National Shipbuilding Strategy
Debate between Kevan Jones and Julian Lewis(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Jones
But Cornwall is, equally, very nice.
The hon. Lady makes an important point. It is about not just the build, but the through-life support. For a lot of the systems that we procure for the armed forces —certainly in shipbuilding—we look at the initial procurement, but we should also be looking at the through-life support. That is where the jobs are, and where the value is for the original, prime companies. As she rightly says, there is also value for smaller companies and others. If we are to spread prosperity around, we should see the contract as an investment in Britain. As she rightly argues, it is an investment in skills going forward. When looking at whether we can afford to make that investment, we should ask the Treasury, “What is the prosperity agenda?” The right hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne) did a very good report that tried to explain that the prosperity agenda should be linked to procurement in the Ministry of Defence. One of the GMB trade union’s reports argued that 20% of the value of the fleet solid support contract comes straight back to the Treasury anyway, through taxes and national insurance.
That has to be taken into account, but it is the throughput of work that will ensure that the shipyards and supply chain are maintained. We have a great opportunity to do that with the FSS contract. Unfortunately, for reasons that I am not sure even the Minister understands or privately supports, it has been put out to international competition. We will make the same mistakes that we made in the 1980s if we think this will somehow lower the price or get a better deal. I am sorry, but no other country in Europe does the same thing.
We can dance on the end of a pin over whether EU procurement rules apply to the FSS vessels—I have made it very clear that they do not. The French have just ordered four new Vulcan class support ships. Did they think about putting that out to international competition or asking British yards to tender? No, they did not; they ordered them directly. It is the same for Italian and Spanish ships. That is the difference.
The South Koreans and Daewoo have now pulled out of the competition for the FSS contract, but we are not dealing with a level playing field. Those companies have huge amounts of Government subsidy, which is not open to UK shipbuilders. If we are to procure the ships and build them abroad, it is quite clear that the Exchequer will not get back 20% straightaway in tax and national insurance. We will also lose the ability to support our shipbuilding and ship repair businesses.
Since 2010, the Government’s industrial strategy on defence has been disappointing. When I was a Defence Minister, I had the privilege of working with Lord Drayson, who understood this issue. As part of his wider industrial strategy on defence—I think it ran until 2010—he rightly argued that if we want to build complex warships in this country, we need to put in the investment, get the drumbeat of work going, and ensure there is certainty for industry.
Since 2010, we have been promised various defence strategies, but what we really need is an overarching defence industrial strategy. I know the Minister will say that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy or other Departments are dealing with these things, but I am sorry: a particular strategy needs to be developed for defence industries, including the maritime sector.
Sir John Parker’s strategy was an attempt but, as I said, I think it misses the point. It tries to reinvent some of the wheels of competition that failed in the 1980s. There is a fixation in the Ministry of Defence—I cannot understand where it comes from—with the idea, “Isn’t it terrible to give the work to BAE Systems?” BAE Systems is the only company in the UK capable of building complex warships. There are ways of incentivising it, but also ensuring that we get value for money and that we have the necessary systems. The hulls are important and the steel is important, but being able to invest in combat systems, engine technology and other things related to shipbuilding is vital, because they are exportable.
The carriers were a good example of Babcock, Thales and BAE Systems coming together in an alliance that worked. I do not understand why that alliance should be broken up on completion of HMS Prince of Wales, which will happen soon. That alliance seems an obvious way forward in terms of skills for the FSS. I understand that the new Secretary of State wants competition to be reviewed, which is welcome. I hope we can get understanding of the points that I and a lot of other Members have made about the importance of shipbuilding in the UK.
Let me conclude where I started. This is a vital sector if we are going to keep sovereign capability for complex warship building in this country. It needs to be invested in. It is not a smokestack industry; properly invested in, it is an industry for the future. Off the back of contracts such as that for the fleet solid support vessels, I would like to see investment in not only technologies but skills. We need urgently to ensure that companies such as BAE Systems, which do a fantastic job of recruiting apprentices, have the certainty to invest in skills. If we do not, we will fall behind: even with the political will to build complex warships in this country, we will not have the skills to do so. As I said, we have only to look at Barrow and the submarine programme to see the problems with trying to regenerate skills from scratch.
