Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Mr Francois
The Chair of the PAC is entirely right, although in the MOD context, if it is groundhog day, “groundhog” sounds like a vehicle that has slipped to the right.
More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the Defence Committee, on which I serve, published a damning report on 4 February 2024, entitled simply “Ready for War?”. I have served on the Committee since 2017 and this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the all-party Committee, which includes six former MOD Ministers, concluded:
“Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary. ”
In plainer English, and as the subsequent detail in the report starkly points out, despite a considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment, not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve. The full report can be found online.
Given that it takes years to build a modern warship—a totally ridiculous 11 years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate—and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war”, one with little further warning, we would have to rely on whatever equipment we had to hand or could rapidly remobilise. We simply do not have enough war-winning kit to win as it is. As the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 10-year equipment plan illustrates starkly, the difference between what the MOD aspires to buy and the funding it is likely to have available is £17 billion. However, it is worse because the three services account for the plan on a different basis. Without going into all the technicalities, an apples and apples comparison across the three services shows that the gap is £29 billion. Even beyond gaps in capability of our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment that we do have. Without them—and far too many of them are leaving, as the Chair of the Defence Committee said—even multi-billion dollar aircraft systems simply remain in the hangar.
One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MOD has now become in relation to people is the saga of Capita—or, forgive me, “Crapita”, as it is now affectionally known to the Defence Committee. It has totally messed up the recruitment system for the British Army. A few years ago, its share price topped £4; today, it is barely 13 pence. Everyone in Defence knows that the outsourced contract has been a disaster, yet absolutely no one in the upper echelons of the Department has the moral courage to sack the company. The Defence Secretary recently described the situation in The Times as “ludicrous”. He is absolutely right. Indeed, no doubt he has made a note of his own comments on his own famous spreadsheet, but still nothing actually happens. Capita limps on as the Army bleeds out—with, in some parts of the Army, three soldiers now leaving for every one that Capita somehow, painfully, manages to recruit. If we think we are going to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner, we are living on a different planet, in a parallel universe, in a fantasy dimension.
Given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, the British taxpaying public are quite entitled to ask why so little of our defence capability works properly. Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles 60 years old? Why do we have hardly any battle tanks that actually work? Why do we have hardly any submarines that are now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that perennially break down whenever they try to leave port? Bluntly, it is because we now have a Ministry of Defence that has become in recent years a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by needless, self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; in which some senior civil servants are now more interested in wokery than weaponry, endlessly ripped off by some of their own major contractors, such as Boeing, to name but one; and in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old—and the procurement system for replacing them so broken—that we now cannot fight a major war with Russia for more than a few weeks, as it well knows.
Moreover, as the Red Book clearly shows in tables 2.1 and 2.2, we are cutting the core UK defence budget next year by £2.5 billion and playing “smoke and mirrors” with the donations to Ukraine and with addressing an overspend on the nuclear enterprise from the Treasury reserve in order to pretend otherwise. This act of what the Russians call “maskirovka”, or strategic deception, is wholly unworthy of a Conservative Government. If Members happen to believe, as I do, that the role of our armed forces is determinedly to save lives by convincing any potential aggressor that, were they to attack us, we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing.
This is not an intellectual parlour game. Ultimately, this is about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s re-education camp, but we might not know that if we walked into the current MOD. We can try to blame the military, for instance, for so frequently over-specifying new military equipment, such as Ajax, that it enters service many years late, but in the end the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge.
The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—he who desires peace save-line3should prepare for war. Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a pre-war world, surely we had better start preparing for it, if we are to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it, and we should now do that in earnest, before it is too late.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I know that he is coming towards the end of his speech. Would he care to remark on a couple of slightly more optimistic features of deterrence, because deterrence of conventional forces depends on far more than an equal balance of equipment, even though, as he says, we are nowhere near achieving that? It also depends on our allies and others who will fight in the same cause. Does he not accept that it is not just enough to take our defence spending up to 3% or more, such as the 5% we regularly spent through the cold war, but essential to ensure that our American allies remain totally involved in the deterrence process and that the Ukrainians succeed in fending off Russia, because if they succeed we can contain Russia in the future, as we successfully did in the past?
