Scottish Affairs Committee - Minutes of EvidenceHC 139-I

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Scottish Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 23 May 2012

Members present:

Mr Ian Davidson (Chair)

Jim McGovern

Iain McKenzie

David Mowat

Pamela Nash

Mr Alan Reid

Lindsay Roy

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Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, University of Oxford, Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Research Director, UK Defence Policy, Royal United Services Institute, and Francis Tusa, Editor, Defence Analysis, gave evidence.

Q152 Chair: Gentlemen, I very much welcome you to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee. We are undertaking a series of investigations into different issues connected with separation for Scotland. We produced some reports on issues relating to the process, but we also want to have discussions and produce reports about issues relating to substance, and today it is on the question of defence. Perhaps I may start off by asking you to introduce yourselves for the record and tell us your backgrounds.

Professor Strachan: I am Hew Strachan, professor of the History of War at Oxford. I suppose it is relevant to this Committee that when I was at Glasgow I set up the Scottish Centre for War Studies in 1997, and in 1999 we had a conference on the implications of devolution and independence for defence in Scotland.

Professor Chalmers: I am Malcolm Chalmers. I am the research director at the Royal United Services Institute in London. I am a Scot by origin and birth, but I was educated and have worked for most of my career in England.

Francis Tusa: I am Francis Tusa, editor of Defence Analysis, a London-based defence newsletter. I suppose the only reason I am here is that I have now done two fully-costed studies of issues to do with devolution, independence and the armed forces. All I will say is that I started the first one simply because I thought I would not be able to fill the pages of my newsletter over Christmas and new year and, rather than writing three pages, I ended up writing close to 15 and revisited the subject this year to update it.

Q153 Chair: I wonder whether I might start off by asking what threats to security do you believe a separate Scotland would face, and how should it configure its defence forces?

Professor Strachan: Inevitably, the question in part relates to what political framework defence is operating in. I suppose the big question all of us confront on this is whether an independent Scotland would be within NATO or not, because that would affect its defence posture and also the security and military roles it might want to undertake. If we are thinking simply in defensive terms, the truism that we live in an extraordinarily secure age and we happen to live in a secure part of the world at the moment holds true. If you viewed it purely in defence terms, the obvious threat would be terrorism and so on. I would add to that the implications of what might happen in the Arctic. That seems to me relevant to Scotland and its Scandinavian neighbours. The possible militarisation of the thawing of the ice cap and opening up of trade routes across the Arctic have implications certainly for maritime security. Maritime security would be one big area. The other big area would be air defence of some sort and, presumably, the need for Scotland to look after its own airspace properly.

To go back to my first point, the big question is how far Scotland would feel the need to get into a wider insurance scheme, if you like. My understanding of where the United Kingdom is today is that a lot of what it does, particularly in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq, has been in order to buy into the favour bank in the United States. That is exactly what a great many other US allies are doing. What they are doing is hoping that, if at some point in the future they get themselves into an insecure situation or a position of greater insecurity, they will be able to call in those favours. For me, that is the core question.

Professor Chalmers: Following on from Professor Strachan’s remarks, I think that in the short to medium term the expectation that we will get into a war between the UK and another country about the UK’s territorial integrity is very far-fetched. As Professor Strachan says, in many respects we live in a particularly secure part of the world, but we also live in a world-the Government’s strategic defence and security review pointed this out-where there is a lot of uncertainty about where the world might be in 10 or 20 years. Of course, independence, if not for ever, is for a very long time, and in considering the implications for an independent Scotland one has to think about where the world might be in 30, 40 or 50 years. I think there is every reason to prepare and think about the possibility of the post-1945 order, with which we have lived with for a long period of time, not necessarily being a permanent one.
The eurozone crisis is just the latest indication of the uncertainty about where
European institutional frameworks will be in 10 or 15 years. We just do not know the answer to that question.

On one level one can say that an independent Scotland will simply be another small European state, which is pretty secure but which needs some modest provision and can do that in cooperation with others, as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland all do with different positions and alliances. The main issues in relation to Scotland would be transition ones-considerable transition ones but transition ones nevertheless.

I think that in the long term there is also a clear difference between being part of a United Kingdom where there is an entirely equal commitment across that country, so that if any part of the United Kingdom is threatened in any way the whole United Kingdom state comes to meet that threat without question and differentiation, and a situation in which Scotland is independent, as is the Republic of Ireland, and, although there might be a reasonable expectation of friendly, allied relations with common membership of the European Union and help when one can, the level of expectation and guarantee would be significantly less if there was independence. In that scenario how much less it would be depends on all sorts of things that we are going to talk about.

In the immediate future-the next five to 10 years-the risks one has to take more seriously as a small power would be ones in which the military would have a role but would not necessarily be the primary responder: things like terrorism, cybercrime and fishery protection. If there is a deepening economic crisis in these islands as a result of the eurozone crisis, there may also be issues of civil disorder, and there is certainly a role for security agencies in relation to that. Whether there is a role for the military is perhaps more questionable. There might also be questions in relation to Northern Ireland. In the hypothetical scenario you paint, it is not clear whether Northern Ireland simply stays part of the United Kingdom and it is entirely a problem for London, or whether Scotland might be asked to take some responsibility there.

Francis Tusa: I take a slightly different view. It is very easy for one to sit in the United Kingdom and say that everything is safe and happy for the foreseeable future. Instead, I would look much more, as I know the SNP have in policy documents, at the likes of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They are far less sanguine about the next five to 10 years. If you look at their defence plans generally, they do not view stuff in the Arctic as a possibility-something that might happen. If I say they view this as tomorrow’s war, they actually do mean tomorrow and not that it "might" end up as a shooting war but that it "probably will" end up as a shooting war. They are investing today in both research and development and procurement for that conflict, cold war, call it what you will. If you had an independent Scotland, I am not necessarily as convinced that there would be a wonderful period of 10 to 20 years for a series of threats to work themselves out.

Just comparing it with other people with interests, Denmark is not a particularly big country but it is investing a huge amount in a completely new navy, all aimed at issues to do with the north Atlantic and the Arctic ocean. Does that mean that an independent Scotland would have to do precisely the same? No, but if you are looking at how comparator nations are dealing with things, that is what they are doing. Interestingly, although Danish defence expenditure has not been cut as much as that of other European countries, not even the UK, Norwegian expenditure is rising significantly, especially in procurement. The Swedes have managed to keep their defence procurement on an upward trend. They are taking hits elsewhere. You have to ask yourselves why they are doing that if there is no realistic, sensible trend. If you talk to Nordic people, especially the air forces but also naval forces, they will tell you about the level of Russian activity, submarine and otherwise. We may not yet see as many Backfires and Bears coming down the North sea. If you are based in Kiruna or Luleå, you are seeing a lot more activity. They have a very different perspective from the one you might get from London or possibly even Edinburgh.

Q154 Lindsay Roy: Has there been any indication that the Scottish Government have taken into account any scenario planning or risk analysis in their future defence programme?

Francis Tusa: I have not seen or heard any despite doing four or five years on this. No one has come back and said, yes, they are doing intensive work at all. If anything, over the last six to eight months, if you raise "what if" topics, certainly on the military side you are met with a very polite smile and, "Oh, is that the time?", and they will move swiftly on. If I were to deduce from it that people had been told, "Don’t even get involved", I think that would be a fair comment.

Professor Strachan: Going back to the conference in 1999, I see almost no development from that day to this in thinking on these sorts of issues and what the implications might be. Of course, the quick and easy response when you ask that sort of question is, "It’s not our constitutional responsibility", which in immediate terms it is not, but, as we have just heard, the issue is not about the immediate but the medium to long term. The drift of your question is entirely right. There does not seem to have been any appetite to engage in this sort of serious thinking. It seems to me that what tends to happen instead is an engagement in, "What sort of forces might we need?", without any sort of context in which those forces might be set. Because it is partly related to the defence industry, it tends to begin with the building blocks rather than thinking of the context within which those building blocks will be stacked.

Q155 Lindsay Roy: Would you accept that there has been almost a vacuum in strategic thinking in terms of the Scottish Government and the defence programme?

Professor Strachan: Yes, partly because there is not a defence programme, so there is unlikely to be strategic thinking. I think there is a wider issue. I was in Glasgow and I am still based in Scotland. I have tried to suggest in Edinburgh once or twice that it might be a good idea if we just had a wider international discussion of the sort you might find going on here at RUSI where Malcolm works or at Chatham House. There really is not much appetite for engagement in it in terms of a security dimension. There is a great sense of outreach-"We want to engage with other countries"-but not a sense that these might be issues that involve threats as well as opportunities.

Professor Chalmers: Clearly, until the issue of the referendum was on the table, the Scottish Government could say, "It’s not our responsibility to look at defence", but we are now in a situation where it is probable there will be a referendum on Scottish independence by 2014. In order for the Scottish people to make an informed judgment as to how to vote, they need to know answers to many questions, one of which is what the implications for defence would be. Like Francis, I have written a paper, which is on the RUSI website, which goes into detail about what independence might mean and what the options are for Scotland’s independence. It is very healthy to have a free-flowing debate among people not in the Scottish Government and also people within it as well about what the different options would be.

The final point I would make, however, is that there is no single Scottish force structure you could have. As for the UK, there are different options, and the more you think that the primary threat faced by an independent Scotland would be from the north-from the Arctic-the more you might put emphasis on naval or air forces rather than ground forces.

Q156 Lindsay Roy: It would be fair to say that the referendum has been on the agenda in a serious way since 2007 and even more serious since 2011.

Francis Tusa: If I could come in on that with a slight change to what I said earlier, have people looked at, for example, force structures, basing and so forth of units all over the UK? Yes. People have looked at future army and air force structures. If you are going for the joint strike fighter as opposed to Tornado, where might you put bases? These things have been considered. When I wrote the first study in 2007, a lot of subscribers from Scotland contacted me to say it was great to see what I had done. It was the first time they had ever seen people looking at a totally blank sheet of paper, but they said the great mistake I made was to say, "Let’s just assume the referendum has taken place and independence is going to happen. What will be the process?" They said it was totally ridiculous. I do not think people are saying that nowadays. Are there people inside main building who are quietly putting in time to consider some of the issues? Oh, yes. Will they talk about it openly? Believe you me, no.

Q157 Chair: To take us slightly back, unless I am mistaken, you did give us three somewhat different perspectives on the threats facing a separate Scotland. Can you give us a brief outline of what you think the appropriate force structure and equipment level might be to cope with those levels of threat just so that we have the parameters around which the debate can be conducted? As was indicated earlier, I have to be somewhere by eight.

Professor Strachan: Do you want a one-minute answer or a longer one? In a way, it is still a chicken-and-egg problem. What are you trying to do? Stuart Crawford, who has done work on this, would say that you need armed forces of roughly 25,000. It will be a couple of brigades, one regular and one TA, and those sorts of things. That is all fine, except for what? The "for what" question determines what you are going to do. If you are talking about the sorts of things that Francis just talked about, of course you will be looking predominantly at maritime and air capabilities rather than ground forces. Picking up what could be a real question for Scotland, if you look at civil disorder possibly involving military engagement, which, certainly at the moment, the Westminster Government do not envisage, such as serious economic problems that cause violence on streets, or whatever else-the sorts of things Malcolm referred to-you might want ground forces to supplement the police in a domestic context. That would put you in a different place again. Do you feel that Scotland should be able to provide a peace-keeping force? Will the consequence of the effects of Iraq and Afghanistan and the elevation at the same time of the responsibility to protect-which potentially create contradictory impulses in foreign policy but, assuming Scotland is in the UN, will be a UN obligation-lead to a revival of old-fashioned peace-keeping, in which case Scotland might well want to see itself as positioned to be part of that?

I am already not giving you the one-minute answer, but I see no reason to dissent from Stuart Crawford’s figures as a departure point. It needs to be said there are things that are not there that a force might want. The big ticket items would be the ones that Scotland would need to discuss. Would it need fast jets? If so, how would it get them? What sort of maritime capability would it want? Would it want frigates as opposed to simple maritime patrol capabilities? I do not think it would need a carrier simply because it would be able to launch air assets from ground bases. What would it need in the way of armour, if anything? Probably nothing would be one argument. You might need a light reconnaissance vehicle but you might not need a tank. Those are the sorts of answers that seem to underpin much of the thinking at the moment and bring the defence budget pro rata to manageable levels, because you are not investing in a great deal of this heavy equipment and you are keeping your forces relatively small on the presumption that they are designed predominantly for Scottish defence and possibly for some notional contribution to something like a peace-keeping force.

Q158 Chair: Before we move along, is it fair for us to take Stuart Crawford’s perspective as a sort of de minimis and add other items off the menu, and then there is a bill attached to them? You have a home guard and some planes and boats, and the more planes you want you just add more stuff. Is that an easy way of looking at it, or does it have to be completely restructured?

Professor Strachan: What he has done is to take what you might call the legacy items and thought, "What will we get? What will we inherit?" He comes from an army background himself. He has taken what he is familiar with. What he has not done is to say, "If you have a new state in this part of the world, what would you want from a blank sheet of paper?"

Francis Tusa: It is not going to be a blank sheet of paper. The starting point for the calculations is that you have a divorce. How are you going to calculate it? It will not be like going along the aisles of a supermarket and picking items. You will end up with a certain amount of kit given to you as part of the break-up of the British armed forces.

Professor Strachan: Well, are you?

Francis Tusa: In what other way will it happen? For example-this is perhaps one of the thorniest ones-despite the anti-nuclear side and no nuclear propulsion, weapons and so forth, the Scottish taxpayers have paid directly for nuclear attack submarines, ballistic missile boats and so forth. They have a stake in those. Therefore, that comes into the mix. You can get into horse trading afterwards and say, "If I don’t want my half of an Astute Class boat, what will you give me for that half?" But the starting point is not going to be a blank sheet of paper. The starting point is that you look at the discussion of the infantry battalions and other units. It is not a blank sheet of paper; it is a sheet of paper with a lot on it. I think the whole issue of force structures is not as difficult as you might think. Bearing in mind the number of examples around-Denmark, the Netherlands and so forth-it is pretty easy to look at what these countries can do for a certain amount of money with what kit. It honestly does not take that much time. You then work out which of those models suits you best as an independent Scotland.

If you were to ask what the balance is, Ireland is not even a gendarmerie. It is a pretty ineffective force that has to rely on everyone else for anything. You then have very capable Danish naval forces, pretty capable Dutch naval forces, and the Norwegians are now mastering very large air forces. You have a range of examples sitting there on the shelves with budgets available. I am not convinced it is that difficult to work out what an independent Scotland would want its armed forces to look like. You have examples with operational experience all over the world. You can look at those and say, "That looks like the one for us."

Professor Strachan: One of the questions would be the balance-these Scandinavian examples highlight the question-between reserves and regulars. When I was thinking of what you might want, you might go, according to the roles you anticipate, in a very different direction in terms of the balance between regular and reserve capabilities. The Norwegians are a case in point. They have roughly 25,000 regulars and twice that number of reservists. It is a very different mix from the one we currently have.

Professor Chalmers: Perhaps I may return to Francis’s point about dividing the assets. It is a Union-wide issue, but it is particularly important in defence. The MOD accounts show the total value, after depreciation, of its assets as about £88 billion. You could divide these in the event of separation in two ways. You could divide them, as has happened in the Soviet Union for example, according to where assets happen to be at independence. Some of the assets are rather mobile, so it will be interesting to see what happened in the days before that, but that would be one principle. On that principle, all the Royal Navy submarines would be part of the Scottish equation and then you do some swaps after that. Or you could do it on the principle of population share. Everybody has paid for these assets over decades, so Scotland should take 8.5% of that £88 billion and then work out what that is equivalent to and do some bartering based on that principle.

