A Better Defence Estate Strategy

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on securing this important debate. I represent the home of the British Army—Aldershot—and I am well aware that there are facilities around the country, principally in Army rather than Royal Air Force hands, that have been allowed to deteriorate. It is necessary, therefore, that we examine the military estate.

Having said that, I have a success story to report. No one has heard of the most successful private finance initiative project, the £8 billion Allenby/Connaught project run by the award-winning contractors Aspire Defence for the refurbishment of not only Aldershot garrison but Tidworth. As a result of the sale of military land in Aldershot, the garrison has been transformed, with fantastic new buildings. Apropos the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) made about buildings, I have to say that Grainger—it is running the Wellesley programme, which involves the release of land in accordance with a master plan—has spent a great deal of time ensuring that some of the historic buildings in Aldershot have been maintained. It has made its headquarters at the Smith Dorrien House, a 19th-century brick building that it has restored fabulously.

That is a very good story, but I am concerned by the fundamentals of the review. We know why it is being done. It is not to ensure that we have a better estate; it is to raise money. That is the brutal truth. The Treasury is not giving enough money to the Ministry of Defence. We have our national priorities completely wrong. We are spending an immoral amount of money on overseas aid, and we are neglecting our armed forces. The review is one of the consequences of that.

The hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) is absolutely right about the footprint of the estate. I have the Welsh Guards stationed in Aldershot. Come Friday afternoon, the whole lot decamp down the M4 to Wales. We will not be able to recruit if we remove military establishments from other parts of the country and concentrate them all in the super-garrisons such as the one in Aldershot—I accept that it is doing a great job, but I am looking at the bigger picture nationally. The points that my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald made about that were absolutely right.

The programme is misconceived and being done in a rush. The Minister knows that Minley Manor was sold in great haste. I had a furious bidder on the phone to me saying, “Why was I not offered the opportunity to make a best and final offer on that property?” The Old War Office in Whitehall is also being disposed of in something of a hurry. There is a gathering rush to remove military facilities, and we will pay a big price. As a Minister I went to Leuchars to announce its closure as a RAF station. Fortunately it was not closed, because it is now an Army station. It enabled us to accommodate soldiers coming back from Germany. We had somewhere to put them, but the way the Ministry of Defence is going now, we will not be able to have that flexibility. Our armed forces are the smallest they have been since the time of Wellington, but look at the dangerous world in which we are living. A policy simply to cash in on the value of the estate seems misguided when we may well need to build up our armed forces in the future, given the state of the world we find ourselves in today.

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[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

We have had an excellent debate this morning. I congratulate the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on raising the issue and on speaking so eloquently about her own constituency and the Invicta Park barracks in Maidstone. All of us have natural empathy for the Gurkhas, recognise the huge contribution that they have made to the defence of this country and are deeply concerned about their treatment and that of their families.

We have heard from a number of Members about different areas, but I will mention in particular the contribution about Kneller Hall, which I feel strongly about as a musician myself. I recognise the contribution to music generally, not only in the armed forces. As a Welshman, I have a long appreciation of the barracks in Brecon and was tempted to burst into “Men of Harlech” when the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Chris Davies) talked about “Zulu”. I am very pleased to be going up to Brecon this weekend to hear the band Rorke’s Drift. I am sure it will be a superb performance.

This is an important issue. As we all appreciate, 1.8% of the UK’s land mass is currently taken up by the defence estate, and we are talking about a massive contraction in the size of that estate: 91 sites will close and the estate will be cut by 30% by 2040. I have several concerns, which in part echo what Members have already said, and I will distil them into three areas.

First, I am deeply concerned by the apparent lack of rationale behind the closure programme. It appears that we are embarking on an arbitrary voyage rather than embracing a long-term strategy driven by changing military need. I suspect that the Treasury is lurking in the wings and demanding that this kind of change takes place as quickly as possible. We are talking about a potential reduction in the workforce of 18,000, or 30%. We are talking about relocation. We are talking about individuals having to travel long distances to work—or, I suspect, large numbers being transferred to the private sector. I am mindful of the Public and Commercial Services Union’s concern that the programme may well be a smokescreen for the privatisation of the workforce and a reduction in their terms and conditions.

Secondly, I am concerned about the impact of closures on local communities. That concern has been articulated by several Members, and there is no better example than the one the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald provided about how the Gurkhas are very much integrated in the local community. They feel as though they are part of the community, and the community welcomes and embraces them. It would be a great shame if we simply severed such an important link on the basis of short-term financial expediency. I must question whether this is all about value for money.

The National Audit Office said that past actions that the Ministry of Defence

“took to live within its means are now leading to increased costs overall and creating risks to military capability.”

My concern is that that ill-thought-out approach is being replicated. We can all point to the example of what happened with MOD housing and Annington Homes, which the Public Accounts Committee looked into in some detail. Unfortunately, the MOD sought to make savings by selling service family accommodation to the private sector but failed to achieve a good sale price. The result was a continued deterioration in the MOD estate and accommodation for service personnel. That is a great shame for the armed forces as a whole and the British Army in particular, and we need to learn from those mistakes and ensure that we do not replicate them.

That leads me to my concern about the involvement of the private sector in this process generally. I am especially concerned about the key role of Capita, which leads a consortium. Capita was awarded £90 million between June 2014 and July 2016, half of which went into its profits. That is a cause for concern. The National Audit Office highlighted that, saying that the MOD has

“failed to set contractual safeguards to ensure savings are achieved from operational improvements, which was the primary aim of the contract”

given to Capita,

“rather than one-off cost-cutting.”

