Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Smith of Newnham

Committee stage
Monday 18th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has made a telling and persuasive case. I hope it will convince the Committee to support the tenor of Amendment 485 in particular; I added my name to it on Friday last. I strongly agree with what the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, are arguing for in that amendment, specifically on the role of the National Audit Office; it is long overdue.

I want to develop the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, a little further for the Committee. Here are some headline points: £4.8 billion has been wasted on cancelled contracts since 2010. Some £5.6 billion has been overspent on MoD projects since 2010, and £71 million spent on unplanned life extensions. Some £2.6 billion has been wasted on write-offs: there are 20 cases of wastage by write-off in the report that was referred to, contributing to some £2.6 billion—or 20% of total wastage—since 2010. Some £64 million has been wasted on admin errors, including £32.6 million in HM Treasury fines almost uniquely imposed on the Ministry of Defence for poor accountancy practices.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, referred to the ongoing International Relations and Defence Select Committee inquiry into future defence policies, not least on procurement; indeed, I mentioned at Second Reading on this Bill. Last week, we heard from Professor John Louth, who was the director of RUSI’s defence, industries and society research programme from 2011 to 2019. Today, he is a private sector consultant. He shared several important insights into the peculiarities and particularities of defence procurement, not least the need to work with significant uncertainty, because of the speed with which technology moves, and how to strike a reasonable balance between insisting on value for money and having appropriate flexibility. The committee also explored associated issues, such as whether there is an optimal balance between indigenous development and off-the-shelf purchases in defence procurement; what considerations would have to be made; how the Government would intervene to prioritise them; how much of our defence capability needs to be supplied by the state itself, and what can and should be sourced from private suppliers; and who the legitimate partners are in the UK’s defence enterprise—manifestly not companies owned or controlled by countries such as Russia or China.

It was clear that there were other factors which distort procurement in the case of defence contracts. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, enjoys the sympathy and understanding of this Committee that it is not an easy world in which to operate. Professor Louth suggested to our Select Committee last week that there had been some successes, mainly around innovation. However, when asked about this Bill, specifically the measures before us now, he said:

“I tried to read as much into the Bill as possible. But it proved hard to identify the end state which the Government was looking for”—


the very point the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, just made. Professor Louth continued:

“Seeing the approach as an attempt to streamline is sensible but we need an Act that identifies the sharing of risk. There are lines and lines of rhetoric; lines and lines of legal reform—some of it incomprehensible even for those of us who are academics.”


He saw the Bill and its provisions as a missed opportunity, saying that

“quite often the private sector does things best and mixing it directly with what the state does would help enormously.”

He pointed to a high degree of private wealth that is funding our defence research and emerging capabilities but said we would get more value for money if a combined commitment was identifiable.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, referred to Ajax. During last week’s Select Committee proceedings, I asked Professor Louth about this, to which he replied,

“Ajax has been a disaster.”


As we heard from the noble Lord, in June the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee warned about the delays to Ajax, a programme which has already been running for 12 years, a point picked up in this admirable amendment about projects that overrun and the costs to the public purse. It said, and I am sure we all agree, that this risks national security and compromises the position of our defences.

Ajax was intended to produce a state-of-the-art reconnaissance vehicle for the Army. It has cost a staggering £3.2 billion to date and yet it has failed so far to deliver a single deployable vehicle—not one. The vehicles were supposed to enter service in 2017, but Ajax has been subject to what the Commons committee describes as “a litany of failures.” The failures included noise and vibration problems that injured soldiers who were testing the vehicles. As the MoD has been unable to say, even now, when Ajax will enter service, perhaps the noble Baroness can tell us whether she has any further information on that, whether the safety issues have been resolved and if it is likely that they will ever be resolved.

Last week, I reminded our Select Committee that the Public Accounts Committee says the programme has been “flawed from the outset”, but also said it was illustrative of a deeper failing, commenting that the MoD had

“once again made fundamental mistakes”

in the planning and management of a major defence programme. Pulling no punches, it accused the Ministry of Defence of “failing to deliver” vehicles which the Armed Forces need to

“better protect the nation and meet … NATO commitments.”