On either of those models, in my view, Scotland would have some assets, but they would not be the right sort of assets for what we ourselves, starting from a blank sheet of paper, might say was a model. One of the differences between an independent Scotland on the one hand and Norway and Denmark on the other is that the latter have had decades to design and build up forces and skills for their role. Norway has been an independent state for more than 100 years. They have had a long period to build up those capabilities. It would not be an overnight job. Thinking about what Scotland would ideally want, it will not get what it ideally decides for another 20 or 30 years in a rapidly changing world.

The last point in relation to the Norway/Denmark comparison is that spending comes into this. Unless there is a very big change in the strategic environment, like a war in the Arctic, which I do not think is very likely but is a possibility, I would not imagine Scotland spending more of its GDP on defence than the NATO average, which is around where Norway and Denmark are. For all that those in the military in Norway and Denmark worry about a range of things, that is what the military is paid to do. Norway and Denmark both spend about 1.4% of their GDP on defence. That is not a hallmark of countries that are seriously threatened by having a war with Russia next year. They are involved in prudent preparation, and so would Scotland have to be. If Scotland spent about 1.4% of its GDP on defence, it would have a budget, depending on how you count oil revenues in GDP, of somewhere between £1.7 billion to £2.1 billion per annum, which compares with the Norwegian annual defence budget of over £4 billion and a Danish defence budget of almost £3 billion. On that scenario, Scotland would be spending significantly less on defence than Norway and Denmark but significantly more than Ireland. In the end, after transition costs were paid, I think that it would get a capability more or less of that order of magnitude.

I think Stuart Crawford’s model army is a very interesting and helpful starting point, as you said, Chair. Given that spending constraint, if you wanted to add anything to his model forces, you would have to take something else away; otherwise, it just would not add up.

Q159 Jim McGovern: On the point about regimental structures and British armed forces personnel, about an hour ago I was lucky enough to be able to ask the Prime Minister a question about this. In my local area, Dundee and Tayside, the Black Watch battalion is very significant. I know it is a matter of opinion rather than fact, but could you see the Black Watch continuing to exist if Scotland separated from the UK?

Francis Tusa: In terms of costing and the force structure issue, one of the most challenging pledges to keep all the names of the battalions and so forth is that you would end up with a Scottish armed forces and keep all the bases and everything. Scottish armed forces are predicated not on what you want to do as a military but simply on numbers of personnel. They would also be very expensive armed forces in terms of just paying people. If an independent Scotland wanted seven named infantry battalions, plus named artillery regiments and armoured regiments, fine. They will just be very manpower-intensive and expensive armed forces, which will not necessarily be able to do much. That is a decision that an independent Scottish Government will have to take.

At the moment, the Scottish battalions are keeping going. I would throw in one thing from the point of view of someone who did in my own way serve for 10 years. At the time of the last review of the future army structure the Scottish regiments did themselves absolutely no favours by trying to claim that they were special, elite and things like that. They actually turned the rest of the Army off. Rather than the armed forces fighting the politicians as a unit, trying to fight their corner as the military, the view was, "If you think so little of us, we won’t necessarily stand alongside you." At this time I would seriously counsel the Scottish regiments not to try to play the same card. I will get it wrong, but who was it who said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately"? That will apply in spades this time round.

Q160 Jim McGovern: I should perhaps put on record that I disagree with you entirely.

Chair: That is what the witnesses are here for so that you can disagree with them.

Professor Strachan: I think you are going to disagree with me, too. To put a slightly different gloss on this, the last time round the Black Watch was absolutely in the front line in resisting the reorganisation and creation of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, whereas the Argylls, which had been the highlighted regiment in the late 1960s and were reduced to company strength and then brought up to battalion strength again, took the reorganisation on the chin. As Francis said, the effect collectively, of course, is that, once one Scottish regiment was resisting, then the collective benefits that came from creating a large regiment were essentially jeopardised because there was not a buying-in to the working of a large regiment in the way that has happened, for example, with the Rifles. That has been a very successful example of a regiment that has lost individual battalion identity but gained greater identity as a consequence.

For my own money, the Royal Regiment of Scotland has a very clear identity, which is that it is Scots, and for most of the Scottish public that is absolutely what they recognise, particularly in the large conurbations. In Glasgow and Edinburgh much of this is really not fully understood. I quite understand that on Tayside it is a different story. I live in the Borders, and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and the Royal Scots amalgamation caused feeling. I understood exactly where people were coming from. But the wider problem here, to which Francis referred, is that the manpower base simply will not sustain this number of Scottish infantry battalions. That has been true since 1881. One of the reasons why every time that there is a reorganisation of the Army, particularly since 1957 but beginning in 1881, the Scottish regiments have been up front in terms of the issue of their identity and future is precisely because the population base has not been there. In 1881 the problem was that there were too few highlanders to fill the highland regiments and they recruited in the lowlands, and the lowland regiments then recruited south of the border to make up their numbers. Broadly speaking, that has been the story from that day to this.

You will all know that, at the moment, in regard to the Scottish battalions, Scottish recruiting is pretty healthy. It is not that it is bad in relation to the rest of the United Kingdom; it is just that the Scottish population base is small. Scottish battalions are kept up to strength by Fijians. Essentially, the Royal Regiment of Scotland is sustaining one regular battalion more than it can fill with Scots. At some point this issue has to be grasped. I believe most people thought that in 2004, 2005 and 2006 it had been grasped, because the Royal Regiment of Scotland was created precisely to enable the sort of flexibility that a large regiment allows, particularly-this leads into the point about whether the Black Watch would go into the new structures-if you are serving. If you are serving and you are an ambitious soldier, you want the career opportunities that a large regiment creates. If you are in a single battalion, the opportunities narrow right down.

What has happened to the British armed forces, particularly in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is a degree of professionalisation, which means that even people comparatively junior in rank are thinking much more seriously in career terms. The old days of the cold war when people spent their time thinking, "When can I go ski-ing? How much football can I get in?" and so on have gone, because there just is not time for that in today’s Army. The upshot is that what people want if they join the Army is a career where there are real promotion prospects, if they are committing themselves to it as a career. A single battalion will not deliver that.

What concerns me in terms of the move to an independent Scotland is that not only would Scotland struggle to sustain a reasonable number of infantry battalions but many Scots, if they possibly could, would vote with their feet and go to the Army that will give them the career options and openings. You see it already with the Irish who serve in the British Army rather than the Irish Army, and it happened before 1707. That was exactly what the Scots did. They did not serve in the Scots Army; they served in the English establishment because that was where the opportunities were.

Q161 Jim McGovern: In my view, both of the speakers have dismissed what is called the "golden thread" of the Black Watch. There are a lot of people in Dundee and probably Tayside and Fife who join the Black Watch because their fathers and grandfathers were in the Black Watch, not because they see it as a career opportunity or somewhere to make a good living, get a big salary or whatever. To dismiss the name of the Black Watch is quite offensive and insulting.

Francis Tusa: I would not take the insult. All I would say is that there is potential insult back that says the large battalions and regiments do not have morale, history and do not have people joining because their fathers and grandfathers joined before them. I know the Royal Anglian Regiment quite well; my cap badge was Queen’s Regiment. You have those regimental loyalties, as do Fusiliers as well. That is why I am suggesting that trying to say the Scottish regiments are different from the rest of the British infantry is a very divisive and dangerous path and does no one any good. I agree totally with the regimental principle. When one hears, "Let’s just make it all into one cap badge and one beret", I am totally against that. In my TA career I have been trained by Scottish NCOs. I am well aware of what they have done to me and all for the good. I am not fighting that side. There was some choice language, I can tell you.

Jim McGovern: In 2006 I visited America as part of the British-American Parliamentary Group. At that time I met General David Petraeus, who at that time was the Supreme Command of Allied Forces in Iraq. He seemed to be something of an authority on the Black Watch; he had studied the history. He told me that the one thing the US Army was envious of when it came to British armed forces personnel was the fact that they had regimental names, battalion names, cap badges and so on. I repeat what I said earlier. I find it offensive and quite insulting if the witnesses here dismiss that.

Q162 Chair: Let’s not spend too much time on this. I understand the strength of feeling on both sides, but I do not want to focus just on this. What I want to pick up, however, is what I understood the witnesses to be saying, which was that they believed separate Scottish armed forces would not be able to sustain the number of single battalion regiments that they have at the present time. Is that correct?

Francis Tusa: And also you would be faced with the probable range of budgets. You have the choice between equipment or manpower. By the way, that has been faced by almost every European country, and also the United States at the moment. Manpower is just expensive. If you want large manpower armed forces, something will give, and the equipment will give, which means those armed forces will do less. From personal experience, I am very much in agreement with what I agree is a totally unscientific opinion poll. Every time I have lectured at armed forces bases around Britain when the subject of independence has come up and I have said, "Would you stay with the Scottish defence force or the British armed forces?" the answer-

Q163 Chair: Let me come to that in a minute. We have got that. I just want to be absolutely clear that you are all of the view that separate Scottish defence forces would not be able to sustain the existing pattern of regimental battalions.

Professor Strachan: Unless there were a dramatic change in recruiting patterns and the offer was that much greater. Coming back to the Norwegian comparison, Norway has conscription but there is competition to be conscripted because it is seen as a good career option, as it is in Switzerland. Of course that situation could change, but then there is a budgetary question if you sustain that number of battalions. You referred to single infantry battalions. The key question is whether you want a single infantry regimental battalion or regimental structure, or whether you want a large regiment. I believe that large regiment should have been called the Black Watch; that is the senior Highland regiment, but that would have eclipsed the other ones, but let’s get off that.

Q164 Chair: That is somewhat of a guess as well. My own experience of the Royal Regiment of Scotland last time I was at the Selkirk Sevens, which was some time ago, is that the regiment’s team was composed entirely of Fijians. There was not a Scottish accent among them. They won the tournament, if I remember correctly, which was presumably the point of the exercise. Can I come back to the division of assets? We have a list of things that we want to cover, and I do not think we have covered this one adequately. How would you envisage the division of assets being handled? You asked earlier whether it was a tenth or a pick and mix. You get the equivalent of Monopoly money and you can spend this amount. Presumably, the assets also have to be balanced by the debits in a sense. Presumably, the relocation costs of Trident and so on, which will potentially be enormous, have to be counted against the costs of the assets. Therefore, shares of each have to be paid. I do not know how any of that will be handled. Perhaps you could enlighten us.

Professor Chalmers: I certainly do not have a magic prediction machine.

Q165 Chair: You are here as expert witnesses, so we expect help.

Professor Chalmers: In that case I will tell you exactly what will happen. The first thing is that it will be put in a wider context, so there are lots of other assets and liabilities. There is North Sea oil, most obviously, about which there will have to be a settlement. In relation to defence specifically, in addition to the actual assets we have now-buildings, infrastructure and equipment-there are contractual obligations for future equipment contracts that have been signed, and somebody will have to take on those contracts. It will not always be London. There may be some contracts that a Scottish Government will want to take on. If there are cancellation costs, those will have to be borne. All of that will have to go in the mix. It just shows you what a complicated process those negotiations for separation will be.

After a referendum, if both sides accept the result, the key thing is what judgments both sides make as to the sort of foreign and security policy relationships they have with each other. If you went into those negotiations in a hostile spirit and saw it as a zero sum game, it would be very difficult to reach an agreement, but the bargaining power would undoubtedly be with the UK rather than Scotland.

It is also possible and maybe likely-who knows, because it depends on the political atmosphere-that both sides will see they have an interest in compromise because they will continue to inhabit the same island. You can go back to a pre-1707 situation when there was a Union of the crowns and a lot of military cooperation, even though they were independent states under the crown, where the UK does not want Scotland to be a base for sub-state threats, terrorism or security problems. The UK will need to have strong security forces and agencies working in Scotland in close cooperation with the security agencies in the UK. They will need access to Scotland and arrangements for mutual procurement. Most symbolically but not the only example, there will be the Trident base. I wrote about this quite a number of years ago the last time there was a surge in support for independence a decade ago. If an independent Scottish Government were to insist on the Trident submarines being removed rapidly without the UK Government having anywhere to put them, that would create a very bad atmosphere between Scotland and the UK, and indeed between Scotland and the wider international community. It is one thing accepting a re-division of territories, which very few other countries in NATO would sympathise with at all,1 but quite another if it was seen to be taking a radically different foreign policy course, and that is what rapid expulsion would be.

If a Scottish Government were to accept that for a significant period of time, perhaps indefinitely but certainly a long period of time, Trident would have to remain because there simply is not anywhere else to put it, that in itself would be a significant bargaining card for Scotland. Scotland could say, "We’ve given you this, but in return we want a reasonable negotiation that leaves Scotland with a defence force that is small but does the job, and a Scotland in NATO that therefore does not have to rely entirely on itself for its own security."

Chair: That is a very helpful point. Essentially, what you are saying is that issues relating to defence should not be seen in isolation but they can be balanced by trade-offs elsewhere, such as access to the Bank of England, the use of the currency and all the rest of it.

Q166 Iain McKenzie: On the assets, would Scotland be able to put criteria in there that said, for instance, "We don’t want handed over a frigate that is over five or 10 years old"? Would what was handed over be a mixture and in effect a separate Scotland would need to replenish that sooner rather than later?

Professor Chalmers: If you look at the defence assets of the UK-£88 billion or thereabouts-almost all the high-end ones are ones that Scotland would not want. It will not want any of the submarines, Type 45s, or the carriers, just in the Navy.

Q167 Iain McKenzie: You have already identified that the Scottish people have invested taxes in that.

Professor Chalmers: Yes.

Q168 Iain McKenzie: Would there be a trade-off to say, "We don’t want a submarine but we’ll take two helicopters", or something?

Francis Tusa: Forget the asset value; let’s look at the size of the Air Force. When I first wrote this there were Harriers and Nimrods around, so forgive the fact that they have both disappeared from the piece. If you say, for the sake of argument, that Scotland is 10% of the economy, to what does that equate? For the sake of argument, you end up saying that Scotland’s share would be 0.3 of an aircraft carrier. Straight away you say, "What’s the use of having 0.3 of an aircraft carrier?" The answer is none. However, that does allow you to say, "I will swap you my 0.3 in favour of something else that I need." If you look through the list as existed at the time, Scotland would be allocated 15 Tornadoes. Is that a useful fleet? Yes, you can run a fleet of 15 Tornadoes-absolutely. If you were to assume all 232 Typhoons were acquired-it will not happen now-Scotland would have got 23. Is that a usable fleet? Absolutely. You could have gone down the list and looked at which fleets were viable, be it armoured vehicles, planes and ships, and which ones were not. Under this sort of calculation Scotland would have been allocated 1.75 Type 23 frigates. Again, the value of 0.75 of a ship, especially if you are missing the front bit, may not be perfect, but that is when you sit down.

To come back to negotiating in good faith, you say, "If you’re going to give me both ships, what do you want in return?" It is doable, but I entirely agree that, if both sides come at it like that, it would not be nice. However, we should bear in mind there are international bodies for negotiations in Geneva. To give one example, for how many years were the three corvettes originally ordered by Brunei tied up on the Clyde? That went to the International Court of Settlements in Geneva, which found in favour of the UK and BAE Systems rather than Brunei. We should bear in mind that in this type of process there is a higher body you can go to and say, "We feel this; they feel that. What do you think?" So there will be a referee, if you want it.

Q169 Lindsay Roy: Are you saying that, even with the best of good will, it would hardly be a strategic approach in terms of the defence of Scotland?

Professor Chalmers: I think Francis’s way of describing it is very useful as a template of one possible way to do it. How it would happen in practice I really do not know. If a Scottish Government in such a scenario were to be strategic, it would look at all the sorts of calculations Francis has done in relation to how many Tornadoes Scotland would be entitled to and so on, and then say, "Could we afford to maintain those Tornadoes? Could we afford to train their personnel?" The running costs of a lot of these high-value assets are much bigger than the capital costs.

