Ministry of Defence

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Lord Coaker

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)]

I want, first, to say something about spending and then to say a bit more about some of the points that can be made from the actual estimates. I think that that would help the defence debate. I will refer to historical defence spending but, whatever the rights and wrongs of that argument, let me say this: there is no disguising the fact that this country is not spending enough on the defence and security of the realm. I have said that before and I will say it again. That is the frank reality. That is the truth. That point has been heard—loud and clear.

My advice to the Minister is that he and the Defence Secretary use the power of this Parliament’s voice to go to the Prime Minister and tell her that we, the elected representatives, by and large do not think that we are spending enough on the defence and security of the country. As the Chair of the Defence Committee said, it is no good generals, admirals, national security people or whoever is responsible telling secret meetings that there is a real problem, and then, in three weeks’ or three months’ time, trying to tell the British public that £x million or £x billion more is needed and expecting them just to click their fingers on the basis of, “If you only knew what we knew.” It is not good enough and it is not satisfactory.

I have said at many meetings that the whole of Government need to shift their attitude and be clear what we are talking about. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) will make this point in a different way. The tables are available from the House of Commons Library. Hon. Members can go back to when they want. One paper goes back to 1956, showing the percentage of GDP spent on defence at 6%. It is now at 2%. We can see the ups and downs within that time but, as my hon. Friend pointed out, the table is clear.

Let me give Members one stark reality. The out-turn figure for the defence budget in 2009-10 was £45 billion at 2016-17 prices. These are not my figures; they are the Library’s. If the Government think that they are wrong, they should tell the Library. The 2016-17 out-turn figures, at 2016-17 prices, were just over £35 billion. There are some notes at the bottom which, quite frankly, I do not properly understand: they talk about changes in accounting practices, and counting this or counting that. However, there can be no doubt that it is a huge reduction. I totally agree with the Chair of the Defence Committee that we are now in a position where we all need to say that more should be spent and more has to be spent. The drop in the figures in that table is frankly astonishing.

Let me ask a couple of questions of the Minister that I really want answered. One of the big things that came out of the defence debate that we had a few weeks ago was that the National Security Adviser said that anything he found—it did not matter what it was—had to be fiscally neutral. The Chair of the Defence Committee said, and I agree, that the state-on-state threats are much greater and more intensified than they were. But apparently that does not matter: it has to be fiscally neutral. Can I ask the Minister a direct question? If the modernising defence programme says that the Government should be spending billions of pounds more to secure the defence of this country, is that whole programme predicated on a fiscally neutral position, or is it predicated on the Government funding what their modernising defence programme tells them?

As the Chair of the Defence Committee said, the defence threats are not reducing but intensifying. It is not acceptable to me, or, I believe, to this House, to say that as we are now facing a greater state-on-state threat because the terrorist threat is apparently not quite as big as it was, we will take some money from this budget and move it to that budget. That is not good enough, because we do not know what will happen in three, four, five or six years’ time. We cannot take money from a capability that is not necessarily needed quite as much at this time in order to pay for something else. It is the methodology of madness.

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Gentleman will perhaps be surprised by how much I will say in my speech that—I hope—he agrees with, as I agree with him. The capability review was fiscally neutral, and we found that unacceptable. That was the first thing that the Secretary of State dealt with, perhaps breaking the trend that my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Defence Committee suggested was the case. Let me make it very clear that the study that we are doing now is not fiscally neutral, but we do have to decide what our defence posture is and how much it will cost.

[Vernon Coaker]

There we go—that is the power of Parliament. That is the point I am making. We had the debate before and this was fiscally neutral. The original review—the national security and defence capability review, or whatever it was—was not set up by accident; the Government set it up, and defence was included in it. Parliament said that that was not acceptable, and the Government responded and took it out. We then said that it was not acceptable for that review to be fiscally neutral, and now the Government are saying that it will not be. Of course no one is saying that we should buy chariots or whatever—what we have has to be relevant to the needs that we face. Before, the process was budget-driven: it was a case of having whatever it needed to be in order to meet the budget requirement.

It is going to be difficult for the Government to do this when, for example, we are told today that, even in their response to the Select Committee’s report on the F-35 programme, they will not put a figure on what one F-35 is going to cost. Then the Government say, “We’re buying 138 F-35s—that is the current plan—and 48 will be F-35Bs, but we’re not sure what variant the other 90 are going to be.” How can the Government talk about being fiscally neutral in their plans when they could not say to the Defence Committee a couple of months ago what the cost of the F-35 is and they cannot tell us in their response published today either?

[Vernon Coaker]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. That is the point of the debate on estimates days. For the Minister to be able to say that we will have the capabilities that we need to meet the threats that we will face, we need to be able to say how much those capabilities are going to cost. My hon. Friend raised the issue of frigates; I am using the example of the F-35s. Cannot the Minister go back to the people who plan this and say, “We need some detail on these costs. Otherwise, how can we project forward what the equipment plan or any other plan is going to cost us?”

