Lord Johnson of Marylebone
Main Page: Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Johnson of Marylebone's debates with the Ministry of Defence
Defence Treaties (France)
Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Fox
An element of some of the coverage today has been to ask what the language of war will be. In the last few years, we have had commanders of the international security assistance force in Afghanistan from Turkey, Germany, Canada, France and Italy, as well as the UK and the US, and we had no linguistic problem.
Joseph Johnson (Orpington) (Con)
Could the Secretary of State give an indication of the value-for-money savings to be achieved over the 50-year life of the treaties, or if that is not possible, over the course of this Parliament?
Dr Fox
We will be looking in that context at some of the projects that we considered in the SDSR, such as A400M support and training. As I said in answer to a previous question, there is no point in us reinventing the wheel at taxpayers’ expense. Where we have common platforms, we should be looking at common support and training. We will also want to look at the future strategic tanker aircraft programme to see whether, within the private finance initiative set out and agreed by the previous Government, we can get better value for money for British taxpayers by having the French use some of that facility.