Mr Francois
I agree with every word my right hon. Friend, the former eminent Chairman of the Defence Committee, just said. My one caveat is that the MOD’s excuse for these capability gaps is that we can rely on allies to fight with us. But they will be relying on us, and if we are unable to support them or they are on wartime tasks elsewhere, things might go horribly wrong.
I say all of this not just as someone who served proudly as a Territorial Army infantry officer in my local Royal Anglian Regiment during the cold war; not just as someone who is still very proud to carry the late Queen’s commission; not just as a former veterans and then Armed Forces Minister in the Ministry of Defence, albeit almost a decade ago; but most of all, as I said at Prime Minister’s questions last week, as the devoted son of a D-day veteran. Stoker 1st Class Reginal Francois died when I was 40 years of age. He told me one night of the carnage—his word—that he witnessed that day, albeit from offshore, on a minesweeper named HMS Bressay. In the afternoon, they were opposite Omaha beach.
Let me quote Shakespeare’s famous phrase:
“This story shall the good man teach his son.”
My father was a good man. The story that he told me was of a country that eventually, reluctantly, had to go to war against the evil of Nazi tyranny because for years its politicians had been so parsimonious—he actually said “tight”—and so naive that when Nazism emerged, we completely failed to deter it. That is the lesson of the 1930s, but it was also his lesson to me.
My father made me take a solemn vow that, as his son, I would never take living in a free country for granted, because, as he said, too many good men had died to achieve it. Two years after we had that conversation, he was dead. That is why I am here this afternoon. That is why I came into politics in the first place. As a wartime serviceman, my father was a great admirer of Winston Churchill, our greatest ever Prime Minister, who led this country through a war of national survival and then lost a general election for his trouble. When I walked into the Chamber earlier this afternoon, I could still see the damage caused when the Chamber was bombed in 1941. Churchill insisted that it not be repaired, lest we forget, and he was right.
In summary, I may not be my father’s contemporary, that famously courageous MP, Leo Amery, so I cannot claim to “speak for England” on this matter, but I was elected to speak for the people of Rayleigh and Wickford, and so, on their behalf, I issue this stark warning today. The skies are darkening. Brutal dictators with powerful weapons at their disposal are on the rise. The democracies are on the backfoot rather than the front. History tells us time and again, and indeed ad nauseam, that the appeasement of dictators—be they called Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin—does not work. We should be increasing the defence budget to at least 3% of GDP—what my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) used to call “at least three to keep us free”—not cutting it, as we now are, and pretending that we are not. The first duty of Government, above all others, is the defence of the realm, and we forget that at our peril. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(4 years, 12 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Two notable parliamentary celebrities have risen to their feet: the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence and a former Minister for the Armed Forces. It is very awkward—[Interruption.] No, you are too modest, Dr Lewis; I call Dr Julian Lewis.
Defence
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Dr Lewis
That is absolutely right. It is a measure of how far downwards our expectations were managed during the reductions in percentage GDP spent on defence under the Blair Government and the Cameron coalition Government, that it was regarded as a cause for triumph and congratulation when it was finally confirmed that we would not be dropping expenditure below 2%. The matter had never been questioned at all prior to that period.
Mr Francois
I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way, and it is a pleasure to serve under his stout chairmanship of the Defence Committee—[Interruption.] I mean stout in personality terms.
In some ways, the situation is even more challenging than the one my right hon. Friend lays out. He has rightly given the figures in terms of GDP, but in recent years—as we heard in testimony from the permanent under-secretary—in almost every strategic defence and security review and comprehensive spending review, the MOD has had to sign up to additional sets of efficiency savings, now totalling some £30 billion over time. Not only does the MOD have a constricted budget, it has had to find those efficiency savings as well, which makes the situation even more challenging.
Defence Capability
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
As time is so pressing, and so many people wish to speak who do not get as many opportunities as I do to speak on this subject, I shall just raise a few brief points.
First, I wish to place on record the gratitude of the Defence Committee as a whole to my hon. Friends the Members for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) and for North Wiltshire (James Gray) and the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman), who served on the Committee in the last Parliament, for everything they did to buttress the strength and depth of our inquiries and conclusions. We are very grateful to them all.
