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8.59 pm
Mr. John Hutton (Barrow and Furness): I fully endorse the tributes that have been paid by hon. Members on both sides of the House to the professionalism and dedication of the British armed forces. Service in the armed forces is public service of the highest order and we are lucky to have so many talented and patriotic men and women who are prepared to serve the United Kingdom in such a way. I especially praise the efforts of British service personnel in Bosnia who have made such a major contribution to the NATO-led peace implementation force.
I am sad that the Secretary of State for Defence chose to begin his speech yesterday by saying that Labour Members do not care about the defence of this country. That is not true. Patriotism is not the preserve of only one party in this House, and Labour Members are just as concerned as anyone else to ensure that this country is properly defended. We have always made it clear that, under a Labour Government, that will continue to be so. It appears that the Secretary of State has not learnt the necessary lessons after his abysmal speech at last year's Conservative party conference.
It is worth looking behind Ministers' bogus rhetoric to study their record in recent years of managing the defence budget. The Government have presided over massive reductions in spending that have often appeared random and unintelligible and have drawn criticism from the Select Committee on Defence, former service chiefs and the defence industry itself, which often has to pick up the pieces resulting from the delays and confusion that have come to characterise the Government's procurement policies about which I shall say a little more later.
I am relieved that Ministers are now urgently looking into the exposure of British forces personnel to organophosphate chemicals during the Gulf war. I remind the Minister about one of my constituents, Corporal Mervyn Gray, about whom I wrote to him on 10 June. Corporal Gray was clearly exposed to massive amounts of organophosphates during the Gulf war but, despite the Government's announcement of an emergency review of such cases, he has not yet had any new or fresh contact with the Ministry of Defence. I hope that the Minister has not forgotten him and will look into his case at the earliest possible opportunity.
Mr. Soames:
Has Corporal Gray been to the medical assessment panel?
I shall confine the rest of my remarks to naval defence procurement and Government policy towards the defence industry as a whole. The defence industry is unique in
many ways. The Government are its only UK customer and have the power to determine in which international markets the industry can operate. That relationship means that the Government have a special responsibility towards defence companies which does not exist anywhere else in British industry. Sadly, that responsibility has not always been properly discharged. That has been especially true in relation to the rundown of defence spending in recent years.
Key procurement contracts are often the subject of chronic delays, with deadlines constantly being allowed to slip further and further behind schedule. That almost always results in further job losses in defence companies, as has sadly been so in my constituency at VSEL. A classic example of such delay was in relation to the batch 2 Trafalgar class submarine contract. Work was due to start in 1994. The contract has not yet been let. When will it be let? A gap of at least three years has opened up. It is worth reminding ourselves that the last contract for an SSN was placed in 1986. That 11-year gap is unprecedented in the Royal Navy's history.
The White Paper makes extensive reference to the Royal Navy's nuclear submarine capability and the Government's desire to maintain it. It is hard to see such a desire reflected in the Government's handling of such a vital contract. What will be the operational consequences for the Royal Navy of that delay? There have also been extensive delays in finally placing the contract for the landing platform dock replacements. I am delighted that that contract has been placed and that VSEL in my constituency won it, but it, too, has been characterised by serious delay.
The contract for two new auxiliary oilers will also be very important to my constituency. I hope that the Minister will give an assurance that that contract will not be subject to similar delays, and that orders will be placed on schedule by the end of the year.
Mr. David Jamieson (Plymouth, Devonport):
I shall keep my remarks extremely brief, because another hon. Member wishes to speak. I am sure that it will not go unnoticed outside the House that there have been more Labour Members than Conservative Members wishing to speak in this debate.
I want to make two simple points. I ask the Minister to deal in summing up with the important matter of service men who suffered from exposure to asbestos from the 1940s through to the 1960s. I repeat the requests that I put to him last year. First, he should find out how many such men are suffering--he can get that information from the War Pensions Agency. Secondly, what would be the cost of compensating those men at the same rate as dockyard workers are compensated? Thirdly, will he seriously consider some ex gratia payment for those men? If we ignore the dwindling number of men who are now dying, we shall continue a considerable injustice to men who are suffering seriously in the autumn of their lives.
Following the massive job losses in the dockyards, certain questions remain in respect of the privatisation of Devonport dockyard. We are, quite properly, asking those questions. First, should a dockyard that is so central to our strategic defence interests be in private hands? Secondly, could a privatised dockyard fall into undesirable or even hostile hands? Thirdly, can a dockyard working as a private company, with all the constraints that that entails, respond to sudden demands such as the Falklands or the Gulf war? I recall the response given to me two years ago by the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who was then the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence. He said then that that was impossible.
The answer to my first question is largely dependent on the answer to the other two. Yesterday, the Minister asked my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Dr. Clark) what is stability. I can tell him now what stability means to something such as our dockyard. It is a period of knowing where it is going; it is a period of knowing that there is a world of certainty; and it is when workers feel valued because there is a period in which they know they will have a job. Most of all, if the sale of Devonport dockyard goes through, it is a period in which the management and the workers of the company together can plan for the future not only of the dockyard, but of jobs in Plymouth.
I ask the Minister to address those important and essential matters. In particular, will he let us know when the negotiations for the D154 will be complete, so that the sale can be completed and we can move into a world of genuine stability?
Mr. Nick Raynsford (Greenwich):
I shall be brief and focus on a single issue: the future of the incomparable buildings in Greenwich which currently house the Royal Naval College.
In previous debates on defence estimates and the armed forces, we have highlighted the way in which the Government took an unwise decision to close the Greenwich complex and move the tri-service college elsewhere on the basis of dubious estimates and suspect figures that suggested that the costs of relocating to Camberley would be less than those of retaining a college in Greenwich. It has now become clear that those estimates and the assumptions behind them were false.
The Government's proposal for the relocation of the tri-service college is now unravelling. Staff and those attending the college now face the prospect of moving into temporary accommodation at Bracknell with a huge question mark hanging over their future at Camberley or possibly at another site. That cannot be the right way to handle the training of our senior staff in all services. The question must now be addressed whether we should have a further look at whether Greenwich might provide the appropriate location for all or part of the tri-service college.
The Greenwich complex is an incomparable set of buildings. Any other country that possessed such rich architecture with such important historic associations
would leap at the prospect of using them as a focus for service training. Few other countries would treat such a priceless piece of heritage with the curiously cavalier attitude displayed by the Government.
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