Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Monday 2nd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Moon]

I will give way as many times as the Minister wants if she brings me such good news every time. I am absolutely delighted that justice will finally be done.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I cannot remember hearing a victory such as that announced in the Chamber, so I congratulate the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) who has been pursuing this matter for many years. I should also point out the value of having a lawyer in a ministerial role.

[Mrs Moon]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his compliment: he is very kind, as always.

I am delighted by that change of heart. I was especially concerned because there had actually been service complaints on this issue, but they had been stayed so that people could not proceed with them. The complainants were told that until the Department decided what it would do, their complaints could not proceed. A service complaints process in which complaints can be stayed for four years is unacceptable. That is why one of the amendments that the Defence Committee was eager to ensure was in place was that a person’s knowledge that they had suffered an injustice was not a reason for saying that a complaint was out of time. The Committee also wanted to ensure that delays, such as the staying of complaints, would not be acceptable and could be seen as maladministration even during the process of the investigation. I am delighted to hear the statement that the Minister has just made.

I shall turn now to the changes proposed in the Bill. The introduction of the ombudsman is a landmark reform and it is most welcome, as are the powers to overturn the rejection of complaints applications and appeal applications. The rationalisation of the complaints process, including placing a limit on the number of appeals, is a common-sense approach.

The Bill has many positive aspects, but the Minister will not be surprised to hear that I think it could go further. The ombudsman’s new powers to investigate allegations of maladministration are welcome. These are significant new powers which, if implemented properly, could allow the ombudsman to root out bad practice, inefficiencies and injustice in the complaints process, to everyone’s benefit. However, during the Defence Committee’s scrutiny of the Bill, we revealed possible confusion surrounding the extent and nature of the power, and I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify that in her closing remarks, if not now.

There seems to be disagreement between what the Minister understood and what the commissioner felt was a real step-change for service personnel. The commissioner told the Committee that proposed new section 340H did not match the policy that had been agreed with the Ministry, and that it risked undermining what the Minister hoped to achieve from the provision. Proposed new section 340H(4) states:

“The purpose of an investigation is to decide…whether the alleged maladministration has occurred”.

The commissioner and the Defence Select Committee are concerned that the wording, “whether the alleged maladministration has occurred”, is too restrictive.

The commissioner suggested, and the Committee agrees, that the Bill should be amended to make it explicit that the ombudsman could investigate and report on any maladministration in the handling of a service complaint, and we have suggested amendments to that end, listed in amendment group D in the annex of our report. In their response to the Committee report the Government dismissed this on the ground that it:

“would require the Ombudsman to look for any maladministration in every case”.

I thought that that was the whole point. The Minister is looking at me quizzically. Are we on the same ground here, or is there disagreement?

Future Army 2020

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Thursday 6th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman, who also does assiduous work on the Defence Committee. It should not be civil servants who determine the size of the Army; it should be this House that determines the size of the Army—it should be Ministers. Ministers are, of course, in overall control, but these are issues that should be discussed by the House of Commons on a regular basis and determined by Ministers.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

According to Ministry of Defence figures, there is a shortfall in jobs across the military. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of our report’s most alarming findings was the number of vacancies in specialist trades, where jobs are being cut and the right personnel are not being recruited? The Army had the equivalent of 8,000 specialist vacancies it could not recruit for.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I agree with the hon. Lady, who serves so wonderfully on the Select Committee. These issues are brought out clearly in the report. She also referred to the matter in the estimates debate on Tuesday. There are real shortages in relation to cyber-reserves. We must build up those specialist areas to guard against the threats this country faces.

Defence Reform Bill

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

I echo what was said by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about the quality of our armed forces and the amount that we demand of them. We are putting them through a lot at the moment.

Once upon a time, before most Members were born, I was a Defence Procurement Minister, and I was delighted by the publication of the Bernard Gray report under the last Government. Sadly, the then Prime Minister tried to suppress it, although he should have recognised that it covered not just the period of a Labour Government, but the period during which I was in charge of defence procurement. The report revealed a great many failings in the procurement process. It showed, for instance, that the programme was overheated, that a weak interface between the MOD and DE&S was resulting in poor discipline and very little change control, and that there were insufficient skills in the DE&S. Subsequently, I was both delighted and highly amused when Bernard Gray was put in charge of sorting out the mess that he had identified.

