Strategic Defence and Security Review

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend has stood up for Lyneham with vigour and tenacity for many years, and I commend him for that. This is a good opportunity to put on record the respect that everyone in this House and in the country has for the people of Wootton Bassett for what they have done. I am in the embarrassing position of having in my constituency the premier RAF base, Brize Norton, which, I am afraid, does not particularly suffer from the announcements made today. My hon. Friend has made a good suggestion for the future of Lyneham, and I am sure that he can pursue it with the Ministry of Defence.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

There are human costs attached to the 42,000 job losses across the Ministry of Defence and the military that have been announced today. Can we have an assurance that those people who are losing their jobs in the Ministry, the civil service, the military and the defence industry will be given help and support to relocate, and that their housing needs will be addressed, given the housing cuts that have been announced in the past few days? Can we have an assurance that the people who have served and offered their lives for this country are not going to be discarded?

[The Prime Minister]

I can absolutely give the hon. Lady that assurance. We want to ensure that as many of the job losses as possible are found through voluntary redundancy and retirement, rather than through making people redundant. I can also confirm what has been said before, which is that we will obviously not be making anyone redundant who is in Afghanistan or whose units are in Afghanistan. That will not be happening; that is extremely important.

In terms of the industrial base, of course there will be impacts—for instance, with the decision on Nimrod—but if we look across British industry as a whole, and at the decisions on shipbuilding, on the A400M and on the joint strike fighter among many others, we can see that there is a strong future for defence manufacturing in our country.

Let me just put on record how much we should value the MOD’s civilians and how hard they work, because I know that they sometimes feel undervalued. I was at the Permanent Joint Headquarters today and saw many civilians working alongside their military counterparts to co-ordinate our efforts in Afghanistan; they were doing a fantastic job. It is right that we reduce the number of civilians in the MOD—it has got too big—but we need to ensure that we do it in as sensitive a way as possible.