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6.52 pm
Mr. Roy Beggs (East Antrim): I welcome the opportunity to participate in this important debate and to register my ongoing admiration and support for those who serve our nation in the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines and the Merchant Navy. My colleagues and I are proud of the work that they do and the contribution that they make.
In East Antrim in particular, those resident in the major ferry port town of Larne have, on several occasions, been honoured and privileged by arrangements made by Larne borough council and the Ministry of Defence to host Royal Navy ships' visits. It was a great pleasure to welcome ashore officers and ships' companies, and when the residents also took the opportunity to go aboard. I hope that expenditure cuts will not diminish the opportunity for future ships' visits. Given the good will generated in my constituency, I urge the Government to encourage ships' visits as a means of increasing contact between the civilian population and serving naval personnel--which should also help recruitment.
I take this opportunity to invite the Minister to join me in urging elected councillors in those areas with seafaring traditions to give support and encouragement to organisations such as the sea cadets whose members may ultimately progress to the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines or the Merchant Navy.
Many of my constituents are employed in the ship building and aircraft industries in Belfast. Hon. Members with a keen sense of maritime history will acknowledge the contribution made by the Belfast shipyards to the British economy in peace time, and to national security in times of war.
In Northern Ireland the state of the ship building and, latterly, the aerospace and defence industries, has come to represent a microcosm of the economy as a whole. When those manufacturing industries thrive--when orders are coming in and contracts are being won--that is of overall benefit to the economy, materially and psychologically, such is the pride of place given to those industries in the hearts and minds of the people. The ship building industry, more modest in size now than during its halcyon days, still employs more than 1,000 people. The aerospace and defence industries, as represented by Shorts, employ more than 7,000 people in Northern Ireland and a further 3,000 world wide. They are our largest manufacturing employers.
In that context, I come to the specifics of the debate to demonstrate how those industries in Northern Ireland can continue to provide a service for the Ministry of Defence and, in so doing, enhance the local economy. The Royal Navy's new joint strike fighter aircraft is due to enter service on the first of the Navy's new aircraft carriers in 2012. Given the massive multi-billion pound investment which the United Kingdom is making in those aircraft, it is essential that they be equipped with the best possible missiles to ensure that they can provide future air superiority for our forces in the 21st century.
Ulster Unionists believe that, in meeting that requirement, the package offered by Shorts Missile Systems, in conjunction with Raytheon Systems of the United Kingdom, is second to none. The FMRAAM solution--the name given to the Raytheon-Shorts
package--is derived from the highly successful combat-proven advanced medium-range air-to-air missile, with upgraded electronics and a new, longer-range rocket motor.
AMRAAM is already in service with the Royal Navy, equipping the Fleet Air Arm's upgraded Harrier FRS2 aircraft. In addition, AMRAAM is also being integrated into the RAF's current Tornado F3 fighter aircraft, and is already scheduled to arm the Eurofighter 2000 when it enters RAF service in 2004. An AMRAAM-based option offers obvious interchangeability and logistic advantages to the services. Furthermore, the incremental growth path from AMRAAM to FMRAAM provides a low-cost, low-risk solution for the requirement, in keeping with the MOD's new smart procurement initiative.
If selected, more than 80 per cent. of the FMRAAM work share will be undertaken in Europe and, more importantly, 75 per cent. in the United Kingdom. Clearly, the programme is highly important to Shorts Missile Systems and, as I have already suggested, to the local economy itself. Shorts will integrate the missile's key advanced guidance section and electronics unit and perform final assembly and checkout in Belfast. Thereafter, Shorts will also provide logistic support for the system while in service, as well as participating in further upgrades of the missile. That will be significant in fostering high-technology employment in Northern Ireland, and in promoting Shorts Missile Systems as a world-class company with an expanding air-to-air missile business.
Mr. Mark Todd (South Derbyshire):
I am proud to represent the most inland constituency in Great Britain. The Ordnance Survey has calculated that one of the villages in my constituency is furthest from the sea of any in the country, so I might be considered ill qualified to speak in this debate. However, my father spent more than 30 years serving in the Royal Navy, and I lived in the Portsmouth area for a long time. I am therefore familiar with naval life and activity from my childhood and teenage years.
