Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2001
SIR ROBERT
WALMSLEY, KCB AND
VICE ADMIRAL
SIR JEREMY
BLACKHAM, KCB
120. So when the tender was asked for, what
was the spec which was given? If we can afford sonar we will have
it. If it is too expensive we will not.
(Sir Robert Walmsley) No it was not like that.
121. Forgive me for saying this, but that is
what it looks like to me.
(Sir Robert Walmsley) The specification did not call
for a sonar. But we know how much a sonar costs and we know how
much it will cost to fit it and we know we can have a change to
the contract in order to fit it.
122. The spec did not stipulate that you wanted
sonar on any of these destroyers.
(Sir Robert Walmsley) The technical phrase would be
"fit to receive" or "fitted for but not with"
In other words the ship is designed to accept a sonar. We knew
that in later ships of the class we were going to put a sonar
in. I am now happy to be able to confirm that we will put sonars
in ab initio.
123. Vice Admiral, I do not want to put words
in your mouth, because based on today I know you do not enjoy
that. To paraphrase what I think you said, you would not send
a ship to sea without a sonar. We have been told by Sir Robert
that it was not envisaged at all to have sonar on these ships.
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) I am a customer
and my job is to say what I want and to say what I want on the
basis of consultation with the services. I then have to go along
to the supplier, in this case the CDP, and say this is what I
want and this is the budget I have. He then says, "Done.
You can have one", or he says, "You must be joking",
or he says, "I don't know. We'll have to think about that".
Then we will begin the negotiation.
124. Was that a cause for concern or something
stronger when you were told you were not to have any sonar on
any of these destroyers?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) I have always believed
that a ship should not go to sea without a sonar.
125. In your view would it have compromised
the safety of the staff complement and that ship to go to sea
without a sonar?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) No. It might have
affected the way in which you operated it. I never envisaged that
the ship would not be able to take a sonar or that we would not
in due course fit one. That was certainly never envisaged. The
question was: when?
126. Paragraph 3.15, the second point, says,
"the First of Class will have no on-board torpedo launch
capability but, as the Type 45 Destroyer will not be a dedicated
Anti-Submarine Warfare platform, this is not regarded by the Navy
as a critical shortfall"—"this is not regarded
by the Navy as a critical shortfall". You have already spoken
about that earlier on in your comments, but is there some part
in your mind that privately hopes—and I am sure we all hope—privately
fears that in five or ten years time you will be asked about these
words again and to justify how wrong we were?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) I feel happier
about this. As it happens, I am a former Captain of an AAW destroyer
and if there is one thing firmly fixed in my mind—and I
apologise for being anecdotal—it is that AAW ships have
no business getting involved in ASW action. It is extraordinarily
intense in command time and it is bound to stop them doing their
main role which is to develop an air picture and conduct air defence
of the fleet. I feel less concerned about this but you will see
the same paragraph says that the ship will have on board a torpedo
magazine and a helicopter which can deploy torpedoes and that
is by a distance the best way to deal with submarine threats.
It says here that that is the view of the Navy and it is the view
of the Navy.
127. I acknowledge your experience and I hope
and pray you are right. Further down in this same paragraph 3.15
it says, "the Type 45 Destroyer's main gun armament meets
some, but not all, of the Navy's requirements". Could you
expand on that?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) I find myself in
a similar difficulty here to paragraph 3.14. As I said a little
while ago, the main purpose of a gun on a ship of this sort is
to provide naval gunfire support to troops ashore. That is an
Army requirement, not a naval requirement. Whilst it is true that
there will be a number of people in the Navy and the Army for
that matter who would like long range guns, heavier ammunition,
smarter ammunition, more precise ammunition, it is only when I
have conducted the full balance of investment into the ways in
which support is applied to our troops that I shall be sure what
is the best mix of weapons to meet this task. Whilst it is true
that the Navy would like to be able to provide gunfire support
further and with more precise and heavier shells, I am personally
not yet convinced that that is the best answer to the entire problem.
128. Earlier on this afternoon Sir Robert said
that it was not so long ago that we had a frigate at sea without
a gun. When was it we sent troops to sea without a gun?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) Quite a number
of times. All the earlier Type 22s had no gun.
