Ajax Programme
Matt Western Excerpts(2 years, 11 months ago)
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Jeremy Quin
I am very sorry that we have lost my right hon. Friend. It gives me scope to interpret his question. I think he was asking about our capability to equip our recce troops. What we can do is a needed step change. The vehicles we are currently using were brought into service in the 1970s. We need that digitised framework. We need those sensors. We need the four dimensional capability. The programme will significantly help our armed forces, and we will be able to deliver it at speed.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
The Minister is a decent person, but this is extremely worrying news. The idea that we have a vehicle that can go almost as fast as a bicycle, but cannot actually fire its weapon on the move, while also posing such a risk to our troops is very worrying. The defence analyst, Francis Tusa, has described this as the Army’s Nimrod MRA4. Is he right, and what does that say about our defence procurement capability or, should I say, incapability?
Jeremy Quin
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his nice remarks. He is also a very decent person, but I fear that he was not listening fully to my earlier responses regarding speed and fire on manoeuvre, which are capabilities that Ajax will be able to deploy. We are still in demonstration phases, so we do not get the full finished article; it is the capability 3 drop that provides us with the vehicle that will be used on operations.
The hon. Gentleman is worried. I, too, am concerned that we have issues. I would much rather have come to this place and said, “All’s well; 30 June 2021—we’re looking good.” The fact that we have tests on vibrations, which will not be fully reported on until the end of July, speaks all one needs to know about that particular date. We have been pushing and pushing, and it is still possible that we will get a very easy answer. I fear that it may take longer, but we will continue to work to resolve these issues. However, we are spending £5.5 billion on a fixed-price contract. A lot can go wrong in a contract. A lot needs to be worked on with the suppliers, and in terms of the demonstration phase, that is what we are going to do.
Strength of the UK’s Armed Forces
Matt Western Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate; I was not entirely sure that I would get the opportunity.
I am pleased that the right hon. and gallant Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) spoke today. His valued comments were missed in our last debate on the subject: it was a real shame not to hear from him on that day, although I cited him in my speech. It was also good to hear from the right hon. Members for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and the hon. Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland), all of whose voices I value greatly for the knowledge, expertise and experience that they bring to these debates.
It is not my specialist subject at all, but I have real concerns about where this is going. I have been extremely concerned for a couple of years now about recruitment numbers in our forces. I think that Serco has been managing it—it was almost as if it were being managed such that the numbers would fall, anticipating the Government’s position.
As I mentioned in the last debate, we are talking about an Army that will be as small as the US special forces. We are talking about the British Army! I once considered joining it, and I would have been very proud to represent the country. The notion that the UK could have a smaller force than the US special forces is quite extraordinary.
I hear the point about new technologies, but let us think back to the advent of the aeroplane and the birth of the Royal Air Force, or the introduction of tanks. Did we cut our forces then because of the new technology? No, we built on what we had. We have some fine forces and expertise, and we are well respected and well regarded around the world for them.
My point on this topic the other week was about peace-keeping and the importance of having people who can make the case, who can win hearts and minds, and who are actually trusted, as we saw in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and elsewhere. That is why we should be maintaining our forces and building on them with new technologies. We have to pay for our security—it is as simple as that. The threats are different from 10 or 15 years ago. We must invest in the new technologies, but keep what we have.
Integrated Review: Defence Command Paper
Matt Western Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Wallace
My right hon. Friend makes an important point. NATO, first and foremost, is the guarantor of European security; no other organisation is, and we do not forget that. Of course, we sit around as NATO Defence Ministers and Foreign Ministers and discuss that with all those partners. There is a proper process of verifying and holding to account our commitments, which is why the national readiness initiative that, predominantly, the United States kicked off a few years ago was all about making sure we were ready and able. It is a constant process of being validated and making sure we can deliver what we are supposed to, and NATO publishes its annual reports and does indeed hold us to account. We are confident that we can do that, but also, as the second biggest spender in NATO and with a large group of forces—despite the narrative that is being put out by the Opposition—we are capable of doing concurrent operations and other types of operations if needed.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab) [V]
According to Admiral Mike Mullen, the ex-chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, 70,000-odd armed forces is about the same size as the entire US special forces. To quote him, he said that the UK forces will be getting “pretty small”. I know that our armed forces are very special, but perhaps the absence of the right hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) is explained by these announcements. His lesson—and, I am sure, that of the Secretary of State—was that we needed boots on the ground if we were ever to win the peace. That was surely the lesson of Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. How on earth will we achieve that in future?
Mr Wallace
The lesson of Sierra Leone and other places is actually that if we engage in conflict prevention early enough and build out the capacity of a country to resist insurgencies and subversion, we avoid having a war or conflict in the first place. The lesson of Iraq is that, yes, we can put lots of troops on the ground, but once the Iraqi army is defeated, if we do not have an alternative way to start building the state again, we have people sitting around in tanks and armoured vehicles after the conflict who are attacked on a daily basis and are the wrong people in the wrong place. I heard what the senior and respected United States admiral said today; he also said that if General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the Defence Staff, whom he knows well, is in support of this, then so is he.
