Strategic Defence and Security Review

Derek Twigg Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right. The whole point about this review is that it has a vision for what our forces should look like in 2020—10 years’ time rather than just five years’ time. Because the Ministry of Defence and the service chiefs can now see their budgets for the whole of the spending review period, they can make proper plans and try to drive some efficiencies through the MOD so that they get even more for the money that they have. We must have reviews every five years. The problem has been that we had a review in 1998, which was not properly funded, and then a sort of scissors crisis, in which the commitments went in one direction and the ability to fund them went in another direction. To stop that happening in future, we need regular defence reviews and that is what we are committed to having.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

We have now seen some of the biggest cuts ever in defence, as we saw when the Conservatives were last in power. The so-called party of defence is no longer the party of defence. The Prime Minister has already said that we should be out of Afghanistan in five years, no matter what. Do the assumptions he has made assume that that is still the case and that the capability will therefore reduce over those five years?

[The Prime Minister]

Along with our NATO partners, we believe that there is a clear programme of training up the Afghan national army, police and security forces so that they should be in the lead by 2014. That is our aim, and in addition I have said that by 2015 we should not be in a major combat role or there in major numbers. By then we will have been in Helmand province for longer than the entire second world war. We will have played our part, and I am confident that we are making good progress so that the 2014 calendar to which NATO is committed will go ahead. I do not accept that taking long-term, difficult decisions about the defence of our country makes us somehow anti-defence—the opposite is true. I am passionate about our armed forces, what they represent in our country and what they do on our behalf, but we do not serve them by putting off decisions for the future, making all sorts of airy-fairy promises and then not funding them.