129. When did that finish?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) Some of them are
still in service.
130. There are still some frigates without guns
on board.
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) Yes. None of our
aircraft carriers has had guns since the 1950s or early 1960s.
131. Will all the newly commissioned destroyers
have some?
(Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham) The intention is,
as I think this paragraph implies, that there will be a gun on
the Type 45. Whether it will be the same gun which will continue
throughout both the range of the class and the life of these ships
. . . It is worth remembering that this ship will be in service
on all past form until about 2040. It will be extraordinary if
it has not had a large number of changes to its weapon systems
in that time, given the pace of modern technology. I could not
assure you that that gun will be installed in all the ships for
their entire life.
132. In terms of the BOWMAN digital communications
system, depending on which date you believe, it is up to ten years
late and £183 million has been written off. The reason, as
I understand it, is because the existing CLANSMAN is error prone.
What percentage of signals in that system is prone to error? What
is the critical mass in terms of the proportion of errors?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) I am sure you have the text.
I do not. It refers to the manual coding system being prone to
error. Therefore, if you do not use manual coding you either compromise
the information by sending it in clear or you compromise your
own ability to know what is going on by not sending the information.
133. You are now certifying the BOWMAN to US
military standards, which I understand are a little less rigorous.
Why is that?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) Only in some places. We have
looked at purchasing, perfectly sensibly, off-the-shelf equipment
and I should just correct part of your previous question. We do
not have a write-off approaching £180 million. We are between
£35 and £104; it depends on the choice of contractor.
The reason we want to be ready to look at accepting United States'
standards is that if we are going to buy equipment off the shelf
we have to look very sensibly at the cost of imposing UK standards.
In this case, the only people who needed -55ºC were the Royal
Marines and we found that we can provide that degree of protection
to the equipment with special covers for the radios and the rest
of them can have -40ºC and that will save us millions of
pounds; off-the-shelf US radio.
Mr Campbell
134. Can you, as a starting point, tell us what
the size of the procurement budget was in 1999-2000 and what percentage
of that budget is produced collaboratively or spent on equipment
which is produced collaboratively?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) It is in the region of £5
billion. I do not have an exact figure for collaborative spend
but it will be in the region of between 15 and 25 per cent.
135. Is that figure growing, is it declining,
or is it fairly constant?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) We think it is going to grow
and it will certainly grow during Eurofighter production. Unless
we actually deliver collaborative programmes to the point where
we commit to them, then it will not grow. We are determined that
it should, but equally we are determined to secure value for money,
so occasionally we walk away from collaborative programmes, as
we did with TRIGAT.
136. Please feel free to answer this in any
way that you wish, but is there a political dimension to this,
that there is a will to produce more collaboratively?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) There is a will to stick with
a programme once you have started, because clearly if you walk
away from a programme unless there is a good reason, you annoy
the people you have partnered with, just as we felt let down by
the nations who did not sign TRIGAT after years of wondering whether
to or not. I am not aware of any political direction to seek collaborative
programmes for their own sake, in fact the very opposite. Value
for money both in the initial acquisition, where you share the
R&D costs, where you get the benefits of economy from scale,
and perhaps increasingly in the future during the support phase
of the equipment, where you can share the support facilities required
to maintain the equipment, value for money has been the dominant
reason for us undertaking collaborative procurement.
137. Yes, and I am sure the Committee is gratified
to hear that. But if you take the Common New Generation Frigate
and you also take Eurofighter, which is a great deal more, if
there is, let us say for the sake of argument, 20 per cent of
the budget—and 25 per cent of £5 billion, if my maths
is correct, is £1 billion—you are talking about an
awful lot of money, there can be a great deal of money. From your
comments very much earlier to the Chairman, I detected an element
of concern in some of the answers you were giving and I wonder
whether there is a particular concern that it is difficult to
ensure value for money in projects such as these, particularly
because by their very nature we do not have as much control over
them perhaps as we would do if they were being nationally procured.
(Sir Robert Walmsley) There is less of a concern over
value for money, where we do impose pretty strict disciplines
on them and where in any case you have the benefit of the shared
R&D costs which moves it into a better value for money region.
