Strategic Defence and Security Review

Bob Ainsworth Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

May I just say a word on the process? I know that the Backbench Business Committee debates are a new procedure, but we need to settle into having some predictability and consistency in their organisation. Last week, there were no wind-ups, but this week there are to be some. Last week, we spoke after the Minister, but this week we are to speak before the Minister. Hon. Members need to know where they stand. I understand that this arrangement is new and I understand, therefore, why some of these issues are arising, but we need those things to be sorted out.

The strategic defence and security review will define our armed forces for the foreseeable future, and the Government will have to take fundamental decisions about their shape, size and capabilities. The report published this week by the Select Committee on Defence raised serious concerns about the speed of, and the consultation process adopted by, the review. Many of those conclusions did not come as a surprise to me, and I agree wholeheartedly with much of what the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) said and what is contained in his report. It has been clear for a while now that the Chancellor is firmly in the driving seat, carrying out this review at breakneck speed and potentially sacrificing our long-term strategic priorities to the need to cut costs. That is an incredibly short-sighted approach, for which the country will pay a heavy price, and somebody needs to put the brakes on. Perhaps it will be the Minister. Before the election, he said:

“We know that whoever wins the election, the Treasury will make life difficult for the Ministry of Defence, especially in the light of the public deficit. All of us in the defence community within the political sphere will have to kick up rough to help to keep the Treasury at bay.”—[Official Report, 15 March 2010; Vol. 507, c. 643.]

He is now Minister for the Armed Forces and if he does not know how to kick up rough, he has a fair few people at his disposal who have the first-class ability to do so. He seems to need a few lessons in self-defence, and he has people at his disposal who can teach him if he does not know how.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for making his point. Does he not recognise that we would not be having this discussion about a rushed strategic defence review if his Government of the past 13 years had had timely and thorough defence reviews throughout that period?

[Mr Ainsworth]

I would not have given way to the hon. Gentleman if I had known that his intervention was going to be a boring repetition of things that are said repeatedly. I will come to the substantive point that the Chair of the Defence Committee raises in a while. I do not underestimate the difficulties that the Government face and the hard choices that need to be made, but they are not going about this in the way that will capture the support of the country, of the armed forces and of Parliament as a whole, and that will enable them to do as good a job as they can in the circumstances. If Government Members were to stop and reflect on that, they would know that what I am saying is true.

The Government will need to address the failure to consult the public and the broader defence community, as identified by the Defence Committee’s report. The failure to consult industry properly will have a serious impact on the ability to supply equipment to our armed forces. The Government appear to have stopped their work on acquisition reform, and will publish their industry and technology policy only next year. They cannot treat procurement and industrial capability as an afterthought; it must be an integral part of the strategic defence and security review.

The Defence Secretary has undergone a remarkable transformation since being in government. He has gone from being Oliver asking for more to being the Artful Dodger, ducking responsibility for his decisions. As entertaining as that spectacle has been, I would prefer to have a Government who acted like a Government. Before the election, the Conservatives called for an extra three battalions for the Army and more helicopters—how many times did they demand more helicopters? They also called for more vehicles and more ships. They now claim that they did not know what the financial position was, but that simply does not stand up.

I say to the Chair of the Defence Committee that we all knew that there were pressures on the defence budget. That is why we commissioned the Gray report and why I took the tough decisions I did last December. I decided not only to prioritise equipment for Afghanistan, but to reduce, ahead of the strategic defence review and to the degree that could be done outside an SDR, the pressures on the defence budget. What was the response of Conservative Members? They howled their disapproval at the cuts that were being made. They knew the situation, they knew the general financial framework of the world markets and what that had done to the British economy, and they knew that there was overheating within the defence budget, yet they continued to howl for more. As a result of what they said and did in the run-up to the election, there is not a member of the armed forces—not one—who would have believed that a Tory Government would not have brought extra funding. The Conservatives told people that efficiency savings would be all that was needed to deal with the budget.

Now the tune has changed but the methods are really quite worrying. Every week in the Sunday papers—rapidly, it is becoming each day—we are treated to more and more briefings dripping out of Whitehall. Will the carriers go? Will the Royal Marines be brought under Army command? What is the future of the joint strike fighter? What about the Tornado? It is government by leak and spin despite all the noble talk.

