welcome the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and I recall with some amusement that when we Liberal Democrats argued previously for that, we were lampooned on the basis that we could not have a timetable for withdrawal and it was naive of us to think that such a thing could be done as we should never signal our intentions to the enemy. However, we said at the time that the day would inevitably come when the Government would announce a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and they have now done so, and so too have the Americans. It is my sincere belief—as it was when my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Menzies Campbell first suggested to this House that there ought to be a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq—that that is long overdue and could have been done a great deal earlier.
I am pleased that a debate on defence in the UK can be interpreted as covering defence in the world, and I would just point out that the Liberal Democrats were proposing a timetable for withdrawal before the surge had happened and succeeded, and at a time when the outcome of the conflict in Iraq was very much in the balance.
I respect what the hon. Gentleman says and I understand his argument, but the point that was made at the time was that one could not have such a thing as a timetable for withdrawal, and the fact of the matter is— [Interruption.] That was not the point that was made at the time; the point was made that we could not have a timetable for withdrawal, but of course we can have a timetable for withdrawal. Clearly, it has to be a timetable that takes account of the circumstances, but the fact of the matter is that we can have such a timetable and, ultimately, as was always going to be the case, that is precisely what we have ended up having.
The arrival of a new US Administration is a very welcome development. That is already giving rise to a remarkably swift reconsideration in the United States of its approaches to some of the significant issues with which we are ourselves tied up.
Will the hon. Gentleman also touch on the changes taking place in Europe, notably the decision by the Czechs no longer to participate in the futile missile defence programme, which the official Opposition, along with the Government, seem to be hellbent on pursuing, regardless of Obama coming into office?
That is certainly a very interesting development, as, of course, is the French decision to rejoin fully the NATO command. These are all factors that affect the circumstances in which we organise our defence in the UK.
It seems to me that in the UK defence is still the poor relation in the progressive agenda. We have seen new thinking in education and health and on the environment, but in defence we remain stuck with some outmoded habits and a lack of new thinking. As has been said, it is perfectly true that there has been substantial and significant reorganisation of our armed forces since the end of the cold war, but it is still possible to level the criticism that we remain too much configured along cold war lines and that there is a need for further reorganisation to get us configured for the modern-day realities. America has, I believe, woken up to this; President Obama is planning an overhaul of US defence procurement and strategy, bringing it out of the cold war era. When, I wonder, will we? In every debate Ministers are urged to set up a new strategic defence review so that we can reassess and realign defence, where necessary, and make new decisions about how to face future threats and challenges, yet still they resist any suggestion that that should happen. I am confident that after the next election, whatever its outcome, a strategic defence review will be set up, but it could be doing its work a great deal sooner if some of the scoping of it were to be set in train now and were to be subject to some debate before the election.
Is there not a danger that if we are still fighting the last war to happen—or the last that did not happen—and still have a cold war mentality, there will be some, particularly in Russia, who interpret that as being a threat to them and that will end up distorting their foreign and military policy? That may make our maintaining a cold war strategy, in part, a reality, rather than the reverse; the deployment of missile defence may be making the situation a lot worse.
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I do not think it takes very much for the Russians to interpret anything they choose as some sort of provocation, but one certainly does not want to give them any additional grounds for doing so, if one can help it.
One can only hope that by the time we next have this debate, most of our involvement in Iraq will be over. I echo the points made in yesterday's debate about the fact that we should be getting on with the process of setting up an inquiry into exactly what we achieved there, what went well, what went wrong, why we got involved in the first place and what lessons we might draw from that for future engagements, particularly if we maintain, as the outcome of the strategic defence review, as I hope we will, a commitment to an interventionist policy and to expeditionary warfare. I hope that lessons will also be learned for operations in Afghanistan, where there are still many challenges ahead, most notably the real problem of overspill into Pakistan, which is, itself, very unstable at the moment. We will have an ongoing task preparing the British public for what will be a protracted conflict.
The economic crisis poses a new threat to our national defence. We have been aware for some time that there is a black hole in the Ministry of Defence finances. A year or so ago, it was estimated at £2 billion, and it is in no danger of shrinking—indeed, there is every likelihood that it will get bigger and bigger. Estimates of true defence inflation vary; some say that it is at least 3 per cent., whereas other figures that are cited are higher. It is clear that the defence industry is not going to remain untouched by the current economic difficulties, and this will bring uncertain consequences for the skills bases, contracts and projects involved.
In these uncertain times, the defence industry is partly immune from the wider malaise, but we must be careful to ensure that the economic difficulties do not impede further our activities overseas or the delivery of vital resources to the front line. The recent Defence Committee report highlighted that, even now, there are problems with equipment. Our track record on procurement is like a broken record: delayed, over budget and below requirement. The Government have yet to face up to the reality of how on earth they will be able to afford all the programmes that are still in place in principle on the budget that is available at the moment and what they will do to get industry on board, to try to make the delivery of existing projects more efficient.
As part of the present crisis, we should look at current procurements, but problems from the past are also catching up with us. We have heard that Nimrod is to be grounded, which is an admission that the fleet is not fit to fly. It seems to have taken Ministers a long time to arrive at that conclusion, whereas aircrew, coroners and others have been saying for some time that the aircraft are not airworthy. It does not surprise me, in the light of the current economic storm, that Trident and the proposal to renew it have been mentioned. We heard from Mr. Kilfoyle that some distinguished retired military figures have been debating it. We heard from the Minister that people have been debating it on the conservativehome website. There is renewed interest in the subject in the light of the economic crisis.
It is not only distinguished ex-military personnel, but they have been fairly outspoken. I would far sooner listen to people who have been on the front line than the armchair generals of the television studios or newspaper columns. Ted Postol, the man who designed the Trident system, has pointed out that it could be adapted for the needs of our country, if that is what we wish, instead of spending an as yet indeterminate sum replacing it.
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. It is right to ask questions about this issue. We believe that the House was premature in seeking to make a decision two years ago. A final decision does not have to be made, and in truth will not be made, until main gate, which is the point at which the Thatcher Government made the political decision about Trident. The significant costs of Trident replacement will begin to rack up only midway through the next decade. I do not suggest that the questions need to be answered today, any more than they had to be two years ago, but it is right that the questions are being asked. They will continue to be asked from now right through to the time at which any decision is made. It is especially apt that the questions arise at the moment, as we progress towards the 2010 non-proliferation treaty conference talks.
I listened with interest to Dr. Fox, who expressed his sincerely held view, which can be fairly characterised as being that there were no circumstances in which he thought it would ever be possible for the UK to give up its nuclear deterrent. That is a point of view, and he is entitled to hold it, but if he, as a Minister, were to articulate that position on behalf of the UK, it would undoubtedly put us in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We have binding and solemn commitments under that treaty that it is our duty to try to fulfil at all times.
Personnel must be our priority. Withdrawing from Iraq will alleviate some of the burden, but Afghanistan will continue to take its toll. The mental health casualties will start to become more apparent in the coming years, and we surely all agree that more needs to be done to tackle this issue head on. However, I welcome the progress that has been made recently. We still have a huge problem of alcohol and substance abuse among former personnel, and a high proportion of prisoners—one in 11, or some 8,000—are ex-services.
Preparing our service personnel for life after the armed forces, whether that be rehabilitation, medical care and support or further skills and education, still needs to become more central to our thinking. For service personnel and their families we must do more to honour our commitments. In particular, a recent National Audit Office report revealed that housing was still in a sorry state. As I have said before in these debates, at the current rate of progress, it will take 20 years to bring all the housing up to scratch. That was widely pooh-poohed at the time, but I was intrigued to note that the NAO report arrived at the same figure.
Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a legacy of the privatisation by the previous Government of the MOD housing stock to Annington Homes? It also represents the failure of this Government to address the problem, because 12 years down the line the public purse is still spending a small fortune for property that it does not, and will never, own unless legislation is introduced to bring MOD housing back under MOD ownership.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Annington deal was a bad deal for the taxpayer and that we have, in a sense, been paying a price for that ever since. I must say that the Government have a nasty habit of aggregating routine maintenance, rent and improvements and of presenting the sum of those costs as though the total was all being spent on improvements. That, I am afraid, is misleading. It will take a long time—
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman a couple of times, and I think that it would be better if he made a speech himself, if he can catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The fact is that nearly a third of service personnel and their families are unhappy with the standard of accommodation.
We have mentioned already that there are interesting developments in Europe. The US, for example, has made it clear that it wants to deal less with the UK as a bridge to the European Union and more with the European Union as a whole. Although we must continue to have a strong bilateral partnership with the United States, it is in its interest as well as ours to have a stronger European partner this side of the Atlantic. I hope that the Minister and his colleagues are exploring avenues for greater defence co-operation, particularly now that the French have changed their stance in such a significant way. I hope that in the fullness of time, such co-operation will come to enjoy the support of all parties.
UK defence, in my view, is in drastic need of an overhaul. We need a new strategic defence review and a good hard look at the configuration of our defence and the infrastructure behind it. The economic crisis only adds to the imperative to deliver cost-effective and vital projects efficiently and to tight deadlines. As John F. Kennedy once said:
"When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters—one represents danger and one represents opportunity."
Let us not get entrenched in the economic crisis to the detriment of our defence capabilities, but seize this opportunity to come out the other side with a more effective, efficient and decisive armed force.
I hope that the Minister is enjoying his time in the Ministry of Defence. I recall vividly that when I was appointed Secretary of State for Defence, I received a letter from the late Julian Amery, who said, "You will enjoy the Ministry of Defence. They spoil their Ministers and make them feel heroic." As Defence Ministers inspect guards of honour, sit in tanks and fly in planes, one can understand what he meant.
I want to begin by addressing what is, in a certain sense, a paradox. The Government will constantly say, as they have said for many years, that there is real growth in the defence budget and that there has been over the period that they have been in office. Technically, they are correct. They will also maintain that the UK, after the US, spends more on defence than virtually any other country in the world. That, too, is correct. However, one recalls the remark that one can use statistics like the drunk man uses the lamp post—for support rather than illumination. The Minister and the Government know as well as the rest of us that although those statistics might have some technical accuracy, they are combined with equally important facts that were referred to by my hon. Friend the shadow Defence Secretary.
Over the past 12 years, we have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of aircraft and combat ships and in the manpower of the armed forces. We have also seen the Government's inability to carry out the task that they have appointed for themselves without extraordinary overstretch for the armed forces and an unprecedented use of our reserve forces, to which I shall return in a few moments' time.
So how does one explain the fact that despite real growth the outcome is so depressing? Part of it, as my hon. Friend Dr. Fox said, was that the increase in the cost of procurement projects is vastly greater than any retail prices index might show when it is used to determine the defence budget. That is clearly part of the explanation, but another element has been the continuing and increasing pressure to improve—quite rightly, in many ways—the pay and allowances for our armed forces. That, too, is something that we welcome, but it has the consequences to which I have referred.
However, the Government cannot escape the fact that another part of the explanation is that their policy over the past 12 years has resulted in far greater use of our armed forces in a series of wars, conflicts and operations. That has not been funded simply by the reserve, because it has involved a much greater utilisation of equipment. The fact that that equipment is used far more often means that it has a shorter life and constantly needs to be repaired and improved, and the overall impact has been of a very serious order.
I freely acknowledge—indeed, I take great pride in the fact—that, after the US, the UK and France are the only countries that can claim a significant ability to deploy armed forces around the world. There are larger armies—in Russia, India and China, and so forth—but, for various reasons with which I am sure that the House is familiar, the UK and France remain very important countries. I deliberately include France in this regard because it is comparable with the UK in the sense that both countries are able to match diplomacy with military capability, where that is appropriate. That is hugely desirable but, despite the incredible economic growth we are told we have had over the past 12 years and the huge increase in cash going to the MOD, there has still been extraordinary overstretch in all sorts of ways. If that has been true during the years of plenty, what do we have to look forward to now, given that we have entered a period for which there are extremely lean implications?
Nick Harvey said that there was a need for a review at some stage. I think that he is right, but we must clarify what we mean by that. In a sense, I am addressing my comments on this matter to both Front-Bench teams because, although there will undoubtedly be a need for a review, it cannot be only a defence review or limited to our armed forces. Any review must combine the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with the Ministry of Defence in a way that has not happened before. Only then will we end up with a coherent and deliverable policy that does not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Most of the time, our defence and armed forces are not an end in themselves but the means to an end determined by our foreign policy. Defence is the handmaiden of foreign policy: it is one of the means—although not the only one—by which we sometimes have to implement or advance our foreign policy objectives.
Frederick the Great once remarked that diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments. Over the past 12 years, our armed forces have been used to a degree unprecedented since 1945. Under Mr. Blair, and the trend has continued under this Government, we have had a series of wars. Of course, wars did not begin in 1997, but what has been unprecedented is that most of the wars since then have not been wars of necessity. Instead, they have been wars of choice.
I do not want to go today into the question of whether the choices were right or wrong. That is a separate issue but, in the past, most of the wars that we found ourselves in were ones in which either we or our allies had been attacked. War therefore became necessary, because no other option was available. However, the wars in Kosovo and Iraq were wars of choice, and the same is true of what happened in Sierra Leone: even though that was a very small combat operation, it was still a war of choice on the Government's part.
I concede that the war in Afghanistan is more difficult to determine, because of 9/11 and the rest of the background. One could say that it was an intervention of necessity, but in every other respect the operations that have been putting such huge pressure on our armed forces were not imposed on the British Government. They were something no Government could have ignored; they were decisions, right or wrong, that the Government chose to take. If we are in that world, it is crucial that this essential review—whether the Government are Labour, or indeed Conservative—not just takes into account the foreign policy that the Government of the day want to pursue, but must actually be based on it.
I have made no secret of my dislike of the policy of using our armed forces to intervene in other people's wars, but I want the United Kingdom to continue to have a global world role. We have much to contribute to the world and, for the most part, our contribution is highly beneficial, but the worst possible outcome would be for us to continue to have aspirations towards a global foreign policy while we refuse or are unable to provide the means to implement it, in particular its military component, whenever it may prove necessary. That would be the worst of all possible worlds.
