Defence

Mark Francois Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

That is absolutely right. It is a measure of how far downwards our expectations were managed during the reductions in percentage GDP spent on defence under the Blair Government and the Cameron coalition Government, that it was regarded as a cause for triumph and congratulation when it was finally confirmed that we would not be dropping expenditure below 2%. The matter had never been questioned at all prior to that period.

[Mr Francois]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way, and it is a pleasure to serve under his stout chairmanship of the Defence Committee—[Interruption.] I mean stout in personality terms.

In some ways, the situation is even more challenging than the one my right hon. Friend lays out. He has rightly given the figures in terms of GDP, but in recent years—as we heard in testimony from the permanent under-secretary—in almost every strategic defence and security review and comprehensive spending review, the MOD has had to sign up to additional sets of efficiency savings, now totalling some £30 billion over time. Not only does the MOD have a constricted budget, it has had to find those efficiency savings as well, which makes the situation even more challenging.

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[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who always speaks knowledgeably on defence matters, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) on securing this important debate and, if I may say so, on introducing it so ably this afternoon. I want to focus on the national security capabilities review—the NSCR—and, in particular, its potential effect on the greatest asset we possess in defence: our people. There is already considerable anxiety in the armed forces about where the review may lead, and it is important to understand the serious damage that could be done to defence if those fears are not addressed.

Unfortunately, we are starting from a position in which the armed forces are already being subjected to a hollowing out. In May 2017, the total strength of the regular armed forces was 138,350, which is some 5% below their establishment strength, as the hon. Member for Gedling intimated—although shortages are far worse in highly specialised pinch-point trades, such as qualified engineers. In the year to April 2017, 12,950 people joined the UK regular armed forces, but 14,970 left over the same period—a net deficit of over 2,000 personnel. At present, trained and experienced personnel are leaving the armed forces faster than the recruiting organisations, which are already running to stand still, as it were, are able to make up for those who are departing. In particular, the Regular Army is currently around 30% below its annual recruitment target, managing only around 7,000 new recruits of the 10,000 required last year.

Moreover, as is borne out in the most recent armed forces continuous attitude survey—AFCAS—published in May 2017, there are also issues of morale, which is not as high across the armed forces as we would like it to be. Pressure of service life on families is still given as the greatest reason for leaving. As people leave, that only increases pressure on those who remain. There has also been a particular drop-off of morale reported in the Royal Marines. That is disappointing, but it may well be linked to some of the speculation about the future of our amphibious shipping and potential reductions in the size of the Royal Marines as a whole. I hope that that speculation does not become a reality.

If we are honest, we are dealing with a somewhat fragile situation, even before the outcome of the NSCR is known. There is clearly much staff work being undertaken, both within the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office, in relation to this review, but I was particularly alarmed when one national newspaper, The Sun, reported some weeks ago that the Treasury was arguing at one stage for a reduction in the size of the Regular Army from its established strength of 82,500 down to as low as 50,000. If carried to fruition, that ludicrous proposal would involve making redundant well over a third of the serving Regular Army and would constitute perhaps the greatest blow the British Army has ever suffered in peacetime.

At a time when we face a resurgent Russia, which has carried out the annexation of Crimea, still has further territorial ambitions in Ukraine and is placing pressure on the Baltic states, reducing the Army would send entirely the wrong signals to the Russians about our commitments to NATO and our willingness to uphold the territorial integrity of our allies. It would be sheer folly. I only hope that the pin-striped warriors in the Treasury, who live in daily fear that their air-conditioning might malfunction or that the tea-trolley might be late, have since abandoned such a daft suggestion as there is no way that I and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) intimated, many of my colleagues on the Government Benches could possibly support a reduction of that magnitude in regular manpower. It is simply unthinkable.

Following on from the 2010 strategic defence and security review, I was the Minister responsible for implementing tranches 3 and 4 of the Army redundancy programme. It was an extremely difficult process that had a detrimental effect on morale and retention, as well as on recruitment. I very much hope that we will not have to announce any further rounds of redundancy in the Army, because that would threaten to make the situation I described earlier even worse.

