Defence Procurement

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I understand my hon. Friend’s position, which is long held and loudly expressed, but DE&S is, if not unique, a very unusual organisation within the civil service. It is almost wholly commercial in what it does. Most of its interaction is with the commercial sector and it is competing directly for skills with the private sector marketplace. It is not like a policy making department. It is absurd that we are constrained to deal with civil servants whose job is commercial in nature in the same way as we deal with policy making civil servants in a central Whitehall policy Department. The freedoms and flexibilities that the Treasury and the Cabinet Office have agreed for DE&S plus will free us from that constraint, which will make DE&S plus a much more credible and commercially focused proposition. However, as I have said, I would not like to rule out the possibility of challenging it in the future with a GoCo competition to keep it on its toes. Let us try everything and make sure we get the best value for money for the taxpayer.

[Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

How will the further involvement of the private sector and the introduction of the GoCo model square with the national interest of having a proper defence industrial strategy for the UK, or do the Government no longer believe in a defence industrial strategy?

[Mr Hammond]

We have a defence industrial strategy. The question from the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (John Robertson) about the Clyde yards will remind the House that, just recently, we made a very important step forward in allowing BAE Systems to explain to the world how it is going to manage complex warship building in the future to ensure that we retain a credible and viable complex warship building operation in the UK.