Trident Renewal

Debate between Nick Harvey and Lord Walney

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I am going to make some progress and I will take another intervention in a little while.

Our defences have seen round after round of cuts as the financial situation has deteriorated, and later this year we face the gloomy prospect of the whole thing happening all over again. Whatever the outcome of the election, there will be a strategic defence and security review this summer and a comprehensive spending review this autumn.

The Secretary of State dismissed the cost figures offered by the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who opened the debate for the SNP, but I readily recognise those figures. It is a fact that if we go ahead and build four submarines, they will cost us between £25 billion and £30 billion. It is a fact that running the nuclear deterrent currently costs us £2.9 billion a year, and if we do that for another 30 or 40 years the cost will multiply. Whatever the outcome, at some point we will have to decommission it all at the end, so I would have thought that £100 billion is the very least it would cost. I would take a private guess that the quantum would in fact be well in excess of that figure, but I certainly recognise it as a starting point.

[John Woodcock]

On the basic maths, if the figure of £2.9 billion is right and, as CND’s own estimates say, the £100 billion figure is stretched over the whole lifetime of 50-plus years, could the hon. Gentleman tell me what is £2.9 billion times 50?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I was taking the lifetime of the submarines as being more like 25 to 30 years. If we operate them for 25 years at almost £3 billion, that would take us into the realms of £75 billion plus the building and decommissioning costs, which would certainly take us over £100 billion very quickly indeed. I would have thought that, in reality, it will cost a great deal more than that.

We know that the national deficit remains a serious problem and we do not hear from any of the political parties—mine or anybody else’s—that defence will be insulated or protected from a tough comprehensive spending review later this year. If defence were to face another cut comparable to that which it took in 2010, which seems entirely possible, the proportion of our gross domestic product that we spend on defence, which is already destined to go below 2% next year, will make rapid headway down towards 1.5%.

We know, however, that on the table for discussion in this summer’s SDSR is a whole series of big procurement projects. The two new aircraft carriers are due to have joint strike fighter craft flying off them—we do not know how much their unit cost will be or how many of them we will be able to afford. The Type 26 frigate is due to be built in the next few years, but it is very difficult to know how much that will cost. We need more helicopters and more intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance assets. We need another generation of remotely piloted aircraft. The existing amphibious shipping is due to become redundant in the latter part of this decade and will need replacing if we are going to sustain that capability. The Army’s vehicle crisis remains unresolved after the collapse of most of the future rapid effect system programme.

All those things will be on the table and wrestled over in agony this summer. In addition, paper exercises are already being done looking at what an Army of just 60,000 would look like, because of the financial crunch that the Department will face. Yet, for some reason, keeping a nuclear deterrent going at the level we thought necessary at the height of the cold war in 1980 gets an automatic bye and is assumed to be beyond debate. Nobody even wants to put it on the table and debate it alongside those other things that are there to mitigate the dangers that our own security assessment said in 2010 are first-league threats that we face here and now.

Defence Equipment and Support

Debate between Nick Harvey and Lord Walney

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nick Harvey]

My hon. Friend makes good points on the difficulties that SMEs believe they currently have in some of our big procurement projects. Since the move to the MOD contracting directly with prime contractors, which then handle subsidiary contracting, it would be true to say that the MOD has rather lost the skill set of managing SMEs. By the time the reforms are complete, I hope that a GOCO of the sort I have described will reinvest in those skill sets and that we will be better able to manage SMEs directly.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

In the light of what the Minister has said on sovereign capabilities, and the fact that Aldermaston is already a GOCO, how will the successor deterrent programme be different if it is transferred into a GOCO?

[Nick Harvey]

There will be very little difference. The fact of the matter, however, is that the project management undertaken on behalf of the MOD by DE&S will—I say this with considerable confidence—be better, because there will be a higher level of skills in DE&S. It will bring in a variety of new commercial skill sets of which it is currently short. That will secure better value for money and more efficient delivery of the contract.

Defence Reform

Debate between Nick Harvey and Lord Walney

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nick Harvey]

I am sure we all wish the family member well. I did say that no criticism attaches to the shadow Secretary for his absence and I mean that most emphatically.

The matter before us is this nonsensical motion. It seems to say that the Opposition recognise the need to make the changes we are making, but the fact is that they ducked these changes year after year. They went for 12 years without a defence review, with pressure building up in the defence programme all the time, and there was a black hole of whatever size—we will come back to that in a minute—by the time of the strategic defence and security review. They left our armed forces overstretched, under-equipped and underfunded for the tasks they were set. That is the legacy of the Government in which the hon. Member for North Durham served. The blame for the need to remove platforms, reduce manpower and make the other reductions we have had to do sits very squarely at the previous Government’s door. They wrecked the economy, they wrecked the defence budget and they failed to make the changes necessary to prepare our armed forces for the future.