Nobody is laying out the options. Nobody is explaining the dilemmas to the country, to industry or to the armed forces. Nobody is pulling together and presenting a coherent plan. That is not the way to conduct a strategic defence and security review.

[Albert Owen]

The shadow Secretary of State is right to compliment the Defence Committee Chairman’s outlining of the fears that cutting too quickly will hurt even more. However, does my right hon. Friend agree that one effect of the leaks and stories before the announcement is that they are damaging morale, particularly among those people who are training for the long-term future and who will be posted overseas into combat? Morale has been affected hugely, and any hasty cut could also end up costing the country more money in the long run.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Before Mr Ainsworth replies, may I say to the hon. Member for Ynys Môn that we must try to have short interventions? A lot of people want to speak and there is a lot of interest in the debate, so I appeal to all Members to make sure that interventions are short.

[Mr Ainsworth]

I would say to my hon. Friend that the people in our armed forces are pretty robust and they can put up with an awful lot. I do not overly worry, having got to know them over a three-year period, about their morale. However, they are worried and they do not believe that they are consulted, and that goes for every rank and for every level of the armed forces. They do not believe that this process is being carried out in anything like a reasonable way. They do not believe that they are having an input, and that goes for industry too. Anyone who talks to the defence industry will know that it is worried about the sequential way in which the Government are going about this, instead of the holistic way that is necessary if they are going to take the right decisions and to capture all the complexity of the process.

On our nuclear deterrent and the latest piece of spin, I do not believe that the BBC is wrong. I do not believe, either, that some special adviser is responsible. I believe that somebody high up in the Government is casting the bread on the water and is thinking about delaying the replacement in the way that is being reported.

Let us be clear about the consequences, which were so well laid out by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) on the radio this morning: short-term savings, massive long-term costs—one might ask what the Conservatives have been complaining about, yet here they are talking and thinking about such things—industrial interruption, safety risks and a very real risk to our ability to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrent. In short, it makes no sense operationally, industrially or financially. As the hon. Gentleman said, one can decide to have a deterrent and one can decide not to, but delay makes absolutely no sense at all.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

I very much support the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex on the radio this morning, but I feel that the shadow Secretary of State’s comments would have far more gravity if he had pushed forward with the review of Trident rather than waiting until after the election.

[Mr Ainsworth]

The hon. Gentleman was not here in the last Parliament. He will know if he looks at the record that we took decisions on Trident in a timely way in 2006 and that we put work strands in place. Those work strands cannot be significantly disrupted without massive industrial consequences. We have a skill base that is pretty unique and capable of building those submarines. We lost it before and we had to rebuild it. If we lose it again, we will have to rebuild it again, but perhaps the Government do not want to do that. Perhaps they are seriously trying to get rid of our nuclear deterrent without a debate. I do not know, but all I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that the person who cast the bread on the water this morning is either a total fool for proposing the delay in the way that they are, or there is some other agenda. The other agenda must be either to get rid of or to reduce massively our deterrent. Perhaps that is a debate that we should have, but I do not understand the common sense—neither does anybody else who knows anything about it—behind the trailing, spinning and leaking that has gone on.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

May I seek to reassure hon. Members on both sides of the House who are firmly committed to the continuation of the nuclear deterrent, given that I was my party’s spokesman on this issue for many years, that both I and the Secretary of State for Defence came into politics primarily to ensure that this country would always have nuclear weapons as long as other countries have them? I cannot answer directly for the Secretary of State for Defence, but I would be amazed if he remained Secretary of State for Defence if a decision of the sort that was aired on the BBC were to be taken in defiance of all the pledges given to the electorate and given to Conservative MPs by our leadership when we were asked to join the coalition.

[Mr Ainsworth]

Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman that I do not believe that the current Secretary of State is the person who is responsible for casting the bread on the water and doing the spinning this morning. The problem that we have is the same problem that we have in dealing with the strategic defence review—not only are the Government not talking to industry, the armed forces and the country, but their members are not talking to each other. I asked the Secretary of State on Monday if he would repeat his unequivocal support for the Trident replacement. Not only did he do that, he absolutely leapt at the chance. However, within the hour, the Government’s position was being clarified and now we have the situation that we are in today.

To coin a phrase, we can’t go on like this. We need the Minister to have a Government position—not a Liberal Democrat position—and to give that position to the House so that we know exactly where the Government stand. Let us stop hearing all this nonsense through the BBC and from leaks, spins and so on.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

The shadow Secretary of State mentioned that he would be happy for there to be a debate on either side of the argument. Will he confirm that his party’s Front-Bench position is to keep Trident and to maintain our nuclear deterrent?