I would like to raise the following questions. What is this review about? Who should be able to scrutinise the process? What should we be spending on defence? What is our concept for defence? Is our decision-making process adequate to produce a strategy? Is our soft power adequately resourced? The answers necessarily will be inadequate.
The answer to the first question—what is this review about?—is: I do not know. It is about either increasing the money, sorely needed for defence, or further cutting capability in order to balance the books. I know which of them I should like it to be, and I know which I fear it will be.
Who should be able to scrutinise the process? This process is being carried out by the National Security Adviser, Mark Sedwill. The Defence Committee has applied to have Mr Sedwill appear before us, but the initial response has not been encouraging. It is being suggested that the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy would be the appropriate body for the National Security Adviser to appear before, notwithstanding the fact that National Security Advisers have appeared before us previously. I hope wiser counsels will prevail there.
What should we be spending on defence? I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh) for not only initiating the debate, but making the point very well about what percentage of GDP we used to spend on defence. We used to spend the same on defence as we spent on education and health in the 1980s. Now we spend two and a half times on education and nearly four times on health what we spend on defence. Although we are spending more on defence, defence has indisputably fallen down our national scale of priorities.
What is our concept for defence? That was ably set out by the Labour-led strategic defence review of 1997-98, which came to the conclusion—at a time when we were not facing a threat on the continent of Europe—that we needed an amphibious taskforce and a carrier strike taskforce in order to form a sea base that could go anywhere in the world. I hope to reassure the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) by quoting to him from what the Minister for Defence Procurement wrote in a letter deposited in the House of Commons Library in January, after I raised the question of the future of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark on the Floor of the House. She said:
“There are no current plans to decommission the ships early, and I can reassure you that their out of service dates are 2033 and 2034 respectively.”
It would be diabolical to take ships with that amount of life left in them and retire them early.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
I absolutely agree with what my right hon. Friend said, not least because he is my boss on the Defence Committee. To take Albion and Bulwark out of service would be an absolute false economy, and I very much hope that the Minister will convey that back to the Department.
Dr Lewis
The idea that anyone could be my right hon. Friend’s boss on the Defence Committee is polite, but fanciful.
Is our decision-making process adequate to produce a strategy? In a word, no. We have got to a situation where the chiefs of staff are too divorced from strategy-making. They are then left to have to make cuts in capacity themselves, while they are not able to get together to thrash out a joint strategy in the way that the Chiefs of Staff Committee traditionally did.
Finally, is our soft power adequately resourced? It could be, but the signs are not promising. For example, we produced a report entitled, “Open Source Stupidity”—I think that is probably the first time the word “stupidity” has appeared in an official Select Committee report title—referring to the fact that, for £25 million a year, we need not close the BBC Monitoring centre at Caversham. It is not too late to reverse that extremely stupid decision; and I am glad that the Foreign Secretary, the Chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the International Development Committee and I will have the opportunity to visit that excellent establishment soon, in the hope that we can, even now, prevent that folly from proceeding.
Armed Forces (Investment)
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(9 years, 6 months ago)
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The Minister for the Armed Forces (Mr Mark Francois)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) on securing this debate and giving us the opportunity to discuss this important subject. Before turning to the matter at hand, namely investment in our armed forces, I will take this opportunity to offer my public thanks to him for his staunch support of the armed forces, including in his role as the vice-chairman for the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in the all-party group on the armed forces, and for his support of the 350th anniversary of the Royal Marines this year.
As for investment in the armed forces, the UK is one of the 12 founding members of NATO and takes that role seriously. We have the second largest defence budget in the alliance, behind the United States, and the largest in the European Union. This Government are committed to and indeed meet both key NATO spending targets, spending 2% of our GDP on the defence budget and over 20% of that budget on new equipment. Those commitments were reaffirmed in September by the defence spending pledge made at the NATO summit that the UK proudly hosted in Wales.