I point out to my hon. Friend Dr. Lewis, perhaps more than to the Government—they are at the end of their term and we are about to begin ours—that implementing that role will be a crucial requirement. We know that the Government have been reluctant to deal with the comprehensive spending review, no doubt because they have problems not just with defence but with all sorts of areas of expenditure. However, with the exception of health and, I think, overseas development, there would be no ring-fencing of any budget by a future Conservative Government. In a way, I welcome that; it is right and proper that such matters are examined without preconditions and without too many pre-qualifications, but it is crucial that the next Conservative Government deal with the problem—as much as the Labour Government have failed to—in a way that does not continue the desperately serious overstretch of recent times.
In the second half of my remarks, which is linked to the first, I shall concentrate on our reserve forces. I declare an interest as I was for eight years the honorary colonel of a Territorial Army regiment. Hearing about the invitation to do that was as much of a surprise to me as it may be to other Members. Normally when someone ceases to be Secretary of State for Defence, the armed forces never wish to see them or hear of them again, regardless of personality or the colour of the Government concerned, so the invitation was unusual and a great privilege. One day I must table a parliamentary question to find out how many Secretaries of State for Defence in the Labour Government were so approached after their term of office. I suspect that the answer would cheer me up enormously.
The way in which the Territorial Army has been used over the past 12 years has been one of the most serious examples of problems in resources leading to policy decisions that have had, and continue to have, serious implications of a considerable kind. I remind the House that until the Reserve Forces Act 1996, the reserves had not been used since 1945. Such was the legal position throughout those years that there had either to be general mobilisation of the whole Territorial Army or no use of the reserves at all. For example, the Territorial Army was never used in the Gulf war or the Falklands war, because there was no legal basis that would have permitted that without mobilising the whole reserve force. That caused considerable frustration. Many individual reservists, having received splendid training, wanted to be able to use the skills they had been given.
As Secretary of State, I initiated the policy changes that led to the 1996 Act and I am delighted that we introduced it. However, the Act has been used in ways far different from anything that was contemplated. Under the Act, it was contemplated that it would be possible to use individual units for a particular short-term operation, or to fill some immediate gap to deal with what nowadays we would call a "surge requirement" for a limited period, but that is not what has happened. There has, in fact, been a continuous use of the reserves in the wars and operations that have continued without interruption since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, our involvement looks like continuing for a number of years to come.
We had better be clear about the implications of that. The Labour Government's general attitude towards the reservists has, I fear, been pretty shabby. One of the decisions that they took in the 1998 strategic defence review was to make a massive reduction in the size of the Territorial Army. It was 56,000-strong at that time; it has 36,000 people today. Over the past 12 years, we have entered the worst of all possible worlds; there has been unprecedented use of our reservists exactly when their numbers have been dramatically reduced to their lowest level for many generations, if not ever. It is that dysfunction and disharmony that are so indefensible, in my judgment.
Let me give the House figures relating to what has happened since 1997. Since 2003—that is, since our involvement with Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth—17,000 reservists have been mobilised. That represents 9 per cent. of those mobilised in Afghanistan, and 4 per cent. of those mobilised in Iraq. I draw attention to a particular point: when we passed the 1996 Act, we did not envisage those sorts of numbers. We said that the use of an individual reservist should be such that his or her cumulative exposure should be a maximum of one year in three. That remains, I think, the legal position today. The Ministry of Defence handout "Future use of the UK's Reserve Forces", published on
"It is recognised that regular mobilisation of the VRF"— that is, the volunteer reserve forces—
"up to this maximum is unsustainable."
It goes on to say:
"The feedback...is that a limit of up to 12 months' service in aggregate over 5 years is more reasonable unless the individual volunteers for more frequent tours."
That sounds good; that sounds as if the policy were becoming more flexible. However, the document goes on to say:
"Where possible, this is the level which we intend to apply unless no viable alternative exists."
In other words, the Government make the concession and make it meaningless, in the same sentence.
It is not sustainable to continue with that policy. I say that to the Government and, indeed, to my right hon. and hon. Friends, because I suspect that they will have responsibility for the matter in the not-too-distant future. We already know the consequences. Reservists have been voting with their feet. After the Iraq war, between 2003 and 2005, some 15,000 reservists quit, and they have not been replaced. I mentioned earlier that the size of the Territorial Army is 36,000. That is not its authorised strength; its authorised strength is 42,000. The reason it has only 36,000 people is that it has not been able to recruit the numbers required. People have not been willing or able to join in the numbers that the Government presumably think necessary. That should cause serious concern to the Government Front-Bench team.
I make one final point in drawing to the end of my remarks. It may be said, "Well, you know, it is not just reservists whom we have had problems recruiting; the regular forces have had similar difficulties." That is true, but there is a crucial distinction that I do not think has yet been mentioned. Over the past few years, we have gone through a period of very low unemployment. Historically, when unemployment is low, the regular forces have difficulty recruiting to the extent required. For very sad reasons, that will now change. Now that unemployment is becoming a serious problem, it is likely that the regular forces will not have anything like the same difficulty recruiting. Although that will benefit the regular forces, exactly the opposite argument will apply to the Territorial Army. Precisely because unemployment is increasing and getting very high indeed, employers will have not the slightest incentive, when they have such a vast number of people from whom they can recruit, to chose those who, for one year in three, or whatever the period will be, are required by the Government to fill the gaps that they are not prepared to fill through the regular Army.
My right hon. and learned Friend is making a typically powerful speech. On the subject of recruitment and retention in both the regular Army and the Territorial Army, does he not think that it is an absolute disgrace that the Government are within a week of implementing a new pay round, and none of our professional men and women in the services have any idea what pay they will be entitled to from Wednesday of next week? When he was Secretary of State for Defence, would he have allowed such a shambolic situation?
I would certainly have tried to prevent it, but whether the Treasury would have allowed me to do so is the question that must be addressed. I have not the slightest doubt that the Ministry of Defence could make the announcement today if it were permitted to do so. Another part of Government is creating the problem, and it is a disgrace. My hon. Friend is right to refer to it.
The Minister was good enough to allow me to intervene on him to raise the review of the reserve forces. I welcome the fact that that review is taking a lot longer than originally intended—I make no complaint about that. However, looking at the review's terms of reference, I am not convinced that those conducting it will be able to address the questions that I have raised today. I hope that they will do so—I hope that when the review is published, it will refer to the gross overstretch and misuse of the reserve forces. It is not good enough for the Minister simply to say that individual reservists like going out on operations—of course they do, I have not the slightest doubt about that, but it is not just about their personal interest. Their families and employers are also involved in the process, and the Government know perfectly well that the strains that have developed in recent years have made the current policy unsustainable.
I simply conclude by saying, first, that we cannot have foreign and defence policies that are not in harmony. Secondly, if the Government—whoever they are, Labour or Conservative—wish, as I hope they will, to have a world view and a global foreign policy, it is no longer possible to resist the argument that the regular forces in particular have to have the manpower compatible with that aspiration. While the reservists can help and may be used for special occasions, such as surge requirements, and to fill particular gaps—that is what they are there for; I do not have a problem with that—the idea that they can be a permanent way of supplementing the regular forces and getting regular soldiers on the cheap should never have come into play. It must stop, and the quicker it does, the better.
My right hon. and learned—and, now we discover, gallant—Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind has just given an appalling portrayal of the defence of this country clinging on by the skin of its teeth.
Twenty-three years ago, just before I became a Member of Parliament, I sat in the Public Gallery and watched a Secretary of State mesmerising the House of Commons. If I thought that I would immediately follow him on the Floor of the House, after the intervening period in which he served as Secretary of State of Defence and Foreign Secretary, I would have been appalled, and I would have been right. However, it is a great honour to follow my right hon. and learned Friend in a debate on defence in the UK.
I am afraid, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you may have a little difficulty keeping us in order, because the title of the debate is, at best, not very helpful and, at worst, utterly meaningless. It gives the impression of "Dad's Army". While many of our forces are of course deployed abroad, there is also a plucky home guard ready to fight off the Russians if they turn the wrong way coming out of the northern approaches. As a title, "Defence in the UK" is complete rubbish. The Defence Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into our relations with Russia. I shall confide to the House, hoping that it goes no further, that we do not consider ourselves under imminent threat of invasion.
We can, of course, in this debate discuss home basing issues, and I intend to say a little about Project Belvedere. We can discuss some of the training issues, in so far as training takes place in the UK, and we have heard from John Smith about St. Athan, which was a surprise to all of us. But "Defence in the UK"? Modern defence is not a geographical thing. It rests on industry, which is global, on our alliances, which are global, on our interests, which are global, and above all on our people in the armed forces, to whom I pay a very great tribute, and there are now few of them who stay in the UK for very long.
Whatever we do has an effect elsewhere. What happens in Pakistan, whether it is an attack by an American drone based in Afghanistan on insurgents in South Waziristan, or the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan, affects attitudes in the Pakistani community and in other communities in the UK, because the media are global too. Communication is now instant. To distinguish between the UK and Pakistan or Afghanistan is becoming increasingly pointless, since everything that happens there will instantly affect what happens here.
And that is what this country does not get. It is what this continent, Europe, does not get. They do not understand that leakage of nuclear weapons technology, as has already happened in Pakistan, thanks to A.Q. Khan, is just as likely to lead to a nuclear bomb going off in London as it is to one going off in Islamabad—in fact, rather more so. The people of this country, of this continent, do not believe and do not understand that if we allow the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan to become even more unstable than it already is, it is not the Islamic countries that will be the targets of the new rulers of those countries. It will be us, here in the UK, so we cannot afford to fail there.
But for reasons that my right hon. and learned Friend has just set out so eloquently, it looks as though, in financial terms, we cannot even afford to try to succeed. We are devoting to that particular struggle one twentieth of the number of troops and one fiftieth of the amount of aid that we devoted to the much richer and more stable area of Bosnia. We are using up our kit five times faster than we can replace it. We are fighting a war with a peacetime mentality.
That is because nobody is effectively proclaiming in this country or this continent that defence is good, that we have the right to defend our values, and that we have the duty to do so. The Secretary of State for Defence recently came out with a reiteration of the defence planning assumptions that is almost identical to the previous defence planning assumptions. There is a sense of treading water. Afghan operations must not mean that the Ministry of Defence or the armed forces will in a few years be trapped in a time warp. There needs to be new thinking now, thinking ahead for future challenges, because they are not even future challenges—they are challenges that we face now. It is just that we have not recognised how serious they are.
To give him his due, I believe that the Secretary of State for Defence believes in defence. I believe that of the whole defence ministerial team. However, the Ministry of Defence team alone does not have the capacity to deliver on the need to inspire and give the country the sort of warnings that Winston Churchill was giving in the 1930s. It needs the whole Government, including the Prime Minister, to pull in the same direction and they need to take the House, which is now nearly empty, with them.
This may seem a cheap point, but it happens to be true. To most hon. Members, a defence debate means an opportunity not to discuss matters fundamental to the survival of this country and our values, but to go to their constituencies. Yes, their work there is important, but it is rarely a matter of life and death, as what we are discussing today is. The Government need to take the country with them, but the plain truth is that the absence of Russian hordes in the northern approaches has meant that defence has become something that we have taken for granted and that some people, such as those involved in the Campaign Against Arms Trade, are even uncomfortable with.
In the House, there used to be three individual service day debates and two days' debate on the statement on the defence estimate. All that became meaningless as the services did more and more on a joint basis, and it rightly changed in the late 1990s and the early part of this century. However, now there are three debates on policy, procurement and personnel, and two more were added—on defence in the world and defence in the UK—to make up for the defence estimates debate, those last two being particularly unfortunately named. We need a return to two days' debate at a set time each year—perhaps when the MOD's annual report is issued, so that there can be a useful focus. We need five general days' debate on defence, and perhaps more.
I said earlier that I would say a little about the basing decision involved in Project Belvedere. For some time, the Ministry of Defence has been considering whether to re-base the Chinook helicopters that are currently at RAF Odiham. In the last debate on defence personnel, I discussed the issue at some length. I shall not do so again today; suffice it to say that the Chinooks should stay where they are. However, I want to say one thing. The Minister said that he was trying to bring the issue to a conclusion as soon as possible and that no decision had yet been made. Today we are having a debate on defence in the UK, and today would be the correct time to announce that the Chinooks will stay where they are. We all know that there is no money and no appetite to move them. The only obstacle in the way of the announcement of the decision, and in the way of some welcome clarity and direction for those who have been abortively slaving away at this ghastly project for years, is chronic indecision. I ask the Minister to make the announcement—just get it over with. He will feel a lot better for doing so, and so will we.
Frankly, the design and implementation of the joint personnel administration system, or JPA, has been a disaster. Its failings were broadly responsible for the Comptroller and Auditor General's qualifying the Ministry of Defence's accounts. Neither the Ministry of Defence nor those, such as the Defence Committee, who scrutinise it, can see what is going on. Many personnel data are provisional, projected or uncertain and that has been the case for the past couple of years. In its quarterly reports, the Ministry of Defence cannot even properly report against some of its new departmental strategic objectives, because it does not have the necessary data.
Those failings may sound technical, but they have caused profound unhappiness among service personnel. Today I heard about the case of an Army captain who was posted abroad and was not paid for three months. When he got back, he discovered that his credit rating had been severely damaged. The response was: "It's your fault. You should have looked on the internet to see that things were working properly." Well, let us remind our soldiers to take their laptops with them to Musa Qala in future. We cannot treat our soldiers in this way.
Unless the JPA is sorted out, there will be more grounds for dissatisfaction within the armed forces than it is comfortable to imagine. We need to treat those people properly—in their housing, in relation to their families, in their medical care, in their pay and conditions, and in their life after they leave the armed forces. That is not just because we need them, although we truly do, and not just because they are courageous and effective, although they really are, but because it should and must be a matter of honour for us to recognise and appreciate that they sacrifice everything for their country and for our values. They give us our freedom, and we owe them more than we can express.
It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I want particularly to raise two issues that are of great concern to my constituency and have been raised with me by a considerable number of constituents.
The first issue, which has already been raised by several hon. Members, is Britain's possession of nuclear weapons, particularly the decision to renew and replace the current Trident nuclear weapons system. As the Minister will be aware, this has for many generations been higher up the political agenda in Scotland than in other parts of the United Kingdom. There has traditionally been a far higher level of opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland, for a variety of reasons.