The Bill was designed to achieve that. Like Gaul, it is divided into three parts—although, according to its drafting, there are four—dealing with defence procurement, single-source contracts and reserves. Each of those issues, but particularly procurement, raises a great many questions. I shall ask some of them now, because in the case of a change as fundamental as this, the devil is in the detail. The change is fundamental and it is being made against a background of fundamental change at the MOD as a result of the Levene reforms, severe reductions in funding and huge redundancies, not to mention the fighting in Afghanistan and the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany. As I have said, we are asking a lot of the Ministry of Defence, and it will need help to achieve the major changes set out in this Bill. It will need help from Parliament and from industry, and from academia and the country, and it should be willing to ask for and accept help, and everyone else should be willing to give it.

I shall start with the defence procurement process set out in the Bill. In December 2011 the Chief of Defence Matériel set out four options: first, the status quo; secondly, a trading fund; thirdly, an executive non-departmental public body with a private sector partner; and fourthly, the GoCo. We are now down to two options: a value-for-money comparison between the GoCo and what we hear is called DE&S-plus. Most unusually, there is no option to stay as we are. It is perhaps surprising that the MOD non-executive directors have not insisted on there being a stay-as-you-are option.

The GoCo option is reasonably clear, and I will come on to it in a moment, but DE&S-plus is not at all clear. The White Paper devotes a massive four lines to it and does not define it. In fact, so far as I understand it, DE&S-plus is designed to be unclear in order to be the basis for a negotiation between the MOD and the Treasury as to the freedoms the Treasury can offer. In other words, if DE&S-plus can pay more for its personnel and so attract much needed skills—more than current civil service terms and conditions allow for—the GoCo will become less attractive. But how, in practice, can the Treasury loosen the rules for the MOD without loosening those same rules for other Departments with similar problems? If the answer is that in practice it cannot, does that mean that in practice this decision has already been made—so it is GoCo or nothing, and there is no public sector comparator? Has my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made up his mind? How will the private sector companies bidding for a GoCo be confident that their bids are being fairly compared with DE&S-plus, whatever that may be?

ADS, the organisation of defence companies, suggests that the proper metrics might be better value for money for the taxpayer; shorter and cheaper bidding processes; improved skills and expertise; and greater stability in the funding of the defence budget. That is a potential set of metrics, but what does my right hon. Friend say are the proper comparators, and how will he avoid this being a wholly subjective guess about future behaviour?

This brings me to the GoCo itself. I am not instinctively opposed to this idea—in fact, I am rather attracted by it—but the Defence Committee has asked lots of questions, some of which remain unanswered. No other country has gone down this route, so this is courageous, Minister. That does not mean it is wrong, but there are some questions. First, if a foreign company is the lead partner within a GoCo, how will the MOD deal with any conflicts of loyalty that arise? The Atomic Weapons Establishment does not create such conflicts and is not as widespread in its coverage. Secondly, there are concerns about the issue of intellectual property, as some of my colleagues have said. That is covered in the single sourcing part of the Bill, but it is not covered in the defence procurement part.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I am not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman is about to mention how the GoCo will affect current alliances and agreements for joint contracting between the UK and our partners. I was in the USA last week for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and I spoke to many alliance partners in NATO and to Congress members in Washington. The best that they could say was that Britain was very brave, that they would like to see whether we succeeded and that they would leave us to get on with it. Concern was also expressed, however, about whether they would be willing to share confidential contracting and technological information. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is a concern?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

As I have said before, the hon. Lady performs a valuable service on the Defence Select Committee. She has put her finger on an extremely important point, which was also raised by the Select Committee in our report on defence acquisition. She is right; this matter has to be covered. I asked my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State a question about how the United States and France were reacting to the proposal, and he was able to say that he had received a supportive letter from the United States that very morning. I also know that there is a working party in operation with the United States to try to ensure that any problems are ironed out. It is true that other countries think we are being very brave. If we are indeed being so courageous, and if this works, we may well forge the way for other countries to follow us. It may well be that whichever company succeeds with the GoCo in this country could find vast new opportunities opening up for it. For example, it could take over the defence procurement of the United States, which would make somebody extremely rich.

The next question, which has been raised by ADS and by the Federation of Small Businesses, relates to how the GoCo proposition would affect small and medium-sized enterprises. The FSB has said that it is broadly supportive of the Government’s proposal, as contained in the Bill, but that it is vital that the needs of SMEs be considered when the reforms are implemented. I echo that, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will do so as well.

The time line involved is ambitious. I understand that there is a suggestion that we might reach a final conclusion in April 2015. That must remind us all of another fixture in our diaries for May 2015—the general election. Surely the risk of this project running up against the next election is huge.

