Armed Forces Restructuring

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. I know that Opposition Members do not like it being said that we inherited a £38 billion black hole in the defence budget. We have dealt with that and we have put in place a balanced equipment plan that is fully funded with a contingency of £4.5 billion in it. More importantly, we have put in place mechanisms to ensure that projects do not get signed off willy-nilly by politicians when the resources are not in place to pay for them. That ensures that we have a coherent defence budget and that we never again find ourselves in the position of the former Labour Defence Secretary Lord Hutton who, for the want of £300 million over two years, was forced to delay the aircraft carrier project and drive £1.6 billion of additional costs into that programme. We will not get ourselves into that position.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Some of my constituents have been alarmed by recent reports of unfilled vacancies in key roles such as intelligence officers, radiologists and electronic warfare system operators. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the announcement today will take account of the need to maintain all capabilities and avoid expensive short-term replacements from outside the armed services?

[Mr Hammond]

As I said in an earlier reply, we will not be making any redundancies in those pinch-point fields. We face, across the armed forces, a number of areas in which we directly compete with very highly paid civilian occupations. I am talking about engineering of all types—nuclear, aircraft and airworthiness speciality skills. In those areas, it is a constant challenge to recruit and retain staff, but those are challenges that the single services manage extraordinarily effectively in the circumstances.