| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
8.21 pm
Mr. Harry Cohen (Leyton): Because my hon. Friend the Member for Warley, West (Mr. Spellar)--who is responsible for procurement issues--is to wind up the debate for the Opposition, and because the Minister of State for Defence Procurement opened the debate, I shall make two points on that subject.
In an intervention, I mentioned the Polaris submarine HMS Renown. In 1993, its refit had cost £155 million. Since then it has been mothballed; it has sat in dock waiting to be decommissioned. That has cost more millions of pounds, and we do not know how much longer it will take. The Minister said that it had taken part in three training exercises, but I thought that a pretty poor response. The money could have been much better spent on schools and the national health service. Ministers in this Conservative Government complain that they have not enough money for the armed forces. How do they justify the waste of £155 million?
The other procurement issue was raised at Question Time by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn). He was told that stores and equipment to the value of some £67 million had been lost in the past five years--and that did not include what was lost in Germany. Five per cent. was lost in Northern Ireland. The lost equipment included a Royal Navy thermal imager, a set of rockets and tanks. I am not sure how the Ministry of Defence managed to lose tanks, but it does not say much for its control system. When my hon. Friend asked for a list of items that had been lost, he was told that the MOD did not keep a central record of the loss of any item worth less than £100,000. What sort of accounting system is that? Is it thought that anything worth under £100,000 does not matter to the taxpayer?
Mr. Cohen:
I shall happily give way, so that the Minister can explain why that money was squandered when it could have been much better spent elsewhere.
Mr. Soames:
The hon. Gentleman and his colleagues queried the cost of the refit of HMS Renown. The decision to carry out the refit was taken at a time when the Trident programme was still many years away from fruition. It was essential to ensure the continuation of the cycle of patrols of Resolution class submarines until the Vanguard class was in service. It was a wholly rational decision. Because the Trident programme had gone so
Mr. Cohen:
That will not do. Millions of pounds were spent on the Trident programme as well. Spending money on both Polaris and Trident must be regarded as a lack of planning. In fact, the Trident programme has not gone so wonderfully, but I shall say more about that later.
In a future debate I may deal with the MOD's new procurement building, which has also cost millions of pounds. It is a castle with a moat and its own railway, surrounded by hundreds of acres of land. Presumably the moat is there so that Navy vessels can sail round it when they are tested before being bought. Now, however, I want to say something about the economics of naval nuclear weapons, a subject that brings us automatically to Trident. Let me ask a simple question: will Trident be the last nuclear weapons system deployed by the United Kingdom?
I ask that question in the context of simple economic necessity rather than politics or strategy. The current official estimate for the purchase of Trident is£11,682 million. I asked the Library to calculate the purchase cost of Polaris in current prices, and it came up with a figure in the region of between £5 billion and£5.5 billion. As with any other military equipment, replacements cost much more than what is being replaced. How much would a follow-on to Trident cost? Between £20 billion and £30 billion, or perhaps more--and that would be just the cost of acquiring the system.
There were many hidden costs in the purchase of Trident, such as the improvement of Aldermaston, which went so badly wrong. The A90 plutonium processing complex, which was due to be operational in 1986, is still not fully operational, and millions of pounds are still required to be spent on the A91 liquid waste facility to get it up to scratch. The cost of those two buildings probably exceeds £1 billion. Many facilities at Faslane and Coulport were not included as Trident works, but were essential to its operations.
If Trident were replaced, it is certain that other parts of the nuclear infrastructure would have to be replaced as well, simply on grounds of age. There would possibly be a much larger contribution to research and development costs, even if a replacement system were bought off the shelf from the United States. The total bill would be more than £30 billion--possibly more than £40 billion in today's prices. Indeed, those figures could be an underestimate. In times of public spending squeezes--indeed, more such squeezes are more likely than our being awash with money--would any Government spend that sort of money?
If Trident were replaced, incurring the high costs to which I referred, the United Kingdom could simply say goodbye to a modern Navy in any other respect. The programme to replace Trident would have to start in five or 10 years, and would probably cost £1 billion a year for the first few years, rising thereafter and taking an increasingly large chunk out of our defence budget.
If Trident is not to be replaced--I have no doubt that, barring some appalling change in the world, even a Tory Government would not spend such money on such a programme in 10 years' time--it must be accepted that
nuclear weapons are not essential to the defence of the country. If the argument that Trident is too expensive is accepted, the Government should also accept that the sky is not going to fall on British heads if we do not have nuclear weapons in 20 or 30 years. The crux of the matter is that if nuclear weapons can be sacrificed in 20 or 30 years' time because we do not need them or cannot afford them, are they really needed now?
It is worth looking at how much Trident will cost from now to the end of its life--and therefore how much could be saved if rational decisions on defence policy were made now. About £3 billion has yet to be spent on the acquisition of Trident. The Government say that Trident is also likely to cost about £200 million a year to run, although that figure is considerably hazy, which is understandable as the system is not yet fully up and running. Such haziness pervades all calculations of expenditure on Trident.
Parallels can be drawn with civil nuclear power. For years, costs were hidden away in other budgets to make it look cheaper than it was. Once the books were open to outside scrutiny, the creative accountancy quickly unravelled. Massive expenditure on infrastructure, which would not have been needed if Trident had not been acquired, was attributed to other budgets. Billions of pounds' worth of construction at Aldermaston and Faslane have been hidden from the Trident budget. In future that will not be possible, as all nuclear infrastructure will be in support of Trident and any possible successor to it. There will be far less chance to meet such costs through other budgets and claim that the expenditure was for more general usage, as has been done up to now.
The other costs to be borne in mind are environmental. It is now recognised that the costs of decommissioning military nuclear facilities in the United States will run into hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades. There is no comparable available information for the UK. The Government have been very slow with a clear-up programme--I refer to the decommissioning of Renown and other Polaris submarines--and do not talk about how much it will cost. There will be a big clear-up bill. In view of costs in the United States, our bill could not be less than tens of billions of pounds.
Another factor to be considered is the increased environmental and health standards that the public now expect. At the height of the cold war, many members of the public were prepared to tolerate radioactive discharges from Aldermaston or Sellafield, because they thought that it was a price worth paying in view of what they saw as the Soviet threat. Those same people will not now tolerate such lax, cancer-inducing behaviour. They expect the Government to make a much greater effort in lessening health hazards and the environmental impact of nuclear power, which will of course cost a great deal more money.
In some ways, it is very sad to return to the economic arguments against nuclear weapons. I should have thought--and have of course argued--that the moral and military arguments were so strong that they would have won the day long ago. I say to my hon. Friends, including my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), who made commitments from the Front Bench, that they must face the economic arguments, just as Defence Ministers must at the moment.
Mr. Cohen:
The Treasury will have an increased influence when it sees the costs involved, especially the cost of a replacement programme.
Mr. Cohen:
The Minister is nodding. I am pleased that he agrees with me. He must therefore accept that the Conservative Government will end up not replacing Trident because of the same economic argument and that a Conservative Treasury will say that enough is enough. Despite their macho stands, both main parties will have to come to terms with the enormous cost of maintaining nuclear weapons and replacing the Trident programme.
In the past few days, the House has heard the chant, "Do as I say, not as I do," passed back and forth across the Chamber in cheap political gibes. Britain's approach to nuclear weapons is relevant to that chant because we are saying that we must keep nuclear weapons, while we tell other countries that they do not need them and cannot have them. That is one of the most obscene and hypocritical cases of, "Do as I say, not as I do," that I have ever come across.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |