Defence Acquisition Reform

Earl of Minto Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, “over-complex, over-budget and over-time” is how major programmes of defence procurement have been characterised not just by the opposition, our enemies or even our allies but by the Minister for Defence Procurement in giving this Statement in the other place. Defence procurement has, over years, been riddled with problems, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, pointed out. While this Statement is very welcome, there is a question about whether it goes far enough or thinks about the wider pattern of defence procurement.

I read the Statement as it was produced and put into the Printed Paper Office last week. It said, “Check against delivery”. I read it, and there were various points where I thought, “Surely no Minister actually said this”. I went back and looked at Hansard to see what the Minister for Defence Procurement said in the other place and, indeed, some of the slightly strange comments were made in the House of Commons. I will therefore ask a few very specific questions.

What we have as the fifth aspect of the new approach to procurement is:

“Fifthly, we will pursue spiral development by default”.


Other noble Lords might know what spiral development is, but I am afraid that I do not. The Statement did not give me much clarity on it, nor does the document that was produced to go alongside it, so I hope the Minister can explain a little more what spiral development means.

Even more, however, I would like to know what is meant by the next line:

“seeking 60% to 80% of the possible, rather than striving for perfection”.

I realise that there have been concerns about the fact that we have looked for exquisite solutions and platforms that are so highly specified that they become ever more complicated, with the timeline for procurement shifting ever further to the right. However, “60% of the possible” raises a lot of questions. Does it mean that only 60% of our ammunition is going to work, or that only 60% of our trials of Trident will work? Given that we seem to have had a couple of problems with Trident recently, I very much hope that the Minister can explain what this means. There is nothing in the Statement or the document that explains clearly that we do not want to spend so long over-specifying things that we never deliver the platforms or equipment that our Armed Forces need. Do we think that we need to specify less? What do the Government mean?

The Statement talks about learning the lessons of experience, which is clearly very welcome. We do not want another Ajax. Learning from that experience is highly welcome and I am sure the Minister would be very grateful not to have to face the situation that his predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, did, of repeatedly coming to your Lordships’ House and having to answer questions about Ajax for which, frankly, there were not any good answers.

Do the Government think that just learning the lessons of the recent past is enough? Will that deliver, at pace, as we say we need, the defence equipment that the United Kingdom needs in an era of unprecedented challenges? Will the noble Earl, in his response, tell the House how far this procurement model will really help us deliver beyond what we have been seeing and help ensure that, if we are sticking at 2% of GDP on defence expenditure, which seems to be the case from the Budget, that we are actually going to be equipped at the level we need to be to face the challenges that we and our allies are facing, and send the messages that we need to be sending to Russia, China, Iran and other countries, some of which we certainly would not think of even as collaborators in international relations?

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (The Earl of Minto) (Con)]

My Lords I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for their questions and their very well-made points. The whole point of this paper is to look forward, not to the past. I think there is a full acceptance on all sides of the House that we can agree on the need to reform our acquisition processes, because they are rooted in the past, not in the current; and of course they ought to be rooted in the future.

As mentioned by my honourable friend the Minister for Defence Procurement in the other place,

“the long-standing weaknesses … are well known”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/24; col. 354.]

They include highly exquisite requirements—“exquisite” is his word—constrained export opportunities, vulnerable supply chains, personnel wary of speaking up when problems emerge, not to mention the overprogramming and unintended competitiveness between different parts of the organisation for finite funding. All these have to be addressed if we are going to move forwards.

I draw all noble Lords’ attention, if they have not already been made aware of it, to the publication placed in the Libraries of both Houses last week, Integrated Procurement Model: Driving Pace in the Delivery of Military Capability. Within that document, noble Lords will find the five core principles through which we will deliver acquisition reform. For the benefit of the House, these are as follows—some have already been mentioned.

A coherent, joined-up approach across the defence portfolio to break down the silo nature of procurement.

New checks and balances to challenge assumptions. Taking expert advice from the outset of projects, not half way through, when it is either too late or no longer appropriate.

Prioritising exportability. Far too much of what we have done has been tailor-made. We work in a global market now, where there are skills and abilities outside our shores, sitting with our allies, where we should not only take advantage of their industrial capability but also the sales opportunity that it presents to us.

Empowering industrial innovation through greater transparency and common endeavour. Transparency is so important in this ability to be honest about the situation as things progress. We need to be able to have the honesty to challenge each other the whole way through the process, to make certain that we do not disappear down blind alleys and that things are produced to time and to budget, when they ought to be, and that everybody feels open enough and relaxed enough to be able to challenge some of these issues.

Then there is the whole question of continuous improvement, or spiral development. Spiral development is a new term for me as well. I come from the private sector, where it is called “test and refine”. The principle is very simple. There is a point when you know that what you are doing is capable of achieving the aim. It is not perfect, but you test it, you use it, you learn and you refine it. You can also refine it for other customers as well: you have the base model, it works well, you can test it and then start to develop it in various different directions, to do various different things that you might want, but also what any potential customer might want. It does make perfect sense, I must admit.

Before turning to the questions quite rightly raised, and some of the challenges, I will look at the way procurement has been taking place. Let us be in no doubt, these are extremely complex pieces of technology and equipment, and they do take a long time to bring to fruition—particularly some of the larger ships and aircraft, as I am sure noble Lords are fully aware. It is a long gestation process, where checks and balances need to be inserted at the right place. But it appears to me, looking from the outside, that the process is well overdue an update, and that it needs to be much nimbler, quicker, more open, more collaborative, more informed, more technologically advanced, more digitally enhanced—you name it. There is such opportunity here.

