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Mr. Brazier: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. George: No, I am so sorry but I have only 15 minutes. I am so very, very sorry.
The 1992-93 report also says that
Our Committee has made critical comments on the defence cuts, but those did not begin on 2 May 1997. If we had continued the downward spiral of defence cuts from 1983 to 1997, there would be nothing in the defence budget to spend. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford should examine carefully what happened before he became defence spokesman and before the Labour Government came to office.
Our Committee said:
Much has been made of the Government's procurement failures by the press, Opposition spokesmen and service men. Headlines over the weekend included "Ministry of Disasters" and "MOD bungles cost taxpayers £6 billion in 10 years". Looking at the last National Audit Office report published under the Conservative Government, I came to the conclusion that the delays were long and the situation was serious. The argument of the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford is on a par with Jack the Ripper blaming the police for not having solved his crimes.
For the hon. Gentleman's benefit, I have devised the A to Z of Tory procurement policy, showing what the Government inherited and have to deal with. It starts with Apache, which is a long programme. The first one will be delivered in 2000. Having visited Pristina airport, I have some questions about how effective they are. The AWACS--the airborne warning and control system--offset agreement also comes under "A". The situation was hopeless. "B" stands for Bowman--a disaster that began under the previous Government.
"C" stands for the common new generation frigate. It was cancelled--thank God--after bad management by the previous Government. The ships automated command system--CACS--was reported on in 1986-87 and it was rubbish. The 1990-91 report refers to HMS Challenger--a sea bed operation vessel that was flogged off. "D" stands for DROPS--the demountable rack off loading and pickup system. That was a scandal that we had no time to investigate.
"E" stands for EH101, which was a story of delay. Eurofighter was expected to be introduced to service in the mid-1980s, but it will be 2005 before the first squadron is introduced. "F" stands for Foxhunter radar. Concrete was stuck into a Tornado's nose to simulate the radar. "F" also stands for Fearless and Intrepid, which were introduced in 1965 and 1967. The Defence Committee said in 1984-85 that it was about time that they were replaced Albion and Bulwark will come into service in 2003.
"G" stands for the GR1 and GR4 Tornado. The Tory response is "not our fault". "H" stands for Hercules replacement, the C130J, which was a bit of a disaster. "I" stands for Istar intelligence, which was criticised. "I" also stands for the improved UK air defence environment, which was the subject of a very critical report in 1989-90. "J" stands for JSTARS--the joint surveillance target attack radar system. We should have bought that for ASTOR--the airborne stand-off radar.
"K" stands for KFOR, which has had many equipment failures. "L" is for LAW80, which is a wonderful weapon, but unfortunately the Russians developed a new tank and the missiles bounced off them. It was the fault of the previous Government. "M" stands for the merchant marine for defence purposes. This Government have remedied the chaos.
"N" stands for Nimrod 2000. If the air frames last their full lifetime, they will be older than me. "O" is for HMS Ocean. It was a compromise that could not continue when it went out on its first voyage. "P" stands for Phoenix, which should mean coming out of the ashes into the sky. The previous Government reversed that classical trend. "Q" is for the married quarters and their sale. I am ashamed. "R" is for Rapier field service C. It was not a
success initially. "R" also stands for the reliability and maintainability of defence equipment, which the 1989-90 report said was extremely disturbing.
"S" is for the SA80 rifle. Again the story is "not our fault". I defy anyone to look at the situation and say that it was not the Tories' fault. "S" also stands for Sea Harrier, whose mid-life update criticised it for being very slow. The Sea Wolf and Sea Eagle missiles also received criticism.
"T" stands for Tornado. Its 1968-69 feasibility study found that it was a good aircraft that had taken a long time. That is more than can be said of the Tornado F3 upgrade, done by the private company Airworks, which almost destroyed half the Air Force. "U" stands for the Upholder class submarine, a good vessel flogged off to the Canadians. "W" stands for Westland--enough said. "X" stands for the unknown examples that must exist, but which I could not remember. "Y" stands for Yarrow, which was almost destroyed by the previous Government's policies. "Z" stands for Zircon, the satellite about which information was withheld by the previous Government.
I hope that I have partly convinced the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford that year one, when all chaos began, was not 1997. It is wrong to put the blame in one place; the matter is too complicated. I hope that smart procurement has addressed the issues seriously, and that the imperfections manifest to anyone willing to read about them will be reversed. Only time will tell.
I commend the report of the Defence Committee to the House. It is an extraordinarily good report, bearing in mind the number of staff and advisers that helped in its production. I am excessively proud of it.
Mr. Tom King (Bridgwater):
I am pleased to follow the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence, the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George). All hon. Members will appreciate his warm and sincere tribute to Michael Colvin, a dearly loved colleague whom the House will miss very much. Friday morning's announcement of the tragic deaths of Michael and his wife will have shocked us all.
It is an extraordinary feeling to begin the second day of a debate without Michael Colvin, whose contribution to the first day's proceedings was exactly what one would expect--well informed, concerned, and passionately interested in the subject. It is a measure of his standing in the House--he became Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence in 1995, and so had to speak for hon. Members of all parties--that he had just recently been made chairman of the European group. That was typical of the respect and admiration in which he was held.
It is one of the sadnesses of this House that awful accidents from time to time happen to people whom one has got to know extremely well. For example, over the door into the Chamber, I can see the coat of arms of another colleague, Airey Neave, whom we lost 20 years ago. We shall remember Michael Colvin as an hon. Member of outstanding quality and integrity.
