Oral Answers to Questions

Jack Straw Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I will look closely at this. We do want to see a competitive market in financial services and conveyancing. It is a major issue in our economy at the moment to get that mortgage market moving.

There are good signs, as the Governor of the Bank of England said last night, that credit conditions are easing, but we need to make sure that they are easing for people who are trying to buy their first flat and first home, who do not have a big deposit or a lot of help from the bank of mum and dad. We need to make sure that we are on their side.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

Q8. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), the Prime Minister justified very large cuts in defence spending, with 5,000 troops being sacked right now, on the basis that he had had to face some difficult decisions on expenditure. But those decisions were made in 2010. The security risk facing this country is now much worse, as he himself has acknowledged and as many of his own hon. Friends fear. Given those threats, including in the Sahel, is there not an overwhelming case for looking again at the strategic defence review and ensuring that our troops have the numbers needed to justify our defence?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a serious point. The point about our defence reviews is that they are every five years, so there will be the opportunity to look at this all over again. What I would say to him about the level of risk—I made this point in my statement to the House on Monday—is that the risks are changing. We still face the biggest risk from the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, but the proportion of the risks that we face from that area has declined, so we are able to use resources as we draw down in Afghanistan to cope with the other risks that we face.

The overall point is absolutely that, yes, we are going to have a smaller regular Army, although the extra reserves will mean that the overall level of our Army hardly changes size. But they will be better equipped, more capable, more mobile and more capable of dealing with the modern threats that we face.