Many service personnel are watching this review very closely, and if it is seen to lead to a further reduction in our conventional capabilities or in the strength of our armed forces, many will react by simply voting with their feet and opting to leave what they might perceive to be a constantly shrinking enterprise. To be clear, I am not suggesting there would be a sudden rush for the exits, but, more likely, there would be a steady increase in the drumbeat of people requesting to leave, above and beyond the ability of the recruiting organisation to replace them. In short, more and more people would go and the hollowing out would become worse and, in some particularly sensitive areas of which the Minister will be well aware, critical.

Senior Ministers who will take the final decisions on the NSCR need to understand the stark reality of our admirable personnel and what may ultimately influence them to stick or twist and change their career. Those personnel do not want sympathy, but they want and deserve our respect. They deserve our empathy, too.

Ultimately, as the hon. Member for Bridgend intimated, we can buy as much shiny new kit as we like, but it is of no use to us, and will not provide the deterrent effect we would wish, unless we have people available and sufficiently trained to operate it in a hostile environment. Too often in defence, we talk about capability in terms of equipment, whether it be new Ajax fighting vehicles for the Army, Type 45 destroyers for the Navy, or F-35s for the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Air Force. However, without the required blend of man and machine, or increasingly woman and machine, we have no capability at all. We forget that at our peril.

The truth is that over the past few decades, under Governments of both colours, our service personnel and, indeed, the country have witnessed a continuing retrenchment in our capabilities and in the numbers serving in uniform. Together with our nuclear deterrent, as the Chair of the Select Committee said, our service personnel are our national insurance policy—they are the defenders of our freedom and of our way of life—and we are now at real risk of skimping on the premium.

As a former Defence Minister, I can only offer the House my earnest and heartfelt advice that we must not take our armed forces personnel and their families for granted. Our history as a nation shows that when we failed to keep up the insurance policy, as we did when we allowed our armed forces to seriously degrade in the early to mid-1930s, the ultimate result, a world war in which some 50 million people died, was utterly catastrophic.

We in this House, we who were sent here by our citizens and whose responsibility it is to protect them, are the guardians of that national insurance policy. On that basis, we have to say to our Government that the time for cuts is over. It is time for our cover to be increased.

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[Ruth Smeeth]

You’ll make me blush.

[Mr Francois]

And that’s not easy!

[Ruth Smeeth]

Not too easy. I thank the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) very much. One important thing, demonstrated here today, is that the armed forces parliamentary scheme and the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces inform all of us and ensure that the standard of debate in the House is as high as it can be.

I return to our amphibious capability. The proposals to cut our amphibious capability in the shape of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark could cause tremendous harm to the adaptability and deployment options of our armed forces. Simply put, they would cut our options at a time when we need as many as possible, not fewer.

We will not adapt to this new world by running down our existing capabilities or by undermining the very people who are putting themselves in harm’s way in our defence; let us remember why they are there. But I fear that that is exactly what we are doing. It is no secret that the MOD currently faces a £20 billion black hole and the risk of further cuts. I sincerely hope that the new Secretary of State has made representations to the Treasury demanding more money from the pen pushers who worry about their air conditioning—my favourite quote of the day.

It is my very real fear that if we continue down the path that the Government have set, we may find ourselves ill-equipped to deal with what the future holds. We also need to recognise that Britain’s security does not just depend on our service personnel, vital though they are; we also need new and advanced technology platforms for them to use. A vital aspect of that is buying British, so that we can retain domestic skills to design, develop and produce cutting-edge defence technology.

In a post-Brexit world, that is more important than ever. That is why I began this year with a visit to the BAE Systems site in Brough to meet the team behind the Hawk. That was not just a chance to see some of the incredible engineering technology that goes into these aircraft; it was an opportunity to speak with the wider defence family—that is who they are: the engineers, technicians and manufacturers—who make kit knowing that their neighbours and children may well end up using it to keep them safe. They support both our own military and those of our allies, and we need to recognise that. Unfortunately, many of them are currently under threat of redundancy, owing to a lack of orders. The reality is that the MOD needs to step up and ensure that that industry has a steady drumbeat of orders, so that it can invest in their workforce and emergent technologies.

Fundamentally, however, my real concern today is that the Government are focused only on the cost envelope—trying to fill the black hole in the budget rather than investing properly in our future and what we need to keep us safe.

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[Andrew Bowie]

Yes, I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. As I have said, we cannot underestimate the effect on the morale of people serving on bases such as Condor when every so often—every other month, it seems—we read in newspapers of ill-judged speculation about the future of bases by, in this case, Scottish Government Ministers. We cannot underestimate the effect that has on them, their families and the communities those bases serve.