From the 1950s, we have had ongoing campaigns against nuclear weapons, so the issue has been very visible in the public eye. Since the 1950s, we have seen considerable shifts to the left in public opinion. Parties of the left are far stronger in Scotland than in other parts of the UK, and social democratic ideas are much more central in the political establishment. There is also the fact that nuclear weapons systems—Polaris, Poseidon and Trident—have been physically based on the west coast of Scotland, which is our major population base. In constituencies such as mine, we do on occasion see the submarines travelling up and down the Clyde, so people feel that this is far closer to them. That cuts both ways. A number of jobs are provided at the Faslane nuclear weapons base, but there is awareness of and concern about the situation and a debate about whether it is appropriate for Britain to possess nuclear weapons at all.
I welcome some of the statements recently made by the Government, particularly by the Prime Minister, on the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their possession by countries throughout the world. Those statements are reinforced by what is being said by the newly elected Administration in the United States of America. As Nick Harvey said, we are moving towards next year's non-proliferation treaty review conference. It is therefore appropriate that the British Government are trying to put this issue far higher up the political agenda, not only because of the new US Administration but because of the greater risks that we all face in the world as the years go by.
The position taken by the Conservative Front-Bench spokesperson, Dr. Fox, suggests that his party sees no circumstances whatsoever in which Britain could move towards not having nuclear weapons. My fear for many years has been that many of the arguments made for Britain's possession of nuclear weapons could be used by any country in the world. The implication of those arguments is that any and every country in the world will possess nuclear weapons as time goes on, and that is a world that we should all fear. We need to put moves on restricting and removing weapons of mass destruction at the top of the international agenda.
Such points have been put to me repeatedly by my constituents, and increasingly in the last few months I been asked whether, given the current difficult economic circumstances, it is appropriate for Britain to be spending something in the region of £76 billion on these weapons. The figure is indeterminate; we do not know exactly what it will cost to replace the current Trident nuclear weapons systems, but we know that historically such projects have tended to end up being more expensive than originally envisaged. Whatever the cost, it is likely to be huge, and given some of the other comments made in the debate about our armed personnel and the support that people receive not just through pay, but when they return home having been in the military—particularly those suffering from physical or psychological injury—we have to question whether that is the best use of the nation's resources.
I place on the record my hope that the Government will look again at the issue of Trident renewal, and use opportunities available in the coming debates on the non-proliferation treaty to consider ways Britain can move to a non-nuclear future, and perhaps more importantly, to use that as a mechanism to ensure that we restrict as much as possible the possession of such weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. Any other position that Britain took would be hypocritical. If we say that it is good enough for us, it is difficult to say that it is not good enough for other nations. In our foreign policy in general, such hypocrisy has damaged us, particularly in the past few years in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and in the repercussions of that war and the war on terror. It would be a significant failing if we continued down that path.
The other issue I want to talk about is the future of the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency, which affects my constituents and those of a number of other hon. Members. The DSDA was formed three years ago after the Ministry of Defence won an in-house bid in competition with two private sector companies. Indeed, since its formation, another look has been taken at whether the service should be privatised or remain in house.
There was great concern that in the pre-Budget review before Christmas the DSDA, along with a wide range of other public sector organisations, was named as an organisation that would be looked at again for efficiency savings, and to establish whether it is an appropriate part of the public sector to consider for outsourcing, privatisation or some other model. More than 250 privatisation programmes are running in the Ministry of Defence, and an operational efficiency programme is currently being looked at by the Treasury to determine whether the DSDA should be looked at again.
Approximately 350 people are employed in a military depot in my constituency by DSDA, and there is a great deal of concern about the proposals. I have written to the Secretary of State and asked him, along with Treasury officials, to meet the relevant staff trade unions to talk through the process. I have also asked them to meet not just myself but other interested MPs in whose constituencies affected depots are sited, on a cross-party basis. We understand that there might be some kind of announcement on the issue in the Budget, so I ask Ministers again whether such a meeting could be set up.
One frustration is that since the announcement, it has been difficult to get information about the process. This might be an early stage, and there might not be a huge amount of information to share, but there is concern that there might be an announcement in the Budget when staff have not had an opportunity to take part in the process. Will Ministers get back to us on that, either in the debate or in the next few days, and will they meet the relevant Members? There is a great deal of concern, given the Ministry of Defence's history on the issues of privatisation and job security. I therefore ask Ministers to reconsider the matter, and I would appreciate it if they would come back to us with some dates for a meeting.
It is a pleasure to speak in what has so far, quite rightly, been a wide-ranging debate. I begin by paying tribute to those who have given their lives in the service of this country since the last defence debate, and to their families, who are left to bear the burden for a very long time.
There have been some excellent speeches, not least from my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State, although I am rather concerned that he did not make the point that we are living in the deepest recession in my lifetime, which will severely restrict his hopes and aspirations for future defence policy. There will be slippage in many programmes and in the amount of money that the current Government have committed for the future. Those problems will land in the lap of the next Secretary of State.
I do not disagree in any way with my hon. Friend on the principle that, as well as being able to fight counter-insurgency wars, we need to be able to tackle what I call conventional, state-against-state warfare. As a down-to-earth person, however, the question that comes into my mind is how Members of all parties think that that can be paid for. The current Government will not be holding the reins, because I do not believe that they will be returned to office at the next general election. That very difficult question will therefore have to be dealt with by the Conservative party, if, as I hope, we are on the other side of the House.
Does my hon. Friend believe that the problem that she has set out was significantly exacerbated by the announcement in December of, in essence, the postponement of all major defence procurement decisions until just after the next general election?
That is the point that I was seeking to make, and my right hon. Friend has made it much more succinctly. Of course, he is absolutely correct. Decisions are being made now, but the payment problem will not arise until after the next general election. That will exacerbate the situation by limiting the choices of an incoming Government.
No one in this House or the UK doubts for one minute the bravery, determination and skill of our armed forces, but we as a nation have failed in our engagement in Iraq, and although heavily committed in Afghanistan, our forces are struggling from a lack of appropriate equipment, especially protected vehicles and air power. Iraq and Afghanistan are two wars for which the United Kingdom, and more specifically the Army, was totally unprepared in terms of both weaponry and training. On more than one occasion, I have welcomed new kit, which has proved most excellent, but we still lack sufficient numbers of protected vehicles, helicopters and airlift capacity. Both training and weaponry have been more suited to conventional warfare than to the sort of counter-insurgency operations to which our troops have more recently been committed. The United Kingdom is now too small, militarily speaking, to engage well in both conventional and counter-insurgency warfare. We have recently been most heavily involved in the latter, and given the present instability in various parts of the world, that is unlikely to change in the near future.
The future Army structure, for which the Army has been completely reorganised, is concentrated on a medium-weight capability based on airlift. With the life of the Hercules C-130K coming to an end in 2012 and the J-type not due in service until 2026, combined with the A400M programme looking extremely dubious, a hopeless mess is likely in a few years unless a decision is taken in the near future. Otherwise, some difficult decisions will have to be made by an incoming Government. It is highly likely that not one A400M will be delivered within the framework of the contract for the whole order of 25 aircraft. The Minister will not disclose in answer to my parliamentary questions what the penalty clauses are or who will pay the damages for late delivery. I should have thought that quite an important point.
Nor is the problem the much quoted "lack of funding". We need only look at the Merlin helicopter as an example. According to RAF presentations, it is a superb aircraft, and I do not doubt that it is in certain circumstances, but it is also very expensive. The six Danish aircraft cost the United Kingdom £29 million each; the RAF Mk 3 costs £19 million, and the Royal Navy Mk 1 costs a cool £39 million, and their running costs are £34,000 and £42,000 per hour respectively. Yet the Merlin cannot fly in Afghanistan without, according to a parliamentary answer, a £1.8 million upgrade to each aircraft to fit new blades—presumably Carson blades—because the aircraft cannot fly hot and high, which the Huey helicopter could do more than 40 years ago in the Vietnam era.
Following the fanfares extolling the excellence of the Pinzgauer, WMIK and Jackal vehicles, their safety has been promoted by quoting their respective speed, off-road performance and manoeuvrability, and yet we find that they are now being used for convoy patrols. When I have tabled questions to the MOD about this, the reply has always come back that that is due to the choice of commanders. I bet, however, that it is a case of Hobson's choice: that is the vehicle with which commanders have been provided, and they have no choice but to use it or walk.
The hon. Lady misunderstands the nature of the convoys that take place in Helmand province. They go over not tracked and tarmacked roads, but wadis, deserts and difficult terrain, which is the function that the vehicle is designed to carry out.
I am very grateful to the Minister. In fact, most of my information comes from the people who have performed all those tasks in Afghanistan. That is what I have been told by them, and sometimes I prefer to rely on what they say.
Commanders do not have a choice. [Interruption.] No, they do not have a choice in every circumstance. If the Minister wishes to intervene and say that commanders have a choice of vehicle on every single occasion, I shall be grateful to him.
The hon. Lady's point was that the vehicles were being used in convoys, and that that is not the purpose for which they were designed. I was in Afghanistan three weeks ago and saw convoys crossing deserts, wadis and other difficult terrain. It is simply not the case that these vehicles were not designed to perform that role in Afghanistan.
The Minister has completely ignored my request for reassurance about the choice available to commanders in the field. That is because he knows that they do not always have a choice—that, in fact, they rarely have a choice.
I am surprised by what the hon. Lady is saying, because I know that, like me, she is something of an armoured-vehicle anorak. She is aware of the range of vehicles currently in operation in Afghanistan that the Government provided—indeed, during our last debate she congratulated the Government on them. The ultimate decision on the ground, however, is for individual commanders. It would be wrong of any politician, including me, or of anyone else to start to direct what our commanders should do operationally and which equipment they should use. They have a range of equipment, which is there to be used.
The Minister has not been able to reassure me that commanders have a choice, because we know perfectly well that they do not. I have praised the Government in the past for their procurement of many protected vehicles, but there are still so few Mastiffs and there will be so few Ridgbacks when they come into service that, in reality, as I have just said, there is no meaningful choice. It is time that Ministers came clean and admitted that the decision that there would, in effect, be no choice was made at the top. Providing a choice of suitable vehicles would undoubtedly interfere with the long-term strategy for future conventional warfare.
I am not convinced that a defence review is necessary. I believe that it would merely kick the whole subject into the long grass once again. We know what the problems are today. Incoming Governments—all Governments—are there to make decisions, and to justify them in the light of circumstances and the money that is available at the time. As we all know, however, the United Kingdom has committed its forces to counter-insurgency warfare of the most difficult and treacherous kind, and that should at present be its first priority. Surely, therefore, the UK has a moral obligation to provide the very best and most appropriate equipment to protect the lives of our fighting men and women. If it cannot or is unwilling to do so, it should withdraw from those engagements and never again commit the lives of our armed services to similar situations.
The United Kingdom used to be the very best at counter-insurgency operations. We used to excel, but to be successful in the future, as we undoubtedly were in the past, requires us to rededicate ourselves and provide the means to reinforce our will to win. We must make a decision soon about the type of future war to which we will commit our troops. In other words, we must decide in which direction we wish the Army and other services to go. Having made that decision, we must ensure that sufficient funding and equipment are available at the outset of any campaign. Finally, we must make the vital decision to remain an independent United Kingdom force, rather than become merely part of a European Union force, with all that that implies militarily and in relation to procurement. If we do not make those right decisions, the back of the British Army will be broken; and that is not a situation that I, for one, would find tolerable.
I apologise most sincerely for missing the first two Front-Bench speeches, but a pressing constituency matter kept me from the Chamber longer than I had intended. I have already heard some excellent speeches in the debate.
Like other hon. Members, I was spitting mad when I saw the images of that despicable protest at Luton against soldiers taking part in a homecoming parade. Those soldiers had returned from places of danger, where they had put their lives on the line. They had probably seen or heard of friends and comrades who were killed most violently while they were there. Some soldiers return with horrendous injuries, including the loss of limbs. As soldiers, all those people endure those experiences on our behalf and for our nation, to uphold our democracy and our rights. Those rights include the right to protest and freedom of speech, which were abused on that day in Luton.
I will counter that with an entirely different account from Stafford. Some hon. Members may remember that when we debated the subject last year, I described the procession through Stafford in 2008, when the newly reformed 22 Signals Regiment and the long-serving RAF tactical supply wing in Stafford were both granted the freedom of the borough. There was a procession and parade in the town centre, and the streets were lined with members of the public, who cheered and warmly welcomed the troops who participated.
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I will discuss further the welcome that the military receive in Stafford later in my speech. The other part of my speech last time concerned Operation Borona, which involves the return of thousands of soldiers to Britain from bases in Germany.
I commend what the hon. Gentleman has just said, as I am sure that the whole House does. The downside of the growing concentration of our regular forces on a small number of so-called super-bases is that events such as he describes are gradually ending. Some of those super-bases are located in places such as Catterick, where there is no civilian population.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. It is never a good thing to put all the eggs in one basket.
On Operation Borona and troops coming home from Germany, the Government's emerging thinking about the so-called super-garrison, at least in the west midlands area, is not to try to shoehorn thousands of extra troops into one base, but to provide a range of places within a locality. In the west midlands, for example, the potential sites for those soldiers include MOD Stafford, Cosford and Shrewsbury. As will become clear a little later, the base in Stafford is not remote and is part of the town. One reason why soldiers have found the civilian population so welcoming is that soldiers and civilians live cheek by jowl in the town. Will the Minister say a little about the emerging thinking on venues in the west midlands for troops returning from Germany under Operation Borona and about the present thinking on Cosford, Shrewsbury and Stafford?
My hon. Friend John Smith, who represents St. Athan, discussed the location there of much of the defence training college work on engineering and technical services. I understand that that includes moving training from Cosford to St. Athan and that, at one time, the thinking was that Cosford would therefore become available to provide some of the accommodation. I am unsure whether the plan has completely changed or whether the process of moving people from Cosford to St. Athan is taking longer than anticipated, but I understand that it is no longer possible to place troops coming home from Germany in Cosford as swiftly as was suggested just 12 months ago, in our last debate on this subject in the House. I therefore ask the Minister to say something about what that means for Stafford. At what pace might we expect more soldiers to return from Germany and be based at Stafford, rather than somewhere else?