[Mr Ainsworth]

We had a manifesto that I helped to write. The Conservatives had a manifesto and the Liberal Democrats had a manifesto, which was the only one that caused confusion. I think that that confusion was deliberate—they were trailing their coats to those who use the unilateralist argument on the one hand while trying to reassure other people that they were doing no such thing on the other. Their proposed alternative does not appear to me to make any sense whatsoever. What I am saying to the Government is that if they are changing their position because of the financial circumstances, they ought to have the decency to share it with us.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Kensington) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is obviously right to raise what could be a very serious issue. The suggestions in the press, none of which have been confirmed, are that the decision to place the major contracts on Trident could be delayed until the next Parliament, which is presumably due to begin in 2015. As the major contracts at the moment are only expected to be signed in 2014, I hope he would agree that a 12-month delay would not be that serious and might allow the decision to be taken in a more favourable economic climate. If, on the other hand, the Government were contemplating a five-year delay beyond 2014, we would be in a very different situation.

[Mr Ainsworth]

Or even in a more favourable political climate. One of the difficulties is that people accept the reasonableness of what the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said and do not think it is a very significant decision. He needs to research this matter because, when it comes to building submarines, we have slowed the drum beat down so much that our ability to slow it down further simply does not exist. There is already a gap and we will lose the capability, which we will have to recreate—if we want to do so—at considerable expense to the taxpayer. That will not be for years to come—it will not be in the next two or three years—but down the line the expense will be massive and the kind of overheating in the defence budget that the Chairman of the Defence Committee complains about will have been hugely exacerbated.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree not only that we must seek to learn the lessons of history, after the Vanguard was not replaced quickly enough with the Astute programme order, but that if the same mistake were repeated, the dangers would be even greater given the civil nuclear programme that we hope will be carried out in parts of Cumbria and across the UK, and given the greater danger of drawing skills away from the Trident successor programme?

[Mr Ainsworth]

My hon. Friend understands that issue in greater detail than I do, but I think he is absolutely right.

I know there is a lobby within the armed forces for such a decision. The Treasury’s decision to transfer the cost of the deterrent to the MOD budget has been described by some as game-changing. If that decision is being taken, it cannot be taken in a hole in the corner; there has to be proper debate. The Government cannot do their business in that way. If they are seriously thinking about changing our posture, that is a profound decision for Great Britain to take and they will not get away with doing it in secret. We created our nuclear capability in secrecy, but we are not going to abandon it in secrecy because that is not the way of the world nowadays. Nobody is going to be allowed to do that. It will need to be done openly and properly, if it is to be done at all. I am worried that there is quite a lobby for it, which I can understand because people are worried about their ability to maintain other capabilities in the circumstances in which the armed forces find themselves, but we come back to the process and what the Chairman of the Defence Committee said: the Government need to do things in an open, embracing and proper manner, and not in the way in which they are doing things now.

[Sir Menzies Campbell (North East Fife) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman knows that my views are rather different from his, but I applaud his call for an open debate. On whether the funding should come from the defence budget as presently constituted or from some other source in Government, which does he believe to be the correct course?

[Mr Ainsworth]

I have said to members of the armed forces that to some degree that is academic because it all comes from the same pot at the end of the day. The understanding has always been, and the structure of the defence budget is, that the defence budget pays for the running costs of the deterrent and the Treasury pays for the capital costs of replacing the deterrent. If the budget were transferred without a dowry of some description to offset the costs, the issues would be pretty profound for the rest of defence capability. Which pot the money comes from is a matter of Government accounting. What I am saying is that if these pretty profound decisions are being seriously considered—if they are just about delay they do not make sense, but if they are about something else they are core to Government policy—then they ought to be discussed openly and not attempted through any sleight of hand.

I have gone on for too long and many hon. Members wish to speak. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] With the discomfort that there is on the Government Benches, I see that people want me to move on, so let me address one final issue—the welfare of our armed forces. As well as it being the duty of any Government to repay and honour the sacrifices of our armed forces, it is also essential to retain world-class forces. No matter how many fast jets, tanks or other equipment we have, they are nothing without the incredible people who operate them. We introduced many reforms when we were in government, including a sustained investment in accommodation, the doubling of compensation for the most serious injuries and the provision of greater access to education, housing and health care. As a Government, we were determined to honour our duty to those fighting on the front line and as a party we will support the Government in building on those achievements. That is why I am glad that they have adopted our election proposal of enshrining the rights of our service personnel in law, but so far we have seen no detail. When will the Minister present his Bill and what will it include?