Q170 Lindsay Roy: But that is a best-case scenario.

Professor Chalmers: Therefore, they might then decide, "We don’t want to get into that; we prefer to have maybe some Hawk jets rather than Tornadoes", for example, which are more affordable to run, even if they are not top of the range. My guesstimate would be that at the end of that process, given the levels of recurrent expenditure Scotland could expect to have in defence, it would end up wanting less than its proportion of the total defence assets. It would want 5% rather than 10% of the total, but it might want to trade that for something else.

Professor Strachan: My understanding of your question was different, and that is that horse trading over equipment would take the place of a serious long-term outlook as to what Scotland’s defence and international position might be.

Q171 Lindsay Roy: That would be a best-case scenario if there was good will.

Professor Strachan: I think the crucial question is the length of time over which this would be done. As things currently stand, it seems to me that on day one, if Scotland were independent, it would probably not have a fully-fledged defence and foreign policy just because it would still be learning those skills. It would still be uncertain of its position in the world and would not know fully what its relationships were likely to be with the EU, NATO or even the UN. Possibly it would be a member of the UN. As a consequence, if it went on over 10 years, assuming it took that length of time to complete the process of divvying up who got what-I do not think it would take that long-concurrently it would be possible for some sort of strategic assessment and understanding to develop. But it seems to me that in the Edinburgh context you would be beginning from a low base point, because essentially such strategic thinking as goes on in the United Kingdom, naturally enough, happens here in London rather than there.

Q172 Chair: Surely, that is not acceptable. When people are going to be asked to vote on whether or not they want to have a separate Scotland, the idea that they would get separation and then work out what they wanted to do in terms of foreign and defence policy is just silly. That is treating the people of Scotland with contempt and asking them to buy a pig in a poke.

Professor Strachan: I agree with you entirely, but that is exactly why the debate needs to happen now and why these issues need to be addressed. It is interesting that the focus has been more on defence than foreign policy, because the defence industry is so central to this and assets are at stake. But, if you are to answer your strategic question, you must have some idea of foreign policy. The NATO question, if I dare come back to it, is a key issue for the SNP, as we know, because it potentially divides the party. That issue is central to answering the question about strategy.

Q173 Chair: It very much seems to us that some of these things ought to be known or certainly knowable and ought to be made available to us now, and then the grey areas, as it were, get filled in as we proceed. I can see no reason why both sides should not be able to lay out their negotiating position on what assets they want, because it is clear what posture they want to achieve well before people are asked to vote. Does that seem unreasonable?

Francis Tusa: That is absolutely fine. I would come back to the point of saying what should defence look like in an independent Scotland. There are more than enough examples in comparator European states. It would not necessarily be that suddenly Scotland reverts to speaking Danish or anything, but, if you look at the various models they have ended up with, I do not see the need for anyone to go through hundreds of years of history to end up with a shape, when they can look at countries like Denmark, the Netherlands or Norway, and see what they are trying to do. You can get a very nice blueprint for where you move.

Q174 David Mowat: This debate is a little artificial because the point is that there would be a transition for two decades or something. If there was not a transition for two decades, one of the things you would see is that Scotland is over-provisioned with infantry battalions for any strategic analysis that they might do. You are saying that the problems are in the Arctic. You do not need infantry battalions for that. Independence would just trigger the fact that that had to be cut hugely, potentially. Therefore, that probably would not be sensible for either side in the dialogue. It just seems to me that there would be a two-decade transition for this sort of thing. I agree with the Chairman that it is a pig in a poke, but it is a little bit harsh in this case. Could you not do a lot of it with governance arrangements at the top as to how the Army, Air Force and Royal Navy are structured on your way to that significant transition, albeit with an independent Scotland?

Francis Tusa: In terms of timing-bearing in mind that even though it has talked about the future force structure in 2020, most of the key moves are happening in six years-I am not sure it would take 20 years to come to a future structure, except if you were looking at large capital equipment.

Q175 David Mowat: For example, you have raised the point, which seems to me to be very coherent, that for 100 years Scotland has provided an overly-significant part of the British Army’s infantry. That is an historical thing. That has been half-addressed over the years, but independence could potentially force it to a head, because they would say, "Either they’re going to use all of that infantry and pay for it or bring it to a head." All I am saying is that in reality there would be quite a long transition. It seems to me that would be sensible for everybody, even in the case of independence.

Professor Strachan: Is it not going to be a long transition, if it were to happen, because legally it is going to take a long time to sort all this out? I hear different estimates, but Malcolm and I were at the defence conference last week organised by The Scotsman. People were talking about the possibility of this transition being a couple of years. I have heard others say it could be 10 years-I have not necessarily heard 20 years-just because it would take that long to unscramble legislation that has effectively been drafted on the presumption of the existence of the Union. Therefore, to create disunion itself would be enormously complicated. This seems to me to have pretty important implications for the armed forces, because, if anything embodies what a state is and lies at the heart of a state’s identification, it is its armed forces and its capacity to defend.

There are issues of citizenship. If you are already an existing member of the British armed forces but have a home in Scotland, which way are you going in terms of your choices? Which way might you be obliged to go because of where you hold your citizenship? These seem to me to be issues that would be resolved only after the decision had been taken, although I agree entirely that, logically, I would want to know before I go and cast my vote in any referendum what the implications were. But my understanding of where we are is that it is much more likely to be the other way round. The issue would be addressed in principle and then the ramifications would follow.

Q176 Chair: To pick up this point, you were discussing having a transition. I think that spending too much time on the transition to some extent misses the point. I can see no reason why, before a referendum vote, a Scottish party or organisation seeking separation should not be able to spell out where it wants to be. That is a menu that is then laid before the Scottish public. The question of how that is achieved, how long it takes, the process of haggling and stuff like that are to some extent issues of implementation, but you do not get the decision, start haggling, work out where you are at the end and pretend that is where you wanted to be. I can see no reason why the strategic part of it, such as whether or not you want to be like Ireland or Norway, or your point about the Arctic, could not be dealt with almost within the next couple of weeks in a broad sweep. You fill in more of the detail, then there is the decision in principle and then the question of transition. Surely, that is the way that this should be handled.

Professor Strachan: The historian in me says that is how it should be, but in practice it rarely has been. The historian in me says that you would love to have a strategy that is clear and addresses exactly the question of what a strategy should be, with means, ways and ends all clearly spelt out. But the reality, particularly in a democratic process, is that it is much more confused than that. What emerges, you hope, is guided by that sort of overall objective. I think it is absolutely right to try to impose that, but what emerges tends to be an interaction between that overall objective and the haggling that we have been talking about.

Q177 Chair: You are not saying that the SNP are confused, surely.

Professor Strachan: Surely not.

Q178 Chair: Surely they must have a clear idea. Either they are completely confused and have no idea or they do know, fine, and they are just not telling us.

Professor Strachan: My impression is that they have not really seriously addressed this.

Francis Tusa: There is nothing published that gives any significant lead on issues about what the size of the budget would be and so forth. It is an absolute vacuum, which is why you have to come up with a table that says if it is 1.1% then it is this, and there is a range of options. You can get some ideas and can argue about them for ever. I have to say that someone who talks about a Scottish self-defence force that is not even going to be spending 1.4% of GDP on defence, will not want to be sending much more than a couple of observers on UN missions, and most of the forces will stay within the 12-mile limit.

Q179 Chair: This gets worse, because you are now describing the separatist defence and foreign policy as a complete vacuum. This is not reassuring to me as a Scot.

Francis Tusa: Unless I have been getting very strange copies of the SNP manifestos of the last few elections or have missed something, there are few concrete statements on defence that allow you to say, "Ah, that means x." One of the few statements in recent years has been, "We would not join NATO", which gives you a pretty firm idea of the direction in which such a policy would take you.

Q180 Chair: To be fair, I think that is this week.

Francis Tusa: I do not know. I always try to stay out of the politics when doing this analysis by saying, if Scotland wants independence, I live in London and I am British; it is nothing to do with me, and I will wish them well. I have tried to keep out of the politics and looked at it just from the point of view of the horse trading that would result. I started thinking that it would cost an absolute fortune to sort out and discovered that it probably would not. It could be far easier to sort out. I would be wholly in agreement with you. I think a lot of these things should be put forward as options so that people know what they are. I know that later we are going on to the industrial side. That will be a very interesting one because it is not very rosy.

Professor Chalmers: If you look at experience within the UK and the extent to which what political parties say before elections about defence is reflected in what they do in defence reviews after the election, there is not always a lot of clarity there. It is understandable as an analyst why politicians do not want to put hard choices before the public when they come to elections, even within a country with a relatively stable situation. I think it is even more understandable facing all the uncertainty one has approaching a referendum. I do not anticipate any political party before the referendum coming out with details of exactly what defence forces Scotland would have.

What I think is reasonable-it underlines what Francis is saying-when sketching out what Scottish independence would mean, is to talk about the broader issues, such as whether Scotland would be a member of the European Union or NATO and the conditions it would have to fulfil to do that at a broad level. But to try to predict how many frigates, armoured combat vehicles or attack aircraft an independent Scotland would have is not the sort of thing you should decide until you have accessed an awful lot more information.

David Mowat: Is there a constitutional point here? The SNP have no mandate for defence or foreign affairs, so they do not speak for Scotland on it. Therefore, there has to be a general election in Scotland on separation, in which case you have political parties coming forward, and coming out of that would be somebody who has a mandate to create a foreign policy. I do not want to defend the SNP.

Chair: The view from Warrington is very interesting in that context, but, for those of us who would be faced with having to vote in a referendum, the idea that these decisions would be taken afterwards is simply not adequate. Going into a referendum with, on the one hand, confusion and, on the other, a complete vacuum-I am not quite sure which is worse-is simply not acceptable, and we will reflect on that. I think we have a fairly good grasp of your understanding of the SNP’s defence policy at the moment, so perhaps we may move on slightly. Iain is going to pick up three points about the membership of the forces.

Q181 Iain McKenzie: We touched on it briefly when we discussed some of the Scottish regiments and the personnel there. What would be the effects of separation on Scots serving in the UK armed forces and also those wishing to serve in the UK armed forces in the future?

Professor Strachan: At the moment you swear an oath of loyalty to Her Majesty, her heirs and successors. I imagine that, if you were a Scot, the successor state is Scotland and that is not necessarily an insuperable problem, not least because under the SNP’s current position the Queen will remain head of state in Scotland. I do not see a massive problem there. I think the much bigger question arises if you are somebody in mid-career-let’s say, a colonel, senior warrant officer, sergeant or NCO in the Army. You have a fair degree of pension entitlement, reasonable career prospects, and you have done the hard graft of your military service. Which way would you go?

If I dare mention the Black Watch again, if they were going to Scotland, would you feel, "I will go with the Black Watch because I love the regiment?" I am not saying for a moment that those who serve in the Black Watch or other Scottish regiments do not love them. They would feel torn; particularly if they had served in it for a long time they might feel that. Or do they stay in a career stream they understand, which has further career opportunities and is a known beast? It will change of course, but there will be an issue. You might say that this is a transitional problem, but, once a Scottish Army or Scottish defence force is up and running and is clearly separate and independent from the rest of the UK, there is a different career option. I think that is absolutely true. If you are a young man or woman in Scotland 20 years after independence and you decide to join the armed forces, it may well be that at that point you take a totally open decision. You say, "I’m a Scot and therefore I serve in the Scottish defence force", except that, if there is a hangover and Scots continue to pursue careers in the armed forces of the rest of the UK immediately after independence, I suspect that trend may continue, if it is legally possible to do so. It is legally possible at the moment from the point of view of the United Kingdom and London, so unless Scotland made it impossible I would have thought that would continue. I think there are real issues.

When we see Stuart Crawford’s analysis we tend to think of this in terms of assets and small units, but I am thinking of the collective capabilities that the UK armed forces have: the Defence Academy, the individual service establishments in terms of training and education, and, above all, intelligence. Where would Scotland have those? Would they be buying into the rest of the UK’s capabilities, and, if they did, that would be another reason for people being pulled away from Scotland and towards London in terms of where they might want to be. It might well be that an independent Scotland would negotiate an intelligence arrangement, if it could-it is more difficult-but certainly negotiate places at the Defence Academy, Sandhurst, Cranwell, Dartmouth and so on. My guess is that that is what would happen.

Francis Tusa: In terms of the legal side of what happens afterwards, we should remember that Irish citizens are still recruited into the Irish Guards and other parts of the British Army. Whatever the legal arrangement was in 1921, they are still allowed to join. I do not know, but I assume they do swear an oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, heirs and successors. Those who wish to do it do it, so, in the nicest sense, that is probably one of the easiest things. If you dust off the legislation from 1921, delete the word "Irish" and insert "Scottish", it should be doable.

Q182 Jim McGovern: Is it also fair to say that the Irish regiments you refer to were only founded in 1921 or since 1921?

Francis Tusa: No. The Irish Guards and Rangers were founded, were they not, in 1915 or 1916?

Professor Strachan: The Irish regiments recruited in what is now the Republic were disbanded in 1921 as a direct consequence. The Connaught Rangers and all those regiments went. Those who were recruited sufficiently in the north, for example the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, remained on the British establishment. You are absolutely right that the Irish Guards were created during the course of the first world war, which was a particularly pregnant moment from the point of view of Ireland. They could justify being retained on the British establishment precisely because of Northern Ireland, but it did not mean they did not recruit from south of the border.

Francis Tusa: The Irish Guards have a very heavy southern component.

Q183 Jim McGovern: The Scottish regiments or battalions-Black Watch and so on-could be disbanded and possibly reformed under a different name.

Francis Tusa: I would not see disbandment. I think you would see regiments marching proudly from one place to another. I do not think you would have disbandment parades.

Q184 Chair: There is a difference between units. Presumably, Scottish units would be retained in Scotland in some way, but the question of individuals is perhaps more significant from that point of view. As I understand it, you are saying that, if Fijians can join the British forces and Scottish regiments, then the Scots would be able to join English ones and probably vice versa. That should not pose a difficulty in future, but what I am not clear about from what you are saying is what would happen to those who are there at the moment. Would they be given an option? If you are an Englishman in the Royal Regiment of Scotland somewhere, or indeed in a Scottish regiment based in England, or a Scot in the Royal Anglians, or whatever it is-no disrespect-would these people be chosen? What happens if you do not have a mix and they say, "We are full up with Riflemen", or, "We don’t need any tank crews any more"? Have you any idea how this has ever been handled before or how it might be handled?

Professor Chalmers: This may be something about which your Committee is doing a separate inquiry. To answer your question, first you have to say what the hypothesis is on how citizenship is determined, because right now, as I understand it, those entitled to vote in the referendum are those on the electoral roll at the time of the referendum. If that is the principle on which future citizenship is decided, there are many English-born people serving with the armed forces in Scotland and vice versa. Indeed, there are many on the crews of submarines based at Faslane who are entitled to vote in the Scottish referendum. Will they be Scottish citizens after independence? Will it depend on where their mothers, fathers or grandfathers were born? Will people be entitled to be English, Scottish citizens and UK citizens at the same time? If dual citizenship is allowed and people can move to a job in the armed forces in England and, by joining the electoral roll in East Anglia, they automatically become a UK citizen, this issue is moot. If, however, it is decided to separate out citizenship in some way so that people like myself, who live in England but were born in Scotland, have to choose which country to be a citizen of-or maybe we will not have a choice-you are in a different and much more confrontational position. In a sense, this is not so much a defence issue but how you sort out citizenship, if there were to be separation.

