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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 59-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
The Future of the UK's Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: the manufacturing and skills base
Tuesday 21 November 2006 MR BERNIE HAMILTON, MR KEITH HAZLEWOOD, MR BOB KING and MR TERRY WAITING
DR KATE HUDSON and DR DOMINICK JENKINS Evidence heard in Public Questions1 - 95
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Tuesday 21 November 2006 Members present Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair Mr David S Borrow Mr David Crausby Linda Gilroy Mr David Hamilton Mr Mike Hancock Mr Dai Havard Mr Adam Holloway Mr Kevan Jones Willie Rennie John Smith
________________ Memoranda submitted by Amicus and Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Bernie Hamilton, National Officer for Aerospace and Shipbuilding, Amicus; Mr Keith Hazlewood, National Secretary, Engineering Section, GMB; Mr Bob King, Chief Negotiating Officer, Prospect; and Mr Terry Waiting, Chair, Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign, gave evidence. Q95 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to this evidence session about the future of the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent. This is the second of a series of inquiries we are doing into the strategic nuclear deterrent. The first was into the global context and the timetable required for decision-making. This one is into the manufacturing and skills base. There will be further inquiries during the course of this Parliament and we are all now waiting for the Government's White Paper. Until that is published, we have to assume that all the options on the future of the deterrent remain open, and so the purpose of this morning's evidence session is to focus on the possibility - and it is only at the moment a possibility - that the United Kingdom might go for a renewal of a submarine-based deterrent. To witnesses and to everybody else I would say please do not take this as a sign that we favour the option of a submarine-based deterrent - we might or we might not - we are simply exploring the implications of various options at the moment, so that is the basis on which we are conducting this evidence session today. Welcome to the witnesses and thank you very much indeed for coming to give evidence. I wonder if you could begin - and we have met some of you before - by introducing yourselves and saying what you do, what your organisations do, where you are based, and what sort of work your members do. Mr Waiting? Mr Waiting: Thank you, Chairman. My name is Terry Waiting and I am the Chairman of KOFAC, that is the Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign, in Barrow-in-Furness. It was established in 2004 after the announcement of 700 redundancies in the shipbuilding industry in Barrow. We were set up to lobby for shipbuilding jobs and to make sure that the people that mattered were aware of our concerns, were aware of what was happening in the shipyard and of the changes that were being made. I am Branch Secretary of Amicus, the union. I am also the leader of the local Labour Group on Barrow Borough Council. KOFAC is a community campaign that is led by the trade union movement and that involves the community and people throughout the North West. I think that is all I need to say. Q96 Chairman: Thank you. Could you say how many people in Barrow work in the submarine industry? Mr Waiting: Directly employed in the submarine industry in Barrow-in-Furness there are now 3,600. That includes 200 contract workers and 3,450 direct workers in the shipyard. Q97 Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Hazlewood? Mr Hazlewood: Good morning, Chairman and ladies and gentlemen of the Select Committee. My name is Keith Hazlewood. I am GMB National Secretary for Engineering and Manufacturing. Our head office is in Wimbledon. I have a responsibility for national negotiations in shipbuilding, aerospace, steel, engineering, construction, thermal insulation and the offshore industry. In the submarine programme the GMB members predominantly are steelworkers. These are the people that actually build the ships, the welders, the platers, etc. Q98 Chairman: And can you say how many of your members work in the submarine industry? Mr Hazlewood: In the two yards that I have association with in Barrow-in-Furness and DML, we have 2,000 members. Q99 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Hamilton? Mr Hamilton: Good morning, Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Bernie Hamilton and I am lead industrial officer for Amicus for the aerospace and shipbuilding sector. I have responsibility for negotiations and conditions of employment within those two industrial sectors. We have membership across the whole spectrum of the industry covering design, research, fabrication and manufacturing skills, and in every establishment that is involved in this sector of industry at Devonport, Faslane, Barrow, Rolls-Royce and Aldermaston. Q100 Chairman: Thank you. And Mr King? Mr King: Good morning. My name is Bob King. For the purposes of this meeting I am the lead negotiator for Prospect, the trade union. We have around about 1,500 members, mainly professional and scientific grades in AWE at Aldermaston and in Burfield so, unlike my colleagues, my main lead role is in relation to those two areas, although Prospect as a union does have scientific and professional members at the submarine bases as well. Q101 Chairman: Can you break down those figures and say how many work at Aldermaston? Mr King: Staff? Q102 Chairman: The 1,500, your members? Mr King: We have 1,500 members at Aldermaston and Burfield, the two sites in Berkshire out of around 4,000 staff. There are other trade unions there as well. Chairman: Can I begin by saying thank you very much for your written memoranda which have been most helpful. Let us move on to the first issue, the Government's White Paper and David Crausby. Q103 Mr Crausby: As you know, the Government have promised to publish a White Paper on the future of the UK's future nuclear deterrent by the end of the calendar year, something I think we all look forward to. What do each of you hope that its conclusions will be? Mr Waiting: As far as KOFAC is concerned, in Barrow-in-Furness we are pleased that the White Paper is, hopefully, going to come before the end of this session of Parliament. We would welcome this. We recognise the arguments that are going backward and forwards about where the deterrent should be based, if we are to have a nuclear deterrent. I think the argument has been won that it should be a submarine-based deterrent, and that the numbers of people that it would employ in Barrow-in-Furness, should it be a submarine-based deterrent, would certainly sustain the workforce that we have at the moment for some years to come. If we do not have this nuclear deterrent based on a submarine platform, well, I am afraid the future for Barrow-in-Furness is indeed bleak. I think at the session on 2 November, Mr Crausby, you mentioned that you came from a cotton town where the industry had folded and people lost their jobs but they moved on and they got other work. In Barrow-in-Furness, as you are aware, we are 33 miles down a cul-de-sac. There is nowhere to go. Before we can get any meaningful employment we have to travel at least 100 miles to the south, and Preston and beyond are the only places for us. We believe that we have the skills in Barrow-in-Furness to build the submarine and to make sure that it is delivered on time and on cost. The amount of work that has been done on current orders on Astute on making the submarine cheaper and more affordable to the MoD is tremendous. The work that is on-going in the plans that the managing director and his team have for the yard has taken the cost out of shipbuilding. The delivery needs to be examined, I know that, and I am quite confident that Mr Easton and his team can do that, but we really do need that platform to be built in Barrow-in-Furness. There is no other yard in the country that can do it. If you even think about saying that we will defer the decision for two years, it would be the end for Barrow in shipbuilding, I promise you that. It is not just the 4,000 people around in the shipyard. It means that in Barrow-in-Furness 70-odd thousand people will suffer. We suffered tremendously in the early 1990s when we lost 9,000 jobs nearly overnight. We are still paying the price of that actually with the skills gap in Barrow-in-Furness. We are overcoming that now, we are getting our way out of that, but it is something that we could not sustain again. Any delay in this order would have a tremendous impact on Barrow-in-Furness and, as I say, it could be the death knell for the whole town. Q104 Chairman: We will come to a lot of those issues in some of the questions we ask you. Mr Hazlewood: From the trade union point of view, we are actually looking at the continuity of employment to cut out the peaks and troughs from the industry because it has been devastating to the whole of the shipbuilding, aerospace and the submarine-building industries. You get peaks and you get troughs and in the troughs you lose your capability and in a lot of cases these people never come back and when you are peaking you are struggling for jobs. If we can get some continuity all away across the piece that would be very helpful from the trade union point of view. There needs to be a recognition of the skills involved in the industries that we are representing here today. Also we cannot emphasise enough the importance of the work for the local community and this particular yard that we are on about, Barrow-in-Furness, as my colleague Mr Waiting has emphasised, is on a 33-mile cul-de-sac. There is no other employment for that particular area. We also have problems with UK manufacturing at this moment in time, as we are all aware, and we are hoping that the White Paper will address that and lead to UK prosperity and the upsurge in the economy which is a very much needed boost. Q105 Mr Crausby: Thank you. Mr Hamilton? Mr Hamilton: From an Amicus point of view we welcome the publication of the Government's White Paper. We hope and we believe it will be consistent with the Defence Industrial Strategy principles. We believe that this has to maintain and retain the strategic capability to build these submarines and to replace this deterrent. We believe that that consistency in strategic approach will give the commitment the industry seeks to put the investment in place to maintain those skills that are required. We have heard from our colleagues about the devastating effect of the gap between Vanguard and Astute which had caused that effect and I think that the Defence Industrial Strategy sets out a different way forward on that and gives us a long-term vision. We hope the Government and Parliament comes to a decision soon and, as you have heard, it is important that it does come to that decision soon for the future of the industry and to retain that strategic capability within this sovereignty, within these shores. That will allow the investment to take place that is required to maintain and to further progress the skills, education and investment in retraining programmes within the different respective sites, whether it be in the build, the front-line primes, whether it be in the supply chain or whether it be in the support and infrastructure that is required for that decision to be taken. And we hope that the pre-Budget report and the Comprehensive Spending Review do not impact in any way in terms of delaying a decision or that Parliament decides to delay that decision because, as we have heard recently from the industry captains themselves, there is a specific need for a specific drumbeat of these orders taking place to retain that capability and skills within the industry, and I hope that the White Paper contains that view and that vision and that Parliament then takes its decision. Mr King: To echo the points colleagues have made, but I think to emphasise another one - as far as Prospect in relation to AWE is concerned, it is the speed of the decision that is more important than anything else. I believe it is highlighted in one of this Committee's reports about the age profile of our staff and the members at AWE, and if is a decision is not made relatively quickly there will not be the ability to succession plan, eg to pass those skills on. We have got concerns in relation to the newer people coming through and the training that they are getting. It was only announced yesterday, I understand, that Reading University, which is the closest university to Aldermaston, has closed its physics department, which is a big concern. AWE needs intake now to train those people up. It is not sufficient to have the qualifications, it needs the experience to do the work, so whatever the decision is, whether it is going to be new build and upgrade or simply to maintain the current or even decommission, there are different skills and different people that need to be involved, so the quicker that decision the quicker we can do the succession planning and get the new skills in. Mr Waiting: I would just like to clarify something. We are not talking about the missile systems. We are talking about the platform and there has been a lot in the press and I do know that people are talking about the actual missiles are going to be replaced. All we are replacing is the submarine. I know that it has been spoken of that you could perhaps refurbish the current fleet of Vanguard class submarines and upgrade them and prolong their life slightly, but I do not think that is a viable solution in the long run and I think it is