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Mr. Brazier: Does the hon. Lady agree that it is time that the Ministry of Defence took the British Medical Association's military committee and the nursing unions seriously on this subject?
Laura Moffatt: I believe that that is beginning to happen, and that pressure is being brought to bear by the Select Committee on those concerned to get around the table. Those bodies must understand the difficulties in terms of recruitment.
Having spent two years on the Defence Select Committee and having visited our armed forces personnel, I can say that it has been a tremendous experience. It has enriched my life--although I doubt whether I have enriched the lives of the armed forces personnel.
I repeat that it is easy from this cosy Chamber to say that our armed forces are a wonderful bunch, but we have a duty to make sure that they are highly trained, and I think that the Government are tackling that well. We must ensure that they are provided with the best equipment, and smart procurement is beginning to do that job. We must ensure that they have a modern outlook, particularly in terms of encouraging those from different backgrounds and women into the armed forces.
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South):
I welcome the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway) to his Front-Bench post and I wish him well for the future.
I wish to address one of the points made by the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt). She referred to communications from ships or shore to the UK. That is all very well, but we must make sure that e-mail is a two-way thing, and that kit for families in the UK is provided at a time and a place that are convenient for them. I represent many service families, and I have learned of the great difficulties that they face and the distress that is caused when telephones are out of action or delays occur, and when people have to wait many hours for their turn to use the telephone. It is no good extending capability if that is done in only one direction. If the Ministry of Defence is serious about that issue, it must address the situation here as well as abroad.
Like many others, I welcome the change in the style of defence debates, which is long overdue. The old single-service debates had long passed their useful purpose. A general debate covering procurement, the general role of our armed forces and personnel matters is a more serious attempt to get to grips with the problems.
The debate is opportune, as it follows yesterday's publication of the National Audit Office's report on major projects. If I were serving in the armed forces today, I would be concerned that a £3.5 billion overspend is identified in the report at the same time as we are seriously undermanned and overstretched. I hope that we can address some of those problems.
I was somewhat heartened when the front page of last night's edition of The Portsmouth News--representing the home of the Royal Navy--carried a story by the paper's defence correspondent, Adrian Wills, who was able to get a quote from the Defence Secretary on overspend. The right hon. Gentleman referred to great mistakes, and said:
Of the 25 projects identified in the report, eight will miss their in-service date by more than five years. What on earth do Ministers believe that will do to the morale in the services? The average delay for any project assessed was three and a half years, and only two of the 25 will meet their in-service targets. We have heard that those 25 projects have overrun, and overspent to a cost of more than £3 million. I would be interested to know by how much the next 50 projects in the procurement budget have overrun, and how much they have cost. Those costs are important.
It is all about what resources are available--whether it is to keep pilots in the RAF, or to keep ships at sea with a full crew deployed for less time. It must be disheartening and frustrating for sailors in the Portsmouth area to read that the crewing costs for HMS Intrepid--which has been tied up in the docks since 1991--have been in excess of £12 million.
Fully trained and well-qualified sailors have been on HMS Intrepid for that period. At the same time, we have sent 46 ships to sea in the last year undermanned. Where is the logic in that? HMS Intrepid has been in reserve since 1991, and probably will be there until she is finally scrapped around 2004. What on earth do Ministers believe that that expenditure and that waste have done to service morale on board undermanned ships in the Adriatic and the Gulf?
Was it right to have sent HMS Invincible to sea on her last deployment, even though she was delayed coming home? No effort was made to bring the crew size of HMS Invincible up to its recommended complement during that deployment. At no time did HMS Invincible have her full complement on board. Those issues are real, and difficult for crews to understand and for commanders to manage--but they do it.
As hon. Members have rightly recognised, this House and our nation owe a debt of gratitude to those men and women who serve in our armed forces. From time to time, they question the decision-making processes in the House and the Ministry of Defence. They do so openly and--as the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) suggested--in a rather pushy and forceful way, which left the hon. Gentleman in no doubt of the sincerity of their concerns about the issues.
Recently, the hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key), the Minister of State and I went to visit our airmen who had been flying missions to and from Former Yugoslavia, including Serbia and Kosovo. It was with great pleasure--and with a great deal of pride for all three of us--that we met those men and women who have dedicated their lives to the service of this country. Many are very young, and they have served their country with great distinction on three occasions in times of war.
We met one squadron which had flown more than 900 missions. However, on leaving Bari, they expected not to return to the United Kingdom or to Germany, but to be sent to the Gulf--another deployment on the back of their current one. They told us of the strain, not only on the pilots who had flown 900 missions, but on the several hundred men and women who put the planes in the air, kept the pilots briefed, and kept them fed and safe on the ground. The enormous strain on those units was apparent to all. People did not spare our embarrassment by confronting us with their strong concerns.
The RAF is not unique; the experience is the same for the Royal Navy.
Mr. Key:
I agree with the hon. Gentleman's every word. At one point, the small number of pilots, who had carried out more than 900 bombing missions, realised that their night-flying and low-flying skills had slipped from lack of use, so they returned to the UK in the middle of the conflict to get their training up to standard. Does he agree that that was a particular mark of the professionalism of those RAF people? I bet that not another air force in the world would do that.