[Mr Francois]

My hon. Friend mentioned accommodation a couple of minutes ago. Will he accept from me that the repairs and maintenance service provided by CarillionAmey is woeful and that many service personnel from across all three services are very upset about it? We need to honour our people and do better. Does he agree that the Minister, who I believe has sympathy with this point, should be encouraged to hold CarillionAmey more firmly to account?

[Andrew Bowie]

I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. In fact, one thing that gets brought up time and again when I speak to friends still serving in the armed forces is the state of accommodation and the support they have received from that company. It would be very nice to see it held more firmly to account by the Ministry of Defence.

Since I came to the House, we have too often heard questions raised about whether the UK can afford to maintain its independent amphibious capability, seen key elements of Royal Marine training cut and even questioned the overall number of our Royal Marines. Over Christmas, we read about the selling of HMS Ocean for £85 million, barely two years after a £65 million refit, which would leave this country without a functioning helicopter carrier capability until the Queen Elizabeth comes into service in 2020.

Even more worrying, however, and something that has not been touched on in this debate yet, is the current level of troops medically fit to deploy today. The British Army today has an official full-time trained strength of 78,407, which is already below the target of 82,000. In answer to a written question of mine in November, however, it transpired that the number of medically unavailable troops stands at 18,000, meaning that the fit and trained strength of the Army is 60,500—just over 60,000 soldiers fit and able to deploy today. In the Navy, that figure is 24,893 out of 29,000. In the RAF, it is 25,000 out of 30,000. That means that as we debate this today the immediately deployable strength of our full-time armed forces sits at 111,026. To put that into context, it is three times less than the number of people employed in Britain by Tesco.

On Tuesday, in Foreign Office questions, I asked the Foreign Secretary about our pausing reluctance to intervene in Syria in 2013, which I believe prolonged the conflict and led to thousands more deaths. Whether someone was for or against intervention in 2013—I know that there are strongly held views on that, and I respect that—the fact is that we had that choice. We had, and still have, the ability to choose whether to intervene because of the size and capabilities of our armed forces. There is a genuine concern today, however, at the heart of the defence and diplomatic community and among our closest allies that in the not-too-distant future our ability to intervene for good, as we did in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, or to support our partners across eastern Europe, could disappear, and with it our standing on the world stage would be diminished, especially if we lose our amphibious capability or cut the number of troops even further.

I know that the Government support the armed forces. Ministers in the MOD are fighting daily battles to secure the budget and numbers, and the record on increased spending and procurement and the improvements in accommodation are a testament to this. Difficult questions must be asked, however, about recruitment and retention, about the size of our defence budget—is 2% of GDP enough? I do not think it is—and about whether the cost of funding our continuous at-sea deterrence should be met from an already-squeezed defence budget, or whether, as some believe, given that it is a continuing operation, it should come directly from the Treasury, as it did until 2010.

These are big and difficult questions, but they must be asked and answered, for we must maintain the trust of our armed forces and our allies. If we are serious—and I know we are—about being a truly global Britain, we must maintain our position on the world stage, leading the world in investment in and commitment to our responsibilities at home and abroad, and we must never lose the ability to intervene with moral purpose in defending the values that we cherish around the world when we choose to do so. Only when these questions are answered—and I know they will be by this Government—can we truly move forward with confidence that in this country we will continue to have the finest, most adaptable and best equipped armed forces in the world—armed forces that, as the hon. Member for Gedling said, we can all be truly proud of.

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[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

They will benefit from many elements of the social contract. Of course, they already receive some of these benefits as members of the armed forces anyway.

I turn to the issue of housing. I was amazed to hear what the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) said. Actually, I should have singled him out because he gave a thoughtful speech. Military housing that I have seen is the kind of stuff that you would not put a dangerous dog into. It is one area where the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois)—who is not in his place, unfortunately—sees that the Government really need to put some work in.

On recruitment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West said, we need an urgent alternative to the Capita recruitment contract, which rakes in about £44 million per year over 10 years. It was the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford who suggested, in his marvellous report last year, that an alternative way needed to be found to fill the ranks. On terms and conditions, let us get our house in order. The right hon. Gentleman has now rejoined us.