The hon. Member for North Durham made heavy weather of the black hole. When we began the SDSR process in the summer of 2010 we asked the officials who were presiding over it at the MOD, “What is our baseline and what is the true financial situation as we start this process?” The explanation came that if we took the manpower commitments, all the overheads and all the committed expenditure, including the contracts that had been signed for procurement and those that had been announced by the previous Government as Ministry of Defence policy, and planned to bring them on stream when the Labour party said they would be, over the 10-year period, there was a gap between all that and a “flat real” terms assumption on funding—not a “flat cash” assumption—in relation to the 2010-11 budget. We were told that the gap over the 10-year period would amount to £38 billion. It was a 10-year period because that is the length of time over which the MOD plans its budgets.

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) said that that was an unreasonable thing to view as a starting point. She compared it with the situation of someone who was about to go personally bankrupt aspiring to buy a Ferrari, but I do not think that is very kind to the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth). When he came to the Dispatch Box a few weeks before Christmas in 2009, he announced that there would be 22 new Chinook helicopters. He did not sign a contract or find the money to pay for them but he announced there would be 22 new Chinook helicopters. I do not know whether in the fantasy budget of the Labour party it does not think that that was a commitment, but it was one of the commitments that that Defence Secretary made, and it was on that basis that the £38 billion black hole was presented to us by officials.

I do not call into question the personal commitment of the hon. Member for North Durham, but he has to recognise that his motion opposes everything that this Government are doing and is pretty scant when it comes to proposing any alternatives. He says that he recognises the need for defence reform, but the only response in his motion is to be concerned, “anxious” and “worried” about how we are clearing up the mess he made. He has not presented one properly costed plan or given us a coherent alternative. He has not given us a plan A, let alone a plan B. He needs to recognise that he has to do better if he wants to hold us to account for what we have done.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the Minister think the decision he has just criticised was better or worse than switching to a “cat and trap” system when first coming into office and then reversing that decision at great cost only a year later?

[Nick Harvey]

I think it was a perfectly sensible alternative to explore the “cat and trap” option. As we said at the time, it would have given us the ability to project a much better aircraft type off the carrier. I think that to commission the detailed work on that proposal was entirely responsible. If it ends up costing us the maximum, as the Secretary of State suggested, of £100 million, that is a small sum compared with the £1.5 billion the previous Government added to the carrier project in one afternoon, when they announced from the Dispatch Box that it was to be postponed by a year. That was a far greater drain on the defence budget than the relatively small bounded study, which unfortunately concluded that the costs of going ahead with the plan were such that it was not viable.

The shadow Defence Secretary has identified £5 billion of cuts that he says he supports, but that would barely scratch the surface of the black hole that his party’s Government left behind. Of course, his cuts are not new; they are already being made. On Labour’s current public plans, the defence budget would still be in chaos. They have pledged neither to make any extra savings, nor to restore the cuts that have been made. What is interesting is not what they are saying in public, but what they are saying in private. Earlier, reference was made to the interesting correspondence between the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Defence Secretary. It is worth quoting the letter from the Leader of the Opposition to his colleague, dated 23 January this year:

“You have powerfully made the case in your recent interventions that there is no easy future for Defence expenditure and clearly in the context of the current fiscal position we can expect to have to make further savings after the next election.”

In public, the Opposition are against the cuts that we are making, but in secret, they are planning even deeper defence cuts. Today’s debate is not simply opposition, but opportunism as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Harvey and Lord Walney

Monday 11th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

How is the review into the alternatives to Trident going?

[Nick Harvey]

The review is making good progress and is on target to report to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister at the end of the year, as was announced by the previous Defence Secretary.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Nick Harvey and Lord Walney

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nick Harvey]

The in-principle debate about whether to embark on the programme was held in 2007, and the final opportunity for the public, Parliament or anybody else to debate whether we pass the point of no return, as it were, on the successor programme is at main gate, and of course there will be debate about that. In terms of what is going on this autumn, the value-for-money study will feed into the SDR and the comprehensive spending review, and, if it is possible to get better value for money out of the programme, it is only right and proper that we do so.

[John Woodcock]

rose—

[Nick Harvey]

I see the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness rising, and, in terms of the impact that the process might have, I must say that the points that have already been made about the impact on the industrial base, if there were to be an interruption, are well understood. They would be not only of industrial significance, but of military significance, so Members should not give way to the temptation to speculate on the basis of tittle-tattle in the press.

[John Woodcock]

The Minister has just said that the decisions on the timetable have been taken and will not change, and that is very significant. If that statement is true, it will be very welcome in Barrow and Furness. However, is he aware that, as I understand it, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, at his Lobby briefing this morning, gave a very different impression?

[Nick Harvey]

Let me say this again: the decision on Trident has been taken. It was laid out in the coalition agreement, which made it perfectly clear:

“We will maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent”

and, in due course, replace it. The value-for-money study, which is currently taking place but has yet to arrive at any decisions, may well consider the expenditure profile, and the order in which we programme different parts of the work, but I cannot speculate on that. However, the initial gate decision is on course to be made later this year or, at the latest, in the early part of next. We know that under the timetable, main gate will be at the tail end of 2014 or, possibly, in the early part of 2015; that is already known and understood. But, as the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) pertinently pointed out in his intervention, if main gate happened to shift a few months, it would not make any difference in terms of either finance or, frankly, the impact on the industrial base. So, the issue involves complete speculation and does not have the significance that one or two people have suggested it might.