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5.43 pm
Mr. John Home Robertson (East Lothian): I have no direct constituency interest in the matter before the House because there are no service married quarters in my constituency and, even if there were, they would be not be part of this deal as my constituency is in Scotland. I want to raise a point arising from that and from what the Secretary of State said at the outset.
The Secretary of State said in ringing terms that the sell-off was the only way to secure good management of married quarters. He seemed to despair at the prospect of the Defence Housing Executive managing the married quarters estate efficiently. What kind of a vote of confidence is that for his newly appointed Defence Housing Executive, and where does that leave the 10,000 married quarters in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which will continue to be controlled by, and remain the responsibility of, the Ministry of Defence? He cannot have it both ways. He seemed to be saying that his Department was incapable of running the estate properly--but those married quarters in Scotland and Ireland will remain under his control.
I do not accept the Secretary of State's counsel of despair. I am convinced that it should be possible for the Defence Housing Executive to manage the estate properly. I am confident that it will be able to do so in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that it should be given an opportunity to do so in England and Wales.
My interest in the debate arises from information gleaned as a member of the Defence Select Committee and from my visits to Army units under the armed forces parliamentary scheme, in which I am taking part this year. I have had the privilege of visiting units throughout England in recent months and I look forward to seeing more.
I have to tell the Secretary of State and his ministerial colleagues that service men and women of all ranks are very worried about what is proposed. Some of them are suffering from a serious depression in morale, if I may put it that way, as a result of a range of problems. The Secretary of State knows about the problems of overstretch, turbulence--call it what you will. Fewer and fewer service men are expected to take on more and more duties, which means that life is difficult for our armed forces at present.
I am left in no doubt from my conversations with service men and service women and their families in recent months that uncertainty about the future of their homes is pushing some of those people far too far. They are worried about rents. I heard what the Secretary of State said earlier, but I am afraid that the recent increase in rents is an alarming foretaste of what could follow. I heard his assurances, but there is no way of being certain that in future the Treasury will not put the Ministry of Defence under pressure to balance that account by increasing rents, and he should know that better than most, as a former Treasury Minister.
People are worried about the risk of being moved even more than they are at present from one quarter to another, as other hon. Members have said. People are worried about the integrity of the service housing patch. Those points were mentioned repeatedly.
The Secretary of State gave a welter of assurances and concessions. We have heard them in recent weeks; we heard them again tonight. They can be summed up as the Secretary of State saying, "Trust me; it will be all right on the night"--or in 25 years or whenever. "As long as I can get the money into the Treasury coffers by the end of this year, it will be okay as time goes on."
The Secretary of State showed a touching confidence in legal arbitration and did not dwell on the costs that are likely to be incurred when we get embroiled in such legal arbitration between a future Ministry of Defence and lawyers acting on behalf of the new owners, if the sale goes ahead. He cannot get away with that. The real problem, however, is that the assurances are largely meaningless. The package is unworkable and unenforceable. With the best will in the world, the assurances that the Secretary of State gave tonight and in recent weeks cannot be fulfilled in future.
The Secretary of State should bear in mind the fact that he will not even be here next year. Someone else will inherit this fundamentally flawed package. It is unworkable now and it will never become any more workable.
The Secretary of State must not be allowed to get away with creating a bed of nails for service families. He will get brownie points from his colleagues, because he will get some ready cash into the Treasury this year, but service families and taxpayers will be left with a whole range of problems in the future. The House should not let him do this. He is being fundamentally dishonest.
Mr. Cyril D. Townsend (Bexleyheath):
I welcome the courteous tone of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, his comments on service families and his genuine concessions, particularly about consulting the families concerned--that is a real concession. Some people in the Tea Room say that early-day motions do not have any impact on the parliamentary scene. Over the past few weeks, I have seen Ministers and Whips scurry round my colleagues with suggestions polite and not so polite, and my impression is that early-day motions have a significant say in the workings of the Palace of Westminster.