That is partly why, this year, I decided to take part in the armed forces scheme, and volunteered to visit naval establishments and ships. By the time that I have finished, I will have spent 21 or 22 days visiting such establishments. It has been an enlightening and enthralling experience. I have been greeted with courtesy and great openness about the Royal Navy's tasks. I have been able to make comparisons with my childhood experience, and occasionally I have met people who served when my father served and asked them about their reactions to the changes that the Royal Navy has faced in the 20 years since he retired.
I have been immensely impressed by the professionalism of those who serve in our Navy. They perform a wide variety of tasks and work hugely
complex equipment, and they carry out their immensely difficult tasks on our behalf with great professionalism and commitment. This debate is an opportunity for us to applaud them.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans(Mr. Pollard), I spent some time on HMS Sheffield and was delighted at the commitment shown by its crew in providing aid following the disaster in central America. The fact that those professional men and women are able to turn themselves to such a tasks at very short notice shows the tremendously valuable contribution that we can make in peacetime emergencies, as well as the versatility of the Navy that we are now developing. It is a valuable contribution to international aid and relief.
I broadly support the content of the strategic defence review. I have one reservation, which is about not the document itself but the precondition placed on the review. That was a straightforward political commitment to maintaining the Trident system, regardless of the strategic analysis of the need to maintain it. Although I did not disagree with its conclusions, I felt that that part of the document was less well developed intellectually than I should have liked. The relationship between what was being attempted by maintaining the Trident system and the rest of the Navy's strategic objectives was not entirely clear. It seemed to be a case of saying, "We are already committed to maintaining Trident. We have it, and it is an important part of the bargaining process of disarmament in which we should play a part--enough said." More could have been said and done to analyse the role of that commitment in the future.
On the positive aspects, there is a critical focus on flexibility and the ability to project forces for any purpose. I am taken back to my childhood in the 1960s and my father's experience in the Navy in welcoming the return of the carrier. I well remember strategic defence reviews in the 1960s, as a result of which carriers disappeared. At that time, such reviews had different objectives and faced a different enemy, so it is not surprising that they reached different conclusions. I look forward to a commitment to implement the carrier-based option.
I recognise the SDR's important commitment to jointery and the recognition that the Royal Navy may be a means of delivering relief operations staffed largely by other parts of the armed services. I know from talking to serving men and women that naval personnel have entered into that commitment enthusiastically and voluntarily. They regard it as a critical part of a modern Navy to work closely, and in an integrated fashion, with other parts of the armed services, and that should be applauded.
My business experience is most relevant to defence procurement. My father thought that defence procurement was ill organised, run by a group of people with no idea of what they were attempting to procure, took far too long and was far too expensive. Those ideas are still expressed frequently by serving members of the armed forces. In that respect, the world has not changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Therefore, I looked carefully at the ideas for smart procurement in the defence review and was encouraged by what I found.
The McKinsey report, on which much of the SDR is based, and the extremely useful background essay showed that a number of key messages about procurement had been absorbed. Incidentally, I applaud the publication of the background essay, which provided useful and
interesting material which allowed one to evaluate the decisions that had been made. The review says that the various elements of procurement should be separated. First, commodity procurement--things which the Navy, like any large organisation, needs--should be done as efficiently, quickly and simply as possible. Secondly, commodities that are broadly like anything else but have a defence bent, but have no risk of innovation going wrong or of one technology not working with another, should have a relatively straightforward procurement process. Thirdly, specific defence-related procurement, which carries significant risk of failure and of the challenges of innovation, should have a more complex and intense procurement process.
That three-tier approach is valuable provided that it is critically and intelligently applied in decision making. What I dread is that the third, top-level category will be used too frequently in the process and that we shall dedicate undue resources to the purchasing of material, which, in some cases, could be acquired through simpler means. That is always a temptation in a service where the relationship with the defence industry is sometimes too close and where awareness of value-for-money concepts disappears as people become obsessed about the latest need for innovation in a particular category, whereas 80 or 90 per cent. compliance with need would be sufficient and could be delivered more quickly.
Also important for procurement are a reduction in project phases--so that the approval stages are reached more rapidly and there are fewer of them--and a closer-working team relationship around the procurement process. All those are entirely laudable and likely to lead to more effective procurement of complex naval equipment.