I know that many Conservatives are concerned about what the coalition’s cuts will do to those in the most need of support. Does the Minister have the same concerns about the impact of those cuts on our armed forces? His party, and he personally, promised to increase the pay of the lowest paid in the armed forces so that nobody would be paid less than £23,000 a year—I am sure he will remember that—but the Government’s pay freeze will hit all those who earn above £21,000. It seems that not only the Defence Secretary is undergoing a transformation.

The review will be pivotal for the future of our nation and for our armed forces. It must be carried out in the right way, for the right reasons, as determined by our long-term strategic needs. No matter what the Defence Committee Chairman says, I know that he agrees that it must not become simply a cost-cutting exercise in which the Treasury calls all the shots. Sadly, the signs are not promising.

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[Nick Harvey]

The figure is certainly spread over the 10-year period of this review. The gap between the commitments that the Labour Government made and the budget that was in place to pay for it is £38 billion. Before the election, both Opposition parties charged the Government with doing just this. We did not know the scale of it, and it turns out to be even worse than we had charged. We therefore have no choice but to face the gravity of that legacy and set about the task of trying to build future defences that are coherent and effective, but doing so against that budget background. We hear that different Government Departments are being asked to indicate what it would entail to make reductions in their budgets of a different size. Let me explain to the House that if the defence budget were to be cut by 10% in real terms, the defence programme would have to be cut by 19% in real terms in order to achieve that. That is the meaning of the black hole that we were left by the previous Government, and that is the scale of the task that the current Government are facing.

The Chairman of the Defence Committee summed up the situation very well at the beginning of his speech when he talked about speed and the issues that have to be determined about how the process is taking place. Let me make this perfectly clear. As I have said in interviews this week, the time scale of the review is a great deal brisker than we would have chosen in an ideal world, but this is not an ideal world—it is a world in which we have been bequeathed the financial situation that I have described, and that needs tackling as a matter of urgency. We have to ensure that the decisions that we take in the next few weeks in the SDSR are sustainable not only over the short and medium term but over the long term, and they have to proceed in parallel with the Government’s spending review. The alternative would have been just to sit back and allow the Treasury to dictate a spending envelope in which a strategic defence review that we might have conducted at a more leisurely pace would be obliged to fit itself, whereas by doing the work at the same time as the comprehensive spending review, we are able to fight our corner within the spending round having done the work involved.

The right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) said that everybody involved in defence in the political community—he quoted my words from before the election—should kick up rough. My sense is that that is exactly what everybody is doing, and I am sure that he is happy to play his part in that process.

[Mr Ainsworth]

Everybody apart from the hon. Gentleman and the Secretary of State, perhaps.

The hon. Gentleman is aware that my predecessor as Secretary of State ordered the Gray report, that I published it, and that National Audit Office reports were published before that. He knew what the situation was. When did he or his Conservative now-friends call for cuts in defence to deal with it? When, prior to the election, did he ever do that? Did he ever do anything other than ask for more?

[Nick Harvey]

Every time there was a defence debate in this House in the two or three years before the election, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members repeatedly quizzed Ministers about the apparent gap between the promises they were making, the plans they were laying down and the funds that they appeared to have at their disposal in order to fulfil them. Time and again, they stood there pretending that it all added up, and the fact of the matter is that it did not.

The right hon. Gentleman refers to the Gray report. That very telling report specifically identified the true situation on the procurement side. However, that was only half the story, because the black hole existed not only in the procurement budget but across the whole defence budget, and that is the scale of the challenge that now faces us.

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[Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

We have had an excellent debate. There has been the usual mixture of party political fencing, good defence analysis and knowledge, and discussion of constituency and single-service interests. These debates follow a particular pattern but are none the less enormously useful.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who was the Minister for Veterans, has asked me to make a point about the comments regarding Luke Cole. We make this point constructively, but the ministerial team needs to stay on top of such issues and to be sceptical about what they are told if they are to make sure that the agreements that have been reached and the care that is, in theory, provided to people is actually provided through the chain of command. I appeal to Ministers to be as diligent as my hon. Friend and his predecessor about the welfare side of the veterans job.