Mr. Hancock:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I support his remarks. We were all gobsmacked when the young wing-commander in charge told us that seven members of his squadron had returned to the UK to bring their night-flying skills up to date. That was a measure of the commitment not only of those young men but of the RAF, because it ensured that there were people with the competence to carry out those missions. However, one might seriously question whether their training was sufficient in the first place, because, although those young pilots had been deployed in a battle scenario, they had to return to the UK to ensure their continued competence to fly those missions.
During the past two years, 19 ships of the Royal Navy were deployed for more than six months; it had not originally been planned to deploy any of them for that length of time. However, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs continues to widen our commitments and to take on more pressured jobs that pose more problems for the Royal Navy. It is neither right nor fair that significant shortfalls in personnel are still a major problem. The Navy alone is short of 1,600 personnel; in the Army, the figure is 4,700, and in the RAF, it is 1,800. Those figures were given in parliamentary answers as recently as early June. Ships at sea--HMS Gloucester, HMS Exeter, HMS Birmingham, HMS Illustrious and HMS Sheffield--have significant shortfalls in particular warfare branches. Those branches are vital both in wartime and, more important for the crews, in maintaining the defensive capabilities of the ships.
As other hon. Members have pointed out, we continue to have a problem of pilots leaving. The Navy is short of about 12 pilots and seven squadrons are undermanned. We are aware of the saga of the plight of RAF pilots, who constantly decide to leave the service early, and of the Government's approach to that problem.
I was heartened by the Minister of State's response to those pilots, some of whom were weeks away from having to make a decision whether to leave the RAF. All of them thoroughly enjoyed their life as pilots; they were grateful
that the nation had invested £3 million in training them. However, many of them had already decided to leave, and were in their final two years of service. They told the Minister, the hon. Member for Salisbury and me of some of the problems that they faced at the age of 32 or 33. They had joined the service as unmarried young men, and enjoyed their life, their training and the experience of developing new skills. As they grew older, they had married and started families. At that point, they faced decisions about their long-term future.
One of them calculated that, if he left the RAF when he was 39--having given 20 years of service--he would leave with a £55,000 cash pay-out, plus a fairly substantial pension. He suggested that he might stay in the service if part of that £55,000 could be paid at times when it was most needed--for example, when the family were looking for their first permanent home, or wanted to pay for the children's education, or for the other things needed by a young family. He put that point to the Minister, who said that he would find out whether such payments could be included in a retention package for pilots.
An American pilot, who was on attachment with the Harriers, told us, and had no doubt told those pilots, that, as soon as he left the United States, his pay was tax-free. Perhaps that point should be considered when we send people to the front line on active service. We must consider what can be done about the retention package. That matter applies not only to the front-line personnel such as pilots, but to air and ground crews.
Like the hon. Member for Crawley (Mr. Soames), I was mightily impressed by the number of women who now hold senior positions and control the effectiveness of squadrons of aircraft. They are responsible for the engineering capabilities of three of the four squadrons we visited. It is a pleasure to see the success that they have made of their careers in the armed forces.
I wholly accept that major breakthroughs have been made in recruitment; I applaud them. It would be silly and selfish if any of us failed to appreciate what Ministers have done in encouraging recruitment to our armed forces. However, the problem is retention. As fast as we recruit personnel, we lose them. We must be more positive and proactive in considering what can be done to retain service men. As the representative of so many service personnel, I am aware that housing and long-term employment are among the biggest problems that they face. They do not want to live in married quarters for ever; they do not want to live for ever in multi-occupation in cities such as Portsmouth, and in the surrounding area. They want better opportunities to buy a permanent base while they are still young enough to put down roots somewhere. We should examine how we can help service men to achieve that goal. We must do much more if we are to keep those people.
We must also address some of the issues that affect the forces and the civilians around them. In past debates, I have spoken of the need to address our obligations to past service men and women--I hope that the Under-Secretary will consider those issues. I want to tackle some of them today. I was disappointed in the most unhelpful--indeed,
apparently unfair--dismissal of the points that I made, and that had been made many times, on behalf of the nuclear test veterans. I quote the Under-Secretary's reply:
"I find this personally offensive as Defence Secretary, as our troops don't get their equipment on time and they don't get it in an efficient way."
I could not agree more. There is no better way of sapping the morale and confidence of our forces than to tell them that they must do more with less, and that the promise of new equipment is many years late.
"The hon. Gentleman said that the case of the nuclear test veterans had not been examined. The case has been extremely well examined. I regret that he does not accept the answers that we, and the best scientific advice, have come up with. The case has been considered by the National Radiological Protection Board, not once but twice. People are entitled to make criticisms, but if they do so from a scientific standpoint, they should do it in proper scientific papers. Those papers should be published in peer reviewed journals so that they can be subjected to the scientific method."--[Official Report, 10 June 1999; Vol. 332, c. 873.]
We are talking about a period from the early 1950s until the beginning of the 1960s, when young men aged 19 were asked to sweep down the decks of ships that had sailed through nuclear bomb clouds. In shorts and khaki shirts, they brushed down those decks. We are talking about men who were asked to pick up debris on islands where nuclear devices had been exploded, and who were not given proper protection or clothing. In the main, they were national service men, who had been in ordinary jobs. Many of them were subjected to horrendous illnesses, and we asked them produce that sort of evidence. We as a nation owe those men and their families a great debt, and we must do all we can to help them. Like many of them, I was hurt by the dismissive way in which the issue was treated the last time.
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