Ajax Noise and Vibration Review

John Healey Excerpts

Wednesday 15th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

I start by thanking the Minister for advance sight of his statement and for publishing this Ajax noise and vibration report. I pay tribute to his determination to get to the reasons why this Ajax procurement has gone so badly wrong and his commitment to updating the House openly on progress. This is vital to the UK’s warfighting capabilities and our frontline troops, so all sides of the House and beyond want to strengthen his hand in undertaking this work.

However, since the Minister commissioned this report, things have gone from bad to worse on Ajax. The Comptroller and Auditor General has confirmed to me that he has launched the urgent National Audit Office investigation into Ajax that I and the Defence Committee requested. The Public Accounts Committee has described the Ajax programme as a “catastrophe” and the MOD’s procurement system as “broken”.

This is a £5.5 billion programme that has been running for the past 10 years, has only delivered a couple of dozen vehicles and still has no definite date for completion. It is the biggest Defence procurement failure of the past decade. It is failing British taxpayers and failing British troops.

The first concern for any Minister or commander is rightly the safety of our own forces men and women, so this is an important report. It confirms that 17 individuals who worked on Ajax are still receiving specialist treatment for hearing loss, 11 have long-term limitations on their military duties and four have been medically discharged from service. What, if any, compensation have they received?

The Minister also refers to

“the significant number of personnel across defence whose exposure to noise results in short or long-term restrictions to their military duties.”

How many is that significant number, and when will the permanent secretary report on the wider problems?

More serious is what the Minister has described as the

“series of failures to act”

when concerns were raised about health and safety risks: the 2018 MOD safety notice that was not acted on, the 2020 Defence Safety Authority report that was retracted and the multiple warnings, including from the commanding officer in charge of the trials unit, that were not actioned. The Defence Secretary declared in this House last month that,

“it is really important…that we fundamentally learn the lessons and people carry the can for…their decisions.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2021; Vol. 704, c. 492.]

Has anyone been fired for the failings? Has anyone been demoted? I hesitate to ask this, but has anyone responsible been promoted since they worked on Ajax?

Fundamentally, there is a Defence Secretary-shaped hole in this report. There is no mention of his role or his misjudgments in this Ajax disaster. When exactly did the Defence Secretary first know about the flaws in Ajax? What action did he take then to investigate and fix the problems? The Ajax vibration problem has been known in the MOD since at least 2018, so why, when the Defence Secretary published his defence White Paper this year, did he double down on Ajax, scrapping Warrior and scaling back Challenger at the same time? Finally, neither this report nor the MOD’s continuing Millbrook trials were ready last month, so why did the Defence Secretary press ahead to confirm in “Future Soldier” that

“capabilities will be built around…Ajax”,

with other systems?

It is deeply unsatisfactory that the action following this review is to launch another review. It is also deeply unsatisfactory that Ajax is still in limbo, beset by suspicions that it is simply too big to be allowed to fail. Will the Minister now answer the remaining fundamental questions? What are the causes of the noise and vibration problems? Will the Defence Secretary scrap or stick with Ajax? What is the MOD’s cost for the additional trials and testing? What contingency plans are in place for the Army to have full reconnaissance and force-protection capabilities while Ajax is delayed or, indeed, deleted? Has the Minister discussed with the Welsh Government a plan to support jobs if Ajax is cancelled? What impact does this continuing delay to decisions on Ajax have on the Army’s ability to deploy the planned strike brigade?

The Defence Secretary’s rapid further cuts in Army numbers is directly linked to more advanced technology based on Ajax. Will Ministers now halt their Army cuts, at least until they have fixed this fundamentally failing procurement?

[Jeremy Quin]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for welcoming the transparency that this report represents from the Ministry of Defence. He is absolutely right that its commissioning and publication have sent shock waves through Defence. That is valuable and important. Everyone needs to be aware of the important imperatives—people need to answer for them and ensure that they are on track—and, even by commissioning and publishing this report, we have sent an important and salutary message, as well as learning a lot of detailed facts. He was generous in that respect, but he was most ungenerous and wrong regarding the Secretary of State.

As set out in the report, we first knew of this issue in November 2020. Ministers acted promptly. I am concerned that at the time it was described to me as a late discovery item, and that was mentioned in the report, and a culture of optimism bias continued. That is why I insisted that no IOC would be declared without ministerial involvement. That is why we were, and have been, very focused on ensuring that we got to grips with this programme, which we have, and on ensuring that we had this report not only commissioned, but published.

The report has laid bare a host of very difficult issues inside Defence, across a whole series of organisations. That is what the Defence Secretary and I are absolutely focused on getting to grips with, and what we are doing. The purpose of the report was not to apportion blame, but to discover the facts. That is the normal process in industrial companies where there are issues of concern—to establish the facts and to set out recommendations. That has been done.

We want to have a second report—I have referred to that previously in the House—to dig deeper and to make certain that the lessons are learned and that the recommendations are appropriate. As I have said, if there are examples of gross misconduct, they will be acted on.

What the report revealed, however, is a deep cultural malaise: across Defence, horizontally, parts of it are not speaking to each other as they should be on a programme of this nature. Concerns are not being elevated as they should be, vertically up through the system. That is a problem, a failing, and it needs to be addressed. If we want to have proper procurement, we cannot have a culture in which people take the view that they want to hear only solutions and not problems. It is necessary to have a proper airing of concerns and for them to be taken up and dealt with.

The shadow Secretary of State raised a number of other points. A large number of hulls have been delivered to Merthyr and are being worked on. Of course, there has been a succession of capability drops in the project, so hulls will have to be enhanced and improved over time.

The right hon. Gentleman may believe that things have got worse. That is not my experience. On the contrary, we are in a far, far better position than we were last year and in a far better position than we were six months ago. Detailed work has been undertaken and conclusions from Millbrook will be with us before Christmas. GD has growing confidence in the design modifications that it believes can be effected. I will have no position on them until we have tested them, gone through them and made certain that they work, that they are efficacious and that they give us the kick that we require. There is a lot of work still to be done on headsets, but I have seen the benefit of having a full-time focused SRO and with ministerial focus on the project, driving it forward. We are in a far better place to take decisions on Ajax than we were. The project is in a healthier state than a year ago, as should be the case. It is an important capability that we need for our operational requirements, and we will continue the hard work to ensure that it is delivered.