more costly. I am sorry, I should have said that earlier. Chairman: To the witnesses can I say that you will perhaps agree with a lot of the points that your colleagues make, in which case there is no need to repeat them - and thank you very much for not doing so in that last answer session. David Borrow? Q106 Mr Borrow: If I can look at the issue of replacing submarines. If we ignore completely the jobs and the skills base and everything around that, what in your view is the reason that the UK needs the capacity to design, build and maintain the nuclear-powered submarines? Why can we not simply buy them from somebody else that builds them without having all these worries about drumbeats and capacity and skill bases, and simply get out of the business and go and buy it somewhere else? Mr Waiting: For instance, if you were going to buy them from America, I think the cost of the American submarine is $2.5 billion, which far outweighs anything that you are going to be buying from the UK. The French would be another option, I understand and you could buy from France, but I do not think that they have got the capability to be up to the sort of standard that we require. The other thing is that if you want a strategic defence do you really want it to be built in another country? Are we going to lose all of the skills so that if ever in the future you needed to build a submarine, you would not have the capability, you would lose all the design skills and all the tradesmen who are so highly skilled. Many of the members of this Committee visited the yard in Barrow and saw the people there. You saw the people in the shipyard. They are not ordinary people. They were walking round in overalls and everything else but really they have got extraordinary skills, and to waste those you have got to be very careful in what you are doing and understand what you are doing because you will never ever be able to assemble that workforce again once it goes. Mr Hazlewood: I agree with what my colleague says. This is one of the biggest concerns that we have regarding the United States. We believe that the Americans' way of sharing work and its intellectual property is based on protectionism. For example, the British model is of free trade but the manufacturing strategy in America is that in defence and the supply chain 70 per cent of the work has got to be fabricated in America. This applies to ships, planes and other defence equipment, therefore enhancing the American manufacturing strategy and it would be detrimental to the UK losing jobs and skills, as my colleague has already said, without repeating what he is saying, as the Chairman mentioned, I agree with my colleague's comments. Mr Hamilton: I think it is vitally important that we retain that sovereign capability and strategic capability. I also think that you have to look at the cost of taking the decision that says you buy off the shelf because the infrastructure and not just the front-line jobs would be affected by that and the communities would be affected by that. As my colleague from Barrow said, it is a remote community and if you look at cities across the UK where the sites are, whether it be the repair or the base or the actual build sites these are in naturally remote communities. That decision would be a devastating decision and therefore the public expenditure to replace that against what it would cost to maintain and continue with that sovereign capability would have to be balanced. Therefore there are two arguments. One is the public expenditure argument but the second is the sovereign capability that has to be retained, in our view. Q107 Mr Borrow: The next question I have got is really for Mr King and it is a similar question looking at the warheads. Given that we buy the missiles from the US, why can we not buy the warheads as well? Why do we need to have the capacity to produce warheads here? Why not simply buy the whole shooting match from the US? Mr King: Not that I am not saying that it is easy to close down a submarine base, but you cannot close a nuclear facility very quickly so everything - the technology, the science and the experience - is already there. To reinforce some of the comments about the submarine bases, to buy that experience in (which to be fair, thankfully, is not widespread across the world) it is going to take an awful long time and a lot of expenditure to do it. The other thing to reiterate on that point - and I believe the MoD said this in evidence as well - is the critical thing on this is to maintain independence. The other element, particularly in relation to the production of the warheads, is the fact that whatever decision the Government makes there will be a necessity to maintain that facility for some time to go. Without wishing to be trivial about it, you cannot just go and put them in the dustbin and they will go away. There is a need to maintain a facility and, if you are going to maintain a facility, it seems sensible to maintain it in this country to do any of the possible three outcomes that the Government may decide because it is going to have to be there anyway. Q108 John Smith: Mr King, you mentioned the future of Reading University earlier. Is there a direct link between Aldermaston and Reading in terms of training and recruitment? Mr King: I would have to refer to my colleagues to know if there is a direct link but it seems fairly clear that that is the nearest physics department to Aldermaston and Burfield which are the two sites in Berkshire, so it would seem fairly clear that that would be one that we would want to maintain to maintain the science. I am not actually from the specific area myself. Q109 John Smith: But you could come back to us? Mr King: Yes, certainly. Q110 Chairman: Perhaps it was a generic point that you were making that you were concerned about the closure of physics departments at universities. Mr King: I am told by a post-it note that there is not actually a direct link but there is a lot of recruitment that comes directly from Reading University into AWE . Q111 Mr Hancock: In the Defence Industrial Strategy they have made it quite clear that there were key capabilities in submarine design and construction and indeed in the operation and refit and how you could retain an onshore facility. What do you consider would be the real risk because it cannot be just a reason to go on with a nuclear deterrent because of the future of Barrow. That cannot be a reason, can it, in realistic terms, but there is an issue, is there not, about the time gap that you talked about between when you stop building the existing run of submarines and when the new contracts will be? What specialist skills would actually be lost? People talk about it but nobody ever emphasises what they are. Mr Waiting: For instance, when we stopped building Vanguard and there was a gap between Astute and there were the layoffs in the early 1990s, then we got Astute and that started coming on track, first of all we did not have the basic skills in the numbers required for the outfitting and the welding and all those peculiar skills that are peculiar to nuclear submarine construction because they are extra special skills. Before we got there we did not have the design team. If you have a gap now you will start to lose your design team for the naval capability because submarine designers can design surface ships but people who design surface ships cannot necessarily do the concept design of nuclear submarines, or of ordinary submarines for that matter. Even as we speak now the Australian yards have got the scent that there could be gaps in Barrow-in-Furness and in the shipbuilding industry in the UK as a whole, and they are advertising in the local press now to take these special skills of the design people who do the concept design. Then you have got the drafting people who put that together and then you have got the workforce who carry it out and work to those drawings. They disappear very, very quickly and they are not, as I said earlier, ordinary skills, they are extraordinary skills of that workforce. It is dead easy to think that a welder is a welder. I am telling you in Barrow-in-Furness a welder is not just a welder. Welders for the reactor have got extra special skills and people who design have got the extra special skills which, as I say, once they are gone they are gone for good. They are not lost to Barrow-in Furness because, as you quite rightly say, I suppose you could replicate what we do in another yard (it would take you a few years but you could do it) but you would not have those skills because they would go forever, and if you are not training people in those skills, as my colleague has said from Aldermaston, you lose those skills forever and they are gone for good. Q112 Mr Hancock: In that case is there evidence that that training is on-going now? Mr Waiting: Yes. Q113 Mr Hancock: What are retention rates like in a plant like Barrow? Mr Waiting: Actually they are very good because the design engineers, especially for what they are do because what we build is unique to Barrow-in-Furness, cannot get that sort of experience and work anywhere else. The designers like doing that sort of work, that is what they do. They are not necessarily all based in Barrow-in-Furness. BAE Systems have other sites in the United Kingdom where some of these men and women are based. Retention is very good because of the type of work. There are obviously offers from other places that poach, for want of a better term, our workers if they can, and they are offered some quite extraordinary sums of money I understand to go and do that. I also understand that some of them do like the challenges that are put to them from the design and build of a nuclear submarine. Q114 Mr Hancock: Do the others feel much the same? Mr Hazlewood: Just to be a bit more specific Mr Hancock, yes, very much the same, but regarding the specific skills you asked the question on, you look at the skilled technicians or the draughtsman that are designing these submarines, and also the skilled and semi-skilled trades such as welders, platers, scaffolders, electricians and electronic engineers, and while ever you have got work you will have a workforce in such an area because there is nothing else, quite honestly, for them in that area. Q115 Mr Hancock: What about the situation at Aldermaston and Burfield? Mr King: In relation to training? Q116 Mr Hancock: And holding on to people. Mr King: The retention is good although there have been specialist skills lost at AWE, which is one of the main concerns. The difficulty with it, and one of the issues that our members always bring to our attention, is the fact that they gain a qualification, a degree or whatever, they then come to Aldermaston, they learn the nature of the business they are involved in, and then you are pretty much limited to where else you can go and work because of the fact that it is so specialist. I have an example with me which is a job advert which is for a fairly middle grade for a joining development scientist/engineer. If you compare the qualifications and experience required for that to an outside role in standard engineering, because of the types of material that you are dealing with, the level of qualification and experience, understandably, is considerably higher. The difficulty that we have noticed from looking at the equivalent of our members in scientific roles in the commercial sector is the average time that they are staying with an employer is around three to four years before they move on and try and develop somewhere else. One of the key things we have got at AWE is the ability for a scientist to have a long career progression without the need, dare I say it, to succumb to swapping into a management role, so the longevity is there and certainly from the scientific environment people can come there and have a job for a long period of time, which is how the job is developed. Q117 Mr Hancock: If I could then come to you first, when you said if we do not replace the deterrent there will be an on-going need to maintain the existing capability and to make sure it was safe, what sort of period of time would you estimate? If there were no replacement for Trident, how quickly would the situation at Aldermaston and Burfield go down? Would it be a fairly gradual decline over the full length of the life cycle of the existing boats or would it accelerate quite considerably? Mr King: It is not so much the life cycle of the supply; it is the life cycle of the material that has got to be maintained, and it leads off the question I believe was asked earlier about why can we not buy in. If we buy in we do not know the life cycle. If we are supplied with a warhead from the US, we do not know the properties of that. One of the key roles that Aldermaston is maintaining is the stability of the current warhead stockpile so it is going to be effectively over the life cycle of the existing warheads obviously into decommissioning. Q118 Mr Hancock: But you are employing 4,000 people there on the two sites. Are they all employed now on just that task? Mr King: No, there is maintenance. Q119 Mr Hancock: Of the plant? Mr King: There is maintenance of the plant and there is maintenance of the materials and maintenance obviously of the stability of the current stockpile, which is the majority of the work that is done, and obviously decommissioning work that comes back in from warheads that have come back from use on the submarines. That is the majority of the work now and obviously they are then refurbished and replaced and sent back out. So it is basically keeping the current stockpile flowing, which is why we were saying earlier there would be a change. If it was the case that there was no longer a need for the deterrent, then