Oral Answers to Questions

John Healey Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

Oh dear. I think the right hon. Gentleman has not even read the defence industrial strategy, where it is very clear that we have committed to enhancing sovereignty. He will know, because he has watched the solid support ship contract with great interest, that we have also classified those ships as warships and started that competition. It is incredibly important that we recognise that, first and foremost, this Government are going to do more, and have done more, to enhance British shipbuilding than any other Government for many, many years, including the one he was a member of.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

May I start by thanking the Defence Secretary and you, Mr Speaker, for the words about Jack Dromey? On this side, we mourn deeply his very sad and sudden death. He touched everyone he worked with—everyone has a proud or affectionate Jack Dromey story—and our House and our politics are the poorer without him this week.

Turning to the question, there are indeed 300,000 UK defence jobs, many linked to MOD contracts. Why have the National Audit Office and the MOD’s own accounts officially confirmed 67 cases of overspends, write-offs, contract cancellations, unplanned extensions and admin errors since 2010, costing at least £13 billion in taxpayers’ money wasted since 2010? Those are only the published data—they are the tip of the iceberg—so will the Secretary of State now commission the NAO to conduct an across-the-board audit of MOD waste, as Labour in government would from day one?

[Mr Wallace]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has raised the issue of the contents of Labour’s dodgy dossier on defence procurement, which are a fascinating read. They include allocating the loss on Nimrod, which the Labour party had governed for 13 years, to a Conservative Government and the fact that the Labour party had estimated that aircraft carriers would cost only £2.7 billion when in fact they cost over £6 billion. Considerable amounts of the so-called “waste” in the dossier show a breathtaking misunderstanding of both accountancy and how things operate when it comes to procurement. Retiring an aircraft last year that was due to retire in 2015—the Sentinel—does not make it a write-off or a waste; it is getting rid of a piece of equipment that is no longer value for money in delivering what we need to deliver. If he wishes to become the future Defence Secretary, I suggest he takes a course in accountancy first.

[John Healey]

The Sentinel was, of course, retired before the replacement E-7 Wedgetails were ready, so the MOD rightly accounted for £147 million in constructive loss in its accounts. However, £4 billion has been wasted since 2019 alone, since the Secretary of State has been in post, and the National Audit Office has judged the MOD’s accounts for the defence equipment plan “unaffordable” every year for the last four years. It has said that there is a budget black hole of up to £17 billion. The Secretary of State has taken no serious action to deal with these deep-seated problems. He is failing British forces, and failing British taxpayers.

[Mr Wallace]

Desperate!

Let us start with the first point. The Sentinel is not an early-warning radar, which the E-7 Wedgetail is. If we are going to say that I retired one platform capability and replaced it with another, let us try to make sure that we replace it with the right type of capability, otherwise someone will be flying the wrong plane in the wrong place at the wrong time—but then I suppose we should not really be very surprised by Labour.

I entirely understand the NAO’s observations. There are, absolutely, a great many things to put right, and in putting them right, yes, we cancel programmes that we cannot afford, yes, we retire capabilities that should have been retired previously, because that is called putting your house in order. Otherwise, we end up with an NAO ruling that

“The MoD has a multi-billion-pound budgetary black hole which it is trying to fix with a ‘save now, pay later’ approach.”

That was the NAO’s report on the Labour Government in 2009, and the “pay later” is what we are now living with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. Friend points out the other job that Defence does, which is building this country’s resilience wherever one may be in the United Kingdom. It is always important to remember that our armed forces have a day job—a main job—of defending our country. When we are out of this national crisis and pandemic, it will be important to look at making sure that other people step up to cover. In the long term Defence personnel are always there, whether for floods, pandemic or other threats, and they will continue to be so. That is why it was important that we put soldiers and sailors at the heart of our Defence Command Paper.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

Today’s US-Russia talks in Geneva start a critical week of dialogue over Ukraine. I assure the Secretary of State that we fully support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. As a defensive alliance, it is clear that it is not NATO’s but Russia’s actions that are dangerously escalating the current tensions. What leading role is the UK playing to ensure that any agreement on the talks is fully co-ordinated with NATO and with European allies?

[Mr Wallace]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support. I will continue to work with him, and the Leader of the Opposition, to ensure that he is kept informed as much as we can on the situation. That goes for the Scottish National party as well. I have personally been to Ukraine five or six times in my time as Security Minister and Defence Secretary. The lessons of Afghanistan are that as we move together, whether as NATO or as a coalition, we will continue to work with—