NATO

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing this debate and I have agreed with all he said—with one exception, which I will come to —particularly about the need for NATO. The one exception was that I think there is a bit of work to be done on the need for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I was once a Member of what was then the North Atlantic Assembly for six months. Then I realised that for two years I had been a Defence Minister and had been completely unaware of the existence of the North Atlantic Assembly. Therefore I suggest that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly needs to do some work in order to build its profile.

It is a great pleasure to see the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Mr Swire) in his place, ready, willing and able to answer this debate. It is also a bit of a surprise, as some of us in our ignorance might have thought that NATO was a matter for defence, but there we are.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Captain George Duff of HMS Mars, who was committed to the deep, along with 28 of his crew, off the coast of Cadiz at the end of the battle of Trafalgar, and whose memorial is next to Nelson’s tomb in St Paul’s cathedral, would have been proud to find the French, the Spanish and the British working as closely together now as NATO allows us to do. Interestingly, at the battle of Trafalgar there were a lot of French and Spanish sailors in the British fleet, just as there were quite a number of British sailors in the French and Spanish fleets. That was not a matter of treachery—more a matter of expediency. In those days, when a ship was taken by the enemy, its sailors were given the not very difficult choice of joining the enemy crew or sleeping with the fishes. I do not want to describe Trafalgar as the beginnings of NATO, but it could be described as an early example of exchange postings.

Allied Maritime Command is the central command of all NATO maritime forces and the commander of MARCOM is the prime maritime adviser to the alliance. While the Allied Land Command is held by a US general, and the Allied Air Command by a US general— although at the moment the acting commander is French because the last US commander became chief of staff of the US air force—the Allied Maritime Command is not only based in the UK at Northwood, but is commanded by a British vice-admiral, Peter Hudson. We have an important and respected role to play in NATO.

And we play it to the full, with our crucial role in ISAF, our joint leadership in Libya, our contribution to Mali and the Balkans, and our operations in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Some of those were not, of course, NATO operations, but even when NATO itself did not deploy, as the hon. Member for York Central said, the command structure, the training, the equipment convergence and the sheer competence of NATO were fundamental to our own command structure, training, equipment and competence. NATO is a vital resource and a valuable pool from which coalitions of the willing can be drawn.

The Defence Committee has been told that the United Kingdom is still regarded by its NATO allies as a leader, and so it should be. Unfortunately, the last strategic defence and security review spoke of “no strategic shrinkage” while shrinking the means available. That led to a perception that there is a gap between the United Kingdom’s stated policy and its delivery. The Defence Committee recently heard from Professor Lindley-French, who told us:

“The German-Netherlands Corps, which I know well, had several British officers in. About a week after we had made the statement in SDSR 2010 that we were going to reinvest in the alliance as a key element in our national influence policy, somebody in the MOD decided that they had to pull those British officers out of the German-Netherlands Corps headquarters. The Dutch and the Germans said, ‘Right, we will pull the Dutch and German officers out of the ARRC.’”—

that is, the allied rapid reaction corps—

“In a sense, what is happening is that we are declaring policy at one level, and somebody lower down the food chain is taking a spreadsheet action at another level, so we are sending conflicting signals.”

Not only the UK but NATO itself is facing unprecedented challenges. The fundamental one, as the hon. Member for York Central said, is how to maintain a strong alliance without a war, whether it is a cold or a hot war. The withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan will throw this matter into even starker relief than did the events of 1989. This will be exacerbated by the economic woes of the western world. How do you spend money on defence if your people are in financial pain, cannot see an external threat and are at the very best ambivalent about the use to which we have put our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Mrs Moon]

rose—

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I give way to the hon. Lady, who plays such a valuable role on the Select Committee.

[Mrs Moon]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman and our Chairman of the Defence Committee. Is not part of the vital role of NATO in these straitened times to enable key competences to be maintained by allowing capacity sharing and allowing officers and service personnel to train, particularly in relation to platforms that have been cut in various countries?

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Thursday 26th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I fear that the strategic defence and security review was a cost-cutting exercise rather than an exercise that focused particularly on the defence needs of this country. As those who know me are aware, I have a particular worry about maritime patrol capability.

Following the decision to scrap the Nimrod MRA4, we have been left with no maritime patrol capability. The £6 billion Nimrod fleet is now ancient history and resting in a scrap yard somewhere. I do not want to spend any time discussing that again, but I want to consider where we stand without the capability that it would have provided. The former Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), summed up the problem in his infamous letter to the Prime Minister:

“Deletion of the Nimrod MR4 will limit our ability to deploy maritime forces rapidly into high-threat areas, increase the risk to the Deterrent, compromise maritime CT (counter terrorism), remove long range search and rescue, and delete one element of our Falklands reinforcement plan.”

