Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, when I put my name down to speak in this debate, I felt that I would probably be entering into a debate where there was a great deal more knowledge among the speakers than I have. I am afraid that has been confirmed to me on several occasions.

Having considered what should be the focal point of my contribution, I decided to talk about the problems of procurement. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, has just jumped all over what I was going to say with far bigger and heavier shoes than I have brought with me today, so all I will say is that everything that I have learnt about this subject boils down to the fact that the procurement process is definitely not fit for purpose, as he describes. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, was the person who talked me through that.

When are we going to develop the courage to say, “Scrap this process, dump it and buy off the shelf?”. At the moment we do not do that, and things taper on. We say, “Oh, let the project bubble on and see if it catches up”, but that does not happen. That is the black hole in the procurement process. All Governments and anyone who has been involved in them share some of the blame here for saying, “We can’t have the most wonderful bit of kit going. Let’s see if we can get the bit of kit that is good enough to do the job and gives our troops in the field a decent chance of achieving that with minimal casualties”. Until we have enough courage to stop thinking like this, we are going to have problems.

The ability to buy off the shelf will mean that we have to have a balancing act between our own strategic industrial capacity and the problems in the field. If we have to structure that and admit to it, we may take some steps towards dealing with it. We cannot have a situation where we are running around and chasing our tails, keeping projects running and then saying, “This isn’t going to be ready—we need to buy something else”, thus incurring maintenance costs that are far in excess of what they would be if we said, “We’re going to do it ourselves or we will buy off the shelf”. When are we going to have something in place that says that we will do one or the other? Until we do, the great background costs—they are the great problem, rather than the upfront costs—will mean that we will never really address the black hole.

One of my noble friends asked before when we are going to develop a coherent attitude towards wars of choice—when do we fight and why? The previous Government got themselves drawn into situations where we sent the troops in. That is understandable. This is not a party political point; it is about the illusions of power—“Let’s just send something in to deal with this situation”. On several occasions the previous Government got away with it. On certain occasions before Iraq and Afghanistan, the consequences were not too bad for us and our troops, but then they suddenly got real. Unless the Government, the whole of Government, learn to say, “We cannot do things”, “We cannot intervene here”, “We cannot do it by ourselves” or “We will not go in just simply because an ally is going in”—once again, I am referring to Iraq; I forget how many undeployed American divisions there were—and build this into the structure of our decision-making process, we are going to continue to push ourselves into places where our structure for supply, troop numbers and planning will not be fit for purpose.

I will leave my comments there. Unless we are prepared to limit our posturing, given our limited defence capacity, we are going to get into serious trouble again and again.