I have listened to my right hon. Friend, and I have tried to work out how I shall vote this evening. I thought that he was busy trying to make a bad scheme better. He did not convince me that he had come up with a "Top of the Pops" scheme that I should admire and rush round my constituency supporting. I admit that I came in on the
issue a little late in the day. I met a senior general at a social function and said, "There is a row on this issue. Does it matter?" For a good five minutes, he pointed out that in his command it was a serious issue, that morale was low and that he hoped that the scheme would be withdrawn in the House of Commons before too long.
I listened to an excellent debate in the other place the other day. Lady Park spoke with great vigour, eloquence and distinction. I was in the armed forces for 10 years in the Light Infantry battalion, and I pricked up my ears when I heard the speech of Lord Bramell--a field marshal; a Green Jacket; a man who has worked his way through the defence field and a man who understands the thinking in the Ministry of Defence.
I differ from the Front Bench in that I have not yet heard sufficient argument for the overthrow of the married quarters system, as we have known it in the United Kingdom and in Germany since the war. In most other countries, the armed forces own the quarters--they are organised and run by the Government. We should not be ashamed of the fact that we have owned the married quarters for many years, and we have to be careful about taking privatisation too far.
I was a little cool when privatisation was first suggested, and I have voted on every privatisation measure. I had some reservations about selling off nursing homes--an issue that is not entirely relevant to what we are discussing tonight. On the whole, privatisation has been a great success. However, I hope that we are not now going to embark on a programme of petty privatisation--looking for small bits and pieces of the national estate to privatise, and I am not just thinking of Greenwich. This is a clever wheeze from the Treasury--it has been around for four years, and many of my right hon. Friend's predecessors had it put in their in-trays and decided not to take it up.
We have to hear good arguments about why the whole system of married quarters, as we know it, needs to be changed in this way. I am concerned that if the change proceeds--perhaps even now there is a paper sitting in the Treasury--there will be plans for the privatisation of the sports facilities of the barracks and the bases: the football pitches, the running tracks, the swimming pools and the pistol ranges. Treasury officials could put up a case similar to that on the married quarters; they could say that if we sell off all these bits and pieces, we shall raise a significant sum at a time when the Treasury desperately needs it. I am not unsympathetic to the Treasury's point of view.
A base or a barracks has a certain integrity. I am not happy at the thought of the commanding officer's house at the Special Air Services in Hereford, or a rather more salubrious house belonging to the colonel of a Guards battalion in Windsor, or the house of the colonel of the Marine Command in Plymouth, being sold off to one of these grand international conglomerates. I do not think that our constituents will say that selling off married quarters to these large, foreign industrial concerns is a wonderful political move.
We have to use our judgment in this regard. I am not convinced that over the past 25 years we have had a copper-bottomed scheme. I do not doubt that the Ministers have the best of intentions, but I do not believe that the Ministry of Defence and whoever it may be in five, 10 or 15 years' time will be able to impose the controls
on the developers that we have been hearing about tonight. The developers are in there because they want to cherry-pick--of course they want the commanding officers' quarters, and it would be naive of us to think that they did not. They want the site in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Martin), which overlooks the Solent, because it is a desirable property. There will be judicial reviews, and we shall move into a messy area. The Ministry of Defence, with the best will in the world, will not be able to hold to the firm intentions that were honourably stated from the Front Bench tonight.
One of the things that the Whips love to say as they scurry around is, "Of course you have to support this--we need £1.6 billion." That is not a serious argument. As Back Benchers, we are responsible for controlling the Executive, particularly in the financial sphere. We are allowed to comment in public and to have views on which particular scheme should raise money for the Treasury--for example, whether the poll tax should raise money for local government. It is a cheapjack argument to be told that we must vote for this at all costs, because that large and important sum can be funded only in that particular way.
Another argument went roughly like this: we do not believe that the Ministry of Defence, when the moment comes, will choose to put money into quarters rather than into weapons systems--the Ministry of Defence is so incompetent that it has not realised that it has to allocate time and resources to welfare as well as weapons. I do not believe that for a moment--it is a basic function of the Ministry of Defence; it is a basic subject of command. Any general who says, "Spend more money on weapons and ignore morale," is no good and ought to be sacked.
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