Let me say a little about Stafford and its welcome for the military. There are now Gurkhas among the soldiers of 22 Signal Regiment who are with us. It has been a delight to see how the people of Stafford have taken to their hearts Gurkha soldiers and their children, who are now in our schools—some of them needing and receiving some support with English as an additional language—and how warm and welcoming the people of Stafford have been to Gurkhas' wives, who have joined us and want to work in our local community. Some of them have needed support with English as a second language, too, and it was a joy to me to hear the principal of Stafford college say that, whether or not he got funding, they were going to get that help for free at his college. That was a great contribution by that college to the warmth of the welcome to our armed forces and their families in Stafford. Many of the Gurkhas' wives have now been helped into work in the local community by Jobcentre Plus.
The new forces have been integrated into Stafford very well. As Members would expect, however, there is a growing challenge in accommodation. The accommodation provided for service personnel on the base is full, and there is a question about how we provide more accommodation, especially if more troops are coming to Stafford. Accommodation off the base is also an issue. Some soldiers and their families will want to buy homes locally, and people who want to stay in the area after they retire from the Stafford base will also want homes in Stafford. Clearly, whatever else happens in terms of population growth in the west midlands, we are going to need more homes for soldiers and their families in the Stafford area.
Now is a crucial time in Stafford. We are at the point when the local authority, Stafford borough council, is consulting on its local development framework, which includes where to put more houses. As all Members know, whenever there is talk of putting more houses anywhere, existing communities have great concerns about where those houses might go. That is an important message for the planners of Stafford to remember, but so too is the fact that there will have to be more homes because of the growth of the base at Stafford. Defence Estates must engage now with the planners at Stafford borough council. I am pleased to say that the news that comes to me suggests that that is happening, but it is important that they keep at it.
That is the main point I wanted to make in the debate, so I shall now finish where I started, by stressing the warmth of the welcome for the military in places such as Stafford. Later this year, we will have the first armed forces and veterans day. The month after that, there will be an open day at MOD Stafford. I am certain that the warmth we saw from the public towards our military in Stafford town centre on
May I start by paying tribute to the 5th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, better known as the Argylls, and the 3rd Battalion The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, a Territorial Army unit, both of which are based in my constituency? The Argylls returned from Afghanistan with one young man killed and their commanding officer severely wounded, but despite that he is still commanding the regiment while recovering from an extremely bad gunshot wound. There were other wounded among the ranks of the Argylls and the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion TPWRR, who went to serve with them. Canterbury is extremely proud of them.
Despite the title of this debate, it is inevitable that all speakers will be tempted to stray into operations outside the UK, but I wish to make a wider point. The shadow Secretary of State made the point that defence planning assumptions are never right, whoever is in charge; one can never gaze into a crystal ball. It is worth reflecting on what a large proportion of the operations we have been involved in over the past 100 years were wholly unexpected. Had we been sitting in a debate of this kind in 1914—it is interesting to read the record of House of Commons debates at the time—we would have found that all serious opinion, or very nearly all of it, was focused on the homeland. We would have been talking about defence in the UK, because the crisis in Ireland was so bad, with guns being run in huge numbers into the island by those on both sides of the argument. Those who talked about the possibility of a continental war were thought to be eccentric.
In 1982, nobody expected the Falklands war the week before the Argentines attacked the islands; in 1990, we had ruled out, only three months before the first Gulf war, the possibility of deploying armoured vehicles outside the NATO area; and, of course, today's operations were wholly unexpected on
That is why I say that although I listen with huge respect to all those who are rightly saying that we owe it to our forces to do the best possible job in supporting them on existing operations, it would be a disaster if we ever designed our armed forces entirely around existing operations. In his excellent speech, my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind touched on a paradox that we face. We seem to be increasingly widely committed and there are so many threats out there—a number of colleagues have talked of threats outside this country, but there are some clear and distinct threats that particularly concern us today—that whoever is in government will face a huge mismatch between the resources that realistically will be made available and the potential demands on them. I make no apology for saying that the reserve forces play an extremely important role in other English-speaking countries in squaring that imbalance, and they could play a bigger role here.
Although my right hon. and learned Friend gave a brilliant summary of the problems in the reserve forces, I disagreed with him on one area. For the moment, however, I wish to pay tribute to the Government and to the Minister for the Armed Forces in particular. This small-scale but thoroughly worth while review, which was largely his brainchild and—perhaps I know more than I should do—was pushed through despite considerable opposition within substantial elements of the Ministry of Defence, both uniformed and civilian, has shed some light on opportunities missed and on things that need tackling. I very much look forward to seeing it come before the House, and I welcome the comment that there would be an oral statement and that, courteously, the team would be brought to meet the all-party group so that we can have a full discussion on the detail.
I think that General Nick Cottam did an extremely good job, although I pulled his leg quite publicly on disappearing to St. Paul's just before the job was finished, in engaging with the reserve forces. He and his team got round and talked turkey with people making huge sacrifices on what was, after all, a secondary activity for them. None the less, that activity resulted in almost exactly one in every 1,000 on operations being killed in action, and we would do well to remember that; I believe that the tally is 17 at the moment—16 Terroritorials and one air reservist.
I will not repeat the statistics showing the large role that the reserve forces, despite their proportionately small size, have played in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier in the Balkans. Instead, I wish to focus on how an imaginative, forward-looking Government could make more use of reserve forces to square the resource circle. Reserve forces cannot solve the problem entirely, but they can contribute to the solution.
Compared with the other major models for all-volunteer forces—the US, Australia and Canada, but not France, where that model is new—we have a much smaller proportion of reserve forces. Broadly speaking, half the land forces in those countries are reservist—the figure is just over in the US, and just under for the other two—and their air and naval reserves are very large, whereas ours are very small as a proportion of the total.
I have four examples to give. First, 2 Signals Brigade exists to provide communications in the event of a nuclear strike or a major disruption, such as after a large-scale terrorist action. The brigade is not used for operations and sends relatively few people to operational theatres because it has a niche capability that we do not need for current operations. Hon. Members should consider how much less expensive 2 Signals Brigade is than keeping that capability within the regular forces.
Secondly, why—at a time when there is so little money and so much more that needs doing—do we retain air defence regiments in the regular Army? I know people will say that they can be used in a different role in operational theatres, but they have a niche capability and, while we should retain it within the British armed forces, the likelihood that it will need to be used in the near future is very low. In fact, I suggest that the possibility of a major terrorist strike that disrupts our communications is more likely than the need to fight an enemy with a superior air force in the near future. Have we thought about how we could release funds for other desperately needed priorities if that role were given to the reserve forces?
My third example is mine clearing. Traditionally, that was performed mainly by the Royal Naval Reserve, although of course some capability is needed in the regular Navy. It is an odd function, because most of the time, even on operations, it is not needed, but when it is needed we need a lot of it in a hurry. The two most obvious areas for our focus would be if the situation in the Gulf took an unexpected turn such as in a confrontation with Iran. I know from having worked in that region that there is an enormous area of very shallow water, where mine warfare could easily be conducted. The second is the waters around the UK, which is the subject of today's debate. Many of our ports have long, shallow approaches.
How is our mine warfare capability currently organised? Almost all of it is within the regular Royal Navy. Therefore, I would argue, we have the worst of all worlds. We have expensive mine-clearing vessels, which carry people with very important skills, many of which are widely available in the civilian world, including deep-sea diving, survey work and so on. Each vessel has one, very expensive regular crew. If some vessels instead had two or three reservist crews, they would be much cheaper—a reservist crew is roughly a fifth of the cost of a regular crew—and, crucially, we would have a surge capability. God knows, mines are easy to lay these days, and if there was a mining threat and we had to try to clear all our major ports at once—if a couple of mines had gone off, we would not know where the others were—we would be able to work the vessels round the clock, which cannot be done with a single crew, especially as some of the skills involved, such as diving, are very tiring. An individual can dive for only a few hours a day.
My fourth example concerns unmanned aerial vehicles. I have not had time to pursue this subject matter through parliamentary questions, but somewhere there is a bit of a story about cost overruns, with which I suspect the Minister is familiar. Very small numbers of UAVs play a significant role in Afghanistan. They are very expensive and, I am told, the exercise is turning into rather an expensive one to man. I suggest that that is an area where reservists would be ideal—the skills involved in operating a UAV are widely available outside: hand-eye co-ordination, understanding of IT systems and a range of other skills in which it would not be difficult to train reservists. There must also be opportunities, particularly if we need a surge capability, to think about how we can transfer that role, at least in part, to the reserve forces, as we proposed in our all-party group report.
I have given four specific examples; let me now give a general one. To my mind, it is quite astonishing that our air reserves are so tiny. The Americans have a third of all their fast jet fighter formed units and getting on for half of all their pilots in their volunteer reserve—that is, the air national guard and the US air reserve. In the Air Force, we have a total of 28 reserve pilots, nearly all of whom are Hercules pilots. That is all. A phenomenal investment goes into training a pilot, even before we think about fast jet pilots and if we consider only helicopter training. The cheque is torn up, in Britain, as soon as the man leaves the service. The Australians and, in particular, the Canadians have made slightly more use than we have of their flying reserves and the Americans have made vastly more use of them. There must be more scope for this.
The Territorial Army has a highly successful small helicopter regiment that will be disbanded in a few months' time, which seems extraordinary to me. The Navy has a very well developed air reserve, with more pilots than the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. Few people from the air reserve have been deployed in operations, although one or two have, but its members have played a significant role in substituting for regulars and saving a lot of money in the training pipeline.
Unbelievably, the Royal Naval Reserve officer who commands the air reserve, which has been consistently up to strength, has been downgraded by one rank. His regular staff officer is being taken away, and the next stage—which will mean that he will be unable to do his job—will be his replacement by a regular officer. The Royal Navy has, shamefully, already decided to replace the commander of the Maritime Reserves with a full-time regular officer who had never done a civilian job. It is no criticism of the individual concerned to say that that will not provide leadership to people who are giving up their free time or provide understanding to his regular brother officers in the RNR about what royal naval reservists can do.
The situation in the volunteer reserves at the moment is, in many areas, fairly dire. I agree with most of what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea said. In a recent presentation to the all-party group, Air Vice-Marshal Paul Luker, who is an ex-regular and the chief executive of the Council of Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations, commented on an establishment of 42,000, although he said that the true figure is probably not much over 30,000. He said that officer recruitment was generally poor and that it was proving difficult to maintain the officer corps, which is at the absolute heart of a successful service. He also said that he was concerned that some aspects of recruiting were so focused on the next operational tour that it was losing sight of building the unit and nurturing the cadre of officers and NCOs needed to maintain its ethos and cohesion. He said that that was particularly true of the Royal Marine Reserve and the Auxiliary Air Force squadrons, which had been used even more heavily than the Territorial Army. I welcome the review, which I think will provide some modest steps in the right direction. We are all anxiously waiting for it.
I turn now to the One Army Recruiting process and its two single-service counterparts. Paul Luker said that the process was not really delivering. In the old days, the reserve forces and cadets associations ran recruiting, and he did not make a bid for that to be restored, but I firmly believe that, although centralised recruiting can lead to significant economies of scale in such matters as the purchasing of television time and so on, the remaining local element of recruiting should be given back to the RFCAs. They have the people—on their council, or in the media and local communities—who have the feel for local areas that regional brigades do not.
The local regional brigade commander in my constituency is excellent. Indeed, he is one of the best people to have held that post in all the time I have been the MP, but the occupant of that role is changed every two years. The result is that no one, however good he is, can have quite the same relationship with the community.
We need to address the issue of officer training, some of which can be done very cheaply and easily. In the Officer Training Corps, the University Royal Naval Units and the University Air Squadrons, we have a substantial resource that we do not tap sufficiently. Very little effort is made in the central planning undertaken by the Army and the other two services to make use of them for the volunteer reserve.
I was very proud to see my son, a medical student at King's, pass out of the first phase of the London OTC. It was a family occasion, because the commanding officer was his first cousin once removed—that is, my wife's first cousin. However, it is a measure of how much the Army has lost its way in respect of the OTC that my son has been told that choosing to sign up for a cadetship would mean that he would be required to leave the that splendid organisation. The reason is that he might be subject to an operational deployment, which would cost him a year in his planning.
The solution, as we said in our report, would be for the senior Army medical staff to get off their butts—if the House will forgive the expression—and sort the problem out with the royal colleges. That would be better than the present situation, which is that they just say, "Well, people serving in TA medical units can suffer from that, but we are not having our regular Army people, including cadets, suffer in that way."
I want to focus on the OTCs for a moment longer and try to explain what I mean. Coming through a typical OTC are large numbers of very keen young men and women, a few of whom will join the regular Army and some of whom might make good Territorials. However, whereas the arrangements in a university regiment in Australia or in a reserve officer training corps unit in America are closely tied into the training cycle—for the Army Reserve in Australia or the National Guard in America—that is not the case here.
For example, a person who has served with the OTC, completed a commissioning course from Sandhurst and wants to do a special-to-arm course cannot schedule it to fit into the same university vacation. Such a person cannot therefore get right through the system while at university, but the Americans and Australians have recognised that students are short of money but rich in time—exactly the opposite of what they will experience afterwards. With proper organisation, we could have an officer corps whose members were very well trained when they reached the end of their time at university.
I apologise to my hon. Friend for not being here earlier, but I saw his name on the monitor and came in. I joined the Territorial Army when I was at university, for the adventure and experience that it would give me and because it meant that I could work on Sundays as well as Saturdays at a time when I needed the money. Had I had the opportunity to do much more training, I would have taken it.
Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. With very little expenditure, we could do a great deal to fix our officer training.
I have talked about recruitment. I end with what is at the heart of the problem of retention of officers and senior and junior NCOs in the Territorial Army. As a result of the reserves review, the word "offer" has come into the vocabulary. If we want people to give up their time and to face serious penalties in their civilian career, what are we offering? The answer has to be: worthwhile and interesting commands, opportunities to train with those commands, whether it is a corporal commanding a section or a major commanding a squadron or company and, in extremis, the opportunity to take those commands on active service on an operational tour. That is why the National Guard almost always deploys formed units.