Will it work? Well, it has certainly made a good start. I will mention just a few things about where we have got to. We already have some initiatives under way, and they are starting to improve things. We are starting to drive pace; risk and complexity are being looked at; senior responsible owners and their teams are much more focused; the strategic alignment is getting better; and the capacity and capability of the professionals involved and the SROs is improving. Psychological safety—this idea of being open and honest with each other and having a non-blame culture, which I do not think we have had in the past—pan-defence category management and financial savings: all these things come down to capability having to be holistic. To have an effective operation and delivery across organisational boundaries, you have to have a holistic view.

I will now address some of the questions. The question of value for money, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, which I am sure everybody is aware of, is a question of budgeting and taking a sensible approach, being up front about the budget and making certain that the opportunities and contingencies within the budget are transparent. That is very much the case.

On the question of underlying mismanagement, there are various plans in place within the organisations to ensure greater accountability, less project management and more specific accountability for specific parts of work, which makes the whole ownership that much easier and more driven on a private sector opportunity basis.

I think I have addressed the questions of analysis and accountability in speaking on the empowering of individuals. Will this work? Like everything, it is never going to work from day one, but it is a real move in the right direction. It is the current way that large industrial organisations work now, and the ability to insert SMEs in the process the whole way along is absolutely critical. If one thinks about technology and digital in particular, it is often SMEs that come up with the good ideas. They need to be inserted within the business and supported right the way through so that—I hardly dare say this—the primes do not gobble them up and sometimes destroy their nimbleness. So, this is the right thing to do. The question of co-operation with NATO and other allies is, equally, extremely well made.

The noble Baroness mentioned spiral development. It is a strange concept to be described like that, but I completely understand that it is “test and refine”. You get to a certain level, which is 60% to 80% of where you want to end up; you feel confident enough that you can actually put it out into the live environment, in the clear knowledge that you are going to get it back to make it better once it has been used and other people have seen its breadth of opportunity.

On the question of overcomplication, it is a difficult matter. We are dealing with very complicated machinery and skills, and everything we have learned in the past couple of years suggests that things do not need to be overcomplicated; they just need to work, and we need to be able to produce them at pace and in volume.

On Ajax, the Sheldon review has addressed this, I hope. Without making silly jokes about it being back on the road, the lessons really have been learned on Ajax—luckily, it is a thing from the past. We do learn from the lessons of the past, and procurement, if it is properly addressed, is about learning from experience, or enhancing and living with the concept of change. I hope that the challenges that we have seen have been addressed by what I think is a an extremely sensible and practical way forward for the very complicated and broad-ranging challenge of military procurement for a nation state. We could not take it more seriously; I certainly undertake to keep noble Lords fully up to date with all progress as we start to introduce some of the main milestones that will come up within the next two to three years.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, war is raging in Europe, the Levant, the southern Red Sea and Sudan. We are in the most dangerous and hostile world we have been in for many years and, amazingly, the Government have not increased or provided any extra spending for defence in yesterday’s Budget. State-on-state warfare is back. Does the Minister agree that, in terms of procurement, we must look much longer-term? For example, the carriers had £1.5 billion added to their cost because, to get the funding line straight in MoD, they stopped work on them for two years—a ridiculous thing to do. Equally, we are now desperately trying to get enough frigates into our Navy because we took too long ordering them. The SMEs have a real problem. We need to have a drumbeat of orders looking to the future, which we should commit to, because we now know that we are in a world where there is state-on-state warfare. More importantly, does the noble Earl agree that that will provide some resilience, so that, for example, when we start giving ammunition stocks or whatever to people, the firms involved have built into their whole organisation a structure that enables them to be replaced?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

I agree with almost everything that the noble Lord said. Certainly, the immediacy of the situation has already introduced into the procurement cycle within the Ministry of Defence a much more nimble way of acquiring the needed munitions, both for gifting and for our own stockpiles. We have started to invest substantial sums of money in the industrial base. If you think about this way of proceeding, it is very much a joint relationship with the industrial manufacturers that will deliver exactly what we want here, as far as both the primes and the SMEs are concerned. It is being driven by the current situation and the rate of technological advance.

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. It is nearly 30 years since I became the Minister for Defence Procurement, so ably succeeded by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, who I see in his place—and the questions do not change. New threats arise as old threats remain, and sometimes get worse. Our dependence on technology is greater now than it ever has been; therefore, our vulnerability is greater now than it ever has been. I welcome what my noble friend says about a more joined-up approach across the defence sector, but does he not agree that it has to be married with a more joined-up approach across the infrastructure sector as a whole, because of that very vulnerability?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, I agree. The Americans have a very good expression: “soup to nuts”. It is a very simple way of describing any project from one end right to the other. I believe that is precisely what my friend in the other place is trying to achieve here, in coming up with a considerably more flexible and nimble approach to the threats that we currently face.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Could my noble friend go back to number two of his five principles? It seems to me that in the private sector, we have a very large number of these problems as far as procurement is concerned. There are many places where great strides have been made. It has always been thought that the forces are not always willing to accept, with a degree of openness, advice from the private sector—not just in the single programme, but overall. Can my noble friend reassure the House that this is really going to change, and that people understand that there are aspects of procurement which are not just about how you do this very difficult technical kind of procurement, but which really can be learned from other people?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend. There is no doubt that the private sector and the Ministry of Defence need to work much more closely together to ensure that the absolutely current technology is not only available but able to be developed, and that the working practices and checks and balances on some of the assumptions that have been made are tested properly within the wider concept, not just within the forces network. This is incredibly important. If there is to be a joined-up approach and a proper pan-defence affordability exercise at the outset, it almost demands engagement across a much wider base than previously.