Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

Andrew Bowie Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Howell]

I see my right hon. Friend is nodding, so perhaps he will not intervene on me, having made that point. But there is another point on that—the strategic investment that the Royal Air Force will be making, which I will come back to. I am very conscious that it is not just us increasing spending now but countries such as Germany and Denmark. I encourage them to increase their spending further.

Before I come to the Royal Air Force, let me say a word about the Navy. Before the crisis between Russia and Ukraine started, I got the Navy’s leading expert on Russia to come to speak to my delegation to the Council of Europe. Hon. Members may ask why I got a naval expert to come to a delegation that has said it has nothing to do with the security apparatus of Europe. The reason is that I do not buy that argument and actually what the rear-admiral concerned said filled us with a tremendous amount of horror. He pointed out Russia’s interest in the Baltic passages in particular and, more generally, how ill-equipped we were to be able to deal with that. I therefore ask for more investment to be made in that area.

Something like £2 billion of strategic investment is to be made in the Royal Air Force. I think that that should be increased. If Russia has taught us anything, it is that investment in tanks is not a very good investment. If we look at Ukraine, a huge amount of anti-tank missiles are there already and something as fleet of foot as the Royal Air Force is to be commended. I do not want to set a hare running, but I hope that the Minister can confirm that bases such as RAF Benson are not earmarked for closure. They play a vital role and Benson does in particular in looking after the helicopters that we use all the time in our Air Force. They also have another use; they provide training.

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

I had the privilege of visiting RAF Benson just a couple of weeks ago and I reiterate my hon. Friend’s comments on that base’s contribution to training the next generation of helicopter pilots and supporting the wider RAF and, indeed, the local community. I echo his remarks and hope that the Minister will confirm that Benson is not earmarked for closure.

[John Howell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks and support. I was going to mention some of that training—and, indeed, some of the training that I have gone through there. Benson is home to CAE, a company that provides a tremendous amount of simulator training for the RAF. He will no doubt be pleased to know that I flew a Chinook and a Puma on the simulator so successfully that I did not crash them. I think that is a tribute to the success of the training, rather than to my dexterity at the controls of two very large aircraft.

On the relationship with companies that provide equipment and larger things to the military, over the years I have tried to put across to the Minister’s Department the idea of a conflict avoidance board for such projects. They work incredibly well in industry. People who are skilled in mediation sit on them and their aim is to stop something becoming a conflict. As we all know, all projects have such problems during their lives and conflict avoidance boards are good at ensuring that we can avoid such conflicts. What is the benefit of that? It goes straight to the heart of the budget. Doing that is much cheaper than spending vast amounts of money going through the courts, with QCs and whoever else is needed to settle a particular argument. I urge the Minister to look at the scheme again for his larger projects. The feedback that I got was closer to a kick in the teeth than anything else, yet I think the boards have tremendous potential. On that note, I will finish and allow somebody else to take over.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to rise to speak in this debate. I have been nearly five years in this place, and every six months or so—periodically at least—we come together to discuss defence. Usually, it is the same old voices and the same points being made, and we all go away saying, “It is good to hear a unified Chamber all speaking as one asking for more to be spent on defence and for more interest to be shown in the defence community or the armed forces in general.” Undoubtedly, we would hear a polite and eloquent response from the Minister at the Dispatch Box—I am expecting no less from today’s Minister—espousing the great extent to which the UK Government were investing more in the armed forces and where it was being spent. The difference today is that we are conducting this debate at a time when images are being shown on our television screens of events happening in Europe now that we thought we would be witnessing only in history books or documentaries—a Europe of 1942, not of 2022. That puts this debate into context. We are talking about defence spending and the estimates, so the debate gives us the chance to interrogate the MOD’s expenditure and to look at wider defence spending. As I was mentioning those on the Treasury Bench, I must pay tribute to the excellent work that Ministers, specifically those in this Department, have been doing over the past few weeks, keeping us all informed, carrying the message to the British public about what we are doing to support the Ukrainian people and ensuring that the Ukrainian armed forces got the training and the equipment that they need to stop Russia and to stop Vladimir Putin doing what he is doing.

I wish to make two points. The first is on the continual debate about percentage spending. We should always remember that 2% is the minimum we are expected to spend on defence by NATO. We now need to look very much at what that 2% is. What does the 2% mean when it comes to UK defence spending? A 2016 report by the Defence Committee called “Shifting the goalposts?” showed that now the 2% includes war pensions, contributions to United Nations peacekeeping, pensions for retired civilian MOD personnel and MOD income, among other things. Fair enough, if that is to be included in defence spending, that is to be included in defence spending, but we should not for one minute assume that if we are saying we are spending 2% of GDP on defence, it is being spent on defence equipment or on personnel; it now covers a far bigger, wider range of things than it used to when we were calculating what we were contributing to the overall NATO budget.

The report also said:

“The 2% pledge, while necessary, may not be sufficient. We believe that the focus should not be merely on a headline figure, but on whether this expenditure can possibly provide a sound defence for the UK.”

Never has that been more true than today, given what we are witnessing in Europe. As has been said time and time again, mass still matters. When the integrated review was published last year, I welcomed much of it. I think we do need to invest in cyber and psy-ops—psychological operations—and we need to spend more on the Royal Navy, in a period when our need to be in charge of the seas, to protect freedom of navigation, especially in the South China sea, with our allies over there, is very important. But it is absolutely true that, as so many Members have said today, a plan survives only until first contact with the enemy. We must now look at the assumptions made in the integrated review, because they are simply out of date. I am not saying we should review the review—goodness me, we all know how much time and effort is taken by defence reviews in general—but it is essential that we look at what we are currently doing and at where we will spend money in the near future.

It is simply inconceivable that we are about to reduce the size of our Army by 10,000 personnel. At a time when allies of ours are being invaded by an aggressive foe, it is simply untenable for us to send the signal that we are reducing the size of our armed forces. That has to be looked at again. I echo the words of so many of my colleagues when I say that we really must increase spending on defence. Defence is not a luxury item, a “might have” or an addition; it is essential to who we are and what we deliver for our allies around the world. We do deliver for our allies around the world, but we need to ensure that we do so in the most efficient manner possible.