Summer Adjournment

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

Defence is the first and most important duty of Government, and it demands particular responsibility when, as now, we face the need for significant reforms. If we do have to cut, we must do so with care. Instead, the Government are making changes that will greatly affect our capabilities and our role in the world without a proper assessment of our needs, without proper consultation, and without proper scrutiny in Parliament. It is unacceptable that the Secretary of State should have appeared in the House yesterday to announce major changes across four critical policy areas with less than an hour for the House to debate them. The British public, and our armed forces, deserve better.

The problems facing our armed forces have grown under successive Governments. Labour’s record included reducing the number of civil servants in the MOD by more than a third and by making reforms to the structure of the armed forces after we came to office. We recognised the need for further reform, which is why we commissioned the Gray report on defence acquisition. We could have done more, and we must take our share of responsibility, but we should not stand by and watch when the coalition Government get it wrong.

I accept that there are genuine challenges facing the Secretary of State, but it is increasingly clear that the strategic defence and security review was a rushed and compromised process, driven by a Treasury agenda and a Treasury timetable. That is not just my view but that of the Defence Secretary himself, who said that

“this process is looking less and less defensible as a proper SDSR and more like a ‘super CSR’.”

It is no wonder, that nine months on, the incoherence of the review has been exposed.

It is always difficult to second-guess military decisions in opposition. However, is the Prime Minister’s judgment not called into question, given that he argued that there are few circumstances in the short term in which the ability to deploy airpower from the sea is essential? Libya undermined that assertion after just five months, and it could be 2020 before we have full carrier capability again. The Royal Navy as a whole has been cut to the bone, even though it is important to the flexibility and reach set out by the national security strategy. At the same time, our island nation is eliminating our maritime patrol aircraft. We now know that there are more cuts to the Army to come. In reality, as Chatham House put it,

“the cuts are actually far greater than those that were imposed by any previous UK defence review.”

Finally, the SDSR fails to deal with the underlying problems in the way the military is structured and run. That is why more than two thirds of defence experts described it as a missed opportunity. It put in place a number of piecemeal reviews that will not deliver the structural and coherent changes needed to address the organisational problems at the Ministry of Defence. I do not believe that that is good enough, so once again I ask that the Prime Minister do the right thing for our armed forces and our country and order a new chapter to this outdated and inadequate review.