Armoured Cavalry Programme: Sheldon Review

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I would like to just take this opportunity to add my thoughts about Glenda Jackson, as I can see there are colleagues in the Chamber who were here in the House at the same time as her. She was a wonderful colleague and a great Minister, and I think we all want to send our condolences to her family. I call the Chair of the Defence Committee.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

May I immediately associate myself with your kind words about Glenda Jackson, Madam Deputy Speaker?

We now have in the Chamber not one, but three current or former procurement Ministers who bear the scars of this project. I am pleased that we are able to discuss the matter so openly and I commend the recent work that the MOD has done to get on top of the issue.

Ajax is now a case study that the MOD and DNS should use on how not to do procurement. This is all about the British Army’s recce vehicle. The current one being used, the Scimitar, was introduced in 1971. It is good to hear that the soldiers the Minister met said that the replacement is better than the last—that is brilliant, because it was built in 1971. Ajax’s journey has been miserable. It started in 2010 and the delivery date was 2017, yet it is not expected to enter service until 2030. Something very serious has gone wrong.

I absolutely welcome Clive Sheldon’s report. The Committee will look into that in more detail and, rather fortuitously, a Sub-Committee study on procurement, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), is currently under way. I am sure that he will have more words on how we will digest the report in more detail.

The Minister covered some of the issues. Concerns include the relationships between different entities within, or associated with, the MOD. The senior responsible officer has been criticised for not being a single point of contact or owning the actual project itself but having to have a number of projects going concurrently. Concerns got stuck because of people taking a rigid view of their remits. It is not just with Ajax that there is a problem; there is also with the land warfare capability. We have similar problems with the main battle tank and the armoured fighting vehicle. I hope that those problems will be addressed when the defence Command Paper comes out.

[James Cartlidge]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee. Of course, we are absolutely committed to engaging with his Committee and, indeed, with the Sub-Committee, before which I will appear next week. I was born in 1974. He makes a striking point about the existing vehicle being from 1971—it is the same age as my elder brother. I take his point that one might therefore expect servicemen to say that it is night and day.

I put great store by meeting those on the frontline, and I will always continue to do that. It was a great privilege to go to Bovington. One of the soldiers I sat next to in the Ares version had been in a Challenger 2 when it was hit by an IED—I think it was in Iraq or Afghanistan; he did not say. He felt confidence in the protection. It is so important that we interact with the soldiers on the frontline. Ultimately, that is the point: we want to deliver a better acquisitions system for them and I look forward to working with my right hon. Friend’s Committee to that end.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend, who speaks with the expertise of a former Army officer and someone who serves on the Defence Committee, has hit the nail on the head in terms of the issue of optimism bias. [Interruption.] Did I say “former Minister”? I correct the record if I said that, but she is certainly on the Defence Committee.

[Mr Ellwood]

No, she was a Minister!

[James Cartlidge]

I apologise; she is a former Minister. She knows what she is talking about—that is for certain. She made an extremely important point about optimism bias. It may be that I was a bit pessimistic in my answer.

This is a serious point, because Mr Sheldon talks about optimism bias at length. Obviously, the new initial operating capability and full operating capability are much later than we wanted them to be, but I think what happened is that DE&S sat down with General Dynamics and said, “This time we’ve got to be realistic. Let’s have a programme we can actually deliver to.” I know it is disappointing, but that is the key thing; we want to actually get this equipment delivered.

My hon. Friend’s point about having psychological confidence to speak up is incredibly important, and she is a champion on that. We conduct the pan-Defence people survey, and the last iteration of the survey asked questions in relation to psychological confidence—are people confident in coming forward and challenging the system? In the last survey, the Army was eight percentage points above the civil service benchmark, so there is improvement happening in this space.