Professor Strachan: I have some dealings with the New Zealand defence force. For some of those serving in that defence force there is an interesting interplay here between that and the British armed forces that really overrides the issue of citizenship. You will find New Zealanders who cannot fly fast jets in New Zealand any more who will want to join the Royal Air Force precisely so they can. More frequently, they join the Royal Australian Air Force because it is a bit closer, but they have certainly served in the Royal Air Force in the past.

You will also find those who later in their career decide they want to emigrate to New Zealand for a slightly quieter life, who will then join the New Zealand defence force and go the other way. There are people who have done maybe 10 or 15 years of pretty active soldiering and service and then decide to move to New Zealand but remain in the armed forces. That move either way seems to be accomplished remarkably easily. I do not know whether it is membership of the Commonwealth and the fact that the Queen is head of state and provides that common identity that enables that to happen, but, interestingly, it does not seem to hinge too much on the issue of citizenship. But it is precisely that sort of relationship, which I think all of us can see happening in some form or another, with a great deal of fluidity rather than a hard division in terms of individuals, that suggests that individual choice will be the key thing, much more than what is decided in terms of citizenship.

Q185 Chair: But the issue presumably in relation to New Zealand both ways is to some extent a trickle.

Professor Strachan: Yes.

Q186 Chair: You have two situations in stasis, as it were. What you are going to have here is potentially the equivalent of the big bang where people will have the opportunity to make their choice. This has been raised with us in the context of whether people who will be eligible to join the Scottish forces, because they are in the UK forces and potentially die for Scotland, should be able to vote in these circumstances in the Scottish election. I think at some point we are going to have witnesses saying that basically they should. I wonder whether or not that is an issue that has occurred to you or has come across your desk at any point.

Professor Strachan: I have looked at this as an historian. For example, possibly the majority of those who served in the British Army in the first world war did not have the vote. We did not have a sense of citizenship being related to military service, because there was no universal manhood suffrage until 1918. Even if you were likely to be eligible for the vote, if you were under 21, of course you did not have the vote either. In many cases you went to the front without citizenship, and you might have died without citizenship.

In the United Kingdom as a whole we do not have a strong sense, as you would have, say, in France, that military service and citizenship hang together. We have not inherited that, partly I think because we have not had conscription. It does not automatically enter the political debate in the way it does in other countries. I think it should enter the debate in this case, but it will be a novel element in terms of how Britain conducts those discussions, because it has tended to divorce these two things. The point we have already been making about Fijians winning the Sevens at Selkirk makes the point exactly. They are not citizens and yet they are serving in the British armed forces. They can become eligible for citizenship by virtue of residence. There is an ongoing issue with their families and their eligibility for citizenship because they have to qualify through residence like any other immigrant, which itself can be difficult because battalions are then moved to Germany and so on.

We really have not digested a relationship between military service and citizenship here. I suppose the question for an independent Scotland would be whether you would begin with military service as a concept that entitles you to citizenship or whether you would begin with the issue of citizenship and say that, from that, our armed forces will be recruited or might be outside that, and therefore we are really not aligning citizenship and military service.

Chair: We have some questions about Scotland spending the same proportion of its GDP, but I think we have pretty well covered most of that in questions 4 and 5. Pamela, do you want to deal with question 5 about deployment of forces overseas?

Q187 Pamela Nash: We have had written evidence, and Professor Chalmers spoke about the most likely percentage of GDP. With that in mind, what is your vision of what a future military would look like in Scotland after all the to-ing and froing and deals have been done? What do you predict would be the percentage of GDP that would be spent?

Professor Chalmers: I tried to lay that out in more detail in a paper I wrote for RUSI. It is hard to predict, and I think quite a lot would depend on the threat perception of an independent Scotland. In a sense, all one is going on is what one senses is the political culture in Scotland, not only in the SNP but across the political elite in terms of what role Scotland might have. The key point is that the UK is unusual in the high proportion of its GDP that it spends on defence compared with other NATO European countries. The reason is that the UK is more ambitious. It is on the Security Council, and it wants to be the US’s number two, if you like, in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans and so on, and that costs money.

Anything is possible, but it is difficult for me to imagine, given the very difficult economic circumstances an independent Scotland would face, especially in the transition but perhaps also longer term, that it would be prepared to give defence as high a relative priority as the rest of the UK. There is a lot of discussion about how Ireland, Norway, Denmark and sometimes Sweden are models, and you can look at how much they spend on defence. It is possible that an independent Scotland, looking at how difficult transition would be, would adopt the Irish option. Basically, almost all the assets would go to the UK, because the UK’s need for defence assets would not be substantially changed by Scottish independence. They would not suddenly wake up after independence and say, "We no longer need that. We only needed that because Scotland was part of the Union." There is not very much the UK deploys that is only for the purposes of Scotland. All of the assets the UK deploys in Scotland, Faslane most obviously, will still be required by the UK, but that is also true of air defence assets and so on to a very significant, if not total, extent. They would want almost everything, and how hard would the Scottish negotiating team ask for that?

Q188 Pamela Nash: That is an interesting point. Can I just ask you to look at that in a different way? You are saying that the UK without Scotland would still have very similar requirements. What we are hearing from the Scottish Government is that they do not think they will, but what would be the difference in defence requirements for a Scotland separate from the UK and what Scotland has at the moment within the UK?

Professor Chalmers: On the assumption-perhaps it is a big one, but I think not an unrealistic one-that an independent Scotland would, after all the argy-bargy, end up as a member of the EU and NATO, like Norway and Denmark, and it had to think about what-

Q189 Chair: You think that Scotland will end up as a member of NATO.

Professor Chalmers: I think it will, because, after a divisive referendum, it would be such a radical step on top of that to say, "We’re going to pull out of NATO, having been in it for so long a period."

Chair: But we have to know that now. Surely that is not a decision that can be left until after the referendum.

Pamela Nash: To be fair, I think the SNP have said they would stay in, have they not?

Q190 Chair: No, they have not. You seem to be suggesting that they would have the referendum and then they would decide. That seems to me to be absurd.

Professor Chalmers: It was not me that designed the system.

Q191 Chair: No, but you are the witness in front of us.

Professor Chalmers: I am saying as a matter of observation and analysis that for Scotland to become independent, for the UK to be the first advanced industrialised democracy to break apart since world war two-Quebec almost got there but it did not in the end-would be a radical enough step in a Europe that itself is in a pretty unstable place. It may well be that all the parties before the referendum are agreed that Scotland should stay in NATO, in which case it will not be an issue, but, if they disagree in advance of a referendum, then, even in that scenario, as one of the other witnesses said, at some stage there would have to be an election after a referendum. I think the pressure on an independent Scotland to maintain a role in NATO would be pretty substantial. Indeed, some of the countries in Europe that are not in NATO, like Sweden, have very close relationships with NATO. Their foreign policy is constrained by the need to keep good relations with the United States, their European neighbours and NATO bureaucracy, so we would have to sketch out exactly what this scenario is.

Francis Tusa: I would like to come back to your original question about what we think it would be reasonable to suspect that independent Scottish forces would look like. Based on the quite sparse policy statements in manifestos, talking about defence of airspace, economic zones and so forth, if that is what the policy on defence structure is, it leads you pretty inevitably towards a maritime and air-based armed forces, with much smaller land forces. At the same time, there is the issue of whether the land forces can actually be provided with the troops, let alone equipped. As soon as you talk about a Scotland not in NATO, that means you are ruling out any significant deployment of troops overseas, in which case I think taxpayers in an independent Scotland after five years would be saying, "Why have we got all these barracks and units when they don’t seem to go anywhere?" If you were to ask me straight away what a Scottish defence force would look like within five or 10 years of independence, it would be a naval arm, an air arm with not much in the way of fast jets, and a smaller two-brigade army.

Professor Chalmers: The reason I was making those remarks about the broader context is that it is hard to answer the question about structure without them. On the assumption that Scotland was in a military alliance, Scotland’s security would be determined mostly by the need to keep the rest of the alliance happy to ensure they came to its aid when necessary. That would require a rather different force structure from one that was self-reliant. It may well be that, if there is a future Afghanistan-type operation, like every other member of NATO right now, Scotland would be expected to send a small contingent to such an operation.

Q192 Lindsay Roy: The First Minister is on record as saying that, if Scotland becomes independent, it would not be a home for nuclear weapons. Is that stance compatible with staying within NATO?

Professor Strachan: Can I just pick up two other capabilities and then answer that question? The other things an independent Scotland would need to think about are what it is doing about its intelligence, particularly if it is thinking about maritime air capabilities. How much horizon scanning is it doing? Where is the intelligence going to come from that will enable it to do its own defence? In part related to it is the question whether if it has only limited ground forces-even two brigades might be big in that sort of structure, unless they were very heavily weighted towards reservists-it would still need special forces, particularly for counter-terrorism operations and those sorts of things.

On the nuclear issue, historically, it has been part of the SNP’s position that Scotland cannot be part of NATO because NATO is an alliance that rests on the principle of nuclear deterrence. There are other countries in NATO that similarly have rejected nuclear weapons but still see that as compatible with being a member of NATO. Norway, whom we have referred to regularly in this discussion, is a classic illustration of that. Norway will not allow nuclear weapons on Norwegian territory but is within NATO so that is its solution to the problem. There are other countries that have nuclear weapons based within them but do not themselves own nuclear weapons, which is another position you can take. There does not have to be this close relationship that the SNP have drawn.

I would go one stage further and say-it is an arguable point-that extended deterrence is something that a lot of states, including those outside the NATO structure, can be argued to have benefited from. This is not an argument we are having currently within the United Kingdom, but during the years of the cold war that presumption had emerged. Essentially, there was stability in the international system and a degree of international security that was provided by American extended deterrence, which meant that, even if you were not necessarily within NATO, or a fully paid-up member of the alliance and therefore paying your dues, if you like, to the United States, you were still deriving benefit from the US. You can see evidence for that, for example, in Australia’s position. Quite openly in its last defence White Paper, Australia acknowledged the benefit it had derived from the United States’ extended deterrence in terms of the stability it provided in the wider region within which Australia found itself.

All I am really saying in relation to the SNP and Scotland’s position is that the SNP have put themselves in a more dogmatic position in relation to nuclear weapons than logically they need to be, given that this issue can be fudged in a number of different ways. Of course the reason they have done that is precisely because of Faslane since nuclear weapons are actually based within Scotland.

Q193 Lindsay Roy: There would be a dependence on the nuclear umbrella.

Professor Strachan: An independent Scotland that rejected nuclear weapons might still get a benefit from a nuclear umbrella without having to have a hand on the umbrella.

Q194 Chair: We usually think of fingers on triggers rather than hands on umbrellas, but we get the metaphor.

Lindsay Roy: Is it called a freebie?

Chair: It is free-riding basically, is it not?

Professor Strachan: Exactly.

Chair: My colleagues Jim McGovern and Lindsay Roy have to leave because there is a debate in Westminster Hall about the regiments at four o’clock. Jim was warming up his arguments earlier on, which he will now deploy.

Lindsay Roy: I am keeping my powder dry.

Q195 Chair: Do you want to come in, Malcolm?

Professor Chalmers: Hew is absolutely right that there is no necessary correlation between nuclear basing and NATO membership. I think the German example today is a rather interesting one. The German Government after the last election in their coalition agreement agreed that they wanted US nuclear weapons to be removed from Germany, but the key thing in German Government policy since that statement is that they have made it clear they want this to be achieved only through negotiation with other NATO members. They are not saying, "These will go no matter what anybody else thinks." These are weapons of pretty marginal operational value; the role of American tactical nuclear weapons in Germany nowadays is almost entirely symbolic. But even the Germans are saying, "We will not do anything unilaterally."

The parallel with Scotland is that one can envisage a situation where a Scottish Government say, "We don’t want these things on our territory; we want a different NATO policy that is much less reliant on nuclear weapons." In the particular circumstances of Trident bases in Scotland there is no way in which the UK Government could rapidly rebase these forces in England. I have written at length on this. Arguably, it would be politically impossible for them to do so, so for Scotland in those circumstances to insist on them leaving would be to force the UK to make a decision effectively to de-nuclearise. Other NATO member states would look at this process and say, "What is all this about? What is Scotland trying to do?" Many expatriate Scots in Canada, Australia and the United States who have some degree of nationalism, at least with a small "n", might say, "What is our old country up to here disrupting long-standing alliances?" I am cautious about predictions, but I think that, if Scotland wanted a reasonably fair wind after independence, it would have to find some way of ensuring that this base was not removed until the rest of the UK had a reasonable amount of time to consider alternative basing arrangements. It might be there were not ones.

On the nuclear umbrella, that is one of those metaphysical concepts that can mean something to anybody. My suspicion is that, like the Norwegians, once a Scottish Government were established, they would have sufficiently skilled diplomats able to construct communiqués, and footnotes to communiqués, to fudge that issue. I think the really difficult issue to resolve is the Trident-basing issue.

Francis Tusa: Increasingly, one of the biggest red herrings is that Trident could not be moved from Scotland. It has become an article of faith. If you even bother looking, suddenly you hear, "Where would we store the nuclear warheads?" It is very easy. Aldermaston and Burghfield have spare storage capability and have full nuclear licences. Coulport is sized for a deterrent with five-

Q196 Pamela Nash: Why are they not there at the moment?

Francis Tusa: The ones at Burghfield require about £50 million of modernisation, but the argument that there is nowhere to store the warheads is simply not true. Is it ideal having them in the middle of Berkshire when your submarines might be based down in Devonport or whatever? No, it is not ideal, but it does not mean you cannot do it. You have to remember that all the nuclear warheads go through those facilities for upgrade and maintenance; they are driven along the roads. It happens daily. Are there submarine facilities in Devonport and Barrow? It has shiplift; you can do refuelling there; and you can do missile reloading, if you want to do it at Barrow. So the facility at Faslane is duplicated by Barrow. You do not require Faslane for any of the major operations of the submarine fleet. Do remember that we keep our ballistic missiles in a stockpile in Kings Bay, Georgia, in the States, so I am afraid that the idea that there are no options is an utter red herring.

Would people be able to move in one day everything elsewhere? No, not in one day, but there are more than enough nuclear facilities all round the remaining parts of the UK. There are harbour facilities as well. The Royal Navy has been relatively active in surveying Milford Haven, which has a wonderfully deep channel; it still has a Royal Navy quay there. You are just off the Celtic Deeps, one of the deepest water channels off the British isles. It is excellent for submarine operations. With regard to Plymouth, I can slightly understand that they do not like the idea of the ballistic missile boats going in and out. It is very shallow for about 25 to 30 miles. Strangely, they have still been operating nuclear submarines out of there for many decades.

I would like to believe that someone is not advertising most of this because they want to keep their cards close to their chest, but the number of options for moving the deterrent out of Scotland is huge, and a lot of them are not that expensive either. I have seen reports that it would cost £50 billion to move. No, it would not; it really wouldn’t. By the way, the figures for renovating Burghfield and Aldermaston were done by people who have recently worked there. With the downsizing in the nuclear deterrent from 500 to 600 warheads to under 200, you do not need a Coulport-size facility. Anyway, over one third of your warheads will be at sea the whole time.

Quite frankly, if the SNP are working on the basis, "We have this great card; it will just be too expensive to move the deterrent", they are in for a real shock. As to the other ones that have been discussed recently, is there any reason why we should not be able to store warheads in French facilities off Brest? We shared American storage facilities for nuclear warheads at Iserlohn for 40 years and no one seemed to care. I spent some time there. There were American, German and British guards. The UK had British bunkers on German soil, but it was a US sovereign base. I did not notice anyone caring one way or the other.

Q197 Pamela Nash: To go back to my original question, which I put about half an hour ago, apart from nuclear, which I accept is a big part of what we have in Scotland in the current military, how different do you think the Scottish military would look in an independent Scotland in comparison to what is planned under the current armed forces spending review by the UK Government?