obviously the work would be solely on the decommissioning and maintaining the stability of materials now. If it was to either upgrade or continue with the current, then the work would remain very much as it is now (although AWE is expanding just to keep up with the work that it has got now). If it was a new build obviously there is a new set of skills that we would need to look at and probably those are the ones that are more worrying because the place has been there some time and the skills to originally develop this are getting older and older. Q120 Linda Gilroy: A question specifically to Mr Hazlewood - because I can get my head around how design teams and design drafts people take quite a long time and you need to keep them together - can you just explain in a bit more detail as far as electricians, fabricators and trades people are concerned, those that work on the submarine, and we have talked about the high level of skills, in terms of the time taken to acquire those skills and experience, how would that compare with probably pretty skilled people who work on ships and so on? What is the extra? Is it years? Mr Hazlewood: To be proficient in the submarine industry you are looking in terms of years at nine years whereas within a normal shipbuilding yard you are looking at three, four, five years, a normal apprenticeship. Q121 Linda Gilroy: So if a gap develops that is --- Mr Hazlewood: That is right, yes. Q122 Willie Rennie: I am a bit confused by some of the comments. You say retention is good at Barrow but then you say there are adverts from Australia seeking staff there. Then you say if Barrow were to go you would not get the skills back, but obviously it is a good enough place to work so why would they not come back? I was a bit confused about all that kind of thing. Mr Waiting: I think there have been surveys done and I think the most recent perhaps was for the Rover plant when people left that industry, and 70 per cent of them would not return to it. That was a similar experience as we had in Barrow-in-Furness with the redundancies in the 1990s. Once we had lost the workforce they would not come back into the yard, voluntarily or otherwise. If they could find any sort of job they went into different jobs and they would not come back again. A lot of the younger people left the area for good and did not return, so we lost those skills. Quite a number of other people went on long-term incapacity benefit. I think if you look at the North West Development Agency's documents they say Barrow is perhaps one of the largest pockets of worklessness in the North West because the men and women did have industrial injuries and once they were out of work they capitalised on them, for want of a better word, but that is what happens, that is really what happens in a working town. It happened in the coal-mining communities as well. The whole community goes down. It is not easy to get back into work and it is easy to get back into ordinary jobs. It is the same when you live in places that are remote like a coal-mining area or like Barrow-in-Furness, it is not easy to get into other work. If you lose the skills of drafts people and the designers, they go away and they do not return because they have got well paid jobs out of the place. The people who are coming from Australia and other places and advertising in the local paper in Barrow want people who are already in work. They are not looking at the ones who are unemployed really. They want the people who are in work. Q123 Willie Rennie: But you did reconstitute them for Astute. How did you manage to do that? Mr Waiting: First of all, we sought assistance from Electric Boat. One of the things the managing director did was to seek the assistance of Electric Boat, the American company, and they did assist us greatly. I have got to say it was a two-way street because we helped them in some techniques on welding as well, so it was not a one-way street. That was one of the things that we had to do. Then we trained our own people to the standard required. We have going through the Barrow yard now a number of graduates and we have a very successful graduate training programme. We make sure that we do; it is an active thing, it is not an accident. We go to the universities and attract people to our industry. Through the graduate training programme in Barrow-in-Furness we are getting the right sort of people and training them through. If there is a gap now in the submarine build or a gap now where we do not order the future Tridents, there will be an excess of design engineers and everything else in Barrow, as I think was said at the meeting on 7 November, in the middle of next year. Those people will go and they will not come back to Barrow, they will go somewhere else. Q124 Willie Rennie: You did reconstitute it for Astute so why can it not be done again? Mr Hamilton: That is where the strategic capability and the Defence Industrial Strategy has to make the change. You have seen the evidence from Murray Easton. A lot of the cost overruns were because of that. The delay in terms of getting Astute out was because of the learning curve that had to be relearned. Murray Easton in his evidence gave you the fit-for-purpose workforce and it is the same across the whole spectrum, whether it is design, build or maintenance of that capability and that workforce. As other colleagues have said, people who work in the shipbuilding industry and refit ships, on the face of it the skills set may look the same but it is completely different when it is applied to submarines because the standards that are required to work on board nuclear submarines and the capability of the nuclear submarines requires that learning curve to be relearned and yes, it was reconstituted fortunately in the Barrow area to build the Astute, but if another delay were to take place as was done between Vanguard and Astute then that capability will be lost in the UK forever. You need only look in your own backyard, Willie, in terms of the effect that that has. Yes, thousands of skilled people left Rosyth Naval Base but when Babcock went back at certain peaks and troughs within the refit cycle to bring skills back in again, they were not there and, equally, they were not fit for purpose because they had left that continuity of training and education which is done on the job, and therefore there is a cost and there will be a very high cost to the public purse if that delay takes place. Mr Hazlewood: If I could just come back to what we mentioned earlier, you mentioned retention and peaks and troughs within the industry, and hopefully this will be addressed by the Government's White Paper, but while you have got peaks and troughs you are going to lose people and in a lot of cases you are not going to get these people back, the reason being they are going to find continuity of work elsewhere and you will never get them back. That is the biggest fear that we have within the industry. That is why we need this continuity across the piece. Mr Holloway: I do think that people sometimes think in these procurement programmes there is a confusion and a gigantic grey area between jobs and having the right equipment - helicopters and fast jets come to mind here - but leaving aside the important issue of keeping jobs and communities like Barrow alive, do you guys not think that there is a global market for skills as well as equipment and therefore that the situation might not be as critical as you paint it? Q125 Chairman: Who would like to start on that? Mr Waiting? Mr Waiting: In what respect? If you want to build atomic submarines and if there is a requirement for atomic submarines and for a nuclear defence of the realm, then you want atomic submarines and the capability is in Barrow-in-Furness. If you are talking about aeroplanes you can build aeroplanes almost anywhere - America, France, wherever. You do not need any extra special facility. If you are going to build an atomic submarine you need an extra special facility. If you are going to maintain an atomic submarine you are going to need an extra special facility. DML is one of those facilities. Faslane is another one of those facilities. You could not say, for instance, we will do it in Liverpool because they have not got the expertise and the licences and everything else, and all of the work that went on for many years before that; you cannot do that. It is not something where you can just say, "We will not do it this week, we will do it over here, we will do it there"; you cannot do it. It is not exactly the same as fast jets and helicopters. As I have said, the capability for the defence of the realm, if it is going to be submarine-based Trident missiles, has got to be done in places like Barrow-in-Furness and serviced in places like DML and Faslane. Q126 Mr Jones: If a decision were taken to abandon Trident, which is obviously an option which certain people are arguing for, that is clearly going to have a massive impact on places like Barrow. What would it mean in terms of jobs? You have already touched on skills but also the argument - and this is not one I am putting forward I hasten to add - that it would be easy to find alternative employment there. Can you just talk us through first what the effect of it would be and then what the alternatives would be? Mr Waiting: If we are not going to continue with the Trident replacement, then the future for Barrow is non-existent really. In 1991-92 when we lost the major part of our workforce (9,500 jobs) overnight we set up an organisation called Furness Enterprise and its remit was to build a local economy so we would no longer be dependent on a single employer so that we could diversify our economy. In that regard Furness Enterprise has failed. In lots and lots of other ways it has been tremendously successful but Barrow-in-Furness is still dependent on BAE Systems and our shipyard for the major part of its employment. Barrow-in-Furness takes £73 million in wages from BAE Systems every year. That cannot be replaced. There is nobody going to relocate to Barrow-in-Furness to give us jobs, believe me. Q127 Mr Jones: I am a very sad individual and on Saturday night I was reading the RAND report on the future of shipbuilding. I am very sad! One of the recommendations in the RAND report is that shipbuilding should be considered for Barrow, particularly in the next few years when you have got this bow wave of procurement, MARS and the carriers and everything else. What is your response to that? Playing devil's advocate, we could say there is enough procurement coming from surface ships to put capacity into Barrow. Mr Waiting: In fact, it could create more problems than it will ever solve. For the carrier for instance we are down, I understand, if it ever is built, to build one block of that. The MARS programme I guess is what the RAND report is talking about - I know it is - but that is some years away yet. What are we going to do? There is going to be a big trough in the meantime because you are not going to build a future Trident so what happens then, how do we maintain that workforce, because it is unsustainable? I know that BAE Systems are not going to have 3,500 people walking round with their hands in their pockets, they are not going to do it. I understand their profit was two per cent but they are allowed up to six or eight per cent to take the profit from any MoD order. If you were a shareholder right now with the way that the interest rates are going, if that is all of the return you could get for your money I think you might be interested in putting your money into a building society rather than in BAE Systems. I do not say that lightly because that was put to me by a former managing director of the yard. Q128 Mr Jones: The point being the point you are making about the continuation of employment but are you actually then saying that what the conclusion of RAND comes to in terms of return of surface shipbuilding to Barrow is a non-starter? Mr Hamilton: It is not a non-starter but the point that is being made is that submarine capability is unique and it cannot be sustained with a surface ship. Surface ship design is different from submarine design. Surface ship capability to build and maintain is completely different. Q129 Mr Hancock: There is going to be a gap. Mr Hamilton: If there is a gap then you are going to lose the sovereign capability. The practical point of all this, in my own backyard and Willie Rennie's constituency, when you took the maintenance of the submarine fleet away from Rosyth, it destroyed the infrastructure, the community and the educational processes to be able to have that highly skilled workforce in place. There is no requirement to maintain the level of employment in a yard that does not have submarine capability because the infrastructure and the overheads that are required because of the very nature of the work that is undertaken is not replicated and not replaced by surface ship work, and therefore the argument which says that these people can go and do other jobs in the community is a non-starter and a nonsense argument. Q130 Mr Hamilton: I will not ask the question I was going to ask. I am going to follow the theme that you moved on to. The real answer to Bernie's point is what are the unemployment levels in Dunfermline at the present time? They are pretty low. Can I ask the question to Terry because Terry is the one who indicated 3,500 jobs from a 70,000 population. Can I give you my background: 20 years in the pits, 80,000 of a population, 4,000 jobs, 2.5 per cent unemployment now. That is the difference. The question I am putting is if Vanguard does not go ahead at all, forget the peaks and troughs, if a decision is taken not to proceed, how many jobs would be retained in