As a former Secretary of State for Defence, I have tended to observe a certain self-denying ordinance or reticence when it comes to taking part in defence debates. It is eight years since I handed over my responsibilities, and the present Secretary of State is the fourth since I held office. I was intending to welcome him to his post, as this is the first time he has taken part as Secretary of State in a debate on the defence White Paper. It is a pity that he is not here. The report from the Select Committee on Defence is sufficiently important to merit a two-day debate, and I hope that, on reflection, the right hon. Gentleman will realise that he should have been here for this important occasion.
I complained officially about the days chosen for this debate. I was told that these were the only days when Ministers could attend, and that the debate was being arranged to suit their convenience. I do not think that the Secretary of State's absence shows courtesy to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence who, like me, had reasons for not speaking on the first day of the debate.
People such as the hon. Member for Walsall, South and I can occasionally contribute; we have been here before. A lot of the problems are not new--there is a desperate continuity about them--as the hon. Gentleman very fairly said. When I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, I had to grapple with the demands that I made and the problems of overstretch that they caused our forces. If I asked for another battalion for Northern Ireland, the challenges and difficulties that I knew that would pose were clearly put to me by Lord Younger, the then Secretary of State for Defence.
It is important that Ministers take seriously the contribution of right hon. and hon. Members. For example, there were lessons to be learned about the SA80 after the Gulf war. I remember hiring an Antonov aircraft in the Gulf war and the debate that that launched about the need for improvement of heavy lift. One looks around and wonders why it is not possible to make rather faster progress. We have moved all the way from the Gulf war to the Mozambique statement this afternoon, when the access to heavy lift would certainly have made a significant contribution in humanitarian terms. The problem is still unresolved.
My concern is that the Ministry of Defence faces some serious problems. I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence and his colleagues on an excellent and interesting report. They did not mince their words. I think that the Chairman may have decided that he would in his speech recover some ground with his colleagues. The hon. Gentleman talked about the concerns of the Select Committee in a number of areas.
I congratulate the Secretary of State; he has been the recipient of very rapid promotion in the Government. However, I do not think that it has been a promotion for the Ministry of Defence. I do not recall a time when the Secretary of State for Defence was the most junior member of the Cabinet. I happen to believe that that matters, and I think that it will matter in the comprehensive spending review, when the pecking order and the weight that the various Secretaries of State carry will be very important.
I also have some sympathy for the Secretary of State. There is an illusion that Lord Robertson left behind a golden legacy after his time as Secretary of State
for Defence. He has lived up to Lord Callaghan's comment about Chancellors of the Exchequer. There are two kinds--those who leave in disgrace, and those who get out in time. I would certainly put Lord Robertson in the latter category. He may have got out in time, but he has left his successor some difficult problems, which the Select Committee report spelled out.
In the time available to me, I should like to comment briefly on the European situation--the European security and defence identity. The attempt to bring defence within the European Union is not new--it was going on for all the years I was at the Ministry of Defence. I remember the attempts of the Franco-German brigade and the French to seduce us away from the military structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. There is much to be said for closer European co-operation in defence matters. There will certainly be areas, as we know, in which the Americans do not want to get involved. However, the issue must be handled with great sensitivity and care. I have heard enough exchanges across the Chamber--quotes from Strobe Talbott, and so on--trying to justify either side's position, to know that it has been handled rather clumsily, and that there are real risks and worries about it in Washington.
We are talking here about NATO and about the Ministry of Defence. There is another element, not directly part of the MOD, in which our connection and very close relationship with the United States is essential to the security of our country. I will say no more about it, but as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I know the value of that intelligence link. If there were too casual an approach to the Americans, and the impression were given that everything we wanted that was otherwise available from the United States could be found in Europe, that would be a very dangerous state of affairs.
The Chairman of the Select Committee is right to point out that overstretch is not new. The matter was of great concern to me when I was Secretary of State. When we considered the "Options for Change" White Paper, we tried to establish two-year tour intervals. However, because of a sustained period of unreasonable demand--as the Select Committee pointed out in a telling phrase--the situation is now vastly more critical and damaging than I can ever recall.
We are told that the average nights out of bed are now 31 per cent. for the First Armoured Division, and that the Royal Engineers and the Royal Signals Corps now have tour intervals of six and seven months. We can always get the Army to do something for a short time--its members will always stand to attention--which is one of the great wonders of our services and a tribute to them. However, we cannot expect them to undertake such duties over a sustained period. The overstretch problem must be corrected. It was described by the Select Committee as the most urgent one facing the armed forces.
our case that chronic overstretch will be the normal state of affairs within the Army unless the Government's restructuring proposals are modified does not rest on the assumption that the additional deployments in Northern Ireland and Bosnia will themselves necessarily be extended.
Those are very critical comments on what happened under the previous Government, so the idea that the crisis began on 2 May 1997 is so absurd as to be laughable.
Our concern that there might be difficulties in managing the Defence Budget into the 1990s has as a result of our inquiry turned into the strongest suspicion that there will indeed be considerable difficulties leading to cancellations, slowing-down of acquisitions and the running-on of equipment beyond its economic life-span. The evidence we have received from the Ministry has not allayed our fears.
That was from a 1984-85 report. Another quotation is:
We cannot recommend the 1996 Statement on the Defence Estimates to the House unless Ministers make clear in the debate that this year's Statement will not again be undermined by further defence cuts in the 1996 Budget or by any other means.
The Committee chaired by Michael Colvin said the following in a report on defence spending in 1996-97:
The case for the restoration of some of the cuts made as a result of Options for Change and Front Line First is well made, but we are now promised instead a period of stability at the present level of funding. We insist that the defence spending plans set out in the 1996 budget must at least be maintained in real terms in future years. Any further reduction would jeopardise the defence of the realm.
That was when the Conservatives were in government.
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