I am pleased that we are having this debate and putting shipbuilding on the agenda. I hope that that incentivises the Government to make an early decision to award the FSS contract to British yards or a British consortium.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
As an old schoolmate of yours, Mr Evans, it is a particular pleasure for me to contribute to this debate under your able chairmanship. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) for continuing his relentless and entirely justified campaign to ensure that the defence footprint, particularly as regards naval shipbuilding, is not shrunk still further in this country.
Mr Evans, you will know, having been in the House even longer than me, that one of the few benefits of having spent more than two decades here is that we get to see trends over decades. What has happened with our naval shipbuilding does not make for a pretty picture. I remember the 1998 strategic defence review undertaken by the then new Labour Government of Tony Blair. It set out a policy for the Royal Navy that seemed to leave it in quite a winning position. Although the Royal Navy was asked to sacrifice three of its frigates or destroyers, thus reducing its total from 35 to 32, the review put forward the concept of carrier strike and amphibious strike, which meant that the two large aircraft carriers would be built.
Had it remained in that formulation, the Royal Navy would have had every reason to be satisfied. We all know, however, that that was not the case. Successive Governments reduced the total from 32 frigates and destroyers, first to 31, on the basis that these were much more capable ships and therefore 31 would be able to do the work of 32. When that little stratagem succeeded, the 31 were reduced to 25, and the 25 were then reduced to our present pathetic total of 19 destroyers and frigates—six destroyers and 13 frigates, to be precise. Before anybody starts lecturing us about the change in the nature of warfare, it is worth reflecting on the fact that one of those 13 frigates, HMS Montrose, is in the news today, having performed the very important function of protecting British shipping from Iranian attempts to respond to the impounding of a large vessel of theirs that was believed to be carrying contraband oil to Syria.
It is rather hard to have a strategy when we are dealing with only a relatively limited number of vessels, even though those vessels may well be much more potent, powerful and versatile than their predecessors. However powerful, versatile and potent they are, each can be in only one place at any one time, and that means that each can be built in only one place over a particular period. That makes it harder to have a versatile and flexible strategy to match those qualities in the ships that are being built.
One of the encouraging results of the publication of the national shipbuilding strategy was that, in identifying the general purpose frigate, the Type 31e—the cheap and cheerful version of the next generation of frigates—as one that should be designed for export, Sir John Parker, to whom we should again pay tribute for everything he did, also specified that, as a result of those vessels being built in modular fashion, they would be very flexible and adaptable over time to what is sometimes called incremental acquisition. In other words, we get the ship hulls built and get them out to sea, and then, over time, because we have built compartments in the vessels that can be used for a variety of purposes over a period of years, we sow the seeds of their future adaptability and additional potency.
We should remember that this was the first time there was talk of an increase in the total number of vessels. Instead of just being told, “We will be replacing 13 Type 23 frigates on a like-for-like basis,” we were told that there would definitely be eight of the Type 26, specialising in anti-submarine warfare, and at least five—not a limit of five—of the Type 31e general purpose vessels. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister whether there are plans to exceed the figure of five for the Type 31e.
Slightly less than a week away on Tuesday 16 July there will be another debate in this Chamber about defence expenditure. Of course, all these issues, including the important one about the fleet solid support ships raised by the right hon. Gentleman, generally come back to defence expenditure and—it must be said—the inadequacy of defence expenditure.
I regard it as one of the achievements of the Select Committee on Defence that, with members representing no fewer than four different parties, it has consistently come to the view, irrespective of party allegiance, that too little is spent on defence in the United Kingdom—far too little. Our expectations were managed downwards to such an extent that it was believed to be some sort of triumph when we did not dip below NATO’s basic recommended minimum guideline of 2% of GDP. To coincide with next Tuesday’s debate, the Committee will bring out an updated report, following on from our 2016 report in which we laid out the decline in defence expenditure as a proportion of GDP compared with rises in health, education and, above all, pensions and benefits, and how defence had declined in our scale of national priorities to such an extent that the size of the armed forces was becoming unsustainable.
The national shipbuilding strategy gives us an opportunity to reverse that decline, and I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what plans there are to do that. It will be no easy task, given that we will remove the Type 23 frigates from the fleet at the rate of one a year between 2023 and 2035. It will be no small task to replace each of those frigates at that sort of rate with a new, modern, complex warship.
Mr Kevan Jones
The right hon. Gentleman is talking about the number of ships. Does he agree that the crisis point in the Navy is also about people and not just in number? I referred to skills in the shipbuilding industry, but there is also a need for particular skills in the Royal Navy.