There is terrific tension in the MOD between people who recognise that and those who see the TA simply as a feeder to pad out regular units. The Royal Marine Reserve, which has had some outstanding people, including Corporal Matt Croucher, who received the George cross, has chosen to go entirely down the latter route. That is why the RFCA identified the RMR as having serious trouble in retaining officer and NCO structures—its fabric is under threat. Ironically, some other units that one might think comparable, such as 21 and 23 SAS—I was privileged to serve with 21 SAS some years ago—and 131 Commando squadron, the sapper unit that supports the Royal Marines, have all gone down the route of sending formed sub-units commanded by volunteer reserve officers, and they have all done exceptionally well. One of 131 Squadron's more ambitious operations in the Gulf got on to the front page of The Times. I cannot give more detail but the special forces regiments have taken decorations, as the Minister knows.
The future for the reserve forces lies in formed sub-unit deployments, although they can also provide limited padding for regular units. That brings me to my last point, which is the only one where I disagree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea. He said that the reserve forces provided only surge capability, but that they were very good at it. I would go a little further. The reserve forces are willing to go on being used in continuing operations if they are used in the right way—provided they have the resources and, crucially, provided they have the support in the local community that is present in America but is, I fear, pretty indifferent in Britain. Reserve forces are there to support the regular forces, but to do that job they need resources, training, an officer corps and the support of the country. I look forward to the Government's reserves review.
It is a particular pleasure to follow my hon. Friend Mr. Brazier, not just because he and I both have the privilege of representing very fine cathedral cities, but because he has unrivalled expertise in and practical knowledge of our reserve forces. It was also a pleasure to listen to Mr. Kidney, because over many years the Staffordshire Regiment was part of the backbone of the infantry, just as in its day, once upon a time, the Wiltshire Regiment was too—it is now part of the Rifles.
I shall concentrate more on the civilian side of defence in the UK. We face a paradox. When I was a child growing up in Salisbury in the 1950s, a substantial proportion—perhaps 20 per cent.—of the people on the streets, particularly at weekends, would have been in uniform. In a garrison town, surrounded by garrison towns on Salisbury plain, I recognised the importance of the military and may even have taken it for granted. Now, Her Majesty's forces have as much popularity, status and respect as at any time since the 1950s, when of course they were regarded as the saviours of our country, which indeed they were. Now, they again enjoy great status.
Perhaps the Royal Navy, as the senior service, does not enjoy as much status as the other forces, simply because people in the Navy are more restricted to their home bases. However, if one visits Estonia, as I did earlier in March, one finds that the Royal Navy is held in the highest regard there. Its visits, such as the visit of HMS Illustrious to Tallinn later this year, are anticipated enormously by the whole population, not least because the Royal Navy helped the Estonians in their independence war in 1919. The Royal Navy should have more status. People do not recognise the purple role that it plays now, or how prominent it is in running our operation in Afghanistan. It may have fewer ships than it did but, my goodness, it is proving its expertise, not just at sea but in military theatres generally.
I want to mention rehabilitation for Her Majesty's forces at places such as Headley Court near Leatherhead. The need for a special swimming pool there led to the remarkable establishment of Help for Heroes by my constituents, Bryn and Emma Parry. It has caught the imagination of the nation. It started with a swimming pool and it has grown and grown. The attention that we are at last beginning to give to stress disorders and mental disorders among serving and former members of Her Majesty's forces has led to new support for Combat Stress, for example. The Army Benevolent Fund has never been busier, along with the Army Families Federation and its sister organisations for the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.
Of course, the respect shown in local communities as coffins are borne from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire—my hon. Friend Mr. Gray will know a great deal about that—is reflected throughout the country in the welcome home parades for soldiers returning from active service held in many of our towns and cities. Only last week—indeed, the process finished this week—we reformed legislation governing the way in which Her Majesty's coroners carry out their duties with regard to military inquests. We can at last say that we are doing the decent thing by military families.
On
It is interesting that a distinct divide appears to have emerged between civil society and the military. There is much greater casualty sensitivity in the west than there was. There has been a growing polarisation of religious belief across the world. There is growing concern for universal human rights across the world, and prosperity has emerged as the overriding socio-political value when considering defence, rather than territorial gain, or Russian tanks rolling across the north European plain.
Although the public's attitude to war is less positive than it was, public support for the armed forces has generally remained consistently high. As Peter Riddell commented in the Royal United Services Institute Journal in February last year,
"Insofar as there is a gulf" between the military and the public,
"it is of ignorance, not sympathy or support."
So it is an extraordinary paradox that defence of the realm is way down the list when it comes to why people vote for a particular party. I hope that that is not a reflection of the fact that most of the time in the House of Commons, defence is regarded as a bipartisan issue. It certainly is on the Defence Committee. That is an extraordinary situation.
The present position, which we all recognise, of overstretch and underfunding, as regards both people and procurement, means that we have to take a long view of how we got to where we are, and where our nation and our military are going in future. Our history and heritage teach us, and economic necessity demands, that we sustain and pay for our armed services to be trained and equipped for high-intensity warfare with global reach, complemented by a strong diplomatic service—a comprehensive approach, as we are learning to call it. Both should be underpinned by increasingly sophisticated security services and intelligence networks.
The British have taken their language, ideas, trade and armies around the globe for many hundreds of years, but gone are the days of empire. The legacy is there, but we are not stopping and withdrawing to our island. The reason is straightforward: British forces are needed to protect UK global interests in trade and shipping. More than 90 per cent. of our imports come in by sea, and those trade routes and vessels must be secure against foreign state intervention, as well as terrorism and piracy. That is why our forces must have global reach, and that is why they need aircraft carriers. They must have power projection by land, sea and air, and that must include amphibious capability and unmanned maritime systems, increasing use of unmanned combat air systems and space-based remote sensors.
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. Does he agree that all those goods by definition end up in British ports, so we must have the capability to keep those ports clear of mines?
Yes, of course. I was extremely interested in that part of my hon. Friend's speech in which he talked about the importance of clearing and detecting mines around our shores. That issue deserves far more attention and research, and we must undertake, too, practical detection and destruction of those mines. Doubtless, we shall return to the matter.
There are new aspects to defence that we did not think about very much before the last decade. We have to think afresh, as we and other European nations need to define our defence in new terms. Obviously, homeland security and territorial defence are vital, but increasingly we have to think in defence terms about energy infrastructure protection, from gas and oil pipelines to wind farms and nuclear power stations. While the politics of energy may dominate in our part of north-west Europe, there are other parts of Europe where the politics of water and food is increasingly important. As the climate change crisis climbs the political agenda, carbon emissions will threaten peace and stability. Poverty and economic migration already cause great friction between states—the day of state-on-state war is not necessarily over.
I should like to turn to some of the extraordinary things going on in the UK against all the odds to improve the equipment used by our armed forces. I should like to begin in my own constituency at Boscombe Down airfield, which I visited only last Friday, where I saw for myself the extraordinary work of the dedicated and experienced work force that is under way to convert the eight Chinooks, for which we have been waiting for so long. The Sea Kings are being fitted with Carson blades, which will allow them to be used in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the Nimrods are being worked on.
My hon. Friend referred to the eight Chinooks that are being modified in his constituency. There is a rumour going round that perhaps only one of them will be available for deployment by the end of the year, but it will not have full operational capability. It will be put into theatre merely to prove that it can be done. From his knowledge, is my hon. Friend in a position to comment on that, or should I ask the Minister?
I fear that I am not in a position to be able to answer that. If I could change places with the Minister after the general election, doubtless I would find many Chinooks flying operationally.
I saw, however, that real progress has been made on that programme, and there is a huge determination on the part of the work force at Boscombe Down to ensure the highest standards of workmanship. People do not realise the complexity of those helicopters. Stripping down and replacing the wiring means replacing 20,000 wires per helicopter. It is an extraordinary undertaking.
I mentioned the Nimrods. Then there are the unmanned aerial vehicles, which will increasingly be seen in the skies over south Wiltshire as we introduce the training regime led by the Royal Artillery in order to deploy UAVs operationally and in infantry tactics.
The science and technology apprenticeship schemes at Boscombe Down are a splendid innovation. When I was first elected to the House, every year I had to present the prizes to the apprentices at Boscombe Down—RAF Boscombe Down, as it was then called. There would be 50 or 60 apprentices a year. Then there were years with none. Now, I am glad to say, they are coming back. There will be more than 20 apprentices this year. That is a great compliment to QinetiQ and to the work force at Boscombe Down.
Only an hour or so ago there was an announcement from an important defence procurement manufacturer in my constituency. Chemring Countermeasures has announced that there is to be a new £18.5 million investment in two new flare decoy manufacturing facilities. Every time any of us travel on a military helicopter, particularly if it is in theatre, we are used to the noise of the flares going off and of the chaff going out behind the helicopter, or any other kind of aeroplane. They have to be made somewhere. They happen to be made at High Post outside Salisbury.
That company has an ancient and interesting history. The sadness is that there will be a loss of jobs over the next year or two because higher safety requirements mean that fewer people and more machinery have to be used. It is safer, better and even more reliable, but the downside concerns the people. I am glad to say that the company is working hard to ensure that the skills of those people can continue to be usefully deployed—locally, I hope. There is great family loyalty in the defence industry. In that factory I know, because I have met them, that three generations of several families are still working there.
The story of Chemring Countermeasures goes back a very long time and is typical of defence procurement companies all over the country. It started back in 1941 with Chemring developing processes for metallising fabrics, which sounds an unlikely link, but it went back longer than that. In 1933 the Wessex Aircraft Engineering Company was set up. It was taken over by Bryant and May. Eventually that became Schermuly, which in turn became the British Match Corporation, incorporated with Wilkinson Sword. It is an extraordinary story of the interlinking of defence industries within the manufacturing base of our country.
Eventually the business all came together in 1997 as Chemring Ltd. On this important day for that company in my constituency, I pay tribute to the company and to the work force who have made it so important a part of the everyday life of our servicemen and women at the sharp end, not just on land, but in the air and at sea, because that remarkable company provides countermeasures and flares for all three services, and sells substantially to our NATO allies as well.
I finish by making another point about defence spending in this country. Sometimes senior figures in the shadow Cabinet groan when they see me coming because they know that I will say we should double defence spending. I know that that wish is unlikely to come to fruition in current economic circumstances. We all have to be hard-nosed about that, but we should seriously consider why we have the lowest defence spending as a proportion of our gross national product since the 1930s.
It would have an electrifying effect on the country's economy and much else for which this nation stands if we were to rebuild confidence in our nationhood, as well as in our defence industries and the armed forces, by increasing substantially the defence budget. This, I believe, would not be resisted by the electorate because of the paradox with which I started. We know that Her Majesty's forces have never been held in higher regard except during the second world war and the years immediately afterwards. Why can we not match that former regard, and remind people that their quality of life, standard of living and ability to buy white goods in the sheds on the edges of our towns and cities depend on the defence budget and the dedication of all three forces? We should start arguing from that point of view. Defence is very much in our national interest in respect of consumer spending, energy, water supply and climate change, because it changes all our economic and political perceptions. If we harness that fund of support for Her Majesty's forces, we will do the nation a service, and—above all—say to those forces, "Well done and thank you."
Like my right hon. Friend Mr. Arbuthnot and others, I was a little perplexed by "Defence in the UK", the title of today's debate. I have a major military establishment in my constituency; I referred to it in my interventions, particularly on John Smith, whose constituency will get my defence college when it eventually moves. There is also a major defence contractor in my constituency.
The Minister probably struck the right focus in explaining the title as a reference to a consideration of the relationship between the armed forces and the people of this country. As my hon. Friend Robert Key has just said, according to the opinion polls, our electorates focus on the economy, health and education. In our debates, we therefore have a responsibility to rehearse the issues and emphasise the importance of the defence and security of this country. My remarks will focus particularly on our alliances, which are essential for the projection of our foreign policy. We should consider our alliance with the United States and the relationship between Europe and the United States; that may change and develop under the new US Administration. I particularly want to focus on the relationship between the EU and NATO.
In a week or so, we will celebrate 60 years of NATO, and this month we also celebrate NATO's major expansion of 10 years ago, when the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states joined the organisation. It is important to reflect on that. I want to mention the European security and defence policy, or ESDP, because its most ardent supporters and fiercest critics possibly misunderstand it. It is not collective European defence, or "défense Europe" as the French would call it, and it never could be.
Sixty-one years ago, on
Over the past 60 years, the collective defence clause in article 5 of the NATO treaty has been invoked only once—following the
After the end of the cold war, the organisation of security and defence in Europe started to evolve, with NATO and the EU both embarking on an enlargement process. Since the NATO alliance was created in 1949, its membership has grown through five rounds of enlargement from 12 founding members to today's 26 members, and NATO's door remains open to any European country in a position to subscribe to the commitments and obligations of membership and to contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area. In parallel, the European Community, subsequently the European Union, has grown from six founding member states in 1951 to today's 27 EU member states, following six rounds of enlargement, and is also open to other European countries willing and able to join.
Let us look at the added value in the defence and security arena of NATO and the European Union's ESDP. What is the added value of NATO? Its strong, integrated chain of command gives it the ability to conduct difficult combat missions. This multinational military structure is unique in the world. Neither the United Nations nor the EU has anything on such a scale. In contrast, the trademark of the ESDP is the EU's ability to deploy a wide range of instruments for monitoring, policing, peacekeeping and rule-of-law missions, including relatively high-risk military operations such as the one in Chad, which concluded a couple of weeks ago, and the anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. The EU can also apply economic, political and diplomatic pressure.
Like many other members of the European Security and Defence Assembly—formerly the Assembly of the Western European Union—I have worked hard over the years to ensure that the ESDP has developed in such a way as to complement NATO rather than compete with it. That makes sense in practical as well as political terms given that 21 EU countries are also members of NATO, and their troops can be used for EU-led or NATO operations, depending on requirements. The WEU, which in the past played a major role in establishing Europe's defence capability, drew up the Petersberg tasks in 1992. They covered a wide spectrum of activities, including humanitarian rescue, peacekeeping and crisis management missions, and were incorporated into the common foreign and security policy under the 1997 treaty of Amsterdam. In parallel, at the 1996 NATO summit in Berlin, the idea of creating a European security and defence identity in NATO emerged. A key development since then has been the Berlin-plus arrangements, which gave first the WEU and later the EU the possibility of drawing on NATO assets for military missions sponsored by them.