Plenty of history shows how the process can go wrong. The Merlin helicopter is still awaited with bated breath and, arguably, is strategically inappropriate for many of the Navy's helicopter-borne defence needs. We have waited so long for Merlin's arrival that it no longer has as great a relevance to need as we once thought. Therefore, we have neglected the modernisation of the Lynx system and been led down a path of overloading those machines to a level at which some are of relatively limited effectiveness.
That worrying process is alluded to in the strategic defence review, which also recognises that we shall have to modernise Lynx and cut back orders for Merlin, which is appropriate in the circumstances. Those strike me as correct, although I worry a little whether the modernisation of Lynx will deal with the fact that we may end up with an underpowered and aged airframe carrying immensely complex and heavy additional equipment. That will need further analysis and review: the allusion to the modernisation of Lynx is welcome, but further work needs to be done on whether that will deliver the outcome that we seek.
On the more mundane level, we allow our naval personnel to steer complex and expensive ships, and to make crucial decisions about the life or death of themselves and their compatriots, but we have considerable difficulty allowing them to purchase even the more routine items for the maintenance of operational activity on ship. Naval personnel cannot simply go ashore to buy a black plastic bucket; instead, they must go
through the full procurement process, which leads back to the United Kingdom. In some cases, the item will be flown out, at immense cost, to meet requirements.
Most modern companies would issue senior personnel with credit cards and encourage them to use those cards intelligently--subject to the normal processes of discipline when they are not being used intelligently--to purchase the necessary rudimentary equipment to maintain operational activity. I know of ships on which basic equipment is not being fixed and ordinary items are not being replaced simply because of the long supply chain back to the United Kingdom and the complex decision-making process that surrounds it.
I am told that my black plastic bucket comes at about £40 in the defence price list. I should think that any hon. Member who walked into B and Q to buy such a bucket would pay about a fiver, although I have not done so for a while. That shows the immense add-on costs that are borne for the bureaucracy and the time-wasting processes that still seem to be tied up in procurement. We have an opportunity: a lot of useful and high-quality management thought has been put into the high-level procurement process, but the lower-level stuff still labours under a complex and arcane bureaucracy that frustrates many of our personnel.
I also note that the Navy awaits Upkeep, its new computer system for stores. I have run information technology projects, and the project is familiar to me--it is running behind schedule and is having difficulty complying with the specifications. With the move towards consolidation of stores requirements and of sourcing of material, one has to ask whether it makes a great deal of sense to have separate IT systems and projects for each armed service for routine products and commodities. That project, as far as I know, is still going on. There may be strong arguments for why it should, but the logic suggests that it should at least be questioned and placed in the context of a joint response to the same issue.
My last couple of points, I am afraid, again hark back to family loyalties, but ones that I still hold dear. This decision was made by the previous Government, so I direct my criticism across the Floor of the House as much as anywhere else: I have doubts about whether dispensing with the requirement for cheap, quiet diesel submarines is necessarily the right strategy at the moment. Many nations are purchasing such submarines quite freely. They are relatively low technology and extremely efficient, if well armed, in furthering defence requirements.
My instinct is that we have made a difficult choice and lumped for a totally nuclear-powered force under the water, but, if we reconsidered, we might judge that a more flexible response would have included a diesel element to the submarine force. We should review that once again in due course.
In their fisheries protection role, our personnel operate under the management of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. My experience prompted me to ask questions about what task they are performing. The Navy carries out the task, but MAFF essentially instructs. Although our personnel apprehend people who are in breach of fishing regulations, it appears that a prosecution is not pursued in nine out of 10 cases. That will, in the end, have some effect on the morale and views of those who are carrying out that task.
If our personnel think that they are performing a valuable function in which they arrest people for breaching the regulations and bring them into port, but hear that no prosecution has taken place--and that happens far more often than not--that will bear heavily on the way in which they consider their task. That is worrying. There is an opportunity to review the relationship with MAFF and how it chooses to manage that particular role; whether that is best management of our fishing stock, which is the strategic objective; and whether it is sensible to maintain an expensive commitment to that role if we are not seriously committed to enforcing the rules.
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