Our equipment programme represents a substantial investment of some £164 billion over 10 years, and is expressed annually in our published defence equipment plan. The Army is receiving significant investment in a number of equipment programmes. In September, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence announced a £3.5 billion contract for the highly advanced Scout armoured vehicle, which will boost our capability and sustain 1,300 jobs across the United Kingdom supply chain. We are also investing in expanding our fleet of battle-proven Foxhound armoured vehicles and upgrading our fleet of Apache attack helicopters and our Challenger 2 main battle tank fleet.
The Royal Air Force boasts an impressive equipment programme, which includes enhancing the Typhoon via Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 upgrades to maintain its battle-winning edge and procuring the new F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter, which will place this country at the forefront of fighter technology, as the United Kingdom is the only level 1 partner with the United States in that programme. We recently announced agreement in principle to procure the next four F-35B aircraft for the United Kingdom. This month, the Ministry of Defence has taken delivery of its first A400M Atlas, marking the start of the RAF’s next generation of airlift capability. Production and delivery for the remaining fleet will continue at pace to deliver the full fleet of 22 aircraft by early 2018. We have also recently acquired 14 new heavy-lift Chinook Mk 6 helicopters, to be based at RAF Odiham, giving us one of the largest Chinook fleets in the world after the United States.
To move particularly close to my hon. Friend’s heart, the Royal Navy continues to be one of the premier navies in the world, especially as we look forward to the delivery of the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, the largest ships ever built in the United Kingdom. I was delighted and honoured to be at the naming ceremony of HMS Queen Elizabeth in July, a truly historic occasion. I was also pleased that the Prime Minister announced at the NATO summit that the second carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, will also be brought into service, ensuring that we always have one carrier available 100% of the time. The Navy is also procuring and supporting seven Astute class nuclear attack submarines and six Type 45 Destroyers, and is starting the transition from Type 23 frigates to the new Type 26 global combat ships. The recent contract award for three offshore patrol vessels also serves to strengthen the Royal Navy’s capabilities and maintain shipbuilding skills in the United Kingdom.
Mr Francois
As my hon. Friend will know, we are still at the assessment phase for the Type 26 programme, but 13 is still the planning assumption.
Additionally, the latest version of the Royal Marines’ protected mobility Viking vehicle is being rolled out, and four new Royal Fleet Auxiliary tankers will be built over the next four years, with the first due to enter service in 2016.
We are also making full provision for the successor deterrent system, providing the ultimate guarantee of our national security. In answer to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport—and to an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) before he has made it—the Royal Navy has maintained a continuous at-sea deterrent for over 50 years, based on four boats. It is envisaged that that will continue under a new Conservative Government.
Dr Julian Lewis
I would not have liked the Minister to have anticipated an intervention that was not then made, so can we therefore conclude that in a hung Parliament there would be no question of our ever agreeing again to a deal with another party to postpone the main-gate contract signing, as unfortunately happened in 2010?
Mr Francois
My hon. Friend, with his usual eloquence, tempts me down a difficult alley. I cannot give him the assurance that he wants on that point, but I think I have made the party’s position on four boats clear. I regret that I disappoint him, as I know he has hankered for a fifth boat for some time, but I cannot promise that to him either.
Furthermore, we are significantly increasing our investment in cyber-security, ensuring our armed forces are equipped with cutting edge capabilities across all environments. That combined investment is not only securing the best possible military capability, but helping to secure UK jobs and growth. The UK defence industry employs more than 160,000 people, with a turnover of some £22 billion.
I turn now to naval bases. For generations, up and down the country, many communities have given outstanding support to our armed forces. That is particularly true for those around the Royal Navy’s three main naval bases at Devonport, Portsmouth and Clyde.
Her Majesty’s naval base Devonport delivers world-class, safe and secure operational capability and support to the fleet. Devonport is home to Britain’s amphibious ships, HMS Ocean, HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion; HMS Protector, the ice patrol ship; survey vessels; half the Royal Navy’s frigates; flag officer sea training, the training hub of the front-line fleet; and the centre of amphibious excellence at Royal Marines Tamar. Devonport is also the main support base for the Royal Navy, particularly with its unique deep maintenance refuelling and defuelling facility for nuclear submarines.
