UK Defence Spending

Dave Doogan Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Defence Committee with the knowledgeable insight that he brings to these debates.

Defence expenditure brings with it an opportunity to extend fairness into every corner of the country. There is nothing quite like the ability to invest in manufacturers and contractors in all parts of the United Kingdom, and the Ministry of Defence should take this role and opportunity very seriously. However, it does not take it as seriously as it should. Scotland and the south-west of England have almost the same population, yet MOD statistics released in January this year show that, when compared with the south-west of England, Scotland receives only approximately one third of the MOD expenditure—one third of the spend per person and one third of the direct MOD jobs per 100,000. Actually, it is worse than that. When we add the MOD spending in Wales and Northern Ireland to Scotland’s, we still arrive at a figure that is below that of the south-west of England. I do not understand how the Government can justify a single region of England, with half the population, benefiting from receiving more MOD expenditure than three quarters of this so-called Union.

Defence expenditure can be a complex issue, and that is set out very clearly by the Public Accounts Committee, which deemed that the 2019 to 2029 equipment plan is too expensive by between an estimated £3 billion and £13 billion. Plans for efficiency remain rose-tinted and optimistic. For example, £4.7 billion of savings are assumed without the remotest indication of how they will be delivered. Of 32 of the top priority programmes,a third are at serious risk of not being delivered on time, with capabilities reaching full operational standards two years late. It is not too hard to see where the money is going: the money is going on waste, and, on that, I will touch on the Type 45.

The oldest Type 45 in service has been in service since only 2011. The order was cut from 12 to six, with the price rocketing, like a sea-skimming missile, beyond the £1 billion per ship mark. There were more than 5,000 operational defects in five years, with a bill of more than £50 million to rectify them. They were brought into service too early, with untested propulsion systems and now have to be retrofitted with different engines at a very early stage in their lifecycle, costing £160 million that could have been invested elsewhere. It is just as well that the Type 45 is an exceptional fighting warship, given its propensity to find itself stuck. The MOD has a habit of hiding behind the complexity of that extremely advanced warship, but inconveniently for the MOD it is not the highly advanced air defence, anti-ship or anti-submarine systems that are falling over; it is the ship’s basic ability to move. Royal Navy sailors deserve far better than that.

On fleet solid support, the entirety of the order should be fulfilled in domestic yards in the UK. Does the MOD believe that by offshoring large elements of the manufacturing supply chain stimulus it is somehow teaching English and Scottish yards a lesson? If so, what is that lesson? I think it might be not to trust the MOD with future workstreams. The notion that a £1.6 billion order for defence equipment could be manufactured in foreign yards to the benefit of their apprentices, supply chain and steel industry shows a Department apparently all over the place in its procurement priorities. It demonstrates that the Government, as currently set up, are blind in many cases to the value of a potential tender, and fixated rather on the price.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Is it not worse than that? Everyone agrees that the Type 26 frigate will be a fantastic addition to the Royal Navy, but HMS Glasgow is taking 10 years to procure, and that is because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) suggested, of what the Government do on all such contracts: they push it to the right to fit the in-year budgets, which leads to costs. That short-termism also means that other projects cannot be funded.

[Dave Doogan]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, if for no other reason than raising the Type 26, which will allow me to highlight that, despite the MOD, we at last have a tremendous ship with very significant exportability, as we have seen with our allies in Australia and Canada. All credit to BAE Systems for the outcome of what has been a less than ideal procurement process, as tends to be the way. Type 31, the steel for which will be cut shortly at Rosyth, is another tremendously exportable frigate for the Royal Navy, and will demonstrate the first-class nature of manufacturing in Scotland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, to the benefit of people working here.

I move to the air. While final assembly of foreign-made ship blocks in the UK is patent nonsense, final assembly and component manufacture of aircraft makes much more sense. To that end, I move to the new medium lift helicopter programme to replace Puma, and so on. The competition between Leonardo with its AW149 and Airbus with its H175 means that they will not be British-designed aircraft, but they will require manufacturing in the UK. Can the Minister assure the House that the contract award need not necessarily follow traditional rotary-wing procurement routes, but will instead place a very stringent pre-qualification on maximising UK content, workforce and suppliers, together with a cast-iron commitment on apprenticeships—the type of value added over and above the asset delivery that the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) set out so clearly? To do so would allow the MOD to best deploy defence expenditure resources for the benefit of communities, as well as air service personnel and operators. That scoring of societal benefit in tenders is vital going forward. It maximises return on investments and minimises waste.

I do not have time to go into the Challenger 3 upgrade, which is not an optimistic proposition, or the royal yacht that is not a royal yacht but might be a flagship but is not a real flagship. We are still trying to figure out what exactly it will be. I will move on instead to the broader consequences of waste.

Waste in defence spending comes with a political cost that I am not much concerned with; I am far more concerned by the operational and opportunity costs of haphazard defence expenditure. The effects of that may be seen in the poverty of our defence housing. Earlier this week, the National Audit Office said that many barracks were in very poor condition. Issues with heating and hot water were the most common complaints. The NAO also highlighted a £1.5 billion backlog in repairs to military accommodation, with only 49% of people residing in that accommodation saying that they were satisfied, which is a decrease from 58% in 2015. So a really bad situation is getting even worse. The NAO found that nearly 80,000 people were occupying single living accommodation blocks either full-time or part-time, and 2,400 of those were in housing so bad that they were not even being charged rent.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) tabled amendment 41 to the Armed Forces Bill, which was dealt with just yesterday, to demand that defence housing standards are at least as good as, if not better than, the relevant local housing standard, wherever the accommodation is in the UK. That will not be going forward, much to my disappointment. I do not see why our armed forces personnel should be living in accommodation that is worse than anywhere else in the surrounding community. It should not be an either/or, but if this Government could get a grip on defence procurement spending, they might find the capital required to invest in the dreadful accommodation that many of our service personnel are currently enduring. Whether it is defence expenditure or anything else, spending is about choices, and I am very clear that we are not currently making the right choices in the UK.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I have to inform the House of a correction to the result of the deferred Division held yesterday on the motion on the conference, November and Christmas Adjournments. The number of Members voting Aye was 568, not 567. The number of Members voting No remains three. There is no change to the outcome of the Division.