there for decommissioning and what would be the position - and it has to come off and the question that Kevan asked has to come up - and are there alternatives? Rather than talking down the area, are there alternatives that you can move on to? The bleak position that you paint I painted 20 years ago as a Labour Group Secretary and junior official in my area. Mr Hamilton: As you would expect from a trade union, the answer that we would give on this is that these jobs are highly skilled and well-paid. Replacement jobs that have taken place within the UK economy - and this is the Amicus point in terms of retaining manufacturing within the UK - are not like-for-like jobs. They are replaced with poorer paid service economy jobs and yes, there will be regeneration, as there is taking place within Dunfermline High Street and within the West Fife area but it has taken ten years for that process to take place and the investment and money that is going to be required to put that back in place to take place. Yes, there is relatively low unemployment but it is not the same substantive jobs that are being replaced and they were never replaced in the mining communities either. Q131 Chairman: We are falling behind a bit but, Mr Waiting, do you want to add to that? Mr Waiting: I have fully taken on board what you have said but right now in Barrow-in-Furness there are 5,700 people on incapacity benefit. We have quite high unemployment for the area considering what we had throughout the 1980s when we were building the Trident, when it was actually going against the national trend and we had nearly full employment and the national trend was high employment. I do not know exactly where your coal mining community is --- Q132 Mr Hamilton: Mid-Lothian. Mr Waiting: We have nowhere to go. As I said earlier, the nearest we can go for a job in manufacturing is about 100 miles away, and that is a 200-mile round trip for your maths. There really is nothing else to do. You mention decommissioning. We do not do de-commissioning in Barrow-in-Furness, we do not do scrapyard technology, we are not into that either, so there is nothing. I am not saying this to tug at your heart strings. It would be virtually the end of the road for Barrow-in-Furness. Chairman: Mr Waiting, you are now in deep difficulty because I think Linda Gilroy wants to ask a question about scrapyard technology. Q133 Linda Gilroy: We do not do scrapyard technology in Devonport! The Defence Industrial Strategy identified affordability as a key consideration in the decision on any future potential Vanguard and Trident successor. Can you tell us how your unions and members are helping to reduce cost and assisting in improving the productivity of the workforce? I think if I start with Mr Hamilton and we will go the other way round. Mr Hamilton: There is the evidence that Murray Easton gave which showed you the efforts that have been made since he was made the managing director at Barrow in terms of reducing the costs, of more efficiency, of greater capability and better use of public expenditure. That is where we have jointly worked together with that employer to do that and I think there is recognition in terms of the shipbuilding and ship repair industry - and I include submarines in that term - since that industry has gone through 25 years of severe pain, that we have to work together with the employer to make the yards as efficient and productive as we possibly can because that is the only way that these key capability skills are retained. Efforts have been made generally across the whole of the industry and I would want to point to the fact that as unions we advocated support, where there are peaks and troughs of work, and we went down and argued with our members that they should transfer to other yards to take those key skills. Therefore the learning curve that is required for a brand new worker or an electrician who has worked on houses and is put into a shipyard is taken away in terms of expenditure on shipyard electricians moving through from Rosyth through to Govan or through to Scotstoun. We recognise as trade unions that we have a role to play in that. However, the captains of industry have a bigger and greater role to play in terms of their interaction with yourself and driving down those costs. I think the Astute programme has showed that where they have continually put in place a programme to have year-on-year, end-on-end, project-after-project cost reductions. There will come a point in time when that will plateau and it will not be able to be sustained beyond that. After the first of class, as everybody knows, there is a huge learning curve up to first of class and then after that there are the efficiency and productivity gains, and I think the Defence Industrial Strategy drives you towards that. Mr Hazlewood: On the issue of affordability, the GMB believes that maintaining and improving the skills and qualifications of the workforce will improve productivity and also investment in new technology and new methods of working to help improve productivity will be an asset, so will incentive reward schemes. The GMB through the CSEU and a company called SEMTA has worked to establish a skills data base within the shipbuilding industry. They have done a trawl regarding the demands and the capabilities for the forthcoming CVF programme. The GMB also believe more co-operation between the shipyards, as my colleague has already mentioned, would help, and we are watching with interest the formulation of the new co-alliance and the sub co-alliance. That is to say the way forward and the way things pan out there. Chairman: I think I would like to move on to John Smith to talk about collaboration. Q134 John Smith: Part of this has already been covered, Chairman, but another thrust of the Defence Industrial Strategic is strategic collaboration - and you referred to it. How do you feel about that - companies working more closely together, the possibility of mergers? What is the unions' position on that? Mr Hazlewood: From a GMB point of view obviously we would welcome more co-operation between the shipyards on design and production methods. Once again I am referring back to the new co and the sub-co and we will see what comes out of that. We think that is going to be a way forward and it could only benefit the industry. Mr Hamilton: We are in favour of it. These projects are massive in terms of skills, investment, research and development, design, and therefore you have to have a substantive company. I think the Government was right in terms of their concerns about the flotation of KBR and the financial capability of that company in terms of support for the Devonport dockyard and the maintenance of a deterrent/the whole nuclear submarine fleet. There has to be a substantive size of industry to be able to support that kind of capital expenditure and to get the best value for the taxpayer on that capital expenditure. So we are fairly relaxed in terms of the Maritime Strategy, the Defence Industrial Strategy (which started that) and also the infrastructure review because there is a requirement for that to take place. Obviously we would have concerns in terms of impacts and in terms of areas and jobs, but at this point in time the lack of skills within the industry and the need for people to be employed outweighs that. Q135 John Smith: What about international co-operation? You referred to the Electric Boat role on the Astute. Could you see greater international co-operation between the UK and the US in submarines? Mr Waiting: We still continue to work with Electric Boat on various issues for Astute and, again, it is a two-way street. There is an exchange of ideas with the Americans. When the Committee was visiting the yard, I am sure that you were told that we are working very closely with our supply chain to make sure that affordability is there as well. Obviously there has got to be great care taken there because you can put people out of business if you put the squeeze on them too much. So the management team within the shipyard in Barrow-in Furness is working with other suppliers to make sure that we are all singing off the same hymn sheet, so to speak, so we can get the price right so that everybody has got the employment that is required and we have got the capability for future ships and submarines in the industry. So there is a lot of time invested in this by senior management within BAE Systems and by other people. Q136 Linda Gilroy: The Minister for Defence Procurement has written to MPs with an interest in these matters in recent days expressing his concerns about how slow the consolidation is to come about. Mr Hamilton mentioned the KBR flotation. I just wondered if you would like to say a bit more from the unions' point of view about how that looks. I was going to ask a question about whether the companies and the shareholders are doing enough to make this happen. Mr Hamilton: Obviously we have meetings with government ministers as well and we understand the Minister for Procurement's strategy. Both myself and Keith have attended meetings with the Minister and we understand the vision that he has. On the view that says that we should not be using public procurement contracts to allow people to exit an industry and therefore for them to walk away with a bag of gold, I agree fundamentally with the Minister on that in terms of the proposed purchase by BAE Systems and BG of Fabric (?) International. I think he was absolutely right that that was not the correct way. I think hopefully in the discussions that are taking place between BAE and BG, the Minister was painting a picture - and if I have got this wrong I have got it wrong - I think the picture he was trying to paint was of a substantive company in its own right being brought together in a joint venture if possible and, if not, working in collaboration, then this would be the next step in terms of having a joint venture. I think the concerns that were being expressed about the flotation of KPR were about the financial capability of that stand-alone company to continue to fund the infrastructure, the investment and the requirements that are needed to maintain that capability within the Devonport area. I think that is a concern and indeed I did not have the assurances from Halliburton in terms of KPR that that was going to take place. I have to say in our own practical experience there are a number of contracts out in the system just now that if that company had stepped up to the plate with financial assurances on, then Appledore shipyard would still be open, but that company has failed to step up to the plate and so therefore I think the Government do have a concern that if that is what has happened would that be replicated within Devonport. Q137 Linda Gilroy: Appledore is still open at the moment. Mr Hamilton: I understand that. Linda Gilroy: I just wanted to set that straight. Chairman: I am sorry, Mr King, we have let you off too lightly, David Crausby is just about to start on Aldermaston. Q138 Mr Crausby: I have some questions about Aldermaston. I guess Aldermaston is in a different situation in some respects from Barrow in that it is in a different part of the country and no doubt the alternative job prospects are better in that part of the world. What I am concerned about is specialist skills from the point of view of not just the employees but from the point of view of their retention in the interests of the whole of the country and in the interests of our deterrent. So what kind of work do Prospect members at AWE need to be involved in to sustain those specialist skills at the required level? To what extent could the skills of scientists and engineers at Aldermaston be utilised in the civil nuclear sector? Does the possibility of the new civil nuclear programme create any difficulties for us in the transfer and opportunities for skills? Mr King: I did say to Dr Stephen Jones when I was going to give evidence that I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination but I will do my best. Part of my role is I deal with the UKAEA, AAT (?), and some of the regional authorities as well and also the JET project, which has got some publicity this morning. I think the skills are different because they are honed at AWE with a specific purpose. I noticed the question earlier about a global market for these skills - and I sincerely hope there is not a global market for nuclear warhead construction, and I would like to think that we do everything we can to make sure there is not! As I say, I am not a scientist but they are particular in the way that these issues are constructed and I was allowed to give evidence today because I do not know any secrets so I cannot give any away and it was the safest way of doing it! Apparently the difference in technology is very much to do with the delivery vehicle, which is obviously launched from the submarines and how it is designed to fit within the Trident missile itself is the clever bit, apparently, which is about as far as my science goes, so it is a particular skill. There are also elements about the life cycle of the products which are being used which are different. I will not go into detail about that because I do not know. They are very, very different skills from the skills of the majority of the members we have got who work, for instance, within nuclear power generation or in relation to the Fusion project because they are developing new technology, whereas the job within AWE is very much maintaining the current technology, it is very much a maintenance element. You mentioned about the area, the direct difficulty we have with the area is the fact that the scientific skills required and the salaries paid - and you probably knew that I was going to bring this