I want to examine each aspect of that assertion—first, the rapid deployment of the maritime forces into high-threat areas. The maritime patrol aircraft is there to protect our nuclear deterrent. In mid-December, The Scotsman reported that a Type 42 destroyer had to be dispatched when a Royal Navy battlegroup appeared off the coast of Scotland. [Hon. Members: “Russian navy battlegroup”] I am sorry—I meant a Russian navy battlegroup. Did I say “Royal Navy”? That is a real Freudian slip—I do apologise. Clearly, my meetings with Alex Salmond have left things in my brain that I should not have brought forward. A Russian navy battlegroup appeared off the coast of Scotland, as have a number of Russian submarines. In addition, Russia is building a new fleet of submarines. In the past a Nimrod would have been dispatched to keep a watchful, discreet eye. Instead, we sent a Type 42 destroyer. Without the MPA, we do not know who is out there or what risks we face.

Scotland is a part of what we should consider our back door—the high north. We spend very little time focusing on that region, but we ignore it at our peril. We tend to forget that we are a northern European country, and that the high north is growing in significance. Without a comprehensive maritime patrol capability, we cannot address the strategic and economic importance of the high north. As the ice melts in the Arctic ocean, the 160 billion barrels of oil that are assessed as being in that region are becoming more accessible. No one dreamed of those sea routes being opened up, or of the 40-day saving on travel made possible by the Suez canal being available for our shipping lanes. Without the MPA, we cannot keep an eye on those shipping lanes to watch for military deployments or respond to any disasters, whether they are environmental, security-related or human.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way and particularly for the extraordinarily good work that she does on the Defence Committee, including in drawing our attention to issues such as the high north. In the comments that she just made, was she also making a comment about some of the possible implications of Scottish independence?

[Mrs Moon]

It is vital that the House addresses the issue of defence in relation to Scottish independence. I hope that, with the Chairman’s agreement, the Defence Committee will include it in our future programme. It is a matter of grave importance to the security and defence of the United Kingdom, and we should take it extremely seriously.

I turn to maritime counter-terrorism. On a visit to Northwood, information was given to me that having one Nimrod, a maritime patrol aircraft, was the equivalent to having 12 ships. We have only 19 ships, and we no longer have MPA capability. We have the increasing problem of countering piracy, which is a form of criminal maritime terrorism. Naval command said last year that 83 warships were needed to ensure a one-hour response time to merchant ships attacked in the high-risk area, yet in October only 18 vessels were deployed. The area of risk is huge—2.5 million square miles—and over the next 20 years, the volume of trade going by sea will increase by 50% and Navy cover will drop by 30%. Tracking rogue ships over such a wide area needs maritime patrol capability, which we do not have.

Counter-piracy operations conducted through NATO and through EU NAVFOR—Naval Force Somalia—rely on the resources provided by members. The availability of MPA fluctuates according to demands elsewhere, and operations in Libya meant that those limited resources were diverted. We face increasing numbers of attacks in the Indian ocean, the strait of Hormuz and now off the west coast of Africa.

Our reliance on the sea is enormous. In 2010, 35% of our total natural gas imports arrived by sea. By 2020, 70% will be imported in that way. Some $952 billion of trade a year passes through the Suez canal, and piracy costs the international economy between $4 billion and $7 billion a year. Those figures are being passed on to taxpayers through the rising cost of the goods transported through the region.

There are huge problems with the proposal to post armed guards on merchant ships. I have particular concerns about the rules that would be needed to govern the licensing of firearms on UK-flagged vessels, and about what would happen to the pirates who were captured. Kenya is no longer willing to help. How will pirates be transported to third countries for trial, and what will the legal position be of both the pirates and the maritime security company that transports them there? Are we in danger of giving rise to the issue of rendition?

I turn to our long-term search and rescue obligations. In 2010 our Nimrods were called out between 30 and 40 times to assist with search and rescue. We have an international responsibility for search and rescue covering 1.2 million nautical miles, but in a collection of letters in The Daily Telegraph in 2010, one writer said:

“I advise mariners to avoid requiring rescue more than 250 miles from shore.”

Without a maritime patrol capability, our capacity to rescue our seafarers is removed.

I wish briefly to consider the Falklands. I remind the House that when the invasion started on 31 March 1982, a Nimrod arrived at Ascension island on 6 April. A battle group of Harriers did not arrive until 1 May. That maritime patrol capability gives us the flexibility that we need, and it is a matter of great urgency that the House is advised on when it will be restored.