All this is good, and much progress has been made, but perhaps the time has come for our Governments to agree to go a little further than the Berlin-plus arrangements and overcome the current political obstacles that are preventing NATO-ESDP co-operation from moving on to the next phase, which is so crucial if we are to meet all our global obligations and enhance the security of our peoples. The announcement by President Sarkozy of full French reintegration into NATO is an important step. It should also be taken as a sign that France recognises that defence in Europe is not a choice between the EU and NATO but complementary. As I said, the ESDP is not "défense Europe" or collective European defence. Nothing in the EU meets the provisions of article 5—not even the Lisbon treaty, if it is finally ratified. It does not, and cannot, provide the kind of collective defence commitment that membership of NATO implies.
Collective territorial and strategic defence in Europe could and should be the role of the 21 EU-NATO members and their three non-EU neighbours, Norway, Turkey and Iceland. A strong commitment by the European NATO members is wanted and needed by the alliance—a commitment not just to deployment but to spending and capacity building—and that would be welcomed by the United States. EU-NATO relations need reviewing, and such a review would be useful on the strategic and institutional level as well as on the operational one. Both organisations run operations in a number of places: in Kosovo in the western Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Africa. But can we honestly say that they are deployed "together"? Is it not the case that they are being deployed alongside each other? Perhaps I might give a few examples that illustrate why the relationship between the EU and NATO is far from perfect.
An EU naval force is currently involved in the anti-piracy Operation Atalanta, off the coast of Somalia Together with a number of colleagues, I recently visited the headquarters of that naval anti-piracy operation at Northwood. Securing our trade routes is important to all of us; 90 per cent. of global trade is carried out with merchant ships. The sea off the coast of Somalia has been the scene of an alarming number of pirate attacks recently, with the result that some merchant lines have changed their routes. Those attacks have reduced considerably since the launch of the Atalanta mission, which obviously has a deterrent effect on potential pirates.
Operation Atalanta is run by the EU in the framework of the ESDP. The 10 or so participating nations are all members of NATO. Norway, another NATO member, has just announced that it will contribute a vessel to the operation, and others may join soon. Five nations—France, Germany, Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom—are responsible for ensuring a permanent operational capability. However, these nations are not using NATO communications and intelligence systems. Instead, some ships have had to install a new, civilian system for satellite communications. I am told that when the navies of NATO member states go on joint exercises, they are normally quite happy to use the NATO communication system. We must look into why a special arrangement was necessary in this case. Why does Berlin-plus not extend to such operations?
Another example is at the political level, in joint meetings of EU and NATO ambassadors. This example concerns the regular meetings that are held between the EU Political and Security Committee and the North Atlantic Council, which bring together the permanent ambassadors of both organisations' member states in Brussels. There was one such meeting on Monday of this week. The 21 EU member states that are also members of NATO are represented twice—by their NATO ambassador and by their PSC representative. Both are usually supported by different administrative structures and both may receive instructions from different hierarchical levels in their respective capitals. These parallel structures do not necessarily share a common culture. Moreover, the NATO ambassador is generally the more senior and higher-ranking of the two, which means that in practice only one of them speaks.
These joint meetings are described by those attending them as sometimes rather sterile. They leave participants with a certain degree of frustration because of the particularities of the EU-NATO relationship, which is based on the so-called Berlin-plus agreements. The agreements consist of a number of unpublished documents that have never been subject to parliamentary scrutiny or ratification. The limits of Berlin-plus in practice confine EU-NATO dialogue to the Berlin-plus Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a joint EU-NATO working group on capabilities, and prevent NATO and the EU from jointly discussing pressing issues such as terrorism, Afghanistan or the middle east. The underlying problem is the unresolved dispute between Turkey and Cyprus. Turkey is a substantial contributor to ESDP missions and has vital interests in connection with its ongoing candidacy for EU accession. However, as soon as the suggestion arises of discussing issues that are not part of the limited agenda of the current military co-operation between the EU and NATO under Berlin-plus, Cyprus is not allowed around the table because it is not part of the partnership for peace programme and does not have security clearance for access to NATO classified documents. Conversely, the EU refuses to deal with anything other than Berlin-plus matters unless all 27 member states are present.
Will my hon. Friend share his perspective on the problem that Macedonia's name holds for the Greeks, who hold the right to block any progress for that new democracy because of the disputed name?
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and share his frustration about the Greek veto over Macedonia's participation in NATO. If we can, we ought to knock some heads together. I remember being in Skopje not long ago with a former Greek Defence Minister, who as we walked into the meeting said that he could not give a stuff what they called their country, but as soon as we were in the meeting steadfastly defended the Greek line on the name. We have to move on, because such ridiculous problems—although the Turkey-Cyprus problem is not ridiculous to a Cypriot—are blocking the co-operation that is essential if we are to move forward. I understand where the political rationale for Turkey vis-à-vis the EU lies, but we all need to look at the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is where my third and last illustration of the current difficulties in EU-NATO relations comes from. It is Afghanistan, where the EU is not a very big player. However, there is a police mission run within the ESDP framework, and both the European Commission and EU member states spend large amounts of money in that country. EUPOL Afghanistan, the EU police mission, is suffering from the difficulties that participating EU member states have in finding police officers who are willing to work in such a challenging environment. The security of the police is obviously crucial to the success of the operation. However, due to the difficulties that I have just mentioned, the EU is not able to obtain a global security arrangement with NATO in Afghanistan, so it was necessary to negotiate individual security provisions with every provincial reconstruction team on the ground. What is more, intelligence sharing is made more complicated by the absence of a relevant EU-NATO agreement.
Those examples show clearly that we need to find a way to improve the relationship between the two organisations. Beyond those examples, which could be regarded as anecdotes, there are deeper reasons for the current difficulties. First, I believe that, for a long time, the United States Government and many in this country have looked at the EU and the development of ESDP with a certain degree of suspicion. There has been a fear of duplication and the feeling that emancipation could lead to separation. None of that is true. ESDP is a process of consolidating, improving and extending member states' capabilities. It has created a new potential actor, ready to stand in when NATO cannot or does not want to get involved. Now is the time to draw the two actors and their member states closer together.
There is, of course, an opposite view. Some believe that closer relations between the EU and NATO would result in too much influence for the USA. I hope that if such fears have ever been justified, they are less urgent with the election of the new President. The announcement made by President Sarkozy that he will take France back into NATO's integrated military structure is a clear signal of new thinking on that issue. There is a new window of opportunity. The new Administration in Washington are interested in good relations with Europeans and recognise the added value of effective multilateral institutions. That should not only help to improve relations between the EU and NATO, but provide us with a vision to help shape the role of both organisations in our security in the 21st century.
I shall take as an example the situation of countries to the east of the EU and NATO border. NATO enlargement might not always be the best answer to their concerns and ours, but if it is not the right thing for those countries, what else can we propose, and what can the EU in particular offer them? Could the nascent EU eastern partnership initiative be developed into a transatlantic one?
It is probably too early for President Obama and his new team to come up with any far-reaching proposals in early April at the NATO anniversary summit or at the EU-US summit the following day. But the different tone and style of the new American President could lay the basis of a positive review. One year from now, there could be a real breakthrough. We need the EU-NATO relationship to be clarified sooner rather than later, not least because we need our own minds made up before we face others who challenge the existing security architecture. I refer to the Russian President, Mr. Medvedev, his recent remarks about the weakness of the European security system and his proposal for a new European security treaty. In that regard at least, we know what we do not want—the unravelling of the Helsinki principles.
I conclude with two thoughts. First, we need to review not only the EU-NATO relationship but the EU-US relationship, and focus those relations more on security issues. We in Europe need to ask ourselves: do we want to be an attractive partner to the United States both inside and outside NATO? Do we want to contribute to the resolution of the huge challenges ahead of us? The Spanish Government, who take over the EU presidency in 2010, are considering the issue with a view to relaunching an EU-US initiative. In Madrid, in 1995, they launched a new transatlantic agenda, and this would be a new, new transatlantic agenda.
Given the limited capabilities and our scarce financial resources, which will not only not grow but come under immense pressure once the current financial crisis has had its full impact on our real economy, we need to be innovative and imaginative in finding ways of co-operation and co-ordination. We need to be able to make the best use of the capabilities of both organisations and their respective member states. The military and civil dimensions of security go hand in hand and, institutionally, our response to conflict and crisis needs to reflect that.
Secondly, as I said at the start, electorates tend to put schools, hospitals and health care before spending on helicopters, guns and missiles. However, we need to realise that we live in dangerous times and a harsh world, and if we want to make a difference and guarantee the security of our citizens, such investment is inevitable. We must also explain to our people that military operations, such as the one in Afghanistan, are not about remote conflicts, but directly concern security at home.
At the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl on 3 and
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend Mr. Walter, whose expertise on matters European is second to none. I had the pleasure of serving alongside him, sadly only for a year, on both the Western European Union and the Council of Europe. Through my own ignorance, I never quite discovered what either organisation was for, what their purpose was, or whether they have one—to this day, no one has explained what it is. None the less, I am sure that they do fulfil an awfully useful purpose, and I congratulate him on the many hours that he spends seeking to discover it.
My hon. Friend and I will not agree, I fear, on the importance of ESDP. My view is that the European Union is a first-class trading organisation among independent nation states, and the notion that it could have anything called ESDP is nonsensical. Why on earth the EU is busily engaging in a very good operation in Somalia defeats me. What on earth it is doing there I cannot imagine. Nor do I know why it is doing policing in Kabul. Those things can be done either by NATO or independent nation states, and I fear that I have a deep cynicism about whether European co-operation of the kind that my hon. Friend describes has much future. I readily say, however, that that is simply because of my bog-standard little Englander ignorance, and I am sure that I can be educated in such matters as time goes on.
Secondly, I agree with my right hon. Friend Mr. Arbuthnot, the Chairman of the Defence Committee, who is temporarily not in his place, about the structure of these debates. I am glad that today's debate has not been a topical debate, unlike, I believe, the last event of this kind. None the less, I feel that the present structure of our defence debates is rather false, and does not quite work. Those of us who are defence anoraks turn up on a Thursday afternoon, drone on for a quarter of an hour, and then go home. No one listens to a word we say, and the sum total of human happiness is not necessarily advanced. That should not be happening at a time when the nation and the globe are involved in such potentially catastrophic and vastly important defence matters. The entire House of Commons should be eagerly involved, and competing like mad to secure a five-minute slot. I hope the powers that be—the Government, the Leader of the House, or others—will think about whether we could restructure our defence debates, at least while the current turmoil around the globe continues, and find a way of attracting greater interest in them.
As always, however, this has been a successful, well-informed and wide-ranging debate. I shall not seek to add to what my many better-qualified colleagues have said about assorted defence matters. Instead, if the House will forgive me, I shall focus on a topic which may sound like a constituency issue more suited to an Adjournment debate, but which I would argue has a much wider significance for the defence of the realm than for my own constituency.
We know that, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, one of the biggest failings one way or another—although the exact way in which it has failed is debatable—has involved helicopters. There are those who would say that we have not got enough of them, there are those who would say that we have not got enough pilot hours, and there are those who would say that both are the case. There are others who would say that although we could always do with more, we have enough to manage with. That, broadly speaking, is the Government's line. I think everyone would agree, however, that the way in which our joint helicopter force—Army, Navy and Air Force helicopters—are currently managed is not ideal. The helicopters are based in a variety of places around Britain, and there is very little coherence. Joint Helicopter Command, which I believe was created only a year or two ago, experiences some difficulty in acting as a coherent "purple" organisation.
There has been a strong demand from Joint Helicopter Command, and from the three services, for a move towards the establishment of a single unified base for, in particular, RAF and Army helicopters. That strikes me as an immensely laudable and hugely sensible ambition with a great deal to be said for it, and I think that just about everyone in the defence world agrees that it should be realised. One senior officer involved with helicopters said to me the other day, referring to Project Belvedere—which is what we are talking about—"They cannot afford to do it, but they also cannot afford not to do it." I think that there is a good deal of truth in that, and I shall return to it in a moment.
There is a reason for my interest in Project Belvedere. The House will recall that some eight or nine years ago it was announced that the C130K fleet of Hercules aircraft based at RAF Lyneham, in my constituency, would reach the end of their useful life in 2012—or would progressively approach the end of their useful life in the years leading up to 2012—and that, at that stage, the C130J fleet of modern planes would be transferred to RAF Brize Norton, just down the road. All the RAF's transport capabilities for passengers, freight and tankers would be based there.
Many of us argued strongly against that decision, which was advanced for two main reasons. First, it was claimed that combining the two bases would produce a cost saving. That may be the case, although a substantial capital cost will be involved in the move, and only accountants will be able to tell us how long it will take for the modest year-by-year saving to pay that off.
I was talking to one of the base commanders—I will not say who it was—who would be involved in Project Belvedere and in the transfer of his helicopters to RAF Lyneham if that were to happen. He maintained that the cost would be so large that it would take 50 years to repay it. I said, "That is a very interesting argument. If that applies to your helicopters being moved from base X"—which I will not name—"to Lyneham, how much longer would it take to repay the vast amount that it will cost to move our Hercules fleet from Lyneham to Brize Norton?" He said, "Well, it is certainly 50 or 100 years, and it is possibly never." I said, "I will not name you, but I will quote you," which I have happily done.
The accountants are going to have to answer much more clearly on how they can add the thing together to make a sum that justifies shifting 3,500 RAF people and up to 50 planes from RAF Lyneham to RAF Brize Norton, which is already too small. Anyone who has had the misfortune to travel courtesy of crab air to Afghanistan or Iraq, which I have done two or three times recently, will know that RAF Brize Norton is already one of the least hospitable bases and that it is demonstrably too small for the job that it does at the moment. If about 50 Hercules, A400Ms—if they arrive—or C-17s were also operating out of the base, goodness knows what it would be like.
