Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 110)
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2005
MINISTRY OF
DEFENCE
Q100 Stephen Williams: May I just
pick up something you said in the start of your answer? You said
that if there were an unforeseen military campaign, the Army would
not be at the desired state of readiness.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
Let me just make sure that I convey exactly what I mean. We have
very high readiness forces which are contained within a joint
rapid reaction force and we preserve those. Therefore, up to a
given scale, we could certainly respond. If, however, this were
likely to develop into something which looked like a higher level
of operation, into something like medium scale, it would be difficult.
That is only what you should expect, given the assumptions we
take into all this and, as Sir Kevin has already said, the assumption
we have is one medium scale and two small scales as the maximum
level of concurrency. Now that is what we make all our preparations
against.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: We are doing
it now.
Q101 Mr Bacon: Sir Kevin, you referred
to paragraph 2.38 and the fact that the Ministry has already spent
some money on operational stocks of consumables. It refers there
to body armour. As it happens, I was looking at the TELIC report
last night and it did say that you actually had armour; I seem
to remember the figure of £2.9 million for a load of body
armour at £169 a set and you actually had it. The issue was
not whether you had it or not: it was in theatre in Kuwait in
containers and squaddies had to break them open to find where
it was. In the TELIC hearing which we had, you mentioned almost
in passing that you had spent £120 million on various attempts
to improve asset tracking and I think you agreed that you had
been trying to buy a Rolls Royce when a Toyota might have done.
I should just like to know where it stands now. I was in Boston
last year and I bought some books from a book shop and they gave
me a slip because there were too many and I had asked them to
ship them back for me. In fact they gave me two slips, because
there were two boxes—the exchange rate was very favourable
and I got quite a lot of books—and they told me just to
type this long code, which was a number of letters and numbers,
into the DHL website and said I would be able to see at any one
moment where the books were. So I duly did and they arrived in
no time in my Commons office. You referred to the word "visibility".
How visible is your asset tracking now? Are you where you need
to be, or is there still further to go and how much have you spent?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Both my colleagues
are keen to chip in here, but I must firstly say thank you for
your question. One of the things I shall miss most of all are
these references to the real world and then challenging questions
as to why defence cannot do the same thing.
Q102 Mr Bacon: And I have not mentioned
Marks and Spencer.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: No, we have
had that out already, so I need not go into all the details about
not having to do it in danger, not having to et cetera, et
cetera. We have had that discussion. However, it is of course
relevant that the Marks and Spencer analogy does not work in terms
of defence. To your question: we have indeed put a lot of effort
into improving the visibility, the efficiency, the simplicity
of our tracking system and the management of our material as it
goes in transit and we are also improving the robustness of our
communications structure; the SkyNet 5 programme putting up satellites.
One of the biggest problems we had was when one of the satellites
went down. SkyNet 5 and now SkyNet 6 is coming up, PFI programmes,
SkyNet 5 very successful by the way. It is delivering exactly
what we require. There are several initiatives which come together
to improve that asset tracking issue.
Q103 Mr Bacon: Is it there now, where
it needs to be?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Yes. It is already
there and it is coming out in phases of improvement. May I ask
the Air Vice-Marshal to give you more details?
Air Vice-Marshal Leeson: It is
there in so far as if you were in the Iraq theatre now and you
placed a demand, you could see the progress of that demand, both
its acceptance by whatever unit it is going to issue against it
and then where that item is actually transferring through the
system, rather as you described civilian systems do. The areas
where we are trying to improve on that are the resilience of it,
because at the moment it is essentially a civilian off-the-shelf
system which does not have some of the robustness in. It is not
exactly soldier-proof at the moment, so the various screens and
front ends that we are using are not as adaptable and flexible
as we should like. Equally we want to transfer that into a proper
accountancy system which also, as well as tracking where the item
has got to, maintains it on some sort of inventory system to fulfil
all the other obligations we have to ensure that every pound we
spend is correctly used. There is a period of work for three or
four more years to get to exactly where we want to be, but we
actually have in place where we need to be at the moment, which
is to make sure that we can avoid the problems that you identified
earlier of tracking exactly where things have got to.