Professor Chalmers: The current spending review does not plan for a Scottish armed force.

Q198 Pamela Nash: But what I am saying is that Scotland is part of the UK in the review. How would what we have in Scotland at the moment and what would be planned under the review compare with an independent Scotland?

Professor Chalmers: It would be utterly different.

Q199 Pamela Nash: In that case, do you think there would be fewer armed forces in Scotland? We would have a down-sizing.

Professor Chalmers: The armed forces in Scotland controlled by Scotland would be very different, because, certainly on the naval side but to some extent on the air force side, there are assets in Scotland that I think it is unlikely Scotland would want to inherit.

Q200 Pamela Nash: What I am getting at is whether Scotland would be more vulnerable to attack with the military that we are currently trying to guess at and envisage in a Scotland separate from the United Kingdom than it is at the moment?

Professor Chalmers: That would depend partly on whether we were in alliance with other countries.

Q201 David Mowat: Surely it would also depend on the position of a future Scottish Government. There is nothing to stop a future Scottish Government spending 20% of its GDP on defence. It depends on who Scotland elects, presumably, after a general election.

Professor Strachan: It also comes back to the intelligence question. I am sorry to say it again, but vulnerability to attack includes both the capability of defending but also the capability to anticipate to some degree. At the moment the United Kingdom benefits, at least most of the time, from an incredibly close relationship with the United States, and there is no presumption that Scotland would. On the other hand, I would imagine the rest of the United Kingdom would want a close intelligence relationship with Scotland precisely because the security of the rest of the United Kingdom would also be integrally bound up with the security of Scotland. They are both on the same land mass and that will not change. Again, this would be a subject for negotiation, but I think the Scottish intelligence capability, whatever it might be, would not come through inheritance. That would have to be negotiated, and it is not at all clear to me that it would be as privileged. I do not think it could be as privileged as the United Kingdom currently is, which would imply a greater degree of vulnerability.

Q202 Chair: Perhaps we may return to the nuclear question later. I know you are keen to go into it, but we have some questions on it later on. That was an enormous diversion dealing with a red herring. So we will maybe stick to the plan if we can, if you don’t mind.

The next point we want to raise-Jim wanted to raise it but, unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned, he has had to go-is that the UK has signed military agreements with France about sharing, cooperating and so on. Surely, it is entirely possible that a separate Scotland would be able to sign arrangements with all sorts of other countries, and therefore it would not necessarily be the case that it had to own everything or staff everything itself. I understand the point about maritime capability and the Arctic, but Scotland would not need to duplicate what everybody else was doing. It might very well be that, in return for doing something close at hand, the Norwegians did all of that all together. Surely, that is another scenario that potentially would be a great deal cheaper for Scotland and would give it a much greater capability for the pounds the Scots spent.

Professor Strachan: That is exactly the difficulty with Stuart Crawford’s analysis. It does not allow for Scotland to develop niche capabilities and forfeit other capabilities on the grounds that partners would provide those, which comes back to political relationships, does it not? The reason Stuart Crawford’s paper and most of the analyses you see go down the line of what would be a reasonable balance of capabilities, rather than what would be a proper niche capability for Scotland to pursue, is that, even within NATO, most countries think in national terms. They still do not do the "niche capability" thing despite the fact that enormous amounts of savings and greater efficiencies could be achieved by doing that, which is precisely why Rasmussen as Secretary-General has been on the front foot on smart defence, saying, "We can obviously do our procurement more efficiently." Scotland could absolutely do that, but, if it does that, then it has to recognise that it needs some sort of relationship, probably geopolitically, with somebody who is reasonably close.

Q203 Chair: Maybe it could share the border.

Professor Strachan: Sharing a border is one possibility, or sharing access to the North sea-which is where we have been going-is the other obvious way. That is why Britain has a defence relationship with France. One of the reasons that defence relationship can operate despite the views of many cynics, to reasonable effect in the case of Libya, is that there is already an existing framework within which that has developed. Of course France is very anxious to get back up to speed in NATO terms.

What Scottish forces would have to be able to do is remain at the same level of operational confidence and interoperability that NATO forces have at the moment. The extraordinary thing about ISAF in Afghanistan is that there are 50 states-many more than there are members of NATO-and those states are able to operate alongside NATO forces. Of course there are problems, but what is more remarkable is the achievement. There are sufficient common operating procedures for these forces to operate alongside one another. Scotland would have to be able to do that if it wanted to go down the "niche capability" line.

Q204 Chair: Two things arise from that. First, is it a fair parallel with, say, Norway and the EU? Norway is effectively not in the EU but accepts lock, stock and barrel a whole host of things from the EU. Even if Scotland did not join NATO but accepted lock, stock and barrel all the rules and so on, it would be effectively the same thing but it would allow the maiden to preserve her virginity, as it were; it would allow Scotland to say, "We are not in NATO."

Professor Strachan: NATO is already in that position with a great many countries. Malcolm is right in referring to Sweden. Sweden is a classic illustration of that. It has troops in Afghanistan; despite its neutrality during the cold war, it is effectively aligning itself more and more with NATO in terms of what it does. This is where NATO is different from the EU. NATO is very ready to take people in on that basis; essentially, it is trying to include rather than exclude.

Q205 Chair: The second point is the question of which niche capabilities you would see Scotland developing. Apart from kilts and the Highland Regiment, it is difficult to identify anything military that is uniquely Scottish, or am I mistaken?

Professor Strachan: The irony here is that the front-page image is that we produce men and export them. That is what we have been doing for 300 or 400 years, and that is where the image of the Scottish soldier comes from. What makes most sense in a less manpower-intensive era in terms of defence capability would be, one would have thought, maritime air because that is where we have been thinking. That is what Scotland seems to need for itself, which you could then apply to others. But that is not where the political sensitivities or heat lies, but it is what Scotland would naturally do.

You might also suggest to the Highlands that, if they are going to have infantrymen, they should be mountain troops. The French now make great play of Chasseurs Alpins and the Italians of Alpini. You have specialist units with specialist capabilities. Norway, of course, has done that also in terms of mountain warfare.

Q206 Chair: That was 45 Commando in a sense, which is now getting moved away.

Professor Strachan: Yes.

Francis Tusa: The point about niches comes back to the whole issue of the orientation of independent Scottish defence forces. If they are solely for territorial defence and so forth, one of the problems of having a niche capability is that you must be willing to use it, because someone will want to rely on you only if you will turn up on the day when they say, "My God, I need whatever it is you are providing." Based on the very scant things from SNP documents, you do not get the impression of an armed force that are looking to deploy anywhere, in which case you will not be able to have niche armed forces, because no one will want to rely on your niches if you will never use them.

Q207 Chair: Picking up the point about maritime surveillance and so on, that is different. As I understood your point about deployment, it was to do with people maybe getting killed, but you are unlikely to have people killed if you are doing maritime deployment or air cover.

Professor Chalmers: It depends on where you are doing it. If you are talking of maritime surveillance off the coast of Scotland looking for Russian submarines that is one thing, but, if you are talking about a maritime air capability deploying to the Gulf, for example, with potentially hostile air forces, you are in quite another scenario.

Q208 Chair: I was thinking of it much more in the context of a piece in the jigsaw around the Scottish coast, as it were. Maybe I picked you up wrongly. I did not think you were suggesting that it would be a maritime surveillance capability that would then be transferable worldwide.

Professor Strachan: I was, if it was to be a niche capability. If you are thinking beyond the notion of what is an all-round Scottish defence for an independent Scotland simply defining itself in territorial terms, as opposed to what Scotland would specialise in on the grounds that it would draw in other specialisations from its allies, whoever they might be, it seems to me that maritime air is what Scotland would naturally do because of where it is in the world and the sort of problems it has. But, as has been said by Francis and Malcolm, you have to be ready to use that if you want to bring in other assets that you might need.

Francis Tusa: If you stay only 12 miles from the Scottish coast it is not niche; it is nonexistent.

Professor Chalmers: Given that, I do not think that is a route that an independent Scotland would be likely to go down, because it is a very expensive route. You would be spending a lot of money on a very specialised capability with very little flexibility. Essentially, it would be accepting that Scottish defence policy was subordinate to UK defence policy and it would have to be guaranteeing those capabilities to be there on the ground. I cannot see any other small European state that has gone very substantially down this road. From the point of view of the big powers, they would love the small powers to have niche capabilities, but from the point of view of the small powers they want ones that they can sell to their electorate as being relevant to their own needs.

Francis Tusa: Perhaps perversely, if you look at Afghanistan and ISAF, what have all the Nordics done? They have deployed infantry battle groups and, boy, has NATO been saying, "Please give us these." They have not necessarily said, "Please send us this niche or that niche." Because they have been so short of bodies, they have been crying out loud for boots on the ground and so forth, so these entirely non-niche capabilities from Denmark, Norway and whatever have been welcomed with open arms.

Q209 Chair: To be clear, is this a disagreement?

Professor Strachan: It is not a disagreement.

Q210 Chair: It seems to me that your positions are different. You are saying you cannot identify any particular niche capabilities that it is likely a separate Scottish state would wish to pursue.

Professor Chalmers: I think Francis makes a good point that there may be or there are some low-tech areas that Scotland would want to pursue.

Q211 Chair: That is hardly a niche, though, is it?

Professor Chalmers: In terms of niche and particularly challenging areas where you specialise, no, I do not think it would be wise for Scotland to pursue that in those circumstances, and I do not think it would be likely to.

Q212 Chair: It is helpful just to clarify that.

Professor Strachan: The difference is simply that Malcolm was addressing, if you like, the political acceptability. I was saying you could do it that way, but whether it is politically acceptable is another issue entirely.

Chair: That is right. To come back to Francis’s point, the question of whether or not a separate Scottish state would wish to have boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq or somewhere similar is a moot point. That would be decided at the time. But Scottish presence would not be vital to the progress or success of any such mission. It would be buying into something that somebody else was doing or not, as the case might be; it really would not be relied on by anybody.

Q213 Iain McKenzie: What I am envisaging here is almost a Scottish defence force that is either incapable or reluctant to go beyond its borders. In essence, are we talking about a home guard situation here, because that is probably what we are setting up?

Professor Strachan: It seems to me that much of Stuart Crawford’s paper-we come back to this again-seems to be working on that presumption. It does not state what the capability is designed to do, precisely because there is no political framework within which it goes. We have used the phrase "territorial defence". During the 1970s and 1980s that was very much a model for states that were aspiring to neutrality within a European context. It was what Yugoslavia was moving towards; it was what Sweden and Switzerland were doing. That is something that you could see as a possibility for Scotland and where Scotland might want to go. Equally, if it went there, it implies a big switch away from regulars to reservists, with a weight-this was why I raised the issue of what the brigade structure and the balance between regulars and reservists would look like-that implies a commitment to defend Scotland and not much more.

One of the reasons Norway can look as it does is that it has been in the front line during the cold war and could be in the front line again, so there is not necessarily an incompatibility between the notion of Norwegian territorial defence and a wider contribution to defence. There is a tension there. If there is a debate in Norway, it is about whether it should put troops into Afghanistan and whether it should also have an expeditionary capability, but the core question does not arise for Norwegians. It is presumed, and has been presumed ever since the Germans took them by surprise in April 1940.

Scotland has no such experience that provides a benchmark; it has no such experience of invasion, at least since the 18th century. As a result, it is hard for territorial defence, if that is to be the basis, to capture the imagination or to have any political impetus behind it, because people say, "Against what?" Then we come back to where we began this discussion a couple of hours ago, which is that we live in a pretty secure part of the world.

Q214 Chair: It seems to me that a great deal of what we have been discussing is essentially a home guard with some planes and bullets. Can I maybe take us on to the questions of industrial policy in the remaining four hours? We are aware of general discussions and debates about procurement and so on. You will probably be aware of some announcements and statements that have been made. What is your perspective or understanding of the likely position of defence manufacturers within Scotland after separation? How will things pan out? Will everything just carry on as it is at the moment? If not, why not and what will happen? Francis, you seem to be keenest to speak.

Francis Tusa: You can look at the force effect or whatever. Why does the United States have the biggest defence industry? It is where the money is spent. Looking at Europe, is the Belgian defence industry the size of the French defence industry? No, it is not. Why? Belgians spend very little on defence. The industry follows the money, pure and simple. We may not quite have the political allegiance that they have in the States in the sense of, "Have you got a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, and one here and one there?"-that whole element of "pork barrel"-and forget, "Oh, the EU has said it will be trans-border procurement." I am sure it will be for bootlaces and bottled water, but for the key systems there is the political resonance of security of supply and very simple things like, again, size of budget. What would be the size of the independent Scottish research and development budget? God knows, the budget in the UK at the moment is going down, but, if you look at the possible ranges and an independent Scotland having potentially £20 million to £25 million, how many defence companies would keep the same size estate in a country with that level of R and D? Will it not just move it to where the money is? It is very easy to move these factories, and the engineers follow as well.

To give one very relevant example of shipyards, when VT Group closed their facility in Southampton and moved to Portsmouth it cost £14 million. That did not even make them think twice. By the way, that yard is now part of BAE Systems and is building major portions of ships for the carrier programme. You could build the next generation of ships there very easily.

Look at rationalisation within BAE Systems and the different factories they have. Brough is closing down and moving most of the work out to India and so forth. There is the growth of Samlesbury and Warton. It is a lot easier to flex factory demand within the defence industry than you would think. The idea that that could take decades before a move is wrong. If you ended up with an independent Scottish defence force with limited capabilities, and low-tech capabilities at that, those facilities will be within Britain within months-end of. It goes where the money is, pure and simple. There would still be cross-border procurement and so forth. You need to look at the examples of companies like Thales, which is international. They move their facilities to where the money is. In the case of air defence, they closed down all of their French facilities and moved them to the UK because that was where the budget was for their particular niche. That is happening across borders as well. MBDA Missiles do the same; they move their facilities to where the money is.

Q215 Chair: That has the benefit of clarity, does it not? I do not think there is very much doubt as to what you say. Do the other two agree with that?

Professor Chalmers: That is substantially right. It may take a little longer than Francis says. It depends on how this process goes, but one thing that a Scottish Government in such a scenario would be able to say is, "We have some procurement budget, and if we are going to buy some things from the rest of the UK there has to be some flow in the other direction." But, given the budgetary numbers we have already talked about, I think the size of that Scottish procurement budget will be pretty limited.

As to the sort of work that is done in Scotland at the moment, clearly there is a lot of work on the naval shipbuilding side with the carrier and possibly the Type 26, which maybe we will come to later. In addition, there is work on the F-35, Paveway bombs and things of this nature, but, for most of the other projects, they are equipping things one cannot imagine Scotland buying. I cannot imagine Scotland buying F-35 aircraft, for example.

The companies will make commercial judgments about whether or not to relocate. They will look at existing contracts and what signals they are being given by their paymasters in Washington, London or elsewhere. They will also look at their employees and whether they are prepared to relocate across the border. I do not think everything will leave on day one, but the trend will be pretty clear. Why should the UK Government in this scenario support jobs in Scotland in the defence area unless it is clearly more cost-effective to buy from those suppliers? Scotland may have some industrial niches, but they will have to fight much harder.

The last point I would make is one made in the seminar in Edinburgh that Hew and I attended last week. This scenario will put a considerable burden on a Scottish Government having an active industrial policy, not only in the defence sector but that will be a very important role. You need to ask people who know much more about industrial policy than I do about how they would envisage providing a structure that allows Scotland’s defence sector to be much more export-oriented. It would have to be much more export-oriented than it is now to survive in anything like its present form.

Q216 Chair: Have you detected any signs of an industrial policy being developed as part of the separation debate?

Professor Chalmers: I have not, but maybe I am simply ignorant of it.