in somewhere along the line - are not relative to the market rate. However, the majority of people do not come to work at AWE because they want to work in the commercial sector; they want to work in the public sector and maintain those terms and conditions, so the salaries are not at a high level. What is a high level, which reflects two things, is the wish of the scientists and engineers to develop a long term career and also to have security in employment, which is obviously something that is rare these days. The current problem that we face is that when we deal with the employer - with whom we do have a very good relationship and I know my colleagues' toes will curl when I say that - is that we are dealing fourth hand. We are dealing with the management group that is designated by AWEML, which then reports to the IPT which then reports to the MoD. For instance, with regard to the current problem that we have with the possibilities of an increase in contributions to the pension scheme, we have got no direct route in and that is definitely causing us a problem. On the longevity maintenance, the apprenticeship scheme that is AWE's is extremely good and, as I mentioned earlier about Reading University, does attract a lot of students across from physics and chemistry and other related sciences, so as far as maintaining it within the company is concerned we are doing very well but I do not think the skills are directly related, although I suppose the only one that would be is the safety element. Q139 Mr Crausby: Can I just ask you to say something about the impact of the Government's investment programme at Aldermaston? What impact has that had? Have you got any concerns about it? Has it had any effect on the skills base? Mr King: As far as I am aware from what I have seen, and I do not actually work there although I do visit a great deal, the majority of the investment programme has been on refurbishing the buildings which basically were constructed in the 1950s. I always make the joke that there are 4,000 people that work at AWE. Two of them design things and the other 3,998 are involved in safety, which I think is very good, but the site obviously has to be secure, it has to be safe, and that is the one key element. I think a lot of the investment has gone into refurbishing buildings. I do not mean putting nice chairs in. I mean ensuring that they are safe to contain the elements they have to contain, so I think the investment programme has been working well. We have had some development in relation to terms and conditions but obviously the latest issue around the pensions is of grave concern to us. If you look on the AWE website under the elements that they attract people to the company with, there are two things on the page and the first one is pensions, so it is a key element that we are currently having issues with. Q140 Mr Havard: I would like to ask you about the argument with regard to the virtual arsenal (do not panic) and whether there is any debate about this. This is the argument that says, given the skills and the information we have through the nuclear cycle civil generation, etc., and if we are to keep the capability, the role and function of Aldermaston could switch to be more like Porton Down. In other words, it would become something that could be involved in terms of verification and so on, so you could keep the skills. In other words you keep the capability to reconstitute a nuclear programme should you wish to have it. The example that is often given is Japan that has both the capability and the civil fissile material potentially and all of that sort of stuff and could constitute a programme within six months to two years. It is a compromise argument and Aldermaston would be absolutely central should you wish to go down that road. I wondered whether or not there was any discussion going on about what would happen in terms of the focus in Aldermaston shifting as opposed to Aldermaston going and what the skills would be and how they could be reconverted. Mr King: To give you a very short answer - purely because you said "virtual arsenal", and as a member of Mr Hancock's constituency I think we are still one above them in the League - it is not something that has been discussed. The only discussion we have been having at the moment is what shape the Government's decision is going to take and we will adapt to that. It sounds like a bit of a strange line, but the position of the majority of staff, including scientific and engineering at Aldermaston, is, whatever decision the Government makes, that is the decision that ----- Q141 Mr Havard: That is what I was really fishing for. In a sense the truth of it is that the capability at Aldermaston is able to do a number of things on this continuum, is it not, to replace what there is, or to develop something different even, and also to maintain safety for what is and potentially to do the problem of dealing with disarmament, if you like. It is capable of doing all these things. Mr King: Yes. Q142 Chairman: Maybe he is not the right person to ask. Maybe the Minister is. Mr King: I would think on the science basis I most certainly am qualified. Chairman: Mr King, you suggested that your colleagues' toes would curl. I had the impression that they had a good relationship with their employers and so I am sure they did not. Can I say thank you very much indeed to all of you for giving evidence so helpfully and so clearly, and also briefly, which is not easy when you have four of you answering several different questions coming from all angles. Memoranda submitted by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Kate Hudson, Chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Dr Dominick Jenkins, Senior Disarmament Campaigner, Greenpeace, gave evidence. Q143 Chairman: May I welcome you both to this second inquiry that we are doing in our string of inquiries. Thank you for giving evidence to our first. As you know, we will have several inquiries during the course of this Parliament. We know who you are but nevertheless could you tell us who you are and what you represent? Dr Jenkins: I am Senior Disarmament Campaigner for Greenpeace. I also have some expertise in the sociology and history of science and technology which may be relevant, but I am not a scientist or an engineer. Dr Hudson: I am Kate Hudson. I am Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Q144 Mr Jones: We have just had the trade unions who represent people who work not only in the civil nuclear industry but also in the construction of Trident submarines and also at Aldermaston. If we abandon Trident and do not replace it that is clearly going to have a major impact on jobs in those local communities. First of all, what would you say to those local communities and, secondly, is there any realistic alternative for those communities other than what they do at the moment in terms of supporting the independent nuclear deterrent? Dr Hudson: First of all I would like to say that this aspect of the issue is something that CND takes extremely seriously. We have very good relations with a number of trade unions. We have trade union affiliates and, of course, we are aware that at the recent Trade Union Congress there were a couple of trade unions who were not in support of the resolution not to replace Trident because of their concerns about the jobs question in particular. Amicus and GMB had concerns about the jobs question. It is certainly CND's position that a decision to replace Trident should not and indeed need not have a detrimental impact on those workforces. We have been working for some years to encourage the Government to adopt a viable arms conversion project. There was much work done around this in the 1980s and indeed the 1990s as well. We have just commissioned, supported by Unison, a substantial piece of new work looking at that very question. It is our understanding first of all that there are not extensive or very significant numbers of jobs still related specifically to the nuclear weapons industry, not on the kind of scale that has been seen in the past, but also in particular that, as there is a large number of physical scientists and engineers working in that area, and those skills areas are well known to be in short supply now with the changes in universities and shortage of graduates, and in particular we know that there is a shortage of relevant PhDs and so on, it is perfectly possible for those skilled workforces to be re-employed in other sectors. In particular we are aware that with the Government's support for the development of sustainable energy forms and so on many of the scientists and engineers working in that sector could find work in alternative sectors. Q145 Mr Jones: Yes, but both organisations are also against civil nuclear power, so what would you say, for example, to the county of Cumbria which relies not only on civil nuclear power but also, in terms of Barrow, on nuclear submarines? It is a bit of a double whammy and it is all right saying that there are alternative jobs, and I have to say that over the years I have read many of these ploughshares types of documents, but it does not actually mean a great deal if your organisation, certainly in Cumbria, for example, is going to close down two of the main employers in that county. Dr Hudson: It is certainly the case that in the past when work has been commissioned by those workforces themselves on alternative forms of employment they have generally been orientated to the Government investing and the companies investing in non-defence sectors and alternative forms of manufacturing production. I do not know to what extent it would be possible to convert into those areas, but as far as I am aware it is possible for some of those workforces specifically to be maintained through non-submarine production, for example. Q146 Mr Jones: If you have been to Cumbria and looked at the geography are you seriously suggesting that you are going to get employers to move to Barrow or, for example, to Sellafield, the Workington area, in large numbers in terms of the jobs there are now both in the civil and the defence nuclear industries? It is just pie in the sky, is it not? Dr Hudson: I am not so sure that it is pie in the sky. It is certainly the case, as far as I understand it, that with the non-continuation of the work at Dounreay it was possible for all the employees there to have continual employment or to be re-employed in similar sectors, particularly with regard to things like decommissioning, dealing with waste and so on. Q147 Chairman: Dr Jenkins, I think you should have the opportunity to answer those questions. Dr Jenkins: The first thing is that Greenpeace has historically been involved in developing precisely these kinds of studies and it has had a long history of that, but the overall perspective would be as follows. It is a national issue whether we continue with the Trident nuclear missile system with world ramifications. In such a case it is incumbent upon the Government to put serious effort, serious money and serious planning into taking care of workforces who have shown their commitment to the nation over many years and it is in that context that this should be addressed. My feeling is, and here I have to go back to historic knowledge when I worked on issues for Friends of the Earth about Sellafield and so forth, that there has been a real failure of the Government and agencies and the MoD to really think creatively and put real effort into defence conversion. Chairman: I did not begin by saying, as I should have done, thank you very much for your memorandum, but Kevan Jones would like to come back to you on that. Q148 Mr Jones: Just in terms of studies, obviously, we cannot replace the jobs by just getting people to produce studies, of which I have read many over the years. None has actually ever been implemented and obviously they have employed a lot of people in your organisations or certain university bods to write them, but in practical terms, in terms of replacement jobs, you say it is a job for Government, but surely, as an organisation which is advocating wholesale unemployment for large parts of west Cumbria and the southern Lakes, you have a responsibility to come up with a better argument than that it is Government's responsibility to do this. Secondly, in terms of a response to the point about alternative jobs, do you not also recognise that there is an issue around the types of jobs? What you are talking about here are very highly skilled jobs and replacing them with a baked bean factory, for example, in west Cumbria would not replace the skill set or the types of jobs which you would be taking away by closing down our civil nuclear programme or the defence side. Dr Jenkins: Just to be clear, here I have to refer to my historic knowledge because today I come to focus on Aldermaston, where there is not a similar job problem. I have been located in the centre of a very prosperous part of England. The studies that were done in the past were not trivial at all. I remember a study done in the 1980s which looked at how jobs in Barrow, nuclear submarines, could have been diversified into the area of equipment for North Sea oil, so in terms of my organisation we have never simply said, "This is a problem for somebody else". We have been involved in such studies, but I think this is a serious issue and demands response in detail and today I have not come with that focus and I am not prepared to give it that kind of consideration. Chairman: We can ask Dr Hudson questions about that. Q149 Linda Gilroy: This is on the same issue so it may be that you can deal with this in the course of answering the question I have got. We have heard this morning, and I think you were probably