In the current situation, with one eye eastwards on Ukraine, this is a very serious statement by a senior committee of this Parliament.

Meg Hillier, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, spelled it out in these terms:

“Enough is enough—the MoD must fix or fail this programme, before more risk to our national security and more billions of taxpayers’ money wasted. These repeated failures … are putting strain on older capabilities which are overdue for replacement and are directly threatening the safety of our service people and their ability to protect the nation and meet NATO commitments.”


Some 324 hulls for Ajax-family vehicles have been built, along with 74 turrets, and 26 vehicles have been handed over to the Army for training purposes. The PAC report points to “operational compromises” which the Army has been forced to make, which include the prolonging of the use of ageing Warrior armoured vehicles which came into service back in 1987 and are expensive to maintain.

In total, the contract with General Dynamics is worth £5.5 billion, and the PAC says that it doubts whether the programme can be delivered within existing arrangements. We have a duty to make a forensic examination of what Professor Louth told us in the International Relations and Defence Committee last week has been a “disaster” and what lessons might be applied via this Bill, especially lessons about poor project management and inadequate contract performance, soaring costs and lengthy delays even before contacts were signed.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the same issues have been raised again and again in various attempts to reform procurement. This has all been at great cost to the public purse and, as I have argued, at a risk to our national security. This Bill should be much clearer about how it intends to put flesh on the bones of a strategic relationship with industry, focusing on delivery within the budget and on time. What a pity it is that this Bill is not in draft before both Houses, being examined by parliamentarians during pre-legislative scrutiny, rather than being placed in the context of the many other diverse issues that we have been considering.

In conclusion, Ajax was a heroic figure from Homer’s Iliad. Apart from Agamemnon, he was the only principal character who received no substantial assistance from any of the gods—perhaps they will come to the aid of the Minister today. She can at least be heartened that Poseidon struck Ajax with his staff, renewed his strength and joined in Ajax’s prayer to Zeus to remove the fog of battle to see more clearly the light of day. I have no doubt that the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, will do precisely that. I hope we will lift the fog and support these amendments.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 485. I will also speak to Amendment 101, which was not signed by noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches, although there is clearly some interest in the issue of whether we use British suppliers for defence. There were some reservations from the trade team, the international team and the business team about whether we should be focusing solely on looking at British suppliers for defence contracts.

One particular question I would like the Minister to consider, which may be something on which the Labour Front Bench also has view, links to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, about whether it is more appropriate to have bespoke defence contracts or whether sometimes it is better to have off-the-shelf procurement. In that context, I would very much like to hear the Minister’s response to Amendment 101.

The reason for not signing this amendment was not that we do not support British industry; clearly there are a huge number of opportunities in particular where we might be looking for small and medium-sized enterprises to be very closely involved in the delivery of defence contracts. Most of the high-level contracts we have talking about—the catastrophe of Ajax, the major extensions, the cost and time overruns and the failures of defence procurement—are about the high-level programmes, but there will be many subcontracts within them. Trying to support our small and medium-sized enterprises is clearly desirable. If there is a way of doing that, alongside ensuring best value for money, there could be some interest in this amendment. However, it needs a lot more exploration and perhaps, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, it would have been better having pre-legislative scrutiny to explore how we look at procurement.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, stole many of my lines, including many of the notes I made during, and the points I raised at, Second Reading, to which the Minister did not have the opportunity to reply, because her colleague, the noble Lord, Lord True, was responding instead. In line with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, I am very much looking forward to hearing a series of answers from the Minister which will enable us to understand in what way this Bill is intended to help defence procurement. In many ways, the idea of having a single Bill that deals with all types of procurement is superficially very attractive, yet, as the Grand Committee has already heard, it is not clear in any way, shape or form how this Bill is going to improve defence procurement.