Q217 Chair: Has it been detected? I must confess that I have not detected it, but I was presuming you were closer to it, certainly in relation to defence industrial strategy.

Professor Strachan: It is interesting how politically silent the defence industries have been, but they have been very silent. Whether or not that has eased the pressure on the need to develop a defence industry policy I would not know. I suspect it has. If they had been as explicit as you have heard both of these two gentlemen being-I have no reason to dissent from what they have said-that this is potentially pretty bad news for Scottish defence industries, you would have expected them to say rather more than they have, but they have not.

Q218 Chair: I think we can discuss why they might not be saying it, but my impression from discussions I have had with companies is that they do not want to get drawn into what they see as party politics.

Professor Strachan: Absolutely.

Q219 Chair: They will say privately that their view is x or y. The company is not taking a view because it will have to survive after the referendum, but commercially this is what makes sense. They outline a case that is pretty much along the same lines as Francis, but they do not want to be drawn on it lest they are seen to be bullying the electorate and all the rest of it.

I have a particular interest in shipbuilding since I have Govan shipyard within my constituency. It has been said that any suggestion that that yard will not continue to get both Royal Navy orders and a mass of export orders is simply talking Scotland down and does not fully recognise the merits of the work force. We have the best engineers in the world; people will want to come here and build ships there; we will be able to win competitions against anybody, and so on and so forth. How would you respond to that?

Professor Chalmers: The key issue there is to ask who will make the decisions as to whether or not to place orders with those yards in Scotland. To date, a very substantial part of the work that has been done in those yards has been for our UK customers. Clearly, the UK customers are not more likely to place orders in Scotland after independence than at present. I would suggest they are much less likely to do so. Again, it is a political analysis, so politicians can disagree with my analysis. If Scotland were to become independent before decisions had been made about where to build new Type 26 frigates, for example, I do not understand what political make-up could in those circumstances make the UK Government place those orders in Scottish yards if there were, as there are, alternative places to build them in England.

Francis Tusa: There is also the terms of business agreement, which would be a remaining UK Government agreement on building and maintenance of ships. An independent Scotland is saying, "We are no longer part of that."

Q220 Chair: Surely, the TOBA is with BAE Systems.

Francis Tusa: But it is also talking about a UK national capability. They have been charged to provide a capability at national level.

Professor Chalmers: It is not clear who would inherit that agreement.

Francis Tusa: But this is signed with the UK Government, and I suspect you will find someone says, "Great. We’ve just got rid of one overhaul yard and two new-build shipyards. We have just sorted out a significant element of our industrial problems."

Professor Chalmers: It comes back to Francis’s point about he who buys determines where it is built. I think only a very limited number of Type 26s will be bought because they are getting so expensive, but those that are bought will be UK ships and not Scottish ships.

Q221 David Mowat: The analysis that all of you have given, which is very clear, is that there will be a drift of this expenditure from Scotland to England. I understand the logic of that. I suppose the only question I have is this. Scotland will have 10% of the procurement spend, roughly speaking, going forward, if it is decided to be at roughly that level. How much of the UK’s procurement defence spend capability is currently in Scotland? Your argument is valid only if it is significantly more than 10%.

Francis Tusa: To turn to something Hew said earlier about joint facilities, there will still be a requirement in the rump UK for a Dartmouth Naval College, or for a Sandhurst. Depending on decisions taken by an independent Scottish Government, they may have to bear the costs of overheads of new facilities; so the 10% will not necessarily buy as much as it would seem.

Q222 David Mowat: So there is a diseconomy of scale.

Francis Tusa: A diseconomy of scale.

Q223 David Mowat: But the fundamental argument is still right that there is some procurement spend in Scotland post-independence; they can put that where they want, and presumably they would put that in Scotland.

Professor Strachan: But the crucial issue is: what will they want to procure?

Q224 David Mowat: Yes, it is.

Professor Strachan: What they will want to procure, on all the indications we have had so far, will be at the low end of capability and low-tech end of capability.

Q225 David Mowat: The sort of stuff for which you do not need the Govan yard.

Professor Strachan: Absolutely. The converse of that, which goes back to what the Chairman was raising, is the argument that says, because the Clyde has a reputation and shipbuilding in Scotland is particularly good, therefore country A somewhere else-not the rump UK-will want to order ships from the Clyde. This comes back to an assumption that you will want to order ships-and warships specifically-from a yard that is not producing ships that are being used in action elsewhere. In the end, the way you sell arms in part is by proven military effectiveness and by employment. Krupp learnt this before the first world war. If you want to sell Krupp artillery, you do it on the back of the German army’s reputation, because that army is using Krupp artillery to great effect. I think it will be very hard over the long term for a Scotland that has warships of limited capability to continue to argue that it is capable of building ships of high capability for other countries.

Francis Tusa: If you look at the world’s naval market, more and more countries are saying, "Do you know what? We have actually got some industry, but we’d like to develop it and we’re willing to pay. So have you got a design and we will build them in our country?" If you are looking for lower-end corvettes-the light frigates-it does not matter whether you are talking about the United Kingdom today or a rump Scotland and rump UK tomorrow. The chances of huge programmes building lower-end ships in the British isles are incredibly limited. There will be some design work, no doubt, but all the work will be done overseas. We should bear in mind the Type 26. We are talking to a number of countries potentially interested in joining the development programme and so forth. If, for the sake of argument, Canada or Japan sign up for the Type 26, how many would be built in Britain? Zero. They will all be built overseas. This is recognised straight off.

If you were able to get an order from, say, Saudi Arabia, they have not got the manufacturing capability. So you would build those in a British Isles yard. You mentioned the capability and cost of the Type 26. This is a ship that at the moment, potentially, is probably of interest to only eight countries, all of whom would build them in their own shipyards. As to your comment about doing the yards down, it is places like Korea, not even Italian or Spanish yards, that are starting to build the next generation of corvettes. Why? They just have the capability, skills and cost base. That was why from the word go on the Type 26, with the belief that we would be building dozens of ships in Britain to export, it was realised that that was not what the market was doing.

Professor Chalmers: To come back to the headline number very briefly, if you had a Scottish defence budget of about £2 billion a year and it spent 40% of that on new equipment and equipment maintenance, which is quite high, you would be talking about £800 million a year. A lot of that would be small-scale suppliers and so on. I think quite a bit would be buying things from overseas. If you wanted a maritime patrol aircraft for Scotland, for example, you would not design and develop it in Scotland; you would buy something off the shelf, like the P-3. According to the figures from the Government here, defence sales from Scottish companies right now are about £1.8 billion a year. That is quite a significant difference. There would still be a market in Scotland.

Q226 David Mowat: For the avoidance of doubt, we have heard that Scotland provides infantry battalions that are greater than its share, if you like. In terms of procurement, at the moment does Scotland provide a higher proportion than you would expect given its relative size within the UK?

Professor Chalmers: Of defence production?

David Mowat: Yes.

Professor Strachan: Yes.

Professor Chalmers: I am not sure it does.

Q227 David Mowat: If it does not, the issue is not so much that; it is that you have taken the view that Scotland will have a much smaller home guard-type outfit and therefore the stuff it will be buying is more commodity-based, which is what takes you to the £800 million number versus the £1.8 billion, which is where you get the analysis that places like Govan would not be used in the same way as they are now. That is right, is it not? That is the answer.

Professor Chalmers: That is right.

Francis Tusa: On another naval point, in terms of business frequency-how much business there is long term-you should bear in mind that, for their new generation frigates, the Norwegians had them built in Spanish shipyards, simply because they had not ordered ships for so long that they did not have the capabilities any longer. They could probably have resurrected them. They just took the decision that it would cost far too much time and there was a serious business risk. Those are also quite sophisticated ships. A country like Norway, which spends nearly £1 billion a year on procurement and which still has a maritime industry, says, "We’ll let the Spanish do it." By the way, it has not been without troubles. That is one of the higher spending smaller countries in Europe. The question is, if that is the decision they took, why would it not be the same situation here?

Q228 David Mowat: That slightly undermines your argument that people’s spending will go where it is commissioned, because you could say in that instance, "Why wouldn’t the Norwegians go to Govan?" in that instance.

Francis Tusa: This comes back to the point that at that time there was no evidence of any decent products.

Q229 David Mowat: But, in future, if people are prepared to do that, that is interesting.

Francis Tusa: The Spanish were producing ships of a type already for their own navy, the F100 class, and the Norwegians looked at them and said, "Do you know what? That’s pretty much what we are looking for. They are going to be using the same radar, battle management system and missiles." In effect, they were looking to try to get economies of scale working off the back of it. It did not quite work that way.

Q230 Chair: I was speaking to a defence supplier last night who said that the Norwegians and Swedes have some defence industries; they have managed to survive. There are some niche capabilities that they have managed to target and achieve. Surely that is a scenario that is entirely possible for Scotland.

Francis Tusa: Yes. It is still fascinating how often, when the Norwegians are faced with buying something from Sweden or something from anyone else in the world, they will go for anyone else in the world. There are little historical bits, such as, "You were our rulers for however many centuries and we haven’t bloody forgotten this." I think that is why they should have bought the Gripen aircraft a long time ago. Every time it is offered in new configurations they lead Saab up the garden path for a year and, at the last minute, go off and buy something else. They almost take delight in doing it. Yes, there are areas where they have been very successful in collaborating on procurement, and, looking ahead, you will probably see deeper procurement between the Norwegians and the Swedes-and the Danes for that matter. I am still fascinated that there is not even a residual but quite large historical knowledge and the Norwegians kick back against the Swedes.

Chair: Whether or not that develops between Scotland and England is a point that no doubt we can investigate in 20 years, but Norway and Sweden have managed to have some niche manufacturing capabilities in relation to defence. Why should Scotland not have that? Instead of being an all-purpose singing and dancing producer of ships, tanks and planes, why not focus on particular things? I suppose this comes back to the question of industrial policy, of which presently there is none, but were there one it might be possible. Is that right?

Professor Chalmers: I think that is right.

Q231 Chair: I am looking for some sort of light and hope from you, because you have been pretty pessimistic.

Francis Tusa: Maritime is probably the area. There is still an offshore industry. Weir Pumps is one of those capabilities. Is it possible to move it elsewhere? Yes. Because you are not talking about a complete ship or aircraft or something big, is anyone necessarily in London going to care if the main pumps for the nuclear submarines come out of Scotland? No. In the same way, rather hilariously, the fasteners on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier all come from a British company called Nelson. They only found out when they saw the names on the fasteners. Certain things are almost internationally traded items now, such as probably Thales periscopes in the old Barr & Stroud. For that type of thing, would anyone in the remaining UK in 10 years say, "I am going to pay for someone to move that facility away from there"? Probably not.

Q232 Chair: That is also, by coincidence, in my constituency.

Francis Tusa: I hadn’t guessed.

Q233 Chair: No, no; you have not researched adequately then. I thought that was one of those questions of following the market or customer. Some of those items would actually be moved.

Francis Tusa: Probably the advantage there is that the market is so specialised and niche and business flows are such that, if you look at the amount of turnover from that facility, which is going on exports anyway, it is doing quite nicely. Again, great, we have the Astute Class and they are going to do six boats; so, potentially with a few spares, there are about 14 or 15 units over 30 years. That is the sort of area where a company would say, "If you want us to move south, what happens after that is finished? What are we going to be doing?" However, the other side of the coin is the old Ferranti works at Edinburgh with all the radar and electronic warfare. All of their future business is going to be in supporting Typhoons down south and then Saudi contracts and so forth. That is the type of business that will move.

Q234 Chair: That is interesting because that was a particular example that was quoted to me as one that would not, because the expert said that the engineers in Edinburgh were so good that they could not be replicated anywhere else. If the plant moved, they would not go with it because they loved Edinburgh so much, and they would go off and rather be taxi drivers or work on the trams or anything else rather than move.

Francis Tusa: All I will say is that I think you will be surprised in the broader sense how international that work force is. It is working for an international company. Its support facilities will all be down south; they are anyway. If there is no R and D budget in an independent Scotland to support radar developments and so forth and no support, why-

Q235 Chair: I am sorry, but I am just trying to identify the key issue. Rather than the location of the skills, in future terms it is the R and D budget, and who has got it and who is going to spend it that will determine it.

Francis Tusa: To give an example of what happens to skilled engineers who love the place where they work and so forth, before the TOBA was signed, on the submarine side Barrow was wasting away at a rate of knots because there was physically no work in Barrow for the engineers. Funnily enough, they loved living on the edge of the Lake District; they had a gorgeous, halcyon life, but they were getting bored rigid and leaving to take jobs all over the rest of the UK and Europe. If you love the engineering that you do and you are in a job where you are literally sitting at a desk with no work, you tend to move pretty quickly. That was the experience of highly skilled maritime submarine engineers at Barrow. They were just leaving and going off to work, funnily enough, at Rolls-Royce and other businesses because there was no work there. It was only once the TOBA said, "No. You won’t just be paid to sit at your desk; you will be paid to carry on working on submarines doing real work", that got people going. Why become an apprentice in a factory where basically you do not do the work? That is a very physical real example. If people say, "How do you know this has happened?", that is what happened at Barrow. I am always surprised at quite how many people you met 15 years ago in one defence company in Britain and then you meet them five years later in a totally different one in a different area. I suppose it is because engineers of a certain type are still in short supply, but the demand is high. They are commodities and they move, and they get poached. Believe you me, at the moment there is a very lively transfer market between some of the companies, and I would not see that changing.

Q236 Chair: Is that a view the other two would accept?

Professor Chalmers: To a large extent it is. I think industrial policy is important. Some of these technologies are dual use; they have a civilian as well as a military dimension. I do not think that all manufacturing industry is going to flee from Scotland in the months after independence. So much will depend on international competitiveness and whether a new independent Scottish Government has the structures and regulations in place to support them properly.

In the specific area of defence, having export control regulations that are easy for companies to relate to will be very important, because an independent Scotland would have to have a separate set of export control regulations. Would that regulate exports between different parts of the old United Kingdom? Would you have to have an export licence to send a pump from Scotland to another subsidiary in England-

Q237 Chair: But if you assume that a separate Scotland behaves rationally, it will want to minimise that.

Professor Chalmers: Yes, it would.

Q238 Chair: It would have an interest in minimising that. There are EU rules. There are a number of problems here, but I do not necessarily see that as being one of them.

Professor Chalmers: I do not think that is an insuperable obstacle. I am just adding something else to the very long list of things that a new Scottish Government would have to put in place. In most areas of Scottish life governance has already devolved to Scotland. In defence there is a whole number of things. It is not simply a case of transferring units from one authority to another; it is putting into place a whole system of government, and export control is something that would have to be done right. If you got it wrong, you might tip the balance in terms of location. Companies do not want disruption. There will be some costs in removing facilities from one place to another. So if they can keep it there, fine, but all the signals would have to be right on both sides of the border.

Francis Tusa: It comes back to the question of reasonable behaviour when it comes to the break-up. If everything is done in a slightly harsh, ill-tempered manner, then you will see harsh and potentially ill-tempered decisions being taken on both sides. The chances of, say, the old Ferranti factory staying in Scotland will be multiplied manyfold if there is a very benign, well thought-out and non-rancorous split.

Chair: You may believe that, but at the moment the Scottish Parliament will not even allow us to meet in their building. The signs are not good at the moment. David, I wonder whether we could turn to question 10.

Q239 David Mowat: In a way, we have covered it. The question is about the extent to which procurement would continue outside borders. What you have said is that it will be minimal, and there is no EU procurement issue that would change that.

Francis Tusa: In theory, even defence is meant to become more open market. However, there are rules and regulations that are so easy to work your way round if you do want to continue to buy from your own domestic suppliers. It will take many, many decades before those are-

Q240 David Mowat: Has the EU ever enforced a defence procurement?

