Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2014 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

1. What steps he is taking to support small contractors in military procurement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Philip Dunne)]

I recognise that small businesses are an important source of innovation and flexibility in meeting defence and security requirements. I am determined to help small and medium-sized enterprises access defence opportunities, including standardising and simplifying our procurement systems, so from this month we are minimising the use of pre-qualification questionnaires and increasing use of standard contract templates for low-risk requirements of under £100,000.

We are regularly making progress on these and other SME initiatives, but we also need to inform the SME community that it is getting easier to do business with the Ministry of Defence, which is why we publish the SME action plan on the gov.uk website and why I am undertaking a series of regional visits to talk to SMEs, such as the excellent event that my hon. Friend hosted in Hereford on 6 December 2013.

[Jesse Norman]

I very much thank my hon. Friend for that reply and for the extremely encouraging news that he has described. There are a large number of specialist defence suppliers in my constituency in Herefordshire. They provide vital new technologies and training for the troops, but they often face huge and apparently unnecessary mark-ups and delays forced on them by the requirement to be part of prime contracts. What can the MOD do to help these companies compete more fairly?

[Mr Dunne]

I agree with my hon. Friend that SMEs have an important role to play across defence procurement, but in particular in new technologies and in training. That is why the Government are committed to increasing the proportion of our annual spend on SMEs. Last year that rose to 15% by value of all spend, with some £1 billion spent directly and £2 billion spent indirectly through larger prime contractors, but the proportion of new contracts is even greater with over a third of all new contracts placed with SMEs in each of the last three years.