The NAO added that Capita

“has not met all milestones or performed adequately against agreed key performance indicators.”

In other words, the taxpayer, the MOD and the armed forces are being short-changed by an ideological move by this Government.

Those are my concerns. My general concern is that there is a genuine fear that land will be sold off below market value. We are told that there is a need to build more houses. We all agree with that, of course, but the Ministry of Defence so far has not demonstrated that it has put its important talk about new houses into practice.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

One of the statistics that I omitted in my reference to Project Allenby/Connaught is that the Ministry of Defence is delivering on that talk with 3,850 new properties in Aldershot. Somehow, the Ministry of Defence stumbled on a good idea and appointed Grainger to manage the release of that land, and that is what is happening.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mark Lancaster)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on securing this debate, and welcome the opportunity to discuss our strategy for a better defence estate.

Some Members, especially the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), seemed to question whether there is a strategy, so I will spend the first half of my time trying to explain exactly how that strategy was put together—it was based very much on military capability. I will then try to address some of the individual points that colleagues have raised. Realistically, I will be unable to do that in the 10 minutes I have—I must allow my hon. Friend time to wind up—so I commit to writing to hon. Members.

Until I became a Defence Minister, I did not appreciate the sheer size of the Ministry of Defence’s landholding. We are the country’s third largest landowner, after the Forestry Commission and the National Trust. Our defence estate represents almost 2% of the United Kingdom land mass—it is equivalent in size to Luxembourg. Whatever comparator we choose, it remains a fact that our estate is vast and vital to our military capability. It is where our people work, live and train, and where advanced equipment is maintained, cutting-edge research is undertaken, major exercises are conducted and major operations are launched.

The estate is vast and vital, but it is also too inefficient. To give hon. Members an idea, our estate costs £2.5 billion a year to maintain, 40% of our assets are more than 50 years old and, because of long-standing budgetary pressures, we simply have not been able to spend enough on maintenance in recent years through successive Governments. Many units are housed in bases and locations that are not fit for purpose and that are neither geographically nor logistically efficient. What is more, while the armed forces are 30% smaller than they were at the end of the last century, the estate has reduced by only 9%.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The whole point is that the armed forces are now at their smallest size. What strategic thinking is the Ministry of Defence doing to consider how it will cope with an increase in all three services to meet future demands? Once we have scrapped an airfield, it will take an awful lot of compulsory purchase to get one back.

[Mark Lancaster]

As I described at the start of my speech, we own 2% of the United Kingdom. Even if we reduce the estate by 30%—someone can do the maths— we will still own 1.4% of the United Kingdom. After the reduction, we will still have an area twice the size of Greater London. There is still scope, if needed, to expand.

In these straitened times when budgets are tight but the threats to our country are growing, efficiency and productivity are the watchwords of successful defence. Let us not mince our words: an inefficient defence estate undermines the effectiveness of our armed forces and the security of the nation they exist to protect. Those are the hard facts. We need to act, which is why the 2015 strategic defence and security review committed to invest in a better built estate that will reduce in size by 30% by 2040, and that will, most crucially, better support the future needs of our armed forces and enhance our military capability, ensuring that our armed forces are the best they can be.

In November, we set out how we plan to do that, when the Defence Secretary unveiled our strategy for a better defence estate, which is the most significant change to defence land since the second world war. The strategy is based on advice from the service chiefs and all decisions in it have been predicated on military need. It has two strands, the first of which is to rationalise our estate, selling off sites that are surplus to defence needs and bringing people and capabilities into new centres of specialism. Secondly, we will invest, spending £4 billion over the next decade on improving our infrastructure and modernising our accommodation. In short, our vision is to create a world-class estate for our world-class armed forces.

Those are lofty words, but what does that mean in practice? For the Royal Navy, it means continuing to focus on operating bases and training establishments around port areas and naval stations, with surface ships in Portsmouth and Devonport; all the UK’s submarines on the Clyde; a specialist amphibious centre in the south-west, based around Devonport; and helicopters based at Yeovilton and Culdrose. For the Army, it means specialised infantry will be concentrated in Aldershot; mechanised, wheeled capability, including two of our new strike brigades, will be in Catterick; air assault forces in Colchester; armoured and tracked capability around Salisbury plain; medical services in the west midlands; and hubs of light infantry battalions in London, Edinburgh, Lisburn, St Athan, Blackpool and Cottesmore. For the RAF, it means building on its existing centres of specialism, with combat air in Coningsby, Marham and Lossiemouth; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at Waddington; air transport at Brize Norton; force protection at Honington; and support enablers at Wittering and Leeming.

The strategy will also see our joint forces command consolidate as much of its capability as possible in centres of specialisation, with defence intelligence at RAF Wyton, the defence academy at Shrivenham and information systems and services at MOD Corsham all due to absorb units relocating from elsewhere. No less importantly, for our servicemen and women and their families, it will mean a better quality of life, which is a key factor for us when we consider that the welfare of our personnel and their loved ones is the key to efficient and effective armed forces. By locating our servicemen and women together with capability, we will provide better job opportunities for their partners, more stable schooling for their families and increase their ability to buy their own home. For those continuing to live in service accommodation, we will invest in creating more modern and more comfortable homes.