Francis Tusa: Occasionally, they send a slightly peeved note to someone claiming they should not be doing this.

Q241 Chair: That will really frighten them, I would have thought.

Francis Tusa: In those cases the note was never answered.

Q242 David Mowat: Presumably, the distinction would occur between bootlaces, as you described, and frigates.

Francis Tusa: Yes. Surely one of the biggest criticisms of the UK’s defence industrial policy, which of course does not exist, is that over clothing, bootlaces and so forth, even when there are perfectly decent suppliers in the country, the resolute driving down of costs or level means it all goes to China. There is an open market but not necessarily for high-tech defence equipment or items that are deemed to be very vital to specific sub-systems.

Professor Strachan: That is really the point, is it not? The dual use argument is about things for which there is an open market in which Scotland might thrive rather than things for which the market is a much more restrictive and closed one.

Q243 Chair: There is one further point about the EU. In the event that it is decided that a particular procurement contract will be placed outside the UK or the rest of the UK, my understanding is that under EU legislation Scotland would not be able to get favourable treatment on that. It could not say, "We are not going to buy it from within our own borders but we are going to buy it from Scotland", because presumably that would be contrary to EU competition legislation. I was under the impression that the exemption to competition legislation under article 236, or something similar, applied only to your own boundaries, not just to your pals, who might not be your pals by the time you get to that position. Is that a fair assessment?

Francis Tusa: If anyone was ever able fully to enforce EU competition rules as far as defence equipment is concerned, then you would not be able to show favour to any particular source; but, as I say, you can get round these regulations so easily if you want to.

Q244 Chair: To be clear, you are saying that, if the UK wanted to favour Scotland in placing defence orders over anybody else in the EU, it would be able to do so.

Francis Tusa: If someone is an incumbent manufacturer, they will have the inside knowledge on the product, how the user uses the product and so forth, which will be worth tens of millions of pounds in research costs and so forth. If they cannot come in with a cheaper bid on that basis, then there is something wrong about the business. It is very easy, and it happens all over Europe, with the incumbent or preferred supplier. Someone writes the specification around a specific product that no one else possesses. Believe you me, that is happening every day.

Q245 Chair: That would happen only in circumstances where there was an incumbency advantage.

Francis Tusa: Unless you have cases where someone has a product that you believe is the one you want and therefore your operational capability guys write the operational capability round that product. When you come to the contracting, someone says, "I’m amazed. Out of the six people who were offering, only one person can meet it." That is one of the oldest tricks in the book for any procurement agency. As I say, it goes on with shocking frequency.

Q246 David Mowat: What you have said is that the UK is buying the stuff in China anyway, if it can. Therefore the likelihood of it favouring Scotland is pretty remote in that instance.

Francis Tusa: If you were looking at those low-value commodity items and so forth, yes, it would be incredibly limited.

David Mowat: It depends what they are.

Francis Tusa: There has been no evidence of anyone wishing to show favour towards UK suppliers in this area.

Q247 David Mowat: If we look at the position of Ireland, Norway and Denmark over the last decade or so, have we seen much in the way of joint procurement? Have they said, "We’re all quite small. Let’s get together and do stuff"?

Francis Tusa: There has been some. For the NH90 helicopter the Nordic nations teamed together, realising they would get better bargaining power.

Q248 David Mowat: Is that a model for Scotland? It is of a similar size and therefore that is what it will have to do.

Francis Tusa: It would make the defence pounds, or whatever, go a hell of a lot further than if they tried just to spend on their own. Ireland does piggyback off the UK a little in some areas and other countries on the lines, "If you’re buying six of them, can we buy one?" If you look at Luxembourg-I am not saying this for comparison at all-for the A400 transport airport the Luxembourgers are piggybacking on Belgium, saying, "When you buy yours, can we chuck one on the production line?" That is a model that works for the smaller states. It has worked in helicopters before and it works in consumables like guided weapons.

Q249 David Mowat: I suppose it is not a model that lends itself particularly well to a large indigenous defence industry, because what you are doing is taking marginal capacity from other people’s industries.

Francis Tusa: Yes.

Professor Strachan: But it is the model you would expect Scotland to end up having.

David Mowat: It is pretty rational, but it is not one that gives you an indigenous defence industry.

Chair: The final major area which we want to touch on-we touched on it earlier-is nuclear.

Q250 Mr Reid: I had better declare an interest that Faslane and Coulport are in my constituency. Let me start with Francis. Earlier you seemed to suggest that it would be fairly straightforward to replicate the facilities elsewhere. Was that for both the Trident and Astute submarines?

Francis Tusa: In terms of the boats themselves, there is no shortage of places they can be based all over the rest of the UK. There are facilities nuclear-cleared for handling of those boats. You have Devonport; you still have a facility at Portsmouth that can take them. This ignores for the moment issues like sea access and sea lanes. There is Barrow. There are more nuclear facilities around than people think. I have heard people in NATO say, "We can’t possibly move from Faslane." You ask, "What if an independent Scotland tells you that you have to move?" One admiral said, "We won’t." Hang on, if that is the standard of debate, there is a degree of denial here. That was why I started to start to look at where things might go and I found out that there are almost replicated support facilities, funnily enough, at Barrow and Faslane. Is there a shiplift at Barrow? Yes, sure.

Q251 Mr Reid: Would there be enough space for all the Trident and Astute submarines?

Francis Tusa: At Barrow you could probably have only two, but they have looked at Milford Haven and you could get all four in there.

Q252 Mr Reid: But there are all the Astute ones as well.

Francis Tusa: The Astutes go down to Devonport; there is more than enough room there. There is an article of faith that it cannot be moved. Could the nuclear coast of Cumbria take a facility? Yes. They have Barrow, which is nuclear-cleared; they have handled nuclear warheads. There are places like Aldermaston and Burghfield. People have not thought about these. They say, "We can’t use them." Especially in the aftermath of announcements spending £5 billion extra to keep the facilities going and the infrastructure built up, these are places where nuclear warheads are stored anyway.

Q253 Mr Reid: But at Coulport and Glen Douglas there are massive underground stores for weapons, nuclear and non-nuclear. Could you replicate those at Barrow?

Francis Tusa: If you want to, sure.

Q254 Mr Reid: How long would it take you?

Francis Tusa: The nuclear ones would take longer, but that is why you use Aldermaston and Burghfield in the short term. You need to bear in mind how many other facilities all over Britain were sold off. As to digging extra bunkers, especially in the south- west with high unemployment, if you were to be a really Machiavellian politician trying to take votes away from the LibDems and get more Tory votes in the south-west, you would be chucking quite a lot of work down to the south-west; likewise, Wales. Are you telling me there are not plenty of facilities and areas where you could not put these facilities in Wales?

Q255 Mr Reid: How long do you estimate it would take to replicate the facilities?

Francis Tusa: Everyone always says it would take decades. How long did it take to build Coulport in the first place?

Q256 Mr Reid: I have no idea.

Francis Tusa: In terms of the physical engineering, it took about three and a half to four years, but in the meantime is there any reason why you cannot use Aldermaston and Burghfield to store the warheads? Can we not speak to our best friends across the channel now who have spare facilities? Could we ask if we could borrow some bunkers? Something tells me that President Hollande would probably say yes. It is just an article of faith that you can never move any of the boats anywhere; none of the facilities could be replicated anywhere else, and it would all take far too long. I have to say that it comes from people like the Navy guy, who says, "It just can’t happen."

Q257 Mr Reid: I want to pursue Francis’s view first. No doubt there will be an alternative view in a minute. What about the skilled work force at Faslane? Between workers and sailors there are several thousand people that obviously have to be housed somewhere.

Francis Tusa: There is a skilled work force at Devonport who have been handling nuclear submarines for the last 30 to 40 years. There is no shortage of people down there to do it. There is Barrow for maintenance and overhaul; they are building these things.

Q258 Mr Reid: Where would you house the sailors?

Francis Tusa: If you have seen how many spare houses and barracks there are in Plymouth, they are considering selling three or four of the barrack spaces there. To come back to a point made far earlier about why some of these issues are not raised before we even get to a referendum, I think it is very worrying, on the issue of property and land sales across the UK regardless, that people come up with decisions to sell facilities without really thinking of some of the longer term conclusions. I have only heard of one person at a fairly low level in the Navy who is looking at the estates plan and saying, "What if?" We are going to be downsizing in Plymouth quite substantially. There is a lot of area of housing. I know that the sea close to it is not regarded as ideal, but they have been basing S-Boats and T-Boats out there for decades, so it cannot be that "unideal", otherwise, they would have moved years ago.

Q259 Mr Reid: Presumably, the Navy has these stores at Coulport and Glen Douglas for a good reason. You seem to be suggesting that we could base the warheads at Aldermaston, but they have to be loaded on to the submarines in pens. I do not know the technical details of how you go about doing that, but I would have thought that, if you are storing them at Aldermaston and then loading them on to a submarine at Barrow, you may need the intermediate storage space that you currently have at Coulport.

Francis Tusa: But you have nuclear-rated facilities at Barrow anyway. Again, it is the art of the possible, and the art is possible. Would it be in the short term as easy as Coulport? No, because it is just across the loch; it is a short drive and so forth. But the idea that it is impossible to countenance any changes is wrong. Even the warhead stock is going in and out of Burghfield for overhaul and maintenance; there are nuclear convoys driving up and down the motorways, maybe not quite on a daily basis, but it is not a once-in-10-years event. This is happening.

Q260 Mr Reid: How much of an increase in nuclear convoys would you have if you were basing your warheads at Aldermaston and then loading them at Barrow?

Francis Tusa: Naturally more than if you were across the loch between Gare Loch and Coulport; of course it will be more, but we come back to the very simple point about what happens if there was an independent Scotland with the attitude, "Right; that’s it. The nukes leave."

Q261 Mr Reid: If they were given, say, a year to get out, would that be long enough?

Francis Tusa: The boats, shiplifts and so forth could sail south, as long as they had the crew to man them. Could they find them barrack space in and around Plymouth to stay in Wallace? Yes, of course they can. Warheads are more problematic because, unfortunately, you cannot just chuck them on Eddie Stobart’s vehicles and leave them at service stations. You have to take care of them, but there are more options open than people have thought about. I put it to a French admiral not that long ago whether he would object to having British nuclear warheads stored, and his reaction was, "No, of course not; we’ve got spare facilities." Bearing in mind the rapprochement between the two nations, he thought it would be an excellent idea.

Q262 Mr Reid: Perhaps Malcolm and Hew have a different viewpoint.

Professor Chalmers: I do. Nothing is impossible, and Francis is quite right to say that. I think it would be much more difficult than he suggests. One of the things that I have done in the past is look at the public records of the surveys, which are now available, that the Government did right back in the early 1960s as to all the alternative bases. All the ones Francis has just mentioned were looked at in that process. There were good reasons why they ended up with Scottish locations right at the top of the list of preferences. A lot of the issues at that time, which would be greatly intensified today, were in relation to the safety margins that the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate would insist on. Unless you are prepared to rehouse a very large number of civilians and close down areas of housing and so on, it limits where you can put the particular facilities.

Aldermaston is not really relevant. Aldermaston is not on the coast. Aldermaston is where we go to refurbish warheads, so that is already part of the operating cycle. The issue is whether there is another coastal location in England, Wales or Northern Ireland that could replicate what we have at Faslane and Coulport. Devonport is a possibility.

Q263 Mr Reid: Are you ruling out Milford Haven and Barrow?

Professor Chalmers: Milford Haven was quite high on the list in the past. There are these large LNG facilities there now that were not there in the past. Perhaps somebody should look at that again, but the idea that you could base these facilities there, with this very important economic and industrial facility there today that was not there back in the 1960s, gives rise to real problems. Some of the people I have talked to suggest that that is not on the cards.

This is going beyond my level of expertise, but certainly in the past issues have been raised about how deep the channel is at Barrow and whether you would have to do a lot of dredging, or whatever it might be, to ensure that submarines could go in and out on a very frequent basis. You would have to tackle that issue. Of course you would have to have facilities that were sufficiently distant from population centres in relation to safety margins. Again, you would have to look at that. Barrow was certainly rejected in the past for those reasons.

In terms of going to the south-west of the country, William Walker and I wrote something about this in the past. Given enough time and expense, you could carve out an area for the Faslane-type facility in Devonport. It would take some time, but you could do it. Francis is absolutely right in that respect. The issue would be the Coulport facility. You could not put the Coulport facility in Devonport because there simply is not the room given the safety margins, which would be higher now than they were in the 1960s. There was at that time, and there continues to be, discussion about whether there could be a location near Falmouth for the Coulport facility, which is a possibility and would involve moving a significant number of people, planning permission and so on.

Q264 Mr Reid: Would the distance between Falmouth and Devonport cause problems?

Professor Chalmers: Given the rather more relaxed operating environment we have today compared with the past, it might be possible. It certainly would be more possible than having a much larger Devonport/Barrow-type arrangement of the kind Francis talked about. If you get to a situation in which the UK has no choice, the first thing it would do is take the warheads to Aldermaston and basically continuous at-sea deterrence would end. Then the Navy would be asked, "How long is it going to take you to regain this?" The politicians would then be asked, "What political price and financial price are you prepared to pay to restore continuous at-sea deterrence?" I think there would be an awful lot of nimbyism where you wanted to put the Coulport facility.

Q265 Chair: Noises off there. Just carry on.

Professor Chalmers: There might be employment considerations as well. You would have to look at the location and talk to the people. For people at Falmouth at the moment, having a nuclear weapons facility in their back yard is not right at the top of their agenda, and it would be in this scenario. I think it would take a very long time to work through. It is very uncertain where it would all end.

There would be some period in that process of rapid expulsion where the UK no longer had a continuous at-sea deterrence. In a way, there would be a bluff going on between Scotland and the UK in which the UK Government has no interest in a referendum discussion, or even after it, saying, "Yes, we can relocate; no problem." The Scottish Government have a very difficult choice, because if they push the issue and say, "We don’t care. That’s your problem, not ours", the diplomatic and other costs will be very substantial. I think the UK Government’s reluctance to go down that road is in my view based on considerable worries about the safety, politics and the cost. Of course, if the UK was faced with an imminent threat, and we were in May 1940, a way would be found. I do not doubt that, but we are not in that sort of situation.

Q266 Chair: The point that strikes me is that we are building aircraft carriers that will not have aircraft on them for a while, so it is entirely possible in defence terms to have a gap in capability, is it not? Who knows what might happen in the next two or three years, but at the moment it does not look as if we are likely to require a deterrent since, if nothing else, we are in an alliance with the French and Americans, both of whom do have nuclear weapons?

Professor Strachan: That proposed gap has been canvassed as a possibility in the British case anyway in relation to its nuclear deterrence. If I may pick up the point about nimbyism, I talked about this with Michael Quinlan, who was the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence. He was the man who is most often credited with having underpinned at least some of the British thinking on this. He always used to scoff when I asked what he was going to do when a Scottish nationalist party was in power and there was pressure to do exactly what we are talking about. He lived long enough to see the SNP form a Government, if not have an absolute majority. He said, "I have got to take it seriously now." His response was entirely along the lines of the political difficulty of doing what is being described. People would resist having the Coulport equivalent, especially, in their part of the world, because he assumed, like Malcolm, that the most likely place would have to be adjacent to Devonport and it would be Devonport they would have to go to. He could not see a possibility of doing that from scratch now, as opposed to being able to do it in the 1960s when the cold war provided the impetus and political acceptability for what you were doing. He thought we were now in a very different place. There was so much more public scepticism about the value of nuclear weapons without the imperative of the cold war that it would be very hard to get people to accept this happening adjacent to their homes.

