Defence Acquisition Reform

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the broad thrust of his comments. Let me deal with them in reverse order, beginning with his point about arms exports. As he knows, we have strong and robust rules, and we do of course follow them. We keep all our existing export rules and priorities under review. He mentioned nuclear parliamentary scrutiny. I responded to two successive Adjournment debates on nuclear matters that had been initiated by Scottish colleagues. I also appeared before the Defence Committee recently, when I spoke as openly as I could about the highly sensitive issue of the recent certification of our nuclear submarine, HMS Vanguard.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the lack of a labour supply from the EU. Let me gently say to him that when I speak to defence companies, I see a real willingness to invest in apprenticeships so that we can grow our own UK workforce, and I think that that is what we all want to see. On the equipment plan, the hon. Gentleman made the same point as the right hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle). The equipment plan is a moment in time. It is a huge programme over 10 years, and only a minority of it—perhaps 25% or 30%—is actually on contract. What that is showing is, effectively, the aspiration for programmes in the future. There will be other programmes, not on contract, that we will not pull out of and that we will be expected to be part of, but there is room for flexibility.

For me, the purpose of this acquisition reform is to inform that process on the basis of what matters most of all: data from the frontline and war gaming data—on what is happening in Ukraine and on our own war gaming—informing spiral and technological development. That is the way forward, and I think it will be a far more flexible process than taking very rigid views.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I commend my hon. Friend for the remarkable pace at which he has got to grips with the challenges of acquisition in defence. He has not been in post for very long, but he has brought intellectual rigour to those challenges, which some of us have been trying to do for a while. I also endorse everything that was said by the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Sir Jeremy Quin), who is an expert on these issues. I am particularly pleased that he has sought to bring the learning from the current conflict in Ukraine back into our own system here in the UK. Other countries are learning how to adapt their acquisition systems rapidly, and we need to do the same.

I completely endorse the integrated procurement model. Its precursors were in the complex weapons programme, which has been running for more than 10 years. I think the fact that my hon. Friend has referred to it in the current contract that he announced yesterday for the next stage of the competition for the medium helicopter lift is a good example of that. He spoke about introducing agility, about exportability and about innovation. Many of us have been pushing the MOD to proceed with all those developments. The spiral development and, in particular, the move from an initial and a final operator capability to a minimum deployable should have a huge impact on the acceleration of processes.

SROs have been referred to. If my hon. Friend can consider extending terms— double or triple terms—for service personnel and key civil servants in that role, he will assist enormously in retaining knowledge within the system.

[Several hon. Members rose—]