At the moment, three tactical runways, two of which are at RAF Lyneham and one of which is at Brize Norton, are used for transport. If we were to bring everything together in one place at Brize Norton, all our eggs would be in one basket—there would be only one runway, and there are many reasons why it might be inoperable. I was there the other day waiting to fly out to Afghanistan. I was delayed for 12 hours because of ice on the runway. If all our transport capability—refuelling, transport and passenger planes—were in Brize Norton, who knows what the end result would be? The first argument in favour of collocating everything at Brize Norton, namely cost, is questionable, and perhaps the accountants will have a second look.
The second argument for collocation at Brize Norton advanced at the time was that the A400M was coming in by 2012, that it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, that it was a European co-operative project and that it would be a superb aeroplane. We all know that the project has been delayed—the latest I have heard is that it will be delayed by up to four years, although no doubt the delay will be longer than that. The Secretary of State has made it plain in a couple of interventions from the Dispatch Box that he is by no means confident that the A400M will be bought by the British forces, at least to the extent that we said we would buy it.
The whole future of transport is questionable. Most people in the RAF would prefer to see a fleet consisting of Hercules and C-17s, which is the ideal combination of sizes. From memory, we already have six C-17s—perhaps the figure is eight—and we can certainly buy or lease more. Hercules and C-17s seems like a nice combination to me. That combination operates nicely out of RAF Lyneham, and there is no reason why it would have to be based at Brize Norton. At the time, the argument was that the runways at RAF Lyneham are too short for the A400M to take off or land. That is demonstrably not the case, and that excuse was used to achieve other things.
I would prefer to see RAF Lyneham remain the same as it is at the moment. I hope that the delays with the A400M and/or the delays in rebuilding RAF Brize Norton will lead to that outcome. I hope that that door is not entirely closed. Without being party political about it, if there is a Conservative Government at some stage in the future—of course, there might not be—perhaps Conservative Front Benchers will consider reversing that decision. There may well be good economic reasons why it is impossible, but I hope that they do. In a recent informal conversation with one of my Front-Bench colleagues, I was encouraged to hear him say that Conservative policy is not to close RAF bases. We have to keep RAF bases open—in 1942, we discovered that we did not have enough. That was an informal remark, and I may be corrected by other Front Benchers, but I will seek to persuade them to keep RAF Lyneham as it is.
Let us assume that for good reasons advanced by accountants or others, it is not possible to keep RAF Lyneham as it is. At the moment, 3,500 service personnel and 750 civilians work on the base. If one brings those people's other halves into the calculation, some 10,000 people in my constituency owe their livelihood one way or another to RAF Lyneham, and there are also retired service personnel. It is, therefore, a major part of my little constituency, and plays a very significant part in its economy, so the future of RAF Lyneham is of gigantic importance to me as a constituency MP.
I hope and think that I speak for the vast bulk of my constituents in saying that we would very much like Lyneham to remain military. We do not think it is right to convert it to any other use. We do not want a new town—an extension of Swindon, perhaps—or a refuelling base for Virgin Atlantic; that is a proposal I have heard, but it would certainly not be appropriate. We do not want it to become a gigantic industrial site either. We would very much like it to remain military. Wiltshire is home to the military, and the military are home for us in a very real way. We are very proud of our contribution to the military; half of the British Army is in Wiltshire. We want Lyneham to remain military—either RAF or, potentially, Army.
Therefore, if we can find a way of making Project Belvedere work and of bringing all the helicopters from all the different commands together—leaving aside the Royal Navy, which will stay in Yeovilton, I think—under Joint Helicopter Command at RAF Lyneham, that would be an eminently sensible solution. That would involve 15,000 people and 230 helicopters, so there would be quite a significant environmental price to pay—although I am encouraged to hear my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire telling me that in all his time he has only had one or two complaints about noise from Chinooks. Nevertheless, I am aware that if we were to have 230 helicopters operating from RAF Lyneham and 15,000 people, compared with the 3,500 we have at present, there would be a price to pay in terms of developing the air base. My soundings so far—I cannot claim to speak for everyone by any stretch of the imagination—are that the vast bulk of the population would be ready to accept that environmental price under certain conditions, which I will return to in a moment, in return for the continuing economic viability of the area. We want the jobs and the military there, and therefore putting up with helicopter noise, which is a little bit noisier than Hercules noise, is something that I think the vast bulk of my constituents—although not all of them by any stretch—would be ready to accept.
In that context, I say to the Minister that if Project Belvedere goes ahead, it would be nice to enter into a period of negotiation with the RAF and the Army about flying protocols, so that we could minimise the disruption to the surrounding areas. I have already had brief discussions with the Army, who tell me that the majority of flights would be in a narrow corridor going from Lyneham down towards Salisbury plain, and we could enter into negotiations to minimise disruption and noise for local people.
The main problem is not knowing. In recent weeks, I have had a number of discussions about this matter with the Minister, as has my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire, and rumours have flown to and fro—"Belvedere is on. Belvedere is off. Who knows what's happening? We haven't got the money, but we need to do this," and so on. It is important that a decision is made soon. Rumours coming back from various people in the MOD suggest that there is a plethora of committees and commands, and reports going to and fro and minutes of meetings, and that no one can make up their mind what to do. It is important now that the MOD decides either to go ahead with Project Belvedere or a lesser form of it, or—although I am very opposed to this—not to go ahead with it at all.
If the MOD comes to that final conclusion, the last thing I would say on this subject—I am sorry to have bored the House by focusing on what is largely a constituency matter—is as follows. I have seen what happened to RAF Wroughton, which my own Conservative Government made the foolish decision to close in 1995 or so. It lay empty for many years, and there was vandalism and dereliction and total waste. I have seen the same in the town of Corsham in my constituency. The Army moved out in the '50s or '60s, and the town went down for a long time, although it is now coming back up again because of investment through the Defence Information Infrastructure process at Rudloe Manor.
The one thing I would not want to see at Lyneham is indecision and its lying vacant. We must not pull out the Hercules and then have nothing happening there at all. We must have clarity in terms of what is happening. The military might want it for some purpose—perhaps a garrison returning from Germany. Alternatively, if the military come to the clear conclusion that they do not need it and that they will leave in 2014 and hand it over to the local authorities and others who will make something out of it, I would welcome that, too. It is important that we now start to get a little bit of clarity about what the future holds.
I repeat my main point: I hope very much that we can keep the Hercules fleet at Lyneham. If we do not, I hope that we can get Project Belvedere and get the helicopters there. If we do not, I hope that we will find some other military use for Lyneham. If none of those three options works, all I would say is, for heaven's sake let us have a clear decision and let us get on with the next stage in our life.
One is sadly accustomed in these debates to paying tribute to service personnel who have been killed in theatre, previously in Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. One did not expect to have to refer to the murder, for that is what it was, of two young soldiers in Northern Ireland on the eve of their bravely flying out into theatre in Afghanistan, where they would have faced danger from a more recognisable enemy. I would like to raise, in a gentle way, for Ministers' consideration, one small issue that has not been raised today. They may not be aware of a petition that has drawn attention to the fact that these two young soldiers have not been accorded the same sort of ceremonial honour in being returned to the mainland of the UK that they would have been accorded had they died on active service in Afghanistan. These young men did die on active service, just as much as if they had been killed in Afghanistan, and it is only right and proper that they should be accorded the same sort of ceremonial honours. I hope that something can be done in that respect, particularly as it appears that one of their last acts was selflessly to try to protect their comrades as they came under fire.
In this debate, one Minister and three Government Back Benchers have spoken, one Conservative shadow Secretary of State and seven Conservative Back Benchers have spoken, and one Liberal defence spokesman has spoken. No Liberal Back Benchers have made a speech, despite the heroic efforts at in-flight refuelling by two Back Benchers making short interventions. In a debate on a subject of such breadth and importance, it behoves both the Government and those other parties that purport to be part of the Opposition to make sure that they are here in strength to speak up for their various views of the interests of the armed forces.
I come to the contributions that were made. John Smith examined in customary depth and detail the defence training project scheduled for his locality. It appears to have been a timely speech, given the likely contents of a report—still embargoed, but due out tomorrow—that might have taken the edge off it. Mr. Kidney spoke warmly of the support for the armed forces, and especially for the Gurkhas, shown by his constituents. My hon. Friend Mr. Walter made a very persuasive speech. If anyone could persuade me that the European security and defence policy could complement, rather than undermine, NATO it is he—but even he has some way to go before he manages to achieve that.
My hon. Friend Mr. Gray, who has just spoken, was, as usual, passionate in his campaign against the proposed amalgamation of RAF Lyneham and RAF Brize Norton, but he was also deeply realistic, saying to Ministers—I saw assent being indicated from those on the Treasury Bench on this matter—that if there is to be some sort of adverse decision, it is better that it should at least be made clear as soon as possible.
My hon. Friend Robert Key stressed in encouraging detail the very high public support for the services and for service charities. He pointed out that we still have major global interests and therefore need global reach, and that of course relates to both the amphibious capabilities and the future aircraft carriers. It must be said that he has a special interest—perhaps he ought to have declared a family interest—in the aircraft carriers, given the excellent news that his nephew has been recently appointed to command HMS Illustrious. He also made a very interesting point about the size of the defence budget and what we would like it to be. He has the freedom to make that point, but I do not, although I shall be returning to that area a little later.
My hon. Friend Ann Winterton asked about how state-on-state war would be paid for. The answer is that if it ever happened—God forbid that it should—it would not be paid for in any planned sort of way. We do not go out and about looking for state-on-state warfare: we tend to get involved in such warfare when we are attacked by large, hostile states. What we have to do then, frankly, is find the resources irrespective of whether we can afford them. What we have to do in times of peace is at least retain the nucleus for expansion across the spectrum of armed forces capabilities, so that if we ever do have to fight for our very lives in or around our homeland, we would at least have the potential for expansion, which we would not have if we closed things down, bulldozed the sites and said that we would never do anything other than counter-insurgency in the future.
I was greatly encouraged to hear from my right hon. Friend Mr. Arbuthnot, the Chairman of the Defence Committee, that his Committee has decided that we are not under imminent threat of invasion from Russia. Indeed, I would have hoped that his Committee took the same view even throughout the cold war. One of the reasons why we were never under threat of imminent invasion was that we were sensible enough to keep our defences strong, not least by retaining a nuclear deterrent that made it clear to any other power that no matter how many times over they could obliterate this country, they would not be able to do it without paying an unacceptable price.
My right hon. Friend gave an appropriate and sombre warning about Afghanistan, but that does take us somewhat outside the scope of this debate. I agree that questions could be asked about the parameters of these debates. I have tended to look at this one not as "Defence in the UK", but "Defence of the UK", as it complements the subject of defence in the rest of the world. That is a commonsense way to look at it.
We heard a typically magisterial speech from my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Malcolm Rifkind. He sets an example to the House of what it means to have experience, intelligence and fine judgment. His observations on the use of the reserves as a substitute—not from time to time or to fill particular gaps, but as a cheap alternative to adequate regular forces—were very well made indeed. The consequences of what he talked about—the under-resourcing of defence as a whole—are clear for all to see. One has only to look at the reports of the breakdown of relationships between the service chiefs, when they spend time rubbishing the projects of the other armed services in order to try to get a better share of an inadequate cake, to realise the poisonous effect of what has been done to the harmony, efficiency and potential of the armed forces.
I shall repeat what I have said every time that I have had the privilege of making a speech in one of these defence debates. We cannot go on as we are. We were spending 2.5 per cent. on defence when we went into Afghanistan and, as Tony Blair said in his valedictory speech on HMS Albion, we are still spending 2.5 per cent. on defence if the extra cost of Iraq and Afghanistan is added. We have, therefore, been engaging in two medium-scale conflicts on effectively a peacetime defence budget.
I do not know yet what final determination will be made by the leader of my party and the shadow Cabinet on pledges before the next election. One thing that I have been allowed to say repeatedly, however, and I say it again—there is nothing so good in counter-propaganda as repetition—is that a future Conservative Government will fully fund the defence commitments that we undertake. That is not happening at the moment, and it must mean that there will have to be either greater funding in the future or fewer commitments. Which of those two it will be, or whether it will be some point in between, will be revealed nearer the time. However, there will not be a continuation of fighting wars in a way that undermines the future viability of the core armed forces.
Does my hon. Friend remember that, before the 1997 general election, the Labour party pledged that we would reduce the proportion of spending on the defence budget to the European average of gross domestic product? Luckily, when European countries started to reduce their defence budgets as dramatically as they did, even this Government decided that they could not keep up with them in the downward spiral.
I do indeed. I also remember during the cold war years—like many middle-aged men who were involved in those arguments at the time, I am prone to looking back to that time too often—the argument was always to ask why Britain was spending a greater proportion on defence than most of our NATO partners when our European colleagues and partners in NATO were spending much less. In fact, we were spending more than just about all of them except for the Americans. As somebody once pointed out, that was the wrong comparison. Those other countries were on our side. We should have been looking at what was being spent by our potential adversaries rather than what was being spent by our allies. We have to spend as much as the country can afford to fulfil as many military commitments as we need to undertake. We must not be guided by what other countries do, especially if they are on our side rather than our potential adversaries.
I now come to the question of the nuclear deterrent. It was pleasant to hear the traditional voice of Labour unilateralism coming in an intervention from Mr. Kilfoyle, who spoke of the letter in The Times from three retired generals, and from Ms Clark, who was concerned that other countries would follow the UK's example if we do not get rid of our nuclear weapons, presumably by acquiring nuclear weapons of their own, and claimed that such projects are historically far more expensive than when planned.
I have to correct the hon. Lady on both points. Both Trident and Polaris are famous, if not unique in MOD terms, for having come in on time and on budget and, in at least one case, under budget. As for other countries, they will not make a decision to acquire nuclear weapons because Britain, an existing nuclear power, continues to maintain a minimum nuclear deterrent as long as other countries still have nuclear weapons themselves. Whether countries acquire nuclear weapons or not is a matter of their hard-headed interpretations of their own strategic interests. Throughout the cold war and subsequently, whenever people on that side of the argument were challenged to name a particular nuclear or near-nuclear country that would follow suit if we unilaterally gave up our nuclear deterrent, they have never been able to give an example.
