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4.9 pm
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood): It is a pleasure that the right hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George), the president of the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, has attended our debate. He always takes a benign interest in our debates as Chairman of the Defence Committee, and he will have been pleased, as I was, by the admirable speeches of his protégés, the hon. Members for Crawley (Laura Moffatt) and for North Durham (Mr. Jones). I know that the hon. Member for North Durham takes a serious and well-informed interest in defence from our common participation in the parliamentary armed forces scheme. He is an enthusiast as well as an expert, as is my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack). The workers at Warton are very lucky to have my right hon. Friend to represent them, because he is exceedingly forward looking. I thought that his exposition of the challenges facing the British aerospace industry and the importance of the defence equipment programme for his constituents at Warton was a model of its kind.
The factory at Warton, where I worked some 24 years ago on the prototype Jaguar, has produced many remarkable aeroplanes. In those days, Canberras were still being refurbished. The Canberra first flew in 1949 and it is still in front-line service with the Royal Air Force today. It was pleasant to behold demonstrations of the aircraft by the late Roly Beaumont. One could recognise his demonstrations: one had to take only one look at the aircraft to know who was at the controls, the aeroplane was so elegantly manoeuvred into the appropriate aerobatic position. The Jaguar is going strong and looks as if it will continue at least until the middle of this decade.
I am not a particular fan, not instinctively a fan, of the European Union's high representative for common foreign and security policy, Mr. Javier Solana. I wish him well. He is always on the move, a very energetic gentleman, and is the Secretary-General of the Western European Union, on which I serve as well. At least his paper on European strategy, which was produced for the European Council at Thessaloniki in the spring, merits reading, because it stated the four basic security challenges that we face: rogue states, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and organised international crime.
It is in that strategic context that we need to view our defence programme. It is because we are not given the overall strategic and budgetary context that this debate is somewhat deficient, although hon. Members have spoken well, as I mentioned earlier. I ask the House to consider whether we ought not to discuss defence programmes in the context of a two-day debate on the defence estimates and revert to the single service days. That way, we would get multiple opportunities to discuss strategy and equipment programmes and air systems, land systems and naval systems in the context of the respective services that operate them. I am sure that, as in so many things in parliamentary life, my view is a minority one. However, I do not think that it is a minority one when it comes to the importance of making the broad judgments of the Government's strategic defence review effective, and that is becoming harder and harder for Her Majesty's Government as the money begins to run out.
I say at the outset that in this era of expeditionary warfare, when we seek to meet the challenges to our security as far from our shores as possible, as soon as they arrive or even in pre-emption in the context of the United States Administration's defence strategy, one of the areas of defence spending that merits examination now is whether we ought not to bring the British Army back from Germany. I regard it as a throwback to the old British Army of the Rhine, the old Brussels treaty commitment, which followed the division of Germany and was perpetuated through the cold war. I do not think that it makes sense now for us to be employing German gardeners and cleaners, providing funding for their economy, when, to put it bluntly, there is not always strategic support from the federal German Administration on key issues such as Iraq and others. So that issue merits examination. There are savings to be made, which could then be put into weapons programmes to give our highly mobile, flexible armed forces the equipment that they need.
Before commenting on European co-operation and ballistic missile defence, I hope that it will not weary the House too much if I offer some thoughts on domestic equipment programmes. The Minister of State claimed that the new carrier programme would provide the most capable carriers in the world, outside of the United States. If carriers are to be reduced in displacement from 55,000 or 60,000 tonnes to some 30,000 tonnes, they will not be so different in size from the Invincible class, the Principe de Asturias, which is in service with the Spanish navy, or the Italian navy's Garibaldi. And I doubt whether they will be comparable with the Charles de Gaulle or a successor carrier of that class, which is in service with the French navy.
Of course, if the Government are conducting a fundamental reappraisal of their planned procurement of aircraft carriers, we should ask—I have put this question to the House before—whether it might not be preferable to have three relatively small carriers, rather than two very big ones. One can be certain that when they are needed, one of those two big carriers will be in refit, and the other will be in the wrong part of the world. We certainly could not have won the Falklands war without being able to deploy two carriers on station. One recalls in naval history what happens when major capital ships—the Prince of Wales at Singapore, and the Hood in the north Atlantic—are destroyed. In this age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, three smaller carriers might be better than two big ones, particularly if Her Majesty's Government have, in essence, already forsworn, by opting for vessels of smaller displacement, the option of operating aircraft off the deck conventionally by launching them with a steam catapult and recovering them on the wire. It will be interesting to discover what the Government decide.
