Army Basing Plan

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I hope the document that has been distributed will answer some of the right hon. Gentleman’s questions, particularly about providing the certainty that personnel and their families will want in terms of where they are going and when they are going to go there. I note that his references at the beginning of his remarks about multi-role brigades and the subsequent evolution of the Army force to match the resources available made no reference whatever to the legacy that we inherited from the previous Government, which has been one of the key drivers in our efforts to deal with the challenges ahead.

Let me try to deal with some of the right hon. Gentleman’s perfectly legitimate questions. He asked me about the £1.8 billion capital spend. Essentially, he sought assurance that this money had not been found at the expense of the budget for employing our forces. It is, of course, a capital budget quite separate from the resource departmental expenditure limit budgets of the Department and it is largely a budget that was in the Defence Infrastructure Organisation’s capital spend programme, supplemented by some of the capital underspend from last year, which we have been allowed to carry forward.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

It will be taken away from Army housing.