National Shipbuilding Strategy

Debate between Chris Stephens and Julian Lewis

Thursday 11th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Lewis]

That is true, because if we fall below what one might call critical mass, we will not be able to maintain the necessary footprint to support the construction and manning of vessels on a consistent basis. That is why the question of the fleet solid support ships is so important. Those vessels can be classified as warships or, if we choose not to, simply as auxiliaries. We have that choice, and it is a choice that we feel, on a cross-party basis, it is necessary to exercise.

The trouble that the Ministry of Defence runs into is that every time a long-term strategic view suggests to it that we ought to make an investment of this sort, it runs up against the short-term imperative that the defence budget is so small that cuts must be made at every opportunity, even where, as in this case, they are short-sighted and storing up problems for the future.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

I thank the Chair of the Defence Committee for giving way. Is there not another priority for the MOD—the increased submarine activity we are seeing from Russia? The lack of Navy surface vessels could contribute to that. The modernising defence programme really needs to address that issue.

[Dr Lewis]

I entirely endorse what the hon. Gentleman said, and I am glad that he mentioned the modernising defence programme. I will take a moment to talk about that exercise. It was felt at the time that the programme was not a very substantial document, but it did rescue the armed forces from what I can only describe as a bureaucratic ambush laid out for it by something called the national security capability review.

Right hon. and hon. Members will remember that that mini-strategic defence review was an exercise that I believe began in 2017 and was conducted not by the Ministry of Defence but by the National Security Adviser, who is currently also the Cabinet Secretary. It was designed to consider security, intelligence, cyber-warfare and defence all in the round. I even heard Sir Mark Sedwill in front of a Committee on which I sat refer to a £56 billion defence and security budget, thus taking all the budgets and putting them together, as it were, in a single basket. There was only one snag with that. If the review decided, as it was minded to do, that much more money needed to be spent on what was called “21st century threats” such as cyber-warfare and ambiguous or hybrid warfare, as there was to be no extra money for anything, the already depleted conventional armed forces would have to be cut further.

The hon. Gentleman’s point is therefore particularly pertinent. Although we live in a world where we face new hybrid warfare, cyber-warfare and other highly technological threats we have not faced before, that does not mean that the traditional threats on the sea, under the sea, in the air and on land have gone away. It is a profound mistake to say that, just because we need to spend more money to meet novel threats, we can afford to spend less money to keep up the strength of our conventional armed forces.

I referred briefly to the Defence Committee’s original report from April 2016, entitled “Shifting the Goalposts?” that set out charts showing the decline in defence expenditure to barely 2%—and that figure was achieved only by including certain categories in the total, such as war pensions, that NATO guidelines allow us to include but we never previously chose to. We just scraped over the 2% line by doing that. I will not spoil the effect by revealing in advance what the new figures show, but believe me, they are not cause for great comfort.

We are now at a stage when we are expecting a change of Prime Minister. Every Prime Minister has a honeymoon period. Even the present one did—sadly, it did not last all that long. In this case, the person most likely to become the next Prime Minister projects an optimism, a sunny personality and a robust world view.

I suggest that all of us, from whichever party we are, should remain united on one thought—there will be a brief window of opportunity. There will be a moment when we will have a new occupant of No. 10 Downing Street who will be full of the joys of spring. This will be our chance to say that the great naval traditions, all those matters of history and all the events in which his great hero, Sir Winston Churchill, participated as First Lord of the Admiralty and later as Prime Minister will be laying, as another Prime Minister once said, the hand of history on his shoulder. What better way to shake the hand of history than to restore defence spending to its rightful place in the scale of our national priorities?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Stephens]

That is an excellent analogy, perhaps better than the one I used. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct: these are warships. If it looks like a warship and acts like a warship, it is reasonable to assume that it is, in fact, a warship and not a civilian ship.

The criterion should be changed to designate fleet solid support ships as warships. If I understood correctly the answers the Minister gave the right hon. Member for North Durham and others in Monday’s Defence questions, that will be the direction of travel. It is all very well saying that will be the future direction of travel, but it should be the immediate one for those contracts. The GMB trade union has said—a point emphasised by my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman)—that 6,500 jobs could be created by securing that; £285 million of the estimated cost of the order could be returned to taxpayers—money that would be lost should the order go overseas. That is an important criterion that the Ministry of Defence, and the Treasury, appear to overlook.

After four years in this place I am starting to believe that it is the Treasury that makes the defence decisions, not the Ministry of Defence.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Definitely.

[Chris Stephens]

Apparently the Chair of the Defence Committee agrees. If the Treasury is making those calls, surely it has to take account of the fact that the workers who would build those ships would pay income tax and national insurance that would go back into the Treasury coffers, but that will not happen if the contracts are sent to other places. Unite has estimated that the Treasury would receive 36p in every pound from those defence projects. This is an excellent opportunity for the Minister—in the next two weeks, before his elevation—to demonstrate the Government’s commitment to taxpayer value by making sure that the ships are built in the UK. I have other constituency demands, which I have lobbied the Minister about, and I hope he will take my advice on those in the next couple of weeks, too.

There are plenty of examples of other countries—normal-sized nations or larger ones such as the UK—that better plan their sovereign naval defence capability, build their warships and keep their drumbeat going. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife highlighted, and as shown in my exchange with the Chair of the Defence Committee, this issue is important in the context of current Russian activity. The excursions into Scottish waters are increasingly blatant but there are still no Navy surface vessels based in Scotland—they are all based on the southern coast of England. That seems a very curious way of organising defence when there is increased Russian submarine activity.

As others highlighted, promises have been made about the shipbuilding industry. We heard the classic one that there would be 13 Type 26 frigates; the Treasury then interfered and they became eight Type 26 frigates, and then five Type 31 frigates. Despite that announcement more than three years ago, I still do not know exactly where the Type 31 frigate sits within the Royal Navy and what its purpose will be. It may have a general purpose, but where does it fit in? It is just a smaller and cheaper ship, and that seems to be the only reason it exists. That ship was supposed to be exportable—one that would be easier for BAE Systems and others to sell abroad, so perhaps we might think about going back to 13 Type 26 frigates. In relation to the Type 31 frigate, the Minister should look at the benefits of the prosperity agenda across the UK; I hope he will give a commitment to that.

Now, there is the frigate factory. A former Defence Secretary still insists that the frigate factory exists in the Clyde, and has found himself arguing that twice in the House of Commons Chamber. On one occasion, the GMB trade union and a BBC journalist with a television camera went around the site of the proposed frigate factory and found ash. There is an important point here, which is contained in the all-party parliamentary group’s report, and I hope the Chair of the Defence Committee will pick it up: the Ministry of Defence needs to look at giving some support to shipyard investment. It is no use the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence insisting that they want the industry to build more efficiently and save costs if they do not help the industry to invest in its own shipyards. That shipyard investment can ensure that ships are built more efficiently and cheaper.