UK Military Basing Review

Debate between Gerald Howarth and Elizabeth Truss

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Gerald Howarth)]

I commend the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) on securing this important debate. He and I have been on trips together, we are both officers of the all-party Royal Air Force group—I have very much enjoyed his support in that group—and we have conferred many times in the past on these matters. I know that he takes a genuine interest in this subject, not least because, as he said, he has a defence-intense constituency. Of course, I am entirely in sympathy with him, because my constituency of Aldershot is also heavily defence-oriented. He will, of course, point out that it is in the south of England. We cannot move Aldershot—it is in the south of England.

There can be no doubt that this debate is important to those who take an interest in the future of Her Majesty’s armed forces, and to the constituencies of a number of Members in the House. I see that my hon. Friends the Members for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) and for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) are here. The hon. Member for Moray has therefore rightly set out several concerns which are, understandably, felt by many Members.

In today’s and previous debates, several RAF bases have been mentioned. I would like to put on record the Government’s gratitude for the exceptional work of all those who serve in the RAF. I was commissioned in the RAF volunteer reserve and would have joined the service—I nearly did—had I not had political aspirations. Our gratitude extends to the local communities which have, over the years, given such strong support to the bases from which the RAF operates—a point that the hon. Gentleman made forcefully.

However, given the context of this debate, I would like to focus for the moment on RAF Kinloss and its proud association with the Nimrod. The Nimrod force played a vital role in helping to keep this country secure during the cold war. More recently, it played a key role in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some RAF Nimrods continue to do so. Kinloss has been the home of Nimrod and those who flew and supported them for nearly 40 years. I am an aviator, and I am acutely aware of the bond between RAF personnel and the aircraft that they service and fly. I understand the shock that was felt when the decision was announced. I know that there is a real sense of loss in the tightly-knit service community, and that seeing pictures of the Nimrods being broken up will have been extremely painful to all of them, as it was to me.

I did not come into government to take such decisions, nor did the Defence Secretary or the Prime Minister. Nor did I come into government to make communities fear for their future as we take difficult decisions on the fate of their bases. The decision to scrap the Nimrod MRA4 programme was one of the hardest we had to take. So how did we come to this situation? That decision must be viewed in the context of the previous Government’s dire economic mismanagement of the public finances. Under the stewardship of the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), Labour doubled the national debt and left us with the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history. Today, we are spending £120 million every single day just to pay the interest charge on Labour’s debt. That is Labour’s legacy.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for allowing me to intervene in this important debate. I understand the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Moray about bases in his constituency. My concern, given our deficit, is that costs should be taken into account in the basing review. Given that in January the Minister for the Armed Forces said that it would be prohibitive to move engineering facilities away from RAF Marham, could I ask what is being considered in respect of the joint strike fighter maintenance facilities? We need a long-term decision that will reflect the costs and the expertise that has built up in RAF Marham, which employs more people than Kinloss and Lossiemouth put together.

[Mr Howarth]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I had the benefit of visiting Kinloss and Marham, so I am acutely aware of the assets of both bases. All I can say to her is that final decisions have not yet been made. I will come back to that point later on. Ministers will make the decisions based on military advice as well as detailed investment appraisals. I am afraid that that is as far as I can go to reassure her today.

I shall continue on the economic legacy we inherited. In defence, the consequences of 13 years of the catastrophic mismanagement I mentioned a moment ago are more severe than in any other area. Labour allowed a black hole of £38 billion to build up in the forward defence programme, over half of which was made up of equipment and support, with no plans in place to fund it. Restoring the nation’s finances is not only critical for the health of our economy and for the future funding of public services, but essential for national security, because a weak economy creates a national security risk.

Every Department has had to make its own contribution to reduce the staggering budget deficit we inherited, and the Ministry of Defence is required to shoulder its share of the burden. However, due to the priority we place on security, the defence budget is making a more modest contribution to deficit reduction than many other Departments. Even so, we are not immune from tough decisions. Some of the toughest decisions were about the Royal Air Force’s structure, not least the future of Nimrod.

There is no doubt that the Nimrod MRA4 would have performed an important role. It would have contributed to a wide range of military tasks. We have sought to mitigate the gap in capability through the use of other military assets such as frigates, helicopters, and C-130 Hercules aircraft. We will also request, where appropriate, assistance from allies and partners. However, it is important to remember that the country has been without Nimrod since March 2010. That was when the previous Government withdrew the Nimrod MR2 from service, so this was not a decision of this Government alone.

Why was that necessary? As the hon. Member for Moray knows only too well, the original plan conceived in 1996 was for 21 aircraft to be delivered in 2003—eight years ago. By the time the new Government took office in 2010, the programme had already been reduced to nine aircraft, was almost £800 million over budget and had seen the unit cost of each aircraft rise by 200% from £133 million to £455 million. At the time of the review, a number of design faults had been identified on the first MRA4 aircraft, which would have taken additional time and money to resolve. The headquarters of the contractor, BAE Systems, is in my constituency yet, as the hon. Member for Moray knows perfectly well, that has not stopped me being a vocal critic of its performance on this programme.

As we all know, the decision to scrap Nimrod was not the only difficult decision facing the RAF: the fast-jet fleet of Harrier and Tornado air defence was also affected. The RAF now plans to make a transition to a fast-jet force comprising the Typhoon and the joint strike fighter by 2021. Those were decisions about military capability and priorities. An inevitable consequence was that the RAF no longer requires RAF Kinloss and two other bases. I need to emphasise that—no longer required by the RAF. That does not mean that they are no longer required by defence. I will take the opportunity now to say again that we have not yet taken a decision about the long-term future of RAF Kinloss or any other air base as a result of the strategic defence and security review.

As Members will be aware, another major decision of the SDSR was to return to the UK 20,000 service personnel from Germany, with the intention of returning half by 2015 and the remaining personnel by 2020. Like all other parts of the public sector, defence is looking hard at its land holdings to ensure that we are using them as efficiently as possible. We have the cancellation of Nimrod, a rationalised fast-jet fleet, the return of large numbers of personnel from Germany, and a requirement to realise better value for money and efficiencies through broader estate rationalisation.