I say to Labour Members, in the genuine hope that we can work together on this, that we should get an armed forces trade union Bill before the House. Let us give the armed forces the dignity and decency they deserve as workers in uniform so that they are in a better position to bargain for better terms and conditions for themselves and their families. I am very pleased not only that that was in the SNP manifesto, but that my party is currently undertaking some policy work—led by our armed forces and veterans spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West—on how we can improve the terms and conditions offered to the armed forces.

[Mr Francois]

The hon. Gentleman has mentioned accommodation. I do not know whether he is aware that Carillion, the parent company of CarillionAmey, is in an extremely difficult financial situation at the moment. It is actually in discussions with its creditors about whether the company will be allowed to continue. Under those circumstances, does he agree that it is extremely important for the Ministry of Defence to have a plan B, so that if the worst were to happen to the corporate entity, its personnel can still receive a housing service?

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention because he is absolutely right. My preferred option would be to bring this back in house. I do not know whether he would go that far, but his central point is right that the MOD needs a plan B. I have been watching with interest the news on Carillion, which made the papers just this morning, and this is a really critical time for it.

I want to talk about capability, and I will do so briefly. We are running slightly ahead of time, but I wish to hear what the Minister has to say. Following the 2015 SDSR, there is a new mini-review, led by Sir Mark Sedwill, as several right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned. The review is looking at both security and defence aspects. My fear, which other Members have adumbrated, is that it is about what the Government can get away with spending, as opposed to what they need to spend given the threats they face.

As the hon. Member for Gedling said in his speech, we learned from a report in the Financial Times at the weekend that the review will now be split. Many of the Members who regularly attend defence debates will recall that the report was supposed to be published, and presumably a ministerial statement would have been made, early in the new year. I would have been charitable and extended that right up to the end of March. We now learn, however, that the defence aspects will be kicked later into the year. I would be grateful to the Minister if he told us in his summing up whether that is the case. The cynic in me does wonder—I am not normally one for being cynical—if this is about getting beyond the local elections in May. I sincerely hope not, because that kind of politics is not on.

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[Mr Ellwood]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to the debate, and it is a pleasure to join him in paying tribute to RAF Odiham and all the RAF bases and the work the RAF does; this is going to be a fantastic year for the RAF. I encourage all Members to talk to their local authorities and ask what they might be doing to mark Armed Forces Day on 30 June this year. This is a great opportunity for us to make sure the nation and our local communities can celebrate what our armed forces do.

[Mr Francois]

I thank my right hon. and gallant Friend for giving way, and, like many others in this House, I am delighted that he remains in his place. I read his cogent article in The Sunday Telegraph about the many roles our armed forces perform, including in maintaining the economic wellbeing of our nation, not least as 90% of our trade comes by sea. Will he say something about the importance of that before he moves on to talk about equipment?

[Mr Ellwood]

I would be happy to do that. We perhaps take for granted how open our economy is, and how we require the freedom of the seas to ensure that we can trade and attract business here. There is now an entwined link between security and our economy, and we forget that at our peril. My right hon. Friend reminds us of this powerful point.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) went through a comprehensive list of our equipment. I feel that he must have copied my list! I will simply underline the fact that we have some amazing bits of equipment coming through as a result of our pledge to spend £178 billion. The aircraft carriers have been mentioned, as has the F-35B, of which 14 have now been delivered. We have heard about the Type 26, and we have had a good debate about the Type 31. We have also heard about the River class, and the Dreadnought programme is coming on line as well. In the Army, we have the Ajax armoured fighting vehicles; these were Scimitars and Samsons in old language, if my hon. Friend remembers them. In the RAF, we have the upgrade of the Typhoon, and the F-35 fifth-generation fighter is joining our armed forces as well.

Much of this debate has focused on expenditure. As has been mentioned a number of times, the Defence budget is £36 billion this year. We hold the fifth largest Defence budget in the world. The Government have made a commitment to increase this by 0.5% above inflation every year of this Parliament, so it will be almost £40 billion by 2021. The Secretary of State has expressed the view strongly in public that the capability review is a priority for the Ministry of Defence, and he will shortly outline in more detail the process of how we will move forward. The capability review was brought about because things had changed since the SDSR in 2015. We have had terrorist attacks on the mainland, and cyber-attacks, including on this very building. We have also seen resurgent nations not following international norms. It was rightly decided that this necessitated a review, to renew and reinforce our commitment to the UK’s position as a force for peace, stability and prosperity across the world.