Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to prepare and improve ground-to-air defences for use by the armed forces.

Our current Ground Based Air Defence (GBAD) capabilities - Rapier and the High Velocity Missile system - are both coming to the end of their planned service life. The Future Force GBAD Air Surveillance programme seeks to provide our future suite of capabilities. The first tranche of this programme will replace Rapier with a new system ensuring there is no capability gap. Subsequent tranches will seek to define and develop the range of capabilities that are required to address the evolving threat environment.