We are about to go into the conference recess. I do not intend to put forward my name for the Labour shadow Cabinet, so this might—one never knows what will happen—be the last time that I speak from the Front Bench in this place. I was the Minister for the Armed Forces for two years, the Secretary of State for 11 months and I have been the shadow Secretary of State for about four months. My involvement with the MOD and the military has been life-changing and, on the whole, enormously rewarding. It has had its low points and many high points and I have worked with some amazing and fabulous people, including military personnel, civil servants, politicians and special advisers. Some great people work in this area of policy.

Let me mention one or two of the things that I have been involved with. I was totally in favour of commissioning the Gray report; I supported my predecessor in that and I never tried to suppress or delay the report in any way. I was totally in favour of my predecessor-but-one’s commissioning of the Haddon-Cave report, which was a devastating report on the systems that we had in the MOD, and I never tried to put any spin or gloss on that. It was enormously important that the MOD learned, or had the opportunity to learn, all the lessons that it needed to.

I was in charge of commissioning the service personnel Command Paper, and I had a lot of support from many good people in making sure that that was a useful document that actually delivered something for our service community—against much resistance, I have to say. I commissioned a Green Paper to try to help whoever was to be in government—us or the Conservatives —to prepare for the very difficult strategic defence review after the election. I did that in an open, broad and cross-party way, not for tactical reasons but because it was the right thing to do. I think that helped in some small way with some of the difficulties that people now have.

In my time as the Secretary of State for Defence, I never widened the gap in the defence budget; indeed, I closed it a little. The opportunities to close it outside a strategic defence review were limited, but we closed it none the less and we took some very difficult decisions in order to do so. What I am most proud of is that we moved force density in Task Force Helmand a long way in the right direction. Helmand is the most difficult job our armed forces face today. They need not only equipment, helicopters and vehicles but boots on the ground and enough of them to cover the ground. We moved force density in the right direction, and I am enormously proud of that.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

Will the right hon. Gentleman please accept that I confirm what he has just said in every respect? In his service to the House, the country and the defence of this country he gained and earned our admiration and respect, and we thank him for it.

[Mr Ainsworth]

That is very kind of the right hon. Gentleman. A number of people have said kind things.

The defence of this country faces some difficult choices. It is not my responsibility or that of my hon. Friends to help the Government in that regard; it is our responsibility to hold the Government to account. There are no easy options. Salami slicing is not going to work. It is the Government’s responsibility, and it is in their own interests, that they do not walk away from those difficulties because, if they do, all that I would say to them on a personal level is that avoiding hard choices is a bit of a matter of character, but organisationally it can be habit-forming. And if they form that habit, they will pay a heavy price.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Harvey]

I suppose I am mildly surprised not even to have seen the usual suspects. In fairness, we have heard from them before very many times on these matters, so I think we can rest assured that their perspective is understood. The right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) said, quoting me from before the election, that all parts of the political community interested in defence would need to get together to make our views clear to the Treasury—“kick up rough” was his expression.

[Mr Ainsworth]

It was yours.

[Nick Harvey]

It was my expression, which the right hon. Gentleman kindly elevated to make his point.

I say to all Members present that it is not at all unhelpful to Defence Ministers that we will be able to illustrate to the rest of Government the strength of feeling that has been expressed in this debate. I am grateful to all those who came to take part and put their point of view.

We are wrestling with very difficult issues. The financial background is that which I described earlier; I do not intend to repeat all that now. However, even if we were conducting a defence review at this time and there were no financial difficulties at all, we would still be making big and significant changes, and we cannot do that without some pain and collateral damage. It is not possible that everybody speaking from every part of the country and every part of the defence community will get what they want at the end of this process. We must acknowledge that and realise that if we are to reconfigure our forces to equip them for the challenges that we believe, in our best estimate, they are likely to face in the 21st century, then there will be change. Some capabilities will be less relevant in future than they have been in the past, and we will have to identify the new areas that will require additional investment to equip the forces in the way that we want them to be equipped.