I entirely accept that in a recession employment opportunities might work against that, but you are constituency MPs and you can reflect on the dynamics of this relationship better than any of us. He thought that was the most likely case. Of course he was not a constituency MP. He stressed the Coulport aspect of it particularly, how effectively you could move that and whether you could move it to the south-west, which is presumably where he would have wanted it to be.

Francis Tusa: I come back to one very significant difference between now and the 1960s, 1970s or whatever. The size of the facility that you would be looking at is less than half because of the number of nuclear warheads the UK states it wants. Instead of 500 or 800, of which about 190 would be on one boat, the remainder being largely in
Coulport, you are looking potentially at under 100 warheads. Physically, the size of the facility will be a fraction of that at Coulport. I have these debates with navy guys, all of whom say, "It’s too difficult." I honestly do not believe they have thought of it. I have spoken to former BAE Systems guys and they say, "At Barrow the channel is great; you dredge it out." This is what a lot of other countries do, including the US Navy, when annoying sandbars start growing. They get a dredger and just dredge it. This will be the problem with Portsmouth. For the carriers in Portsmouth they have accepted they will have to have a long-term contract with somebody to dredge the channel. I do not notice anyone getting particularly uptight about that. They make and launch boats at Barrow anyway. Could you use that as a loading facility? I am now trying to think of other operational bases. Is the ballistic missile storage site in Georgia an operational boomer base?

Professor Strachan: Yes.

Francis Tusa: Are you sure? I thought they were up in Bangor, Maine.

Professor Chalmers: As to the issue of Barrow and dredging, in principle that is right. It would cost something because you would have to maintain it continuously. Warhead basing is the number one safety issue. That would severely constrain it. As to Coulport, Francis is right; it could be smaller because of the smaller size of the force, but you would still have to have the safety assurance in relation to loading and offloading missiles and warheads.

Q267 Chair: Maybe this is a daft question. If we can have storage capacity in France, is it possible to have just loading capacity? You store them yourselves, load them on the boats and then the boats sail away. Presumably, it does not matter if you load them in France or indeed the United States, as long as the British control it.

Francis Tusa: We load the missiles in the United States. We do not own any Tridents. They are all owned out in the general pool. When another boat goes on patrol, it is not that that is British missiles 1, 2 and 3; it is missile 7; then the other tube has missile 64. It is a joint stock of missiles. We have the right to access a certain number of missiles; we do not own any.

Professor Chalmers: The option of having the Coulport facility in the United States was looked at when Trident was first purchased. I think part of the reason it was rejected was that it was seen as just a step too far to being perceived as not having an independent deterrent if both your missile servicing and warheads were based in the United States. It would have saved money. There was also an issue at that time, which was not fully explored, as to whether the United States would be prepared to have a foreign nuclear weapons base on its territory or whether it would ask, "If you are not even prepared to have your nuclear servicing done in your own country, how serious are you about having an independent deterrent?"

I think that in the case of France it would be a different dynamic. There may be a stronger French stake in Britain remaining a nuclear weapons state than there is an American stake in that, but, even then, it would not be automatic that the French would be prepared to have a sovereign foreign nuclear weapons base on their territory. They would think twice about it. It is possible; I think it is an option, but I think it would be a difficult one.

Francis Tusa: Do remember we have just started-it is a very early process-of mutual dependency in nuclear design and testing. We are now totally reliant on the French for some areas and they are now totally reliant on Burghfield and the explosives facilities. On that basis, you could say we have both given up our independence in nuclear weapons to the other, without massive investment. It has only just ended, but we would not be able to get back all those areas. If you had spoken to the French about this 15 years ago, a load of Gaullists would have just said, "Non." This is not the case now. I have been following France’s drive back into NATO and so forth, seen French units come over here working with their British opposite numbers at all levels, and the desire to be like that.

Chair: The answer is that these things are not inconceivable. The point you made at the beginning, Francis, was a very good one. It was assumed-we just assumed-that there was no solution, save the status quo. The thing that strikes me is that this is more properly a matter for the Defence Select Committee. As the Scottish Affairs Select Committee we are interested in the Scottish dimension. If there is to be exploration of where else it might go, since presumably if it is moved out of that part of Scotland it won’t be moved to another part of Scotland, it is not really our remit, as it were.

Q268 Iain McKenzie: Regardless of the difficulty or ease of handing over the hardware and so on-I am pretty sure they are all cardboard anyway-there is also the transfer of jobs. A lot of our constituents will work in these facilities. You have already touched on probably a bonanza for jobs in certain parts of the UK. Can you comment on the ease of transfer of those jobs and also the degree of skills that could or would be transferred?

Francis Tusa: In part, it comes back to when we talk about the different regiments and whether people would sign up one way or the other. Some people who heard that Faslane was closing down and it was all going to Devonport might well decide they would move with the work. If you are looking at jobs in Scotland, for example, submarine support and maintenance is done by Babcock, who have facilities both sides of the border. They have flex capability to move either way. If there were different stove-piped firms, it would be more difficult, but the fact is that BAE Systems and Babcock, let alone Rolls-Royce, are the two and a half most important firms with facilities south of the border in different places with the requisite licences. From an industrial point of view, it is not just not inconceivable; for them it becomes a business operations matter to move stuff to a different facility. Will there be some jobs that will not move because people do not want to move? Yes, there will be.

Q269 Iain McKenzie: What seems inconceivable, and probably will not affect that, is what will replace those jobs that transfer, especially in that area of the country.

Francis Tusa: To come back to the point I made earlier about engineers generally, if you are a specialist nuclear submarine engineer, you love that job and the future of that job, as much as a major wanting promotion to colonel and brigadier afterwards, and that is moved to somewhere else-

Q270 Iain McKenzie: You may not be persuaded to stay and work on our ferries.

Francis Tusa: I am not saying there is an easy answer. I am just saying it is not as clear-cut as somebody saying, "No, thank you; I’m going to stay here", if the job you have trained for, and you are potentially a national leader in it, has just shifted 450 miles to the south-west.

Chair: I am conscious that Professor Strachan has to go off in a moment. Alan wants to ask another point, and then we will draw things to a close.

Q271 Mr Reid: Moving on to the next stage, if we assume that the submarines have gone and a separate Scotland is left with all the facilities at Faslane that have not been moved, do you think a separate Scotland would have any use for submarines?

Professor Strachan: It depends. It comes back to every question that you have asked about Scottish capability and the political framework. Yes, of course there is a function for submarines, particularly if you are thinking about maritime defence. There is a presumption at the moment that Scotland will not have them, but it seems a very logical thing for Scotland to want to have them.

Q272 Mr Reid: Would it be a practical proposition?

Professor Chalmers: The key thing is that, as Hew says, there might be a requirement for submarines but it would not be these submarines. The Astute Class submarines are designed for global deployment. They have a very high capital cost and running costs. It is the sort of thing that only a small number of major powers with defence budgets of $70 billion, $80 billion or $90 billion a year can afford. You would have to think about what the shape of a Scottish Navy would be. Like Norway, it might like to have a couple of submarines.

Francis Tusa: That is the whole point. If you look at the comparator nations, the best ones-Denmark, Norway and Netherlands-all have submarine forces and they are modernising.

Q273 Mr Reid: Are these diesel submarines?

Francis Tusa: These are diesel electric submarines, but in certain areas with the modern technologies they are as capable and silent as nuclear submarines, so they are no longer the poor man’s submarine. Some of them are incredibly expensive. As a weird aside in terms of nations and their submarine use, one of the key requirements of the South Africans when they bought their German submarines a decade ago now was not force projection or defence of the coastline but fisheries protection. That may sound really weird, but a submarine can be on station for a long time, whereas an aircraft goes out, does two hours and then disappears, and rogue fishermen are very good at working out, hang on, the fisheries protection aircraft is about to come over and they disappear. One of the requirements for the periscopes from a certain company was to be able to identify and take photos of fishing boats that they could then raid and arrest. I am not suggesting that is the best reason to buy submarines, but it is interesting how different nations look at this.

Q274 Chair: Professor Strachan has his jacket on, so this is really getting serious.

Professor Strachan: I have two generals waiting for me, and I know I have got to get there.

Q275 Chair: You name-dropper. What we want to ask all of you is, first, whether or not there are any other points that you particularly want to raise with us; and, secondly, if upon reflection there are points you wished you had made to us or we had asked you about, we would very much welcome any further correspondence. Professor Strachan, is there any point you want to raise?

Professor Strachan: I do not think there is anything immediately. I think it has been a constant theme throughout this that the foreign policy question ought to come first. You can get much more sensible answers to many of the questions you are trying to address if you have some sense of what the foreign policy would look like, but every answer we have given has been contingent on that.

Q276 Chair: There are just a couple of other points we would like to clarify with the other two victims. To clarify the position on submarines, did any of these states build their own submarines?

Francis Tusa: The Dutch did, but, because of the complexity of some of these platforms, more and more often you go to one of the two key developers and builders, either DCNS in France or ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems in Germany. If you buy enough of them or are willing to put up the money, you can probably do licensed assembly in your own country. One not very good example of how to do this was when the Greeks decided to buy some submarines from ThyssenKrupp and then forgot to pay for them. They started welding bits of hulls the wrong way up and so forth. That one was not a particularly pleasant programme. In terms of conventional submarines, there is no UK design; there are no British yards.

Q277 Chair: I was just thinking for Scotland. Would it be feasible for a separate Scotland to build its own submarines?

Francis Tusa: Yes, it is absolutely feasible. Is there is a learning curve? Yes. It is different from building a surface warship. The minimum number you have to do is four. Below that the economies of scale are insane, because there are not any. If you were building four, the first one would almost certainly come out of either the TKMS yard in Germany or the DCNS yard in France. They would take engineers and workers from Govan to those yards to show them how they are built. This is now relatively common. If you look at DCNS, they are building submarines with and for the Brazilian Navy where precisely this practice happens. The first one/two get built in France and the rest are built in country, and they do technology transfer.

I would not like-it is strange for me-to minimise some of the hiccups you can have. There is a learning curve, but it is doable, and, quite frankly, almost the first question asked by either of the two submarine manufacturers when selling submarines overseas is, "Do you want to build them yourself?", because that changes how you market the submarines.

Q278 Mr Reid: You mentioned that four would be the minimum. Would Scotland need four submarines?

Francis Tusa: The reason I say four is not just industrially; you look at support, training and investment in facilities. Much less than that and you are spending a vast amount on sunk costs. We do not actually need four SSBNs for constant atsea deterrence. Again, that is one of those inconvenient truths. Four submarines allow for one in maintenance, one doing stuff, one going out, and one probably just in training. Four is about the minimum flotilla where you get the advantages.

Q279 Mr Reid: Would the facilities that exist at Faslane at the moment for the nuclear submarines be of use to Scotland with smaller diesel submarines?

Francis Tusa: Yes.

Q280 Mr Reid: It would not be starting completely from scratch.

Francis Tusa: I would come back to the point that Malcolm or Hew made. All of the training would have to happen down in Plymouth and Portsmouth because that is where the facilities are. Would you ever want to try to replicate them? No. For that reason the
Dutch and Norwegians still send people over to Portsmouth because it is just not economic for them to replicate those facilities. As a facility you have all the means of handling submarines.

Q281 Mr Reid: You mentioned the fishery observation. What other uses do you envisage Scotland having for submarines?

Francis Tusa: The broadest one is an insurance policy. Especially with oil and gas rigs out at sea and so forth, you have the ability to say, "By the way, if you do fancy trying to sniff around some of our assets, we are in a position to stop you."

Q282 Mr Reid: You have mentioned fishing and oil and these assets tend to be in the North sea. Faslane is obviously up a sea loch on the west coast. Would you be advising a Scottish Government to base their submarines at Faslane, or would you be looking at a fresh start on the east coast?

Francis Tusa: It would take advantage of what you said. If all the nuclear boats are heading south, you still have a work force with expertise and knowledge of dealing with submarines. They will not say, "My God, what’s this turning up?" They will be used to it. The transition will be far, far simpler than if you were to try to transport a base somewhere totally different. You would then have to build all the infrastructure again. If Scotland had submarines of any type, you would have to come up with an amazing defence and business case not to put them at Faslane.

Q283 Mr Reid: If Scotland had any surface ships-Scotland had fishery protection vessels-would it make sense to base them also at Faslane or somewhere else?

Francis Tusa: You could put some at Rosyth. Again, how many are we talking about? If you are talking about three frigates and four fishery patrol vessels, I suppose the best/worst case, for the sake of argument, is to put the frigates at Rosyth and the smaller vessels at Faslane. But, quite frankly, looking at comparator navies-even New Zealand and so forth-how many of them have two, three or four naval bases? No; they are pretty much down to one naval base. Why? It just makes sense.

Q284 Mr Reid: Could you make an estimate of the number of jobs that a Scottish Navy would support compared with the number of jobs that are supported by the Royal Navy?

Francis Tusa: I could find out the figures for the size of submarine bases in some of the comparator nations, if that would help.

Q285 Mr Reid: It would certainly be helpful, if you could send that to us.

Francis Tusa: Of course you do not have the nuclear site; so you do not have all the safety people.

Mr Reid: That would certainly be useful to have.

Q286 Chair: Do you want to respond to any of that exchange?

Professor Chalmers: Only to say you could make these calculations for the Navy in isolation, but you have to look at the whole force structure. If you put emphasis on surface ships and submarines, the key thing is that in all these areas of the Navy there would be a lot of new buy by Scotland. You are not talking about inheriting; there is not much to inherit that would be appropriate for Scotland, given its income and strategic situation. It would have to be new buy. Would you be able to get them on a sort of long-term hire purchase agreement?

Q287 Mr Reid: Are there second-hand ones about the world?

Professor Chalmers: Second hand is not cheap.2 Would you have a procurement-dominated 10-year initial defence budget? I suspect you would not, and what would happen is that it would take a long time to build these capabilities. You would have to make some really hard choices. If you made the choice, which you could do, to get four Scottish submarines by 2025, you would have to spend much less on aircraft, the Army or whatever it might be.

Francis Tusa: If you are going to go for frigates, submarines and so forth, with all the reasonable assumptions on the size of the budget, you are saying that the Scottish Army will be smaller, because there is not the budget to pay for the manpower of a largish army and then the equipment and high-tech stuff.

Q288 Mr Reid: You are convinced it would have to be new build; there are not reasonably priced second-hand assets.

Professor Chalmers: There are some; there will be a second-hand market.

Francis Tusa: The Greeks are selling.

Q289 Chair: But, if you do not buy new submarines and build them in Govan, the Clyde shipyards shut, which is the reality.

Professor Chalmers: Yes.

Q290 Chair: If they are not building the Type 26, then there is no work. It is clear that you have said they will not be building the Type 26; indeed, that is what the Minister said. Unless it is something like the Scottish Navy building new submarines, there is simply no work.

Francis Tusa: Unless we do "the card" deal and all of the current offshore patrol vessels go to Scotland so that the UK keeps all the Type 23s, or something like that. The other question is the work force required for very sophisticated ships like the Type 45. Compare that with the work force you need to build an offshore patrol vessel like a corvette. It is a small percentage.

Chair: Thank you very much. I hope this has not been too much of an ordeal for you. We have found it immensely interesting. My head is now completely full. If there are any other points that upon reflection you would want to draw to our attention, please drop us a note. We are seeing Ministers immediately after the Whit break. Given the scale of uncertainty, we will be producing a pretty quick report focusing on the need for clarity and identifying a number of the possibilities rather than trying to answer lots of these questions. In a sense we are not in favour of breaking up the Union, and therefore we do not need to produce the answers; somebody else needs to do that. What you have identified for us is that some of these things have to be clarified as soon as possible.

Again, thank you very much for coming along. I am sorry for holding you for a little longer than you might have expected.