Defence Aerospace Industrial Strategy

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

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

May I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) and the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on securing this debate? On 10 October, I raised an urgent question with the Speaker on the issue of more than 1,000 job losses across Lancashire in the aerospace industry and this was addressed on that occasion. The response was that the jobs could not be maintained, with the principal reason given that there were not enough orders coming through. The hon. Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) said rightly that we are doing quite well on orders from the middle east countries, but the Typhoon is a world-beating aircraft and it should be being sold around the world. Nobody was more angry and upset than me when we did not get the India contract. I am sure there are other contracts where, with good co-operation between Government and the industry, we could do Government-to-Government deals, in order to keep this supply of Typhoons running.

There are two big issues facing the likes of BAE Systems at the moment. One is keeping the current Typhoon work going. It is ticking away slowly; the production lines have been slowed down. That is mainly to do with this not being as saleable as we thought it might be or it not being sold hard enough. The second big issue is one that colleagues have touched on, which is the question relating to a sixth-generation fighter. That has to come, and the elephant in the room seems to be who we collaborate on that with. The Chair of the Defence Committee mentioned that we need to see integrational capability, which we are not getting a great deal of with the F-35. We are not going to get all of this if we do it in partnership with our European neighbours, and the French and the Germans must be prime candidates here. We have to develop that sixth-generation fighter and sell it far better than we have sold the Typhoon to date.