Q104 Mr Bacon: There is one more
part of my question. Perhaps I can ask that and then ask my final
question all in one go. First, how much have you spent and are
you planning to spend in total to get asset tracking the way you
need? Second, could you just say something about the Defence Information
Infrastructure, how much that has cost in total or how much it
is going to cost and where it is in terms of development?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: On the first
thing, again I shall refer to the Air Vice-Marshal. My recollection
is that we have spent something like £27 million so far on
it. There are various elements; that is not the SkyNet thing.
The point is that you also need the communication system which
you have to put in, as you will recognise yourself, rather than
rely on what might be available in the country in which you are
operating. So that does not include anything to do with the SkyNet
structure. I think the actual changes to our own IT systems have
been something like £27 million.
Air Vice-Marshal Leeson: For the
asset tracking system, some £27 million so far and a further
£3 million next year, which is the ability to track where
an item has got to. There is a wider series of activities which
moves into the more inventory management area, for which I regret
I do not have the figure, but that is a slightly more elaborate
system in the longer term[4].
Q105 Mr Bacon: Perhaps you could
send us a note.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: It does not
sound very much, but, just to recall—I never thought I managed
to get this point across earlier—two years ago when we were
talking about these issues, it was not so much that we did not
have a system there, it was that the system we had worked slowly.
It took quite a long time once a container arrived, in this single
place where they were all turning up, for the people manipulating
the machines to work out what was inside the container. By the
time they got going, another container and another container had
arrived and they were simply overwhelmed by the speed of arrival
of containers, because their system worked far too slowly and
was too cumbersome. Our work has been to speed up, to simplify,
to clarify that process in the first instance, so it has not actually
cost us as much money as one might have assumed to make quite
significant improvements.
Q106 Mr Bacon: And the DII?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: The DII, as
you know, is crucial to the whole of our transformation programme
because it is the ring main which replaces 300 existing stand-alone
IT systems brought together by the three Services and the various
bits of defence as it has merged. Tranche one under the contract
has been let; that will provide the basic infrastructure, the
terminals which cover the UK and I think some overseas locations,
not all, certainly not the deployed bit, but fixed locations.
That is a massive contract. I am not sure what that bit of it
is worth, but the whole of the DII programme is worth something
like £4 billion. I think phase one is about £1 billion.
Q107 Mr Bacon: Is it possible that
you could send the Committee a note just summarising DII, not
in detail but the main heads and the main money?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Happy to do
so. We are working on tranches two and three, so we will not have
final details on that because they have to be let and contractual
negotiations have to go on. For phase one I can certainly let
you have that[5].
Q108 Mr Bacon: And a sketch of the
rest of it.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Certainly. Very
happy to do so. Two quick additional points on it: it is running
to time and cost, it is on track at present. It is being monitored
by the Defence Management Board itself; it is of that importance
to us. We are also standing on the shoulders of the US Marine
Corps in certain areas where they have used some of the same sorts
of contractors. We are doing everything we can because it is so
important to manage the risk and I am satisfied we have got a
very robust arrangement for doing so. I shall give you the details
of how much it is costing and what the steady state costs will
be, because this will be several hundred million pounds per year
when the contract is fully let.
Q109 Mr Bacon: Perhaps you could
sell your advice to the health service.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: We are quite
confident about this.
Q110 Chairman: Air Vice-Marshal,
General, thank you very much. I am sorry it has been quite a long
day, but it has been a very illuminating one and, Sir Kevin, thank
you very much for coming before us and thank you on behalf of
the Committee for all you have done over the last seven years.
It has been a great pleasure. Whether it has been as much of a
pleasure on your part appearing in front of us . . .
Sir Kevin Tebbit: There are times
when I did not think I would say this, Mr Chairman, but I am genuinely
sorrowful that this is my last appearance.
Chairman: Thank you.
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