Maritime Surveillance

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Good. I am so pleased.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

He did stop us going into the euro.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Yes, he did. I have been searching for something positive to say about the hon. Gentleman’s right hon. Friend, and I am happy to say that he was right about that.

I got the House of Commons Library to do some research for me last week. I pay tribute to the Library, which does a fantastic job for us. The Library found that this year, the overseas aid budget will increase by £2.65 billion. The Government are struggling to spend the money as it is. We have done our bit and shown an example to the rest of the world. It does not make sense for us to increase overseas aid when we lack such important capability.

Perhaps my right hon. Friend the Minister will go back to our right hon. Friend the Prime Minister—I know that they are close friends—and say that this is what we should do. When I put to him the issue of ring-fencing overseas aid and not defence, the Prime Minister said, “I gave a commitment in 2009, as I did on the third runway.” I respect the Prime Minister for that principled view, but the world has changed. We have had the Arab spring and turmoil around the world. Our armed forces are one of this kingdom’s greatest assets, and our defence industry is one of the economy’s. There is a need, a requirement and an obligation, and we have a number of options to deliver that capability. I believe we should provide it now and that, quite legitimately, we should divert funds from overseas aid to provide a maritime patrol aircraft, which would contribute to stability around the world and greater prosperity among the countries we are trying to help.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire and his colleagues on the Defence Committee on their report and on bringing the matter before the House. They have done a great service to Parliament and the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robathan]

I have told the hon. Gentleman that I will not engage with him again, because we have done it before and he is in denial. One cannot have military or economic security based on unsustainable defence spending. The Soviet Union found that out. That is why we took a number of difficult decisions during the SDSR, including the decision not to bring the Nimrod MRA4 into service.

At the beginning of the debate, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire said that he did not wish to concentrate on Nimrod, but I am afraid that it has been largely about Nimrod, which I will therefore have to deal with in some detail. I asked the officials present—this huge number of serving personnel and civil servants—at what date the original Nimrod decision was taken, so I knew before his confession that it was, sadly, taken under the previous Conservative Government.

We should not forget the background to the decision to cancel Nimrod. There were no maritime reconnaissance aircraft flying in the RAF when we came into government. We did not create the capability gap—the capability did not exist. Owing to cost growth in the programme, the original plan to convert 21 airframes for the MRA4 had by 2010 been scaled back to only nine. The in-service date had been delayed from 2003 to 2012, costs had none the less risen from £2.8 billion to £3.6 billion, there were still outstanding technical problems which would have taken further large sums of money to solve and we knew that it would cost about £2 billion to operate over the next decade. While the capability’s role in support of anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, strategic intelligence gathering, and search and rescue remained important, in a financially constrained environment dominated by the operations in Afghanistan among other threats, it made the most military and financial sense to discontinue the programme, however unhappy that made us.

I was particularly interested in the comments of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife. I joined the armed forces in 1970 and, during my time in the Army and in Parliament since, I have seen a long list of poor procurement projects—[Interruption.] That is the Leader of the Opposition ringing. Out of a litany of procurement disasters, as the hon. Gentleman said, this has been one of the worst. It was more than nine years late, each aircraft was to cost three times the original amount and we still had not finished. We did not where the programme was going, there was no end in sight and we were not asked to throw good money after bad. I am afraid that that decision, much as it is regretted, was the right one.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I apologise to the Minister and to other right hon. and hon. Members for coming late to the debate. I was serving on the Justice and Security Bill Committee, which has only just finished. Given that so much money was sunk into this project and that considerable technological advances were made for the equipment that was to be carried on the Nimrod, will we still get the benefit of that advanced technology development for possible use in future programmes?

[Mr Robathan]

My hon. Friend asks a good question, but I am afraid that I cannot answer at this moment. I will write to him and let him know but, certainly, technological advance does not go away—it has happened.

We have not been idle in dealing with the consequences of the decision. Revised plans and operating procedures are in place for other platforms to mitigate the absence of a maritime patrol aircraft capability. I will not go into too much detail, as some things are classified, but we can request support from allies and partners if necessary and we have established a seedcorn initiative to maintain the skills and knowledge necessary to operate maritime patrol aircraft in the future, should circumstances change. I was in New Zealand last year and saw some of our RAF personnel who were taking part in the seedcorn initiative. They said it was extremely valuable, and I thought it also sounded like a pretty good posting.