Less of a concern over that than there is over the ability to
secure agreements between the partner governments and if necessary
between international industry, in order to deliver the programme
to a predictable timetable. This afternoon we have talked a lot
about delays. I can absolutely assure the Committee that whatever
difficulties we have with national programme delays they have
an additional element in a collaborative programme which is that
it takes two to tango. You cannot guarantee to secure an agreement
with another party. That is why we walked away from a programme
called TRIMILSATCOM in the summer of 1998, because we saw that
that programme was going to be subject to all sorts of uncertainties.
One of the programmes where you absolutely must meet the in-service
date is a satellite because the ones you have got up there stop
working and you have to be sure that you are going to replace
them in good time. So we decided to walk away from an international
programme on those grounds. Timetable would be my worry.
138. I want to go back to this question of delays
and slippages because it seems, even without collaboration, that
we have enough to worry about there. Some of the figures you quoted
earlier did not exactly line up with my understanding when I read
through. Correct me if I am wrong. My understanding is that Type
45 destroyers, if they enter service in 2007, will be about five
years late, but if the replacement for the BL755 comes in in 2002
it could be as much as 11 years late. BOWMAN was due in 1995.
Now we may have it in 2003 at the earliest, again about eight
years late. There seems to be this question of roughly eight to
ten years of slippage. It could be a lot worse with TRIGAT from
what Mr Williams said. My memory, if it serves me correctly, remembers
a trick which was pulled by Bismarck—I do not remember this
personally because I was not there. He set up the Second Reich
and he did not want politicians to interfere in the Army. He made
sure that Army estimates were only debated once every seven years
and because the Reichstag changed every five years, it was only
alternate Reichstag's which could ever get their money and therefore
any control over what was going on with the Army. It seems to
me that we have invented, perhaps not deliberately in the way
that he did, a new form of frustration in the form of eight years'
slippage. It seems to me that Secretary of States coming into
office are faced with a very simple choice. How do you explain
away huge losses which are being made and how do you deal with
a lack of capability or inability to control money, or how do
you simply make do with what you have. There is very limited room
for manoeuvre, is there not?
(Sir Robert Walmsley) No, I do not think there is.
The decision to walk away from the Common New Generation Frigate
was a decision which was very much inspired by the then Secretary
of State for Defence who wanted to introduce certainty into the
programme. I was unable to provide him with a certain timetable,
so he said we should do something about it. At the same time we
secured the collaborative Principal Anti-Air Missile System programme
which was a fundamental need for the United Kingdom and the Royal
Navy. The Secretary of State does have an ability to direct it
and in that case I am quite clear in my own mind that he was a
hugely strong influence on our decision to move away from the
frigate programme. I should just like to say that on the air-launched
anti-armour weapon, it is quite true that in the 1999 report that
is characterised as 18 months late. I also explained that during
the gestation of that project, it stopped and started as the Cold
War ended, as the new situation developed, as we looked at the
possible threat range, at the volume of threat. In this year's
report I mentioned 15 months in answer to an earlier question
but actually I look at the paper now and see it is 13 months late.
That is because I believe drift on in-service date is now very
sensibly being measured from the main investment decision point
and I accept that this is 13 months late. I also accept that the
frigate is five years late. The Secretary of State did take action,
he was not denied that possibility, and there is no doubt that
Lord Robertson played a big part in that decision.
139. Nevertheless Secretaries of State who have
perhaps served some time in Opposition and have seen decisions
being made in the expectation that certain equipment will be there,
very often find when they come to office that it is not there
and that it is not going to be there for some time and the best
that they can hope for is an upgrade on the weapons system that
they have. You quoted examples there of where the Secretary of
State was able to influence events by making a decision, but there
are plenty of other examples of where in a sense he has to play
the hand which has been dealt for him.
(Sir Robert Walmsley) Part of that hand would be the
arrival into service of HMS Ocean, a new helicopter carrier, an
enormous success of value for money procurement. I do not think
anybody would say that was not a very welcome hand which was dealt
to the then Secretary of State.
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