Defence Spending (Wales)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[John Glen]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. No doubt the Minister will want to deal with the point about the logic of the Government when they made the decision.

What is confusing to me, as someone who has taken an interest in defence matters, is the extent of the investment at St Athan. Let us say that three services are coming together and, for example, work is being done on ship engines. How reasonable and cost-effective will it be to get engines from Portsmouth to St Athan? Is that the right option? To what extent will all that work be cost-effective? Presumably it would be helpful to have a driving range for tanks if people wanted to test the tanks on whose engineering they had been working.

How does the Minister reconcile the fact that, as the hon. Member for Swansea East (Mrs James) said, Wales receives the second lowest “investment” from the MOD with the arguably bigger imperative to achieve value for money for the MOD as a whole and for UK defence as a whole? Looking to the future, I am clear that defence training needs to be harmonised. That issue needs to be considered on two levels. Where would be the best place to site such a college from a UK defence perspective? In addition, such a decision should not be wholly based on relative under-investment in one region of the country or another.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Glen]

No, I shall make a little more progress and come back to the hon. Gentleman in a minute.

If the best place is St Athan, there is a need to bring certainty to the decision and clarity on the time scale and scope of the project. However, I do not believe that money should be spent in Wales just because it needs the investment. That is just one part of the decision. It is critical to ensure that any consolidated training college addresses the broadest possible needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Diolch, Mr Gray; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Swansea East (Mrs James) on achieving this very important debate about defence spending in Wales. The reality is that the trajectory of Government policy in recent years has seen a reduction in defence spending in Wales, and it is very important that we have a discussion about that. Hon. Members are here largely to express their concerns about the ending of the Metrix proposal for the defence training college at St Athan, about which the hon. Member for Swansea East spoke eloquently. It was cancelled in October by the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government in Westminster.

As with other areas of defence, such as the £10.5 billion contract with AirTanker Ltd, the Public Accounts Committee has pointed to the flaws in defence procurement and the difficulties in keeping a lid on projects paid for under private finance initiatives. Indeed, the estimated budget for St Athan, even before work really commenced, had increased substantially, from an original estimate of £12 billion to £14 billion, and that at a time when the recession hit and the necessary capital from land sales was not becoming available as expected.

We shall see in the spring whether St Athan will be successful again, depending on the new criterion being announced for defence training by the UK Government, which will of course have changed in the light of the strategic defence and security review and the downsizing of the number of UK troops who will require those training facilities. However, we can be sure of one thing: the scheme will not go ahead as previously envisaged.

While I am on the subject of St Athan, I need hardly remind everybody that the number of staff working at the site is falling, with 339 job losses having been announced this time last year. Further to that, a response to a parliamentary question a fortnight ago from the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns), whom I notice is not here today, concluded that no further work would be done using the super-hangar to maintain and repair RAF aircraft at the base after 2010. Make of that what you will.

However, the topic of today’s debate is defence spending in Wales, and it is good that we can have a debate about that, because those figures have been made available to us. Thanks to the “UK Defence Statistics” annual publication for 2010, published on the Defence Analytical Services Agency website, we can see that the number of jobs as a result of defence spending in Wales under the last Government fell from 8,990 in 1997 to 4,900 today—a drop of 42%. In terms of service personnel, that is a drop of 13% from 3,300 in 1997 to 2,930 this year. In England, the figure has risen by 3%. For civilian personnel, it is a far more substantial drop of 62%, from 5,100 in 1997 to 1,970 today. In England, the figure has fallen by only 30%, which is less than half the fall that happened in Wales. The south-east of England has the largest number of service personnel, with almost 45,000, or, in other terms, 15 times the number of service personnel based in Wales. In percentage terms, those figures might be more striking. Although Wales has 5% of the UK population, only 1.7% of service personnel are stationed there and only 2.8% of civilian Ministry of Defence jobs are in Wales. Meanwhile, of course, almost 20,000 service personnel remain in Germany—seven times as many as in Wales—and there are almost as many service personnel stationed in Cyprus as in our country.

Unfortunately, this year’s figures do not include those for the estimated UK regional direct employment that is dependent on MOD expenditure, which were included in previous editions, such as, “UK Defence Statistics 2009”. In the past, those figures were provided through the MOD by DASA according to country, so that we could see what was taking place—a concentration of defence spending in England, away from Wales, Scotland and the other Celtic nations. The figures in last year’s statistics show that 92% of MOD employment is in England, which has 84% of the UK population, and that 1% of the employment is in Wales. There has been growing centralisation, with that figure rising from 89% of employment in England in 2003-04.

The figures are true for both equipment expenditure and non-equipment expenditure. However, our ability to be aware of those figures and scrutinise them is under threat. Instead of the Government’s being accountable for changes in policy, manpower and spending in different parts of the UK, they will simply no longer publish the statistics relating to them, and, indeed, they have already stopped doing so. That was the subject of a Westminster Hall debate in July secured by my friend, the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), after the Minister for the Armed Forces initially said on the Floor of the House that such country and region statistics would continue, only for a later note to confirm that he had misspoken and the series of statistics would, in fact, be discontinued. This is a matter of freedom of information, as much as anything else. In the United States, such statistics are available to state level, and in Canada, a Commonwealth country with a similar military and parliamentary system to our own, the Department of National Defence produces similar statistics, down to provincial and even constituency level. The simple fact is that we must have open books.

The coalition agreement says

“technological innovation has—with astonishing speed—developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before. So we will extend transparency to every area of public life.

The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account.”

There are two specific commitments in the deal, first:

“We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.”

and, secondly,

“We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.”

It seems almost self-evident that that transparency and openness necessitates continuing the series of national and regional data in the defence industry, so that we can easily see and scrutinise the amount of spending in the defence sector, inside and outside the UK. If we cannot see the effect on our countries of UK defence spending, how can we, as Members of Parliament, be effective judges of it? I hope the Minister will confirm that the UK Government intend to maintain the series of statistics in accordance with the spirit of their coalition deal. Diolch yn fawr iawn.