observing the trade union contributions this morning, that the scientists, engineers, the design people but also the skilled trades people, are very proud of what they do. They do it very specifically because they believe in it, and we have certainly had a sense of that on the various visits that we have paid, particularly to Barrow, where they were, I think, not unrealistically comparing what they do with the work on the space shuttle and the complexity of what they do, the safety case justification work that is done there. Is it not therefore probable that a proportion of those people - and we have heard from the trade unionists that some of them would not - would go elsewhere, probably abroad? They would obviously have restrictions placed on them as to where they could take their specialist knowledge in some cases. Is that something which CND have given consideration to? Would you be comfortable with that idea, that they would be taking their skills elsewhere rather than retaining them within the United Kingdom? Dr Hudson: First of all, in the discussions that we have had with trade unions in the recent past I remember a particular discussion we had with Prospect, and the point they were making was precisely the one you are making about comparing like job with like. Jobs in that sector are very good jobs with very good conditions, and those people do not want to go and work in a supermarket. CND is absolutely opposed - and as a trade unionist myself I would be absolutely opposed - to anything which would suggest that, but we do not think that that is necessary. Just to refer back to my point about the Dounreay nuclear power plant, this point is made in our paper, but according to the UKAEA which is responsible for clearing up this site, the decline in employment at the end of the Dounreay research programme has been reversed, with 1,200 people now employed in engineering, radiological protection planning, environmental and waste management. We made a similar point about the new role of Porton Down, given the biological and chemical weapons conventions, so we believe that it is absolutely possible for like employment to be found. I wonder: is it the case, and it seems unlikely to me, that it would be possible to sustain the works at Barrow solely on the commissioning of four new submarines? Q150 Mr Jones: It would be a better alternative to what you are proposing. Dr Hudson: It would be a big help but how sustainable is that? There is also the Astute class, of course. There is also presumably the production of surface ships and commissioning of other forms of production. Q151 Mr Jones: You are against all these things anyway most of the time. Dr Hudson: No, no. I am only talking about nuclear weapons. Chairman: Was that the answer to your question, Linda? Q152 Linda Gilroy: It was an answer but it was not exactly an answer that I think the people that I represent would understand because the comparison I made was with the space shuttle. It takes 18 months to two years just to do the long overhaul of these submarines, let alone build them. We heard that it takes nine years to train up to the level of skill that is required. These really are unique jobs and I am a bit disappointed with the reply. Dr Hudson: As far as I understand it, part of the work at Devonport is the refitting of the existing Vanguard class submarines and that is a kind of periodic but regular thing where the ships come in and are refitted and so on. That work will continue. There are other nuclear powered submarines, for example, and there is a whole range of jobs there and commissions and contracts and so on. Q153 Mr Jones: Which you are against. Dr Hudson: No, we are not. I am here specifically to make the case as to why a decision not to replace Trident need not destroy Britain's skills and manufacturing base. I am not here to make any comment about having the Astute class submarines or refitting the existing ones or having decommissioning of all those types of things that are necessary and could occupy skills and provide employment. Q154 Chairman: Dr Hudson, could you tell us: do you oppose the position by the United Kingdom on nuclear powered submarines? Dr Hudson: We are not in favour, under conference policy, of new build nuclear power stations for a number of reasons, particularly because we think that it will not provide a solution to the problems of climate change. Constitutionally as an organisation we are only for the abolition of nuclear weapons. That is overwhelmingly our concern and I am not particularly interested here in making any kind of case against nuclear powered submarines. I see that as a separate issue. Q155 Chairman: But as a separate issue is it the policy of CND to oppose the existence of nuclear powered submarines? Dr Hudson: I do not actually know if we have got a conference policy on that specific issue. It is certainly not something that we campaign against. Q156 Linda Gilroy: I just want to clarify something. You suggested that the refits on the current Vanguards would go on. Is it the position of CND therefore that the Vanguard submarines should continue until the end of their lives? Dr Hudson: Our current campaigning priority is to prevent the replacement of Trident. That is our absolute focus at the moment. Obviously, we have campaigned for scrapping Trident and so on for many years. We are for the abolition of Britain's nuclear weapons, but I would say personally that there is very little likelihood of the Trident nuclear system as it currently exists being scrapped prior to a decision on a replacement being taken and prior to the end of its natural life. As these things take very long times to achieve and to bring about we nevertheless believe that there will be sufficient skilled work provided for those communities for very many years, whether it is decommissioning the submarines or dealing with problems of waste and so on around nuclear reactors in submarines, all those things. We believe very strongly that there will not be a detrimental impact on those workforces. Q157 Chairman: But, Dr Hudson, in your evidence to our first inquiry did you not suggest that if there were a decision not to replace Trident it would be based on the principle that nuclear deterrent no longer worked and was not a good thing, and therefore that it should follow that we should immediately abolish the existing deterrent? Did you not suggest that? Dr Hudson: I think this is a bit of a red herring really because obviously CND is an abolitionist organisation. We want British nuclear abolition and we also work for global abolition. We have a kind of unilateralist plus multilateralist position. That is what we are very strongly committed to on moral, legal and security grounds. That is absolutely the case. Much as I might like it to be otherwise, I do not think there is any immediate chance that those things are going to happen. What is possible, however, is that there is again a very serious national discussion about whether or not we need to renew the Trident system, and that is what we are engaged in talking about. Mr Hancock: I think that is a very fair point. I think some members here are trying to twist the issue, Chairman. Mr Jones: I just want straight answers. Q158 Mr Hancock: No, no. The debate we are having today is about the replacement of the Trident missile system, whether or not we should continue with it. We are not debating whether we are going to stop the current programme tomorrow. I think the answers they have given are about the brief we have in front of us today. I am interested to know, particularly regarding jobs, about the suggestion that the Government have a responsibility to look at that in Barrow, for example. The answer we got from the people from Barrow was that in a total population of 70,000, and I do not know exactly what the working population is, 5,600 are on some form of disability benefit. I was interested when you said that Government have a responsibility to look to diversify. Why would they want to do that when they are still committed to building nuclear submarines? You would not set up a diversification programme at the same time that you wanted this very skilled, uniquely placed workforce in this very difficult location to continue to build at least another three submarines for you in the Astute programme and possibly two replacement Trident boats, would you, so when does this kick in? Dr Jenkins: The first thing is that if I indicated that one agency solely had this responsibility that is not what I am saying. When I worked for Friends of the Earth I was deeply involved in talks with British Nuclear Fuels, which, of course, has the Sellafield plant in the area, and right from the Chairman down they were interested in a major, indeed visionary, re-orientation of British Nuclear Fuels that would take it from being a reprocessing company into being a global nuclear clean-up company which would, for example, have contracts in the United States to clean up giant plants there and would be involved in dealing with the horrendous problems of the nuclear waste of the former Soviet fleet and so forth. The approach there was a dialogue between British Nuclear Fuels, organisations like Friends of the Earth and Government. In the larger picture that is what one wants. On this issue of jobs in the Barrow-in-Furness area I can only indicate my broad frame that that is the approach that should be taken and certainly this issue of jobs would not immediately arise because of the Astute programme. Q159 Mr Holloway: It strikes me that all your comments are around mitigation of the central point for both of you, your sincerely held view that unemployment in these places is completely preferable to having a nuclear armed UK. Dr Jenkins: No, because I think that is a false alternative. It is completely possible, and it is indeed the business of Government, to take care of its citizens without ----- Q160 Mr Holloway: Sure, but from your perspective the main thing is us not having a nuclear arsenal. Therefore, from your point of view this is kind of semantics, talking about jobs, because ultimately you prefer us not to have nuclear weapons regardless of the consequences on those communities. Dr Jenkins: Not regardless, because we believe that it can be done without such terrible consequences. Mr Holloway: Okay. That is just semantics, I think. Q161 Chairman: Dr Hudson? Dr Hudson: I do not think it is a semantic issue. There is the question of what is in the scales. On the one side there is international law. There are moral questions, there are our treaty obligations, there is the question of whether or not we think that the course we might follow in replacing Trident might contribute to the development of nuclear proliferation rather than helping to secure us. Those are things which any government has to take extremely seriously when it is looking at the future security of the nation and its own people, not to mention the impact on the wider community. There are, let us say, 3,500 jobs at Barrow. It seems to me that if the Government is very serious about these issues and serious about the employment and the skills base in this country, as well as ensuring the security of the nation, then the Government can, if it wants to, put significant thought into thinking about how these skills can be redeployed, and we know there is a skills shortage nationally in these areas, so it does not seem to me impossible that if a government wanted to take all these issues seriously it could find ways of redeploying these skills or indeed investing in Barrow for production in surface ships and other forms of submarines. Q162 Mr Holloway: But for you the main thing is nuclear disarmament and not jobs. Dr Hudson: Clearly it is, but there is no reason in my view why the Government cannot find ways of investing in Barrow to sustain its long term future or redeploying the workforce in like-for-like skilled work. Q163 Mr Jones: You mentioned Barrow and, Dr Hudson, I do respect your position, but it is a purist position, is it not, in the sense that, as Dr Jenkins just said, it is the Government's responsibility to plug this gap? Do you not think though, as a campaigning organisation which has an abolitionist stance and certainly not just on civil nuclear power, there is an onus on you to come up and say to people in Barrow and parts of west Cumbria and others, Devonport as well, what the alternatives are going to be and that the actions you take by abolishing the independent nuclear deterrent and also civil nuclear power are going to have consequences, not just in terms of numbers of jobs; it is also the types of jobs? We heard earlier on in terms of Aldermaston that it is about also future skills and investment in nuclear technology and other things like that, so do you not think that you - both organisations - do need to give a little bit of thought to what these people would do in the future rather than just say, "We are an abolitionist organisation"? Dr Hudson: Yes, I think it is incumbent upon us to take the issue very seriously and, as I tried to suggest earlier, CND does take it very seriously. That is why, in addition to doing some preliminary work, we have also commissioned an expert in this area. Thanks to Unison we have commissioned a major piece of research. I have been down to Devonport on a number of occasions and spoken at public meetings there. We have tried to engage in local campaigns and have particularly tried to engage with the workforce in discussion down there with the local trade unions as well. I myself was invited to speak at a fringe meeting at the Amicus trade union conference two or three years ago on this very issue and I would be more than delighted, if I were invited, to speak at a meeting of