Of course, Commando Brigade will need new helicopters to replace the HC4 Sea Kings. It is important that the Merlin be produced at the earliest possible date, so that we have commonality with Royal Air Force Merlin support helicopters. It is also important—this is the lesson of combat over the Balkans and Iraq—that we have combat rescue capability. We should therefore consider using the Merlin, a three-engined aeroplane, in that role, and replacing Sea Kings for air-sea rescue use around our coasts.
I wonder whether the Commando Brigade ought to retain its own organic anti-tank helicopters. I doubt whether the Apaches will be fully marinised, and we can be certain that when our amphibious forces want their own integral anti-tank helicopters, the chances are that the Army generals will want them somewhere else. Although I welcome the joint helicopter structure that now exists within our armed forces, I should like that particular decision to be revisited.
I am surprised that the Minister made so little mention of the tankers for the Royal Air Force. Perhaps he feels that the decision-making stage has been reached, and that he cannot therefore share his thoughts with the House. However, I will share mine. I hope that the industrial imperative of supporting the Airbus consortium with the A330-200 aircraft is taken. It will of course be the more expensive option—much more expensive than buying hand-me-down 767s from British Airways. Nevertheless, the tanker will be an aircraft common with other European air forces, perhaps operated in a common tanker pool. The export potential of such an aircraft would be considerable.
Unmanned air vehicle systems and the future offensive air system were well dealt with by my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde.
I suggest that we need to consider the organisation of procurement. The Petersberg task has set an ambitious headline goal of an Army corps to be deployed up to 4,000 km from Brussels and maintained in theatre for up to a year, with supporting air and naval elements. The capabilities to make good that commitment should have been fully operational by June, but they are not. They require massive investment, especially in mobile systems. Decisions have been made on the capabilities that are deficient, and project groups have been set up to try to meet them. However, the European members of the alliance recognise that for the foreseeable future there will always be some areas of capability that the Europeans cannot meet, including heavy lift, space-based systems, intelligence and several others. Therefore, the European members of the alliance will have to obtain the Berlin plus category of armaments from NATO, with US support, if the European members are to be able to operate independently and autonomously as they aspire to do.
I urge the continental countries to think carefully about their conscious policy of diverging from the US—I mean the French and the Germans, with the Belgians in their slipstream, who are all flirting to some degree with Putin's Russia—and whether they can, in the present political circumstances, depend on the automatic acquiescence of the US Administration in providing the mobile equipment and capabilities that the Europeans themselves cannot provide. I urge our continental friends either to come up with bigger procurement and research budgets to make up those deficiencies or to modify their political postures to try to assuage the anxieties of the US.
We need the US, not least on the question of ballistic missile defence. An extended air defence system is being evolved by the US, with the support of the Italians and the Germans, which will have a theatre capability and beyond. If the threat of weapons of mass destruction is perpetuated in the world, we will need just such a ballistic missile defence capability of our own. I am surprised that the Minister made no mention of ballistic
missile defence in his speech. As I said, the Italians and Germans have been working with the US Administration for eight years and will provide 45 per cent. of the funding for the programme. Why have the Government ignored that threat? They will not even share with the House what preparations they are making to meet it, but it is an important issue that cannot be ducked.We all want operational requirements to be harmonised within the alliance and for alliance member countries to work better together. The hon. Member for North Durham rightly pointed out the dangers of the Buy American legislation before Congress and the risk of defence equipment protectionism that could ensue on the part of the US, at a time when the European and American components of the alliance are beginning to diverge anyway.
An armaments agency is not a constitutional matter. It has nothing to do with the governance of Europe. We want effective armaments co-operation, based on sound commercial principles. We want operational requirements to be not concocted by some bureaucratic agency but clearly defined by the operational requirement staffs of the respective armed forces working together. In other words, it would be a mistake for the operational requirement aspect of an agency to be blended with the normal executive function of the agency in the procurement of equipment.
I hope that the Government will argue hard for the exclusion of operational requirements in the formulation of the agency. There is a risk, however, because the draft constitutional treaty states that the format of the agency shall be decided by qualified majority voting. That is no way for British defence procurement to be worked out.
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