Remembrance, UK Armed Forces and Society
Matt Western Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton), who clearly has so much knowledge about life in the services. Today is an important day to pay tribute to our armed forces for their service and ultimately their sacrifice, for the conflicts they have fought and for the work they have done throughout the world to preserve peace and to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone and other countries, and for the important civil work that they have done, not least on our islands with covid-19.
Sunday was not a normal Remembrance Sunday. It was important that we paid our respects, as always, to show our gratitude. Normally, it would be an opportunity to meet veterans such as Len, Stuart or Paul, as I would have done last year to talk about some of their experiences, or even Rusty, who is now getting very old but is one of our great, gallant airmen of yesteryear. In Warwick, we would normally see hundreds of people around the war memorial, honouring the 358 men and one woman from Warwick who died in the great war, and the subsequent 112 who lost their lives in world war two. We would see the march past the war memorial and hear the sound of the local bagpiper, Andy Wheeler, and the last post played by a bugler from Warwick School. In Leamington, there are 550 names on the war memorial from the first war, and many hundreds following from the second war and subsequent conflicts—all courageous, all gallant. Among those names, there are recipients of the Victoria Cross: Lance-Corporal William Amey, Captain Arthur Kilby, Lieutenant John Cridlan Barrett, and perhaps most significantly Private Henry Tandey, the most decorated British private soldier of the first war, who in the space of six weeks in the autumn of 1918 was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal, a Military Cross and the Victoria Cross.
However, I want to recognise his near neighbours, just down Kenilworth Street from where he grew up: the Tims brothers, Fred, William and Jack, all lost in the same conflict. I want to remember in particular their mother Esther and so many families who lost so many. The strength of feeling was best illustrated by Warwick Poppies in 2018—62,500 hand-knitted poppies decorated our church at St Mary’s in Warwick. The scale of loss is perhaps best illustrated by a map produced by the Leamington history group that showed every household across the town that had suffered a loss in the great war. It was virtually every house in those terraces in the centre of Leamington, and some of those houses had multiple stickers. That map showed how communities were literally decimated: so many towns, villages and cities, if they had maps, would show the same.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) was right to say that we should think about the individual. All of us will have lost family in those wars and in subsequent conflicts, perhaps relations in this country or from other Commonwealth nations. This is perhaps illustrated, if I may, by my own great-uncle Clarke Duff, who in 1915 left the farm in Ontario, Canada to fight in Flanders fields, but would sadly never till a field again.
We have much to be thankful for, and so many to thank, including those who served and made the ultimate sacrifice in subsequent conflicts. I thank the Royal British Legion for its work, and particularly Tony Glover and Pat Edgington for the extraordinary work they do in raising so much money locally. I also thank other charities for their work: Help for Heroes, and people like Michael Vallance and Charlie Sabin, and the Royal Air Forces Association, and people like Patrick Fitzgerald and Dave Brown.
Finally, can we remember and think of all those who were left behind and lost so much of their lives? I am thinking of the families and loved ones: people such as Esther Tims, who I mentioned, for whom life can barely have been worth living, and those friends of my parents—all women, who we referred to as aunts—whose boyfriends never returned and who would never marry, but would live with the loss all their life. These are the people I wish to remember and pay tribute to.
Counter-Daesh Update
Matt Western Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Wallace
When my hon. Friend was in the Foreign Office, she did an excellent job on crafting the Africa strategy, from which we still work. Just so that Members realise that I have not just announced a new troop deployment, let me say that the MINUSMA troop deployment was announced to the House some years ago. I fear it may have been so far away that people may have forgotten and thought I have suddenly announced a deployment. Africa is going to be key in the next 10, 15, 20 years. It always has been important, but the spread of Islamist terrorism, through al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and Islamists in west Africa, is a real, existing threat that we have to deal with. They undermine fragile democracies and fragile countries, often those that are very poor. We cannot turn our back on Africa on these issues. Where we can, we have to support those countries to see off the threat of Islamists and help them on the path to successful economies. I know that DFID and its strategies are working to do that, and at the MOD we are doing it through training and other such things. That is why we commit to countries such as Kenya and, indeed, now to Mali.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
The hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) made a point about foreign and defence policy in west Africa. Is not the crucial part of that whether the Secretary of State wins his own battle with the Treasury in autumn?