the workforce in Barrow. Q164 Chairman: Dr Jenkins, is there anything you would like to add? Dr Jenkins: No. I share the statements made by Dr Hudson. Mr Hamilton: Kevan has already asked the question but I would like to follow it on Dr Hudson's point, and that is that skills redeployment is one thing, but that does not help the town, because what will happen is that the best of the skills will move out of town, will move elsewhere within the UK. I have to say to Dr Jenkins that you do your case no good to argue that it is a government responsibility, and I accept the point you make that you have to look at alternatives and not go down the cul-de-sac that some people are trying to put you down. You are entitled to have a principled position and that position should and will be accepted by a great many Members in the House of Commons. There is a secondary issue and that is about jobs. It is not just about government. I am sorry; I find that comment quite offensive. It is not just about jobs and it is not about the Government having to do that. It is the collective responsibility of us all. Q165 Chairman: Mr Hamilton, it is about a lot more than jobs, as you say. Dr Jenkins: I made very clear my clarification. As part of the analogous issue of Sellafield I should say, because I was not employed by Greenpeace at that point, that Greenpeace was also part of that process. It involved a process of, as I said, trade unions, British Nuclear Fuels itself, NGOs; the Government was mainly missing from the process, I have to say, so that is the approach that should be taken. That is the approach that Greenpeace has historically been involved in, but I would emphasise that Government must take a lead because none of those actors can deal with the problems of taking care of the town without the strong, involved and continuous engagement of Government. Q166 Chairman: If I can echo something that David Hamilton has been implying, what your organisations are fighting for you are fighting for on the basis of your belief that it is the future of the world that is at stake and that strikes you as really rather an important issue? Dr Jenkins: Yes. Dr Hudson: Yes. Mr Hancock: I agree entirely with the line you have taken and I think that we have missed the point considerably as the Committee today on why you were here offering us your advice. Chairman: That is not part of their contract. Mr Hancock: No; I want to ask it now because others have deviated. I would like Dr Hudson to tell us where CND feel the Government would be breaking treaty obligations if they were to replace Trident because I think that is really important to us as an example to the rest of the world. Chairman: Hold on. We had that evidence in the first inquiry. Mr Hancock: I would like to ask it in the context of the question. We are very close to a decision. Q167 Chairman: No; this is an inquiry into the preservation of the skills base. Dr Hudson: Can I just say something there? Q168 Chairman: Could you be very brief, doctor? Dr Hudson: I will be very brief. When we gave evidence to the first Select Committee meeting, which was on the strategic context, you told me then that that was not the appropriate place to raise the question of treaty obligations. In fact, you said that that was the responsibility of the Foreign Affairs Committee, not the responsibility of the Defence Committee. Q169 Chairman: I do apologise. Dr Hudson: Then I wrote to Mrs Beckett and subsequently went to have a meeting at the FCO to see if it was possible to have a discussion about that angle of it and they said no, so I am sorry to say that so far we have not actually had any opportunity to put our case about the legal implications, our responsibilities under the NPT. If you read my memorandum and publications that we have produced and are currently producing, including our alternative White Paper which we have produced today, it specifies very clearly in there the obligations of our Government under Article 6 of the NPT in good faith to begin and indeed effectively conclude discussions on disarmament. That was strengthened not only by the verdict of the World Court in 1996 but also at the 2000 NPT review conference where we made an unequivocal undertaking to disarm our nuclear weapons, so I very much hope that Parliament and the Government will provide an opportunity for all those issues to be raised and thoroughly discussed in the national interest. Q170 Chairman: Dr Hudson, can I give a commitment that this Committee will give you the opportunity to talk about the treaty matters in our next inquiry? Dr Hudson: Oh, good. Q171 Chairman: If that is okay. Dr Hudson: When is that? Q172 Chairman: We have not decided yet. Dr Hudson: After the decision. Q173 Chairman: No. It will, I hope, be before a decision by Parliament anyway. Dr Hudson: Right; thank you very much. Q174 Chairman: Dr Jenkins? Dr Jenkins: I want to address this from a different perspective, which is that the major treaties, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, are technical treaties. To take the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, at its heart is the idea that by blocking the development of a technology you effectively can arrest the nuclear arms race, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, so it is all about the skills base, that treaty, and it is impossible to separate the issue of skills base from the issue of treaty obligations in the case of what is now happening at Aldermaston. Chairman: That is very interesting. Mr Hancock: Hear, hear. Chairman: Thank you. Do you want to carry on? Mr Hancock: No. I am perfectly happy with those answers. Chairman: What about decommissioning? Do you want to ask questions about decommissioning? Mr Hancock: No. I assumed that they had already answered that and they had recognised that from both perspectives, Dr Jenkins on behalf of Aldermaston, Burghfield, that there would be an ongoing issue while the decommissioning, or indeed the existing programme, continued, and likewise I think Kate Hudson made it quite clear that she recognised there would be the ongoing issue of servicing the existing boats and the warheads that were contained within them, so I accepted that they had answered that question in some detail. Q175 Mr Borrow: I would like to move on to Aldermaston. The written submission has cast doubt upon the rationale explained by the Government for the investment of £350 million over each of the next few years, so I would be interested in what your principal concerns are in respect of that and how you would respond to the argument that the key nature of such an investment was to ensure that the skills were not lost because there was a risk that they could be lost and that would put at risk the existing nuclear deterrent from a safety point of view, irrespective of any decision that is made in terms of a future replacement deterrent. Dr Jenkins: I think it is important to address this issue in the last context. The concept of science-based stockpile stewardship was developed in the United States and is a completely discredited and ideological concept. Effectively what happened in the United States was that in the mid nineties the giant US nuclear weapons laboratories, of which Aldermaston is in many ways merely an offshoot today, were faced with the prospect that they no longer had a reason to be in business. Moreover, they were also faced with real concerns about environmental contamination of sites and so on. Furthermore, they were faced with the prospect of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It is in that context that they struck a deal with the Clinton administration. In return for their technical support, saying that the treaty could be verified, they would receive from the US Government close to or greater than Cold War levels of funding to continue the development of exotic technologies with the ostensible purpose of maintaining the existing deterrent. Those nuclear weapon laboratories received that funding and then reneged on that deal in a most despicable and --- words fail me at this point. In the US Senate they gave testimony, contradicted by their own studies, that it would not be possible to continue with the treaty for verification issues. They have since been rewarded by the Bush administration with levels of funding equal to those at the highest point of the Cold War. What we now see today with this concept being deployed in Britain is a horrendous undermining of British foreign policy. Prime Minister Blair took the unprecedented step before the Senate vote, with the German Chancellor and the French President, of appealing directly to the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, making very clear his commitment of British foreign policy to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as a priority matter. What we are now seeing with the development of Aldermaston bomb-making capacity is a subtle but insidious undermining of that British foreign policy goal. If you would like me to answer in more detail about Aldermaston I can be specific,. Q176 Mr Borrow: It would be helpful to the Committee if, having spoken at length about US Government policy, you were to deal specifically with how the investment of £1,000 million over three years in developing and sustaining Aldermaston is not what the Government says it is for. Dr Jenkins: The situation we find ourselves in is one of a blanket of secrecy in which it is not possible to have absolute certainty, and this is a situation this Committee has commented on as being unsatisfactory in the past. It is more a question from my point of view that there is evidence that real questions need to be asked. Here I refer to the statements made by leading US nuclear weapons scientists from the heart of their nuclear weapon programme where they challenge this very idea that these exotic technologies were needed to maintain the safety and reliability of the deterrent is crucial. Men such as Ray Kidder, Norris Bradbury, Carson Marks, Richard Garwin, Sidney Drell, Bob Purefoy and Simon Seymour Sachs have all raised the issue that if your actual objective was to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear deterrent the best way to do it would be engineering based inspection and re-manufacture. Q177 Chairman: Can we come on to that? It is a slightly different question. The issue is whether the preservation of skills allows the UK to keep its options open to allow the possible replacement of Trident if we decide to go down that route, and you are saying that that is not what is happening? Dr Jenkins: What I am saying is that it would be good if this Committee called expert witnesses, both of these senior US scientists but also Aldermaston scientists and engineers themselves, and asked them precisely the question, could we not maintain the deterrent, and in doing so we would be maintaining the skills necessary to maintain it, by a much cheaper programme of engineering based inspection and re-manufacture? Dr Hudson: I have a slightly different angle on what I think you were asking about the Government's stated intention for the investment at Aldermaston. It is certainly our view, and this is obviously taken from information available in the public domain, that what is taking place there is far more than that required for stockpile stewardship, and of course our great concern, with other campaigners over the last two or three years, is that what is taking place at Aldermaston is actually the preparation or indeed the beginnings of development of new nuclear warheads. Just to refer you to what it said in AEW's in-house magazine, they talked about the scale of development taking place there as comparable with that of Heathrow's Terminal 5. This is from their own statements on it, a budgetary increase of some 36 per cent. We understand that has brought a project 1,050 additional staff and an anticipated 1,200 contractors. We follow very closely with other colleagues from campaigning organisations the planning application process in West Berkshire and we know, for example, that in spite of considerable local protest permission was given for the building of an Orion laser facility which, as far as we understand, is a thousand times more powerful than the existing laser, and that laser is able to simulate the effects of weapons testing, so obviously that leads one possibly to conclude that developments are taking place with the purpose of developing a new nuclear weapons system. We understand the scale of the new computers that are being developed there, with other types of facilities, the core punch hydrodynamics facility, for example, and the new uranium facility; all the evidence would suggest to us that the developments and the investment there are not merely for stockpile stewardship but for the development of a new system, and we believe that the works are so far in development that one could conclude that the Government might have already commissioned that work to begin. Q178 Mr Borrow: Given that this inquiry is looking at skill bases, and the evidence that the Committee has received is that the skill base at Aldermaston is an ageing workforce and therefore the argument that has been put is that they need to start a programme of recruiting young skilled scientists who can be trained to take over from those older scientists who will be leaving service, the argument is that that needs to be done irrespective of the decision on replacing the nuclear deterrent; otherwise that skill will have been lost and we will not be in a position to replace the nuclear deterrent. Do you think that argument is totally fallacious? Dr Hudson: I would not say it was necessarily totally fallacious. Certainly, looking at some of the age profiles, reading the