Dr Lewis
That is true, because if we fall below what one might call critical mass, we will not be able to maintain the necessary footprint to support the construction and manning of vessels on a consistent basis. That is why the question of the fleet solid support ships is so important. Those vessels can be classified as warships or, if we choose not to, simply as auxiliaries. We have that choice, and it is a choice that we feel, on a cross-party basis, it is necessary to exercise.
The trouble that the Ministry of Defence runs into is that every time a long-term strategic view suggests to it that we ought to make an investment of this sort, it runs up against the short-term imperative that the defence budget is so small that cuts must be made at every opportunity, even where, as in this case, they are short-sighted and storing up problems for the future.
Ministry of Defence
Debate between Kevan Jones and Julian Lewis(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Kevan Jones
I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says about civil servants, but the decision to cut the defence budget by 16% between 2010 and 2015 was not a civil servant’s invention. It was the political decision of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Government at the time.
Dr Lewis
Yes, and I will come to the issue of how we can use the percentage of GDP to track what has been happening to defence in a moment. I hope that the hon. Gentleman—a former Defence Minister in the Labour Government, of course, and a very good one—will try to be non-partisan about this for the simple reason that successive Governments are responsible for what has happened.
What actually took place was, as has already been hinted at, something that has been going on over a very long period. Colleagues on both sides of the House have heard me recite this so often that I am afraid they might do that terrible thing and join in, singing the song with me. But I will just run through it again. In 1963, the falling graph of defence expenditure as a proportion of GDP crossed over with the rising graph of expenditure on welfare at 6%. So we were spending the same on welfare and defence—6%—in 1963. In the mid-1980s, as we have heard, we regularly spent between 4.5% and 5% of GDP on defence, and that was the period when we last had an assertive Russia combined with a major terrorist threat—the threat in Northern Ireland. We were spending at that time roughly the same amount on education and health. Nowadays we spend six times on welfare what we spend on defence, we spend four times on health what we spend on defence, and we spend two and a half times on education what we spend on defence.
We have to ask what we mean when we say that defence is the first duty of Government. If it is the first duty of Government, it is a duty that is more important than any other duty, because if we fail to discharge it everything else is put in jeopardy.
Dr Lewis
What I am looking for today is agreement across the House that we recognise that we should not be having almost theological debates about whether we are just above or just below the 2% minimum guideline that NATO prescribes to its member states for defence expenditure, but that we have to get back to the level—at the very least—of what we considered appropriate for so long, right up until the mid-1990s, when the Labour Government came in, which was 3% of GDP.
Mr Jones
The facts do not bear out what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. According to the Library, the last time defence expenditure was 3% was 1993-94. After that, there was a 7% decrease in 1995, a 1% decrease in 1996 and a 5.7% increase the following year. The Labour Government came in, following the Treasury rules laid down by the previous Government, and in 1998 increased defence spending by 5.8%. The idea that the last Labour Government were following a trend that had been set is just not the case.
Dr Lewis
It depends whether the hon. Gentleman is talking about absolute figures or percentages of GDP spent on defence. In 2016, the Defence Committee produced a unanimous report called “Shifting the Goalposts? Defence expenditure and the 2% pledge”. We had the Committee staff use all available sourcing to draw up a definitive table of what had been spent on defence by Britain as a proportion of GDP over the past 50 years. The figures for the period we are talking about are: 1990-91, 3.8%; 1991-92, 3.8%; 1992-1993, 3.7%; 1993-94, 3.5%; 1994-95, 3.3%; and 1995-96, 3%. It then dips below 3% in 1996-97 to 2.7%, and thereafter it is down and down, with little blips here and there, until it is hovering around 2.5% because the cost of operations were included.
The point about all this is that we should not be arguing about who did the most damage. We should be agreeing about what we need in the future. If we are hearing a chorus of voices from the Labour Benches—it is music to my ears—saying that we have not been spending enough on defence and we need to be spending more, that is what we should be saying loud and clear to those people who seem to be perfectly content to spend the existing inadequate sums.
I do not wish to prolong my contribution, but I do wish to speak briefly about the equipment plan that was alluded to in some detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. The equipment plan of 2016 is for £178 billion over 10 years. That includes a small number—nine, which some would say was too small a number—of new P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, replacing a capability that was quite wrongly dispensed with after 2010. We are also supposed to be replacing 13 Type 23 frigates and supplying mechanised infantry vehicles out of this budget, and we are of course engaged in resurrecting carrier strike capability—another capacity that was temporarily lost after 2010.