The Devonport base employs 2,500 service personnel and MOD civilians, supports around 400 local firms and generates around 10% of Plymouth’s income. In all, some 25,000 people in Devonport’s travel-to-work area depend on defence for their livelihoods—and in my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport they have a worthy champion.
Portsmouth naval base is home to almost two thirds of the Royal Navy’s surface ships, including the Type 45 destroyers, half the Type 23 fleet and the mine countermeasures and fishery protection squadrons—something close to my heart, as my father, to whom my hon. Friend kindly referred, served on a minesweeper at D-day. HMS Clyde, the Falkland Islands patrol vessel, is also based at Portsmouth, which will be home to the two new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, the first of which should arrive in early 2017.
Her Majesty’s naval base Clyde is the naval service’s main presence in Scotland. It is home to the core of the submarine service, including the nation’s nuclear deterrent, and the Royal Navy’s newest and most advanced submarines, HMS Astute and HMS Ambush. From 2020, Clyde will be the Royal Navy’s single integrated submarine operating base and submarine centre of specialisation. The nearby Royal Navy armaments depot at Coulport is responsible for the storage, processing, maintenance and issue of key elements of the UK’s trident deterrent missile system and the ammunitioning of all submarine-embarked weapons.
The 2010 strategic defence and security review confirmed the requirement to maintain all three naval bases. This commitment is evidenced by the recently announced maritime support delivery framework—MSDF.
Turning specifically to that framework, on 13 October my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence notified the House that the Ministry of Defence had awarded two contracts to provide continued support to the management of the UK’s naval bases, and maintenance and repair of Royal Navy warships and submarines to ensure that they are able to meet their operational commitments. The award of these contracts, with a combined value of £3.2 billion, shows a clear indication of our continued commitment to invest in the support provided to the Royal Navy.
MSDF contracts have been awarded to both our industrial partners at naval bases. The contract awarded to Babcock to provide support services at Her Majesty’s naval bases at Devonport and Clyde is valued at £2.6 billion, and the contract awarded to BAE Systems to provide support services at Portsmouth naval base is worth some £600 million. The Babcock MSDF contract covers the 5.5 years to March 2020. The BAE Systems contract covers an initial period of 4.5 years to March 2019, with an option to extend it for an additional year.
We should recognise the contribution that this level of investment will make to the long-term economic health of the nation’s three main naval bases. They will sustain around 7,500 industry jobs across the three naval bases, with 4,000 of those jobs in my hon. Friend’s constituency at Devonport naval base. I thank him for his kind words and I will ensure that his gratitude is passed on personally to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, whom I will see in about an hour. I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport considers that to be telegraphing the message pretty quickly.
There will also be 1,500 jobs at Clyde naval base and more than 2,000 at Portsmouth. MSDF is a modern commercial and financial strategy replacing a number of existing support contracts with one wider contracting framework with each company. We have consolidated several different contracts into two main ones. This new strategy incentivises industry to transform and rationalise to meet the needs of the Royal Navy, to drive continuous performance improvement and to provide a better deal for defence and the taxpayer by delivering significant savings. We estimate that those savings will be of the order of £350 million over the life of the contracts.
Investment is not just about equipment, infrastructure and support contracts. It is also about people and we are investing in them. Like other employers, our armed forces face a challenge in recruiting and retaining personnel, especially in engineering and nuclear cadres. That is being addressed through a range of measures, including affiliations with four university technical colleges. My hon. Friend the Minister for Defence, Equipment Support and Technology—Min DEST—is in discussion with colleagues at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills about a new engineering college. My understanding is that those discussions have not yet concluded and that there is still some way to go, but it may assist my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport to know that it is planned that the next meeting on the project will take place early in the new year.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Julian Lewis and Mark Francois(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Francois
I can tell the hon. Lady, and indeed the House, that cyber-reserves will be subject to the same stringent vetting process as other members of the Ministry of Defence. Regarding criminal convictions, all applicants seeking to join the regulars or reserves are looked at individually, and a decision is made based on the type of conviction and sentence imposed. No one will be employed as a cyber-reserve if there is evidence that they represent a security risk which means that they cannot pass the vetting process.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
17. What assessment he has made of the conclusions and utility of the Trident alternatives study.