My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for securing this debate this afternoon. He clearly has a personal stake in this narrative, and we salute his service. I also pay tribute to the RAF on its centenary.

Others who have spoken have covered much of the ground at the centre of this debate. I come to it relatively unformed, because it is not an area of expertise for me. I spoke on bees last week; I am much happier on that aerial form, and able to contribute. I am prepared to indulge the House and go into more detail, if noble Lords would like, because it seemed to go down quite well at the time—but perhaps not. However, I would like to claim that I went to the trouble of visiting Yeovil and the area that we have been talking about to prepare for this debate, but it was because I managed to take a wrong turning last week and ended up on the M5 when I should have been on the M4. I happened to end up at a rather splendid helicopter museum, which actually was extremely useful for this debate—and I actually talked to some local people about some of the issues. So I have a little vestigial information to back up my rather narrow approach to the issue.

I have listened to what has been said, which makes a case that I want to move on to later, which will be mainly about where the industrial strategy might come to meet some of the issues that have been raised today. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, mentioned a similar debate on this issue that was held in the other place and led by Marcus Fysh, the MP for the area. It was actually the defence spokesman who responded in that case, but today we are graced by the presence of a Minister from BEIS. That helps my argument, because I think that it will be possible therefore to pass on questions about the industrial strategy, and I hope that he will be able to bring us up to date with where we are going on that.

I suppose it was inevitable, given the former connections that have been mentioned in this debate, that it will be centred around Yeovil and the company Leonardo. However, it should not be forgotten that there are other manufacturers of helicopters in the UK; I think that all noble Lords have received a briefing from Airbus about its work. It wanted to draw attention to its design and maintenance facility in Oxford, where more than 30 design engineers are based; to work that it has been doing in RAF Shawbury; and to the £500 million a year which it invests—