The first report of the Defence Committee in the new Parliament was entitled, “Gambling on ‘Efficiency’: Defence Acquisition and Procurement”. The word “efficiency” was in inverted commas because we believe that the affordability of the scheme is predicated on an estimate of £7.3 billion of theoretical efficiency savings that are to be made in addition to some £7.1 billion that was previously announced. As we have heard, the National Audit Office thinks that the equipment programme is at greater risk than at any time since reporting was introduced in 2012. The truth of the matter is that we encounter black holes everywhere we look in defence. This brings me to my concluding point.
Mr Jones
It was a deliberate strategy, in the Cameron-Osborne Conservative party, to ignore the facts and spin—“If we keep saying it long enough, people will believe it.”
The 2009 NAO report said that if the equipment budget was not increased at all over 10 years, it might be possible to arrive at a figure of £36 billion. How did they then get an extra £2 billion? I think the then Defence Secretary just added some personnel revenue costs to get to the £38 billion figure. What the report actually said, however—this point was completely ignored—was that the scenario it envisaged, of the budget remaining constant in real terms over the 10-year period, would lead to a £6 billion funding gap, which could have been managed over that 10-year period.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) is right. The impression was given to the public, and to everyone else who wanted to hear this spin, that the £38 billion had to be found in year straightaway. That was a clear fabrication. We know that, because when the current Chancellor became Defence Secretary, following the resignation of the right hon. Member for North Somerset after two years, he suddenly announced that the black hole had disappeared. I do not know whether he was auditioning for his current job as Chancellor, but the idea that it is possible to get rid of a £38 billion in-year black hole in the defence budget in just two years is complete nonsense.
The Conservative Government used that as a smokescreen to allow them to cut the defence budget, as part of the Chancellor’s austerity drive, by 16%. The effect of that has been some of the decisions referred to earlier on, including the scrapping of capability such as Nimrod. Making people compulsorily redundant in our armed forces was completely inexcusable. Certainly, if the Government I was a member of had done that when I was a Defence Minister, we would have been rightly decried by the people who are always arguing for defence. Those decisions have had an impact on what is happening today. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) referred to the increased expenditure on the Trident programme. The £1.2 billion to £1.4 billion in additional costs happened because that decision was delayed. The deal done by the then Prime Minister David Cameron to get the Liberal Democrats on board in coalition delayed the programme, which built in costs.
Mr Jones
The right hon. Gentleman is nodding. He and I kept raising that and asking why that decision had not been made. The costs arriving now are because of the decisions taken by the coalition Government. I accept all that has been said about increased defence expenditure, but we cannot get away from the core decisions that have led to the problems we have today.
The 2015 pre-Brexit strategic defence and security review announced an additional £24.4 billion spending on new equipment. Some of that, for example on the P-8, was to fill the gap the Government created in 2010 with a hasty decision to scrap the Nimrod. Reference was made earlier to the civil service making decisions. I am sorry, but it was not civil servants or generals making those decisions; it was Ministers making these decisions, including the right hon. Member for North Somerset and the current Chancellor, when he was Defence Secretary. They decided to reduce the size of the Army to 82,000. I asked a retired senior general, “Who came up with the figure of 82,000 for our armed forces?” He scratched his head and said, “We were just told that that was what the figure was going to be to fit the cash envelope.” We then had the construct of Army 2020, which is a complete political cover, to try to give the impression that we are going to keep the Army at nearly 100,000. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend very eloquently outlined in her contribution to the debate, that is not only not producing the additional personnel required, but is actually costing more than if we had not done that in the first place.
Another point about the 2015 review is that, again, hasty decisions were taken in ordering the P-8. There is a gap, created by this Government, in maritime patrol aircraft. The P-8 was to be bought off the shelf—the Apache contract was announced at the same time—from the United States. That was pre Brexit. The added costs in foreign currency exchange are now creating pressures on the defence budget, and that is before we look at the effect on the economic and industrial base of our country. It may seem an easy option to buy off the shelf from the United States, but that lets our own industrial base decline, and that is what is happening. I have not yet seen any meaningful commitment by the contractors, Boeing, to create real jobs in the UK. What angers me is that if it was the other way around and we were selling equipment to the United States, we would be unable to do so without a clear commitment to jobs and investment in United States industry. That is where the MOD woefully and shamefully let down the British economy.