Defence Command Paper Refresh

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend. Long before I was doing this job, he was campaigning for defence to be properly apportioned the funding it deserved to keep this country safe, and I pay tribute to him for that. He has fought for that for many years.

Should there be an increase in funding for defence—and I seriously hope that there will be, based on our Prime Minister’s 2.5% pledge—and if we invest in our specialties and our skills, we can expand our armed forces when the threat increases. Finding a way to hold those skills on the books even if they are rarely used, is why it is important to develop a single armed forces Act. Currently we have legislation that says that if you want to join the reserves from the regulars, you have to leave the regulars and join a separate legal entity—the reserves. That prevents soldiers from going backwards and forwards and people from being mobilised in the way we want. We want to introduce a single armed forces Act. We think this will help us do that. Skills are at the core.

The second thing is the investment in rapid procurement—the ability to keep headroom in the budget to respond to the latest threat as the adversary changes. The third is making sure that we invest in sustainability and enablers, because there is no point in having all the frontline vehicles if you cannot get anywhere.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I know it is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, even the politically dead, but frankly the Secretary of State’s contribution was pretty thin and full of clichés, and fundamentally an admission of failure—of 13 years of continual cuts by this Government.

Let me take just one example, which is touched on in the report. It was clear from allied exercises that in any major conflict we would run out of artillery munitions within a week, and the Ukraine invasion reinforced that. So why has it taken until this month for the Secretary of State to sign the contract to replace those artillery shells?

[Mr Wallace]

It is very clear. First, the right hon. Gentleman might actually understand that sometimes the supply chain has to be reinvigorated. When we placed an order for the NLAW—the next generation light anti-tank weapon—it turned out that the optics had stopped being made 10 years before. You can ring up all you like and try to place an order the next day, but until the manufacturers source the supply chain, it is not going to happen. But what I did was ensure that I placed the order in the United Kingdom—in the north of England and in Wales. That factory will start producing 155 mm shells. I have given it a long-term contract of half a billion pounds to start supplying our forces. By the way, the stockpiles of our ammunition started depleting around about 1997.