As for the letter from the three generals, I would like to think of one of the three, Sir Hugh Beach, as a friend of mine. He is a very gallant and courteous man, who won a military cross fighting the Nazis in world war two. I think very highly of him, but he has always been against Britain's having an independent nuclear deterrent. I was pleased that, when the Royal United Services Institute invited him to write a long article for its journal, I was encouraged to write the rejoinder for the opposite side of the case. I invite anoraks on this subject to get hold of the February 2009 edition and immerse themselves in those two articles.
As well as being one of the most decent Members of this House, my hon. Friend Mr. Brazier is certainly one of the most respected on the subject of reserves, but I want to concentrate on another aspect of his excellent speech. He went to the heart of the matter when he pointed out that virtually all the wars and conflicts in which we have been engaged in recent history took us completely by surprise. He gave a long and extremely impressive list, but I should like to add one more example. In the 1920s, this country's armed forces were so unclear about where the next war was likely to come from that each of them prepared its own hypothetical contingency plans against entirely different potential enemies—the Royal Navy against Japan, the Army against Russia, and the Royal Air Force against France. At least one of them got it right, but I leave it to hon. Members to decide which.
I turn now to the contribution made by the Minister for the Armed Forces. I was surprised at his feeble attempt to suggest that the Conservative policy on the maintenance of Trident was unclear. The Conservative party is the only major party in this House that has supported the maintenance of the strategic nuclear deterrent ever since Britain acquired one.
I take the Minister back to that happy day of
All I was seeking was clarification.
Well, you got it!
Absolutely, we certainly have it now, but it is something that the shadow Chancellor will have to bear in mind when he draws up his plans. As I said, the Conservative party must somehow stretch its ambitions around the money that it is applying, and the two do not match.
Here is a litmus test for the Minister: when he sees that my hon. Friends the Members for Woodspring and for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth)—and, I venture to say, myself—have been quietly shifted away from the defence portfolio to other responsibilities, he may have some grounds for suggesting that there is something in what he has said. One never knows, as all such matters are in the lap of the gods—or, in this case, my right hon. Friend Mr. Cameron, the leader of my party, whom we all greatly admire and respect.
I particularly admire and respect my right hon. Friend because I remember his excellent response to Tony Blair at the end of 2006, when the statement about the Government's intention to go on with a new generation of the nuclear deterrent was made. I was somewhat involved in the drafting of that reply and my right hon. Friend made only two alterations, both of which made it even tougher than it had been in the original draft. I therefore have no doubts whatsoever on that matter.
I turn now to the contribution from the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Nick Harvey. I think that I dealt at the time with his bizarre claim that his party had been vindicated by the fact that a timetable had been set for withdrawal from Iraq, now that the insurgency has been brought so massively under control. The Liberal Democrats were advocating a timetable for withdrawal while the outcome of the conflict was still in doubt. I have argued before that counter-insurgency involves four elements: identification of the enemy, isolation of the enemy, neutralisation of the enemy and negotiation with realistic parts of the enemy to deal with the irreconcilables so that peace can then prevail. That is precisely what has happened in this case.
The hon. Gentleman's remarks about the protesters were well made and his commitment to a strategic defence review is good. It is a pity that it came so long after my party's calls for one, not only now but every four years. One of the interventions made during his speech seemed to suggest that we needed a strategic defence review because the last one had been tailored to the cold war. That is the opposite of the truth: the last strategic defence review, which we all, on both sides of the House, said at the time was a pretty good piece of work, was precisely tailored to the post-cold war world.
I am glad the hon. Gentleman sees that. Perhaps that was why he described the intervention as "interesting" rather than giving it more positive support.
My time is all but up but I should like to say a word or two—[Hon. Members: "It is up."] Okay. I shall say a word and a half about the carrier project. In a written statement on
"We have concluded that there is scope for bringing more closely into line the introduction of the joint combat aircraft and the aircraft carrier. This is likely to mean delaying the in service date of the new carriers by one to two years."—[ Hansard, 11 December 2008; Vol. 485, c. 67WS.]
However, although Lockheed confirmed that it was ready to deliver the first aircraft by 2014, the company was told by the MOD that it would not need the aircraft until 2017. The Minister with responsibility for defence equipment stated on
"the reprofiling of the carrier programme was in no sense due to any delays in the JSF programme".—[ Hansard, 23 February 2009; Vol. 488, c. 10.]
I have been referred by the Prime Minister in written answers to questions that were not reached on a Wednesday, both yesterday and last month, to each of those answers, so I should be very grateful indeed if the Minister would give us the reason why the aircraft carrier programme was delayed. It has not been made clear yet.
As usual, the debate has been wide ranging. The contributions were not only well informed but covered interesting subjects.
Today, on the Conservative Front Bench we saw the neo-cons versus the Cameroons. Dr. Lewis is a strong advocate for the nuclear deterrent—I would recommend to anyone his pamphlet arguing the case for it. It would be interesting if there were a Conservative Government—I shall not say that I look forward to the day—and Mr. Howarth was at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the hon. Member for New Forest, East at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with Dr. Fox running some bit of Government equivalent to a Siberian power station.
Today, the Conservatives have set out clearly that the nuclear deterrent is not up for negotiation. The reason that clarity is important is that sad anoraks, such as me, who read conservativehome can see that the central hierarchy of the party are trying to test the water—to find out whether negotiation would be possible. The clarity we have heard today is very important.
The hon. Member for Woodspring made an interesting speech and, in his usual way, covered a large number of subjects. He seems to think that the Navy is separate from the rest of the defence budget. He talked about the Navy being betrayed. I want to reinforce the point made by my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces. We have the largest building programme ever for the Royal Navy—£14 billion over the next 10 years. That is a clear commitment from the Government to the Navy. It is important to ensure not only that we equip the Navy with the ships it requires but that we have the skills to produce those ships in UK yards.
Resources were mentioned. I look forward to hearing debates on the issue as the election gets closer. The hon. Member for Aldershot is clear about his position; he said on "Newsnight" on
I will not give way; I do not have time.
I think that the three hon. Gentlemen on the Conservative Front Bench argue their point of view quite sincerely, because all three are strong advocates of the armed forces and supporters of the defence sector, but they will come up against a lot of Cameroons and others in their party who will not want to commit to defence.
The hon. Member for Woodspring mentioned Russia; I know that he raised the issue on another occasion, too. He asked whether there had been increased submarine activity. There has not been any increase in the usual levels of activity. There has been an increase in surface activity, but I think he will appreciate that I do not want to go into too much detail about that. Cyber-security needs to be taken seriously not only by the Ministry of Defence, but across Government. It is a new field that will increasingly play an important part in any type of attack in future.
The hon. Member for Woodspring rightly referred to the increased body armour provided in armed vehicles. More armed forces men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq are now surviving attacks, not just because of the skill of our medical staff but because of the protection they get. That leaves issues to do with rehabilitation, and I am certainly committed to ensuring that those concerned get support.
I will not.
The hon. Member for Woodspring touched on the subject of mental health, which was also mentioned by Nick Harvey. The hon. Member for Woodspring asked whether the issue was at the centre of the Ministry of Defence's concerns. I am determined to make it so, not just for the ministerial team, but within the chain of command, because all the evidence is there. We have to be careful not to use intemperate language when talking about the numbers. The numbers are quite small, but that does not detract from the fact that if just one single person suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, it is a personal tragedy for that individual and their family. We must do our utmost to protect them. I am working with service charities and other sectors on the welfare pathway, which will be announced later this year. It will look at the support that we give to our men and women not only when in service, but once they leave service.
I am sorry, but I will not.
The hon. Member for Woodspring raised the issue of decompression. Every time I have been to theatre, I have asked about the issue. I was in Afghanistan a few weeks ago and asked again whether the decompression period was long enough. It is 48 hours in Cyprus. Every single time, both commanders and normal soldiers tell me that that is long enough. I have said this to the hon. Gentleman before: I ask him not to denigrate in any way the role of our civil servants serving overseas. I do not think that he did so intentionally. Those staff are volunteers, and many are doing dangerous jobs in dangerous situations. We should thank them for the role they play.
I do not know whether anyone here has seen the film "Groundhog Day", but the contribution of my hon. Friend John Smith perhaps reminded a lot of us of it. He is a great, strong advocate for St. Athan. A lot of Members have asked where the new facility is, and I had to think very hard about whether it actually was in his constituency. I pay tribute, as he did, to the brigadier and the project team who are delivering that facility. It is a challenging and complex project that will not only deliver the training we need, but, as he rightly highlighted, have an economic impact on his constituency and part of Wales; that should not be underestimated.
The hon. Member for North Devon spoke of the number of people who have, sadly, been wounded or died in Afghanistan. May I join him in paying tribute not just to the men and women who have lost their lives, but their families, and to the medical staff, to whom he drew attention? I will not repeat the arguments on the timetable for withdrawal—it is one occasion on which I agree with the point made by the hon. Member for New Forest, East.
As for the larger issue of where we are, we are making changes, and there is new thinking on how we deal with, for example, the arms plot to provide more settled lives. The regional forces review will address some of the issues that, particularly in the Army, have not been previously addressed. I am not a great supporter of a defence review, because I fear that it would take a lot of time and effort, and detract from the immediate task at hand, which is not just supporting our service men and women but looking at their operational commitments.
Turning to the contribution from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, may I say that, yes, it is a great honour to be a Minister in the Ministry of Defence. Anyone who has that privilege, as he did, knows that we deal with some remarkable men and women in a great Department. I was a little concerned, because I know that he is a former Foreign Secretary, that he used the words, "wars of choice". I am worried that that may be interpreted as our being able to pick and choose the conflicts in which we become involved. I accept that he is not an isolationist who thinks that England can somehow divorce itself from the rest of world. However—and he knows this from his experience in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence—one of those Departments may not think about the implications for others of its decisions. Having been on both sides, seeing that must have been difficult for him.
I do not agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman's perception of why and how reservists are used. The position has changed. I never cease to be impressed when I go to theatre by the dedication of the men and women I meet. In some cases, certainly in reconstruction projects both in Afghanistan and Iraq, their civilian skills serve a useful purpose.
Mr. Arbuthnot raised the issue of Belvedere. May I tell him and Mr. Gray that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has got the message? We need to move on this, and my right hon. Friend agrees that the delay and uncertainty are not helping. The right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire raised the issue of JPA—the organisation that procured it is based in his constituency. May I say—and I have said this before—that it is a standing issue when I meet the head of defence personnel? There have been problems, but it is a remarkably successful IT project compared with those in other Government Departments. The important point about JPA, which I want to push, is how we achieve increased access to it. Internet access is the way forward. There are some security issues, but we are addressing them.
My hon. Friend Ms Clark raised the issue of nuclear deterrence. As the hon. Member for New Forest, East said, it is nice to see that the unilateralist flame still burns in our party—although that is not something that I ever supported, I hasten to add. My hon. Friend mentioned the DSDA, and I will take that message back to the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend Mr. Davies.
I have a lot of time and affection for Ann Winterton, but I thought she was occasionally a little intemperate in her speech. She takes a close interest in protected vehicles, and in a previous debate expressed thanks and recognised the advances that had been made. She asked for numbers, but I do not want to give the number of individual vehicles for operational reasons. Great advances have been made. When I was in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I saw not only how they saved people's lives but the adaptations that had been made in theatre. We can rightly be proud of that.
The hon. Lady spoke about Merlin. The reason for the upgrade is that it is not a simple matter to move an aircraft from a peacetime role in the UK to an operational role. The issue was not that the helicopters could not fly without their rotor blades, but the need to increase efficiency. As a result, the number of flying hours that we are getting out of helicopters in Afghanistan has substantially increased.
My hon. Friend Mr. Kidney paid tribute to 22 Signals and thanked the people of Stafford for their support for the armed forces, particularly for the Gurkhas. The Gurkhas are within my area of responsibility, so I know that they will warmly welcome the support they are getting locally.
On the Borona project, I was in Germany on Tuesday and was briefed about the process. There is work to be done on sites and time scales, but I assure my hon. Friend that the project is still on schedule and under active consideration. It is important that where we site super-garrisons we have good working relationships in advance with local authorities, and I am sure he will play his role in that.
Mr. Brazier made a passionate and well-argued speech. He is a great advocate for the reserve forces. I, too, congratulate the Argylls in his constituency. We should not forget the reservists who have been wounded or killed in action, especially members of the special forces. We should ensure that they get recognition. I am sure that when the review document is published, the hon. Gentleman will be pleasantly surprised by much of it.
Robert Key is my former colleague on the Defence Committee. I think I have been to Salisbury more times in the past few months than I had ever been in my life, and it is a wonderful city. He spoke about the role of the Navy and he is right. When I go to Kandahar or Camp Bastion, there seem to be more submariners there than anywhere else. They are playing a key role. I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising the issue of Help for Heroes, which has raised not only money but the profile and support for our troops, which is welcome.
One of the privileges of my job is to work with armed forces charities, which do a fantastic job. I am not one who thinks that Government can do everything. The charities have an important role. I hope that many people take part in armed forces day on
We heard a fascinating contribution from Mr. Walter, which showed the tensions in the Conservative party on Europe. I am glad that he and Mr. Clarke are now in the ascendancy again in the party. The hon. Gentleman's speech was well argued. Britain cannot do anything alone. Working with European partners and NATO is important. We need to explain that and fight back against little Englanders such as the hon. Member for North Wiltshire. I wish the hon. Member for North Dorset well in his campaign to educate the more recalcitrant members of the Conservative party about the benefits of the European Community.
I have already mentioned Project Belvedere, which was also raised by the hon. Member for North Wiltshire. I understand the frustration. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point: a decision needs to be taken so that we can move on and get the necessary involvement.
In closing, it is always important for us to say a big thank you to our men and women in the armed forces. Whenever I meet them, whether in this country or abroad, I realise that they are young men and women carrying huge burdens of responsibility. In my first contribution to one of these debates, I said that I would like to continue the bipartisan approach in the House, which we certainly had in the Defence Committee, so that we are united in thanking and supporting the members of our armed forces who are doing very difficult jobs on our behalf.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the matter of defence in the UK.