Defence Budget

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for reading out the names of the two members of the Armed Forces who have recently died in Afghanistan. I would like to associate these Benches with the condolences to their families and friends and to support the Minister in his reference to the wounded. The two members of the Armed Forces concerned were involved in the extraordinarily difficult task of mentoring the security and armed forces of the Afghan Government. I am sure that we all admire the courage necessary to carry out that task in such difficult conditions.

I thank the noble Lord for repeating that very long Statement—it took him a bracing 15 minutes to do so. I have been faced with Statements and papers throughout my career. Those documents have varied greatly in length, and my suspicions have deepened as their length has increased. One way to work out whether a Statement or paper says anything is to précis it. When you précis something again and again, you can see what is left at the end. If there is not much left after that process then there cannot have been very much there in the first place. I put it to the House that this is a profoundly vacuous Statement. It says very little indeed.

The first thing that it does not contain is a plan. You would think that a Statement about defence expenditure over the next 10 years would have a plan associated with it. The Statement did not contain a plan—it promises a summary of a plan some time in the future. It does not even give a date when that plan will be put forward.

What else does the Statement say? One of the few new things it provides is an overall figure. It says that the equipment and support plan for the next 10 years involves £160 billion—that is the hard figure in the middle of the Statement. It then goes on to explain how that figure is made up. It says—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—that £8 billion will be available over the next 10 years to adapt to the changing world. So, over 10 years, 5% of that amount will be available for innovation, new equipment and new threats—things that we do not know about now. Some £4 billion will be available as a contingency, which is about 3% of the overall figure. So £152 billion will be available over 10 years and the Government have got things so right that they can manage with a contingency of 3%. I put it to noble Lords that that level of accuracy simply is not credible.

What else will the plan contain? Does the Statement mention any new acquisitions? I do not know—I could not see any. Although it mentions the decision to purchase three offshore patrol vessels, as opposed to leasing them, we have heard everything else before. Is there anything new in the Statement? Are there any new cuts? I cannot see any new ones. I can see no mention of how money will be saved.

Let us go back to what the Statement purports to say. I should add that the press reports about what the Statement would say were rather more exciting than the Statement itself. I invite the Minister to correct me if I have overread the press reports, but they seemed to imply that the Secretary of State for Defence would say that there would be no more cuts over the next 10 years—no more cuts until 2022. That is pretty ambitious. If that is what the Minister said, I am sure that noble Lords will welcome it. If nothing else, we will not have so many Statements to look at when plans change.

Does the Statement say that there will be no more cuts? The closest reference I could find was:

“I can tell the House today that, after two years’ work, the black hole in the defence budget has finally been eliminated and the budget is now in balance”.

Is the budget in balance for 10 years? Will there be no more cuts over the next 10 years?

What does this promise? Once again, I looked through the Statement. Does it promise anything different from the SDSR of October 2010? That was a very precise document. For instance, it stated on page 19:

“The new Defence Planning Assumptions envisage that the Armed Forces in the future will be sized and shaped to conduct … an enduring stabilisation operation at around brigade level … with maritime and air support as required, while also conducting … one non-enduring complex intervention (up to 2,000 personnel), and … one non-enduring simple intervention (up to 1,000 personnel)”.

Does this equipment plan with its balanced budget still commit the Government to resource our Armed Forces to meet that commitment?

Throughout the SDSR there were a series of statements about numbers of ships, although fewer about numbers of aircraft. We heard about changes to the size of the Army and about a different way of approaching the carrier. Otherwise, are all the commitments in the SDSR fully funded in the plan referred to by the Statement?

I am amazed at the brilliance of the Government. About a year ago, there were what seemed to be extremely well informed rumours in the press—in the Times and the Daily Telegraph, which are normally well connected—that the Government in the SDSR had created a plan that was underfunded by more than £1 billion per annum. May I assume from the Statement that by some miracle the problem about which defence chiefs or their agents briefed the press—the massive gap between what was aspired to and the money available—has been bridged? I cannot see, without any new cuts being described and without any changes other than those mentioned, how it has been bridged.

We know that a very large number of civil servants—about one-third—will disappear. In my career I purchased a large amount of materiel. It was not for the military but for the railways. The essence of doing that efficiently is not underfunding professional capability but if anything overfunding it to get the right contracts, structures and monitoring. Will the Civil Service, after these massive cuts, have the capability to keep hold of this plan and deliver on it?

I find this to be an incredible aspiration, and an incredible Statement that is impossible to judge. I look forward with bated breath to the NAO report and its judgment on whether it will work. I hope that the Minister, in spite of not yet having the report, will be able to assure us that the Statement really means that there will be no more cuts to equipment programmes for the Armed Forces for the next decade.