other submissions and so on, if a third of the skilled workforce is in the higher age profile then obviously one can see that there is some concern about that, but the scale of the recruitment, taken together with the nature of the jobs that have been advertised, some quite leading senior engineering teams and those types of things, does not suggest to me developing talented young scientists in the field. It suggests more importing quite advanced expertise in the range of sectors that could lead to the development of new nuclear weapons. Also, of course, this is one of these areas linking to the wider skills issue in Britain, and a sucking into this of quite a large proportion of skilled graduates, PhDs and so on, is going to deprive other areas of those skills. Q179 Mr Havard: I read the memoranda you both sent around this. One of the things you say to me is that the capability at Aldermaston is too great, it is more than sufficient to do the safety and in fact it is greater than that and it has the capability of producing a new bomb, of doing all sorts of things it should not be doing. It has got in it these exotic technologies that allow this development to take place, and you say it to me as though this is a surprise, but it is no surprise. There is nothing new in this argument. When the investment for Aldermaston was set out it was made very clear that it would do more than just provide safety for the existing warheads. It said it would keep a design successor for the existing warhead, should one be required, and keep the options open, so all these skills are there. This is nothing new to me, that these skills are there. It is capable of doing all of the things on the continuum, which is why I asked the question I asked earlier of the trade unions who represent people in Aldermaston, so the skills that are there are the skills required to do any one of these things. The decisions about which ones are done are political decisions. The other part of your evidence is that you suggested that in some way or other that is contrary to particular technologies, treaties and all the rest of it, which we are not going to go into today, but in terms of skill retention and skill necessity to either provide safety or development, then all you say to me is, "Yes, both are there but one should not be". Dr Hudson: Obviously, for us the concern, as you say rightly, is the overarching concern. We do not feel that these developments enable Britain to be in compliance with its treaty obligations. While the Government currently has a policy of having nuclear weapons it is not surprising that they wish to invest in the facilities which enable those to be continued. I think the point that we were raising in particular about this is that the scale of the investment and the activities and the building that is taking place there currently would suggest that in some way the decision to go ahead with a new generation of nuclear weapons has already been taken, which would seem to be the wrong way round. Q180 Mr Jones: What do you base that on? Dr Hudson: What I was just saying about the scale of development there which AWE itself has likened to Terminal 5, the new laser and so on. Dr Jenkins: I have to enter into an area which is of great obscurity but at the same time of real importance, which is that the evidence, it seems to me, is not that Aldermaston has just been sitting around developing capacity. Actually, there is already track record. A nice remark was made by John Brown, the former Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he said, "You cannot just have this conversation about warheads. It has to be about delivery systems and even military command and control. These things are part of an inter-related system. That is what people forget". The importance of that is that since the end of the Cold War we have seen an upgrading of the Trident nuclear missile system, the technical characteristics of which make it more conceivable that it could be used, so that involves single missile warheads, it involves re-targeting systems and a dual yield. The point here is that suddenly in 2000 Aldermaston says, "Yes, we have done it". "With high accuracy, targeting and an option of two warhead yields [Trident] can now operate in both strategic and sub-strategic roles". The point is that it is not simply an issue of what Aldermaston may be about to do, but also that Aldermaston has already been in a way - and it is a semantic question - producing a new weapon; hence that suggests that we have also got to be concerned, for example, when we discover from an advertisement in PhysicsWeb that the new scientists that are being hired will be making prototypes. At what point does making a prototype turn into making a new weapon? Mr Havard: That is the point I wanted to get to. You say that taking a multi-warhead and producing just one single warhead on it and improving its target capacity so that it can be dropped with much more accuracy is a new weapon. That is what you have just said. The truth of the issue is that for a period of time the UK has effectively been reducing the capacity of its nuclear weaponry. We used to have tactical nuclear weapons. We do not have them any more. There are various ways in which we have said we will have fewer warheads on them. Whether you make them any safer by having fewer warheads is a different debate, but what you are saying now is that they have produced this capacity so you can drop a less lethal nuclear weapon with more accuracy than you could before in the form of a Trident missile, so they have improved it to that extent. That is what you are saying. Q181 Chairman: Is that what you are saying? Dr Jenkins: What I am saying, and here I stand on what the Director of Los Alamos says, is that what matters is the whole system, and in terms of what we have done, we have made a weapon which states across the world will see as more usable against them and that is deeply distasteful. Mr Havard: That is a debate. What is clear is that the Government has not hidden any of this. As you say in your own memorandum, in the history section of the report in 2000 it made very clear that this potential that you have just described had now meant that Trident could be used in a sub-strategic way rather than in a strategic way, and I think this whole question of their ability to provide those options to the Government is hardly a secret because the Government has admitted it is doing it, has told the public it is doing it, so nothing that you are telling me is particularly a secret or new, and it is consistent with the Government's position ----- Chairman: Dai ----- Q182 Mr Havard: Hang on a minute; I am going to finish this sentence. The potential for Aldermaston was always to be to keep that potential there, to have that ability to do that. Whether you think it is right or wrong is a different debate, but do not try and pretend to me that in some way it is some sort of X-file that has come out of somewhere and it is a conspiracy. It is not. It might well be wrong but it is not a conspiracy. Dr Jenkins: The Government has said different things at different times, and it said to this Committee that this investment was required "irrespective", and then John Reid talked about the purpose, so it would appear that the Government's clear intention was to say, "This is simply for maintaining the existing warhead", and we are raising doubts about this. Chairman: I think it was for maintaining the existing skills. Q183 Mr Jones: It is an important point because I accept that you are trying, as Dai said, to portray a great conspiracy theory when there is not, because actually what it says in the memorandum, and I will read it again to you - there is a film at Aldermaston - "It will also ensure that we retain a minimum capability to design a successor for the existing warhead, should one be required, and keep our options open". Would not the Government, can I put it to you, be failing if it did not put this investment in? I accept you do not want any investment at all, but if we did not put investment in now the argument we are going to have on whether or not we replace the nuclear deterrent would be academic because we would not have the skills and the expertise to do it. Dr Jenkins: What I think would be appropriate, because, as I say, this is an area of obscurity and secrecy, would be for the Committee ----- Mr Jones: No, it is not secrecy. I do not accept that. Q184 Chairman: Hold on. Let Dr Jenkins continue. Dr Jenkins: The parliamentary question put down by Norman Baker MP asks, "What is the lower yield of the Trident nuclear warhead now? Has it been developed into a mini nuke?", and the reply is, "This is a matter of national security". Q185 Mr Jones: Well, of course it is. Dr Jenkins: At a time when the Government has itself said that there is no direct military threat to the UK, then we need to know the facts. Mr Jones: No, but what you are trying to portray ----- Q186 Chairman: Dr Hudson, you have an answer you were trying to give. Dr Hudson: I just wanted to make an additional point. It is quite clear that our organisations are opposed to the replacement of Trident for a very wide number of reasons. Our specific concern about the situation at Aldermaston is that irrespective of normal functionings and stockpile stewardship and so on, which obviously the Government under its current policies is required to do, and quite sensibly so given the safety considerations and so on, nevertheless we have been promised by the Government a full public and parliamentary discussion and debate about the future of the nuclear weapons system and whether it is appropriate or not for Britain to maintain such a system for its future security and so on. This parliamentary Committee I understand is part of that discussion and process and looking at the issues. If the Government has already taken a decision and therefore what is happening at Aldermaston is the enactment of that decision then it seems the wrong way round and we have concerns that that is what is taking place at Aldermaston. Nothing anyone has said has yet convinced me that that is not the case. Mr Jones: I accept that nothing I am going to say or anyone is going to say is going to convince you, but what would be wrong would be any government saying they were going to go into an open public debate about the replacement Trident when they realised that if they had not put the investment in (which everyone has been quite clear about because it has not been secret in any way, shape or form in terms of policy), in other words that if they took a decision without this investment in skills etc. or in Aldermaston to replace Trident, they could not do it because they would not have the capacity to do it. I think you are going to enter into a debate which is open and transparent, which I think this is, and I think the MoD have been quite clear. What you are trying to do, which I accept you are entitled to do, is whip up the conspiracy theory et al to try and damage the debate, which I do not think is very helpful in terms of your case, to be honest, which I do respect. Q187 Chairman: I do not think that is what you have been saying. Dr Hudson: I am not suggesting there is a conspiracy theory. I just hope that there is no intention to pre-empt the decision, which I hope will be taken by Parliament. Chairman: I think you have stimulated the Committee so much that we will go on, if we do not stop pretty much now, until about teatime, and we cannot because the Minister for Defence Procurement is coming before us. Do you want to ask a nice, emollient question to round it off, David? Q188 Mr Hamilton: Do you seriously think, if there were an ulterior motive by the Government, that during the debate - and it was myself who asked the Prime Minister about a vote in the House of Commons and now all we need to find out is whether it will be a free vote, but that is a separate issue - if there were conspiracy theories going about that would not come out during the debate that we are going to be having in the House of Commons, and do you think that that is going to make a difference to MPs? I am just to trying to think of a scenario. If the Government say, "We have proceeded with this investment so much that that is why we should make a decision to accept a new nuclear deterrent", do you honestly think that MPs will vote according to the amount of money they will spend potentially? It just does not work out. Dr Jenkins: I would like to put this in a historic context. It has been said by people like Lord Solly Zuckerman or Dr David Owen, speaking about his time as minister, that Aldermaston scientists have manipulated political decisions, have gone ahead with the development of systems without proper oversight. All this has been said by people of that calibre. We have the historic Chevaline decision. The issue may not simply be one for Downing Street and that is why I would very much hope that this Committee will first question senior scientists and engineers at Aldermaston, secondly, seek independent technical advice because this is a technical issue, and thirdly, go to where the best expertise can be found for opposing points of view, which is the United States, and call on the people of the very highest calibre from inside the nuclear weapons establishment to advise it in this issue. Q189 Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed. I have said that you will have the opportunity to come and talk to us about treaty obligations. If after this morning you want to come back you would be most welcome. Dr Hudson: I would love to. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for your evidence this morning. As I say, you have stimulated us enormously and we have enjoyed it. |