Not all these decisions are self-evident. It is more than a decade—12 years—since the last formal review, and the world has changed immensely in that time. Furthermore, we have learned a lot from the operations that we have been involved in during that time. I very much agree with the right hon. Member for Coventry North East that the force density taking effect in Afghanistan now is having much more impact than we had on our initial entry into Helmand. The military have learned from these experiences, as have the Department and the NATO coalition. When we consider how we prepare force structures for the future, we have to learn those lessons. We cannot be exempt from the overall overhaul that we can see taking place across Whitehall. However, retaining effective defence will certainly be our priority, and we will not allow that to be undermined by the financial predicament in which we find ourselves.

Comments have been made about the speed of the review. As I said earlier, I have a great deal of sympathy with what the Defence Committee said in its report. It would not be from choice that anybody would conduct a review at this speed. I pay tribute to the previous Administration for the work they did last winter. The Green Paper process, with its cross-party nature and the involvement of an advisory panel that brought in a variety of interests, paved the ground for the work studies that took place prior to this stage of the review, which have in effect laid the agenda on the table and enabled the National Security Council to get to the point where it can decide the priorities and make the decisions.

Let me turn to some of today’s contributions. I should like to respond to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal), which was picked up by Opposition Front Benchers. I take the point. The right hon. Member for Coventry North East—in a very level and, in no sense disloyal, way—encouraged new Ministers to question quite vigorously the information that we receive from officials and the military, and the point is taken. I will personally ensure that we do go away and have another look at that case.

Similarly, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) raised the issue of rest and relaxation and the fact that it ought to begin from the moment people get back home. I entirely agree that that is the most desirable way of doing it, and if in particular circumstances it proves, for operational reasons, not to be possible, we have guaranteed that we will add it on at the end, when people get back. That is a sub-optimal solution, but it may on occasions be necessary, for operational reasons, to handle it that way, and we will ensure at any rate that people do not lose out. My hon. Friend made a good point.

I re-emphasise that we are still listening to representations from a wide variety of interests and will continue to do so until the end of next week. If any hon. Members, even after having had the opportunity in the House this afternoon, have further points that they or anybody with whom they are in touch wish to make, the end of next week is the deadline for doing so. We have, as I said earlier, had almost 7,000 representations, so although the process has been brisk, the opportunity for a diverse range of interests to feed in their thinking has been there, and many have taken it up. We will do our absolute utmost to process all that and arrive at the best possible conclusion, if we can, in the light of it.

I think it was with some sadness that the House heard the right hon. Gentleman say from the Dispatch Box that this was probably his last contribution in his current capacity.

[Mr Ainsworth]

Maybe.

[Nick Harvey]

Maybe, he says. I should like to echo the words of the Defence Committee Chairman and others in paying tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his work throughout his time in defence. He is very, very highly regarded inside the Ministry of Defence. He is remembered not only with affection, but with a great deal of respect, as somebody who was able to see the wood for the trees, take a decision quickly and get it right. He has earned a big reputation in that area, and it will go with him.

The right hon. Gentleman’s plea in mitigation that the gap between the programme and the budget—upon which I charged his party earlier—had shrunk during his tenure is possibly, just about, true, and to the extent that it is I commend him for it, but he served only to make the point that the mismatch between the programme and the budget had existed for a long time. Indeed, in all truth it dates right back to the strategic defence review of 1998, which set out boldly on quite a sensible and well regarded path, but it was underfunded from the first year and the gap continued to grow thereafter.

However, we wish the right hon. Gentleman well and thank him for the contribution that he made. He will be remembered by both the armed forces and the Ministry with a great deal of respect and admiration.

We will publish the SDSR later in the autumn, and I am encouraged by the fact that there is a degree of cross-party agreement on what we are trying to achieve. I hope that that will be sustained when it comes to understanding some of the tough decisions that we will inevitably have to make. The public and the armed forces will understand when we in this House seek to represent the interests of our constituents; what they will not understand or appreciate is if politics infects the response to the SDSR. We have to make incredibly important decisions and keep in mind at all times the shape and configuration of the forces that we think we will need in 10 years’ time, at the end of the period that the SDSR is considering; but we have to get ourselves from where we are today, in our financial situation today, to where we want to be then, and at the same time sustain in Afghanistan the operation that we are undertaking there. It is gaining momentum and genuinely advancing towards the objectives that we have set.

Nothing will be done to undermine the work of our forces on the front line, but those difficult decisions will, nevertheless, have to be made, and I am sure that we will return to them in this House in due course, when the decisions have been taken and the situation is understood for all to debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of the Strategic Defence and Security Review and future of the UK’s armed forces.