Mr Wallace
I am fighting. I spoke to Lord Robertson of Port Ellen about his quite excellent defence review in 1998. We have all been around that block. It is important that we fight for the correct amount of resource. It is also important that we demonstrate, both to the taxpayer and the wider Government, the utility of defence, which is often sub-threshold in the area of training, nation building or intelligence gathering, so at the very least we can make sure we help our allies. In the integrated review, one of the arguments I will be using to the other Departments is that we help to stop conflicts. We are not there to start them, but to stop them, and in the long run that is how to save money.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Western Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Anne-Marie Trevelyan
I am sorry, but I did not quite catch the start of the hon. Gentleman’s question. In relation to call centres and Capita, we have to remember that those who are applying, who are 16 and upwards, live in a digital world. They live on apps and dealing with those systems is very much part of that. The call centre is one part of the whole. That service ensures that young people can really ask those questions and get to grips with their initial questions about whether joining the armed forces is for them. How that follows on from that is something that, as I think we would all agree, my colleague the Minister for the Armed Forces has spoken about at length this afternoon. We are making huge progress in making sure that we get the numbers that we need in the armed forces.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Mr Jim Cunningham
The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Ben Wallace)
We are committed to supporting the UK defence manufacturing industry. On 14 March, the Government provided an update to Parliament on our ambitious defence prosperity programme, which includes work to sustain an internationally competitive and productive UK defence sector. In 2017-18, the MOD spent £18.9 billion with UK industry and commerce, directly supporting 115,000 jobs.
Matt Western
I thank the Minister for his response, but last week the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, said that the deal for Cobham, which is being taken over by Advent, the private equity company, should be blocked. The Business Secretary said that there would be guarantees, but we know that in the case of GKN and Melrose, those guarantees were worthless. If the US President can say that the US automotive industry is a concern that should be protected for national security, what sort of protections do we have in place for our industry?
Mr Wallace
The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point about protecting our sovereign capability and I take that incredibly seriously, as someone who worked previously in QinetiQ, in the UK aerospace sector. The issue with Cobham is ongoing. It is currently before the relevant Department in Whitehall. We have made our internal submissions on that and I therefore cannot comment on that particular issue. It is important that we maintain and keep our sovereignty, where that is viewed as necessary for our future, but we should also not forget that the reason we are the second biggest aerospace exporter in the world is that we take an international consortium attitude towards it.
Oral Answers to Questions
Matt Western Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Mark Lancaster
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is an absolute champion for his constituency and the south-west. Her Majesty’s Naval Base Devonport and the south-west of England continue to be vital to the Royal Navy and, as we plan to develop a concept for the littoral strike ship, we will look at how it goes. At the moment, no decision on basing has been made.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Many employees of GE Power in Rugby happen to live in the Warwick and Leamington constituency. Will the Minister update us on what discussions have been had with that company to preserve its quality manufacturing and skills in our country?
Mark Lancaster
I know that, for example, my colleague the Defence Procurement Minister has had several discussions with the constituency MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey). Although of course this is very much a matter for the company, the MOD will look to see in what ways we can provide support.
RAF Centenary
Matt Western Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Gavin Williamson
I know that everyone at RAF Cosford will be greatly appreciative of those thanks. It is great to be able to name-check such a wonderful RAF base that is making such an impact in terms of training and skills for future generations in our Royal Air Force.
What truly makes the RAF so remarkable is that, since 1990, it has been continuously deployed on overseas operations. RAF100 has also been a chance to celebrate that continuing contribution to defence and the security that the RAF provides to our nation. As we speak in this Chamber, the RAF is involved in campaigns across 23 countries and five continents, working closely with our NATO allies. It has protected Baltic skies over the Black sea and it will soon be over Icelandic skies. It is all about protecting those nations and also Britain from all those who wish to do us harm—nations that are becoming more aggressive and more assertive in their international view and their willingness to put pressure on their neighbours.
Further afield, our RAF is supporting the French counter-terrorism mission in Mali, and RAF Regiment personnel are training their counterparts in Nigeria to combat the menace of Boko Haram. Following the devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean last year, who did we turn to? We turned to the Royal Air Force, which flew more than 850 tonnes of vital freight, including water, rations and shelters to help local people.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I would like to pay tribute to my own father for his service in the second world war, and say that the Secretary of State is making an important point about the service provided by so many other nations, particularly in the second world war—the Poles, the Belgians, the Canadians, the Kiwis, the Australians, the US and so many others. We still see that. The RAF has performed such an important role that over the decades.
Gavin Williamson
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is a truly international service. It is absolutely fitting that he mentions so many of those nations that provided an instrumental part of our effort not just to defend Britain, but to defend the values that interweave all our nations together. I had the privilege of being in Poland and meeting some of those veterans who had served for Britain in our services. The pride that they had in their contribution was truly uplifting. It is a debt that I hope this nation will never ever forget, and I do not believe that it ever will. It is a very important part of our tradition.
I am slightly desperate to see the film “Hurricane”. I am not sure whether any Members have had the opportunity to see it. I tried to persuade my wife to come with me to the cinema, but she was not convinced. However, I am looking forward to it being released on DVD, so that I can purchase it.