Defence Review

Baroness Wilcox Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilcox (Con)]

The way in which the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, has put his Question together is fairly open-ended, which gives a lot of us a chance, so I have lost two pages of what I was going to say by now.

I picked up the Times newspaper last week and was rather delighted to read that our national shipbuilding strategy has gone to work. It has recognised the challenges faced by the MoD and the UK industry and set out an ambitious plan to improve the way in which the MoD goes about procuring warships and how industry responds to the MoD. Procuring Type 31e through a competitive process within UK shipyards and with a capped cost of £250 million per ship will not only ensure that the Royal Navy can afford to buy enough of the ships it needs to meet its global commitments but will deliver value for money for taxpayers and strengthen UK industry, including through exports. We can do that because, right now, no other shipbuilding can match the price tag for our frigates.

I was also very tickled to read in the article that it looked like the end of BAE’s monopoly after all that time. Here we have competition back again. So I am a little more optimistic about what is going on. I am rather keen on us all having these fights every now and again. If we keep doing it, we will eventually feel that we are where we need to be. The man that we had involved with this is Sir John Parker, the industrialist and veteran of shipbuilding. Such men and women will take us to our next fight.