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Gentleman answers his own question in a way. He asked for, and supports, a fiscally open defence modernisation programme. That will pose the question as to whether we want A variants or B variants of the F-35s. The study needs to be done. On the individual cost, he knows from his own experience that it will vary, as the cost of prototypes does. There was not a unit cost for the F-16 because it was a prototype. It is very difficult to pinpoint the exact cost because the life cycles, the upgrades and the weapons systems that would be put on board vary. That is why we cannot provide the exact figure that he is seeking.

[Vernon Coaker]

I will leave it there, but the Government need to have a better idea, and make it public to the Select Committee and Parliament, of the individual costs. I say gently to the Minister that, otherwise, in a year’s time or two years’ time, he will find himself in exactly the same place that the Government find themselves now, where the National Audit Office is pointing to various gaps in the affordability of the equipment programme.

Let me give another example of where the Government need to be clearer with regard to their estimates. I again say this as something that the Minister and the Government should be saying to the Treasury and to the Prime Minister. The hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) mentioned this point. As the Minister knows, the Government have had to bring forward £300 million to pay for some more up-front costs with regard to the deterrent programme. When they were asked where that money has been taken from, there was a very vague answer, to put it mildly. In essence, therefore, it is an IOU for future programmes. I think that between 2006 and 2007—certainly in the last few years of the Labour Government—where there was an up-front cost that perhaps needed to be taken from future programmes, the Treasury came forward with an uplift to the defence budget to pay for it. That then gave some certainty to future programmes.

Because the Treasury has not uplifted the Ministry of Defence figure by that £300 million, there is already a potential £300 million gap in the future—next year or the year after. I say this to the Government, again trying to be helpful: the Ministry of Defence should go to No. 10 and say, “We believe that where there are additional costs with regard to our deterrent programme that were unforeseen, or there was a growth in those costs, the Treasury should fund that uplift in costs, as was previous practice”—for example, the £300 million. I use that as just one example.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

We have a programme—it is not fiscally neutral, as the last study was. This will allow us to make the changes and the recommendations that we need to take forward. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to get behind that, in order to make sure we can provide the service and the changes that we need to make, and which our armed forces deserve.

[Vernon Coaker]

What the Minister has just said is very important. Will he confirm what he just said: this modernisation of defence programme is not fiscally neutral?

[Mr Ellwood]

I can say it again and I think I am going to say it a bit later, because it is in my speech: I am happy to confirm that it is not fiscally neutral. That is exactly why we are doing this. I am not saying this just because the Defence Secretary is in his place, but the first thing he recognised was the fact that the capability review was fiscally neutral and it was prohibiting us. We saw a lot of the stuff that came out in the media and so forth. The challenges that that would have imposed on our armed forces were exactly why there was a requirement to look in more detail at what our armed forces are doing. We now have that opportunity and we have to make the case as to what changes we need, what our defence posture is and how we move forward—

Defence Reform Bill

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Lord Coaker

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

The right hon. Gentleman is flying another kite. I am not making that commitment at all. We support the thrust of the reforms to the Regular Army and the uplift in reserves, but new clause 3 seeks to obtain a proper understanding of whether the reform is working, whether it is saving money, whether it is offering value for money and what is happening with the recruitment targets. We need much more clarity and openness about all those things. The Defence Secretary can say that these are spending pledges or things we do not know. He can attack the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay for not properly understanding the reform. However, he needs to address what is being said rather than what he thinks we are saying, and that is the whole point.

We talk about allowing adequate uplift in the reserves to meet the shortfall, and we heard from the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox). He remarked only last month:

“When I was secretary of state, I said we would only decrease the numbers of regulars when we had guarantees that we would be able to get the numbers—training and equipping up of the reserves—to match.”

Members of the armed forces and of this House deserve to know from the Defence Secretary when that policy changed and why.

We support new clause 3 because we want the Defence Secretary to take more responsibility for these reforms. We consider it better to pause until the MOD has managed to get recruitment back on track as a plan accepted by Parliament than to be forced to ditch the entire reform a few years down the line when it is clear that it is not working. A pause before progressing the reforms would give him time to fix the problems, to provide us with the figures, to prove his plan is cost-effective and to show that he can meet the time frame he has set.

[Mr Ellwood]

I, too, welcome the hon. Gentleman to his position. Will he place on the record his thoughts on the fact that our commitments in Camp Bastion and in Afghanistan are to be downsized, with 9,000 troops coming home? In that situation, would a Labour Government keep the armed forces, particularly the Army, at the same size, bearing in mind that downsize, or return it—[Hon. Members: “This is about reservists.”] I am asking about regulars for the moment. Would he retain the regular forces at their current levels bearing in mind that we are reducing a major commitment in Afghanistan in the middle of next year?

[Vernon Coaker]

I have said on countless occasions—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is generous. He talks about this uplift replacing the duties on the regular forces. That is why I posed my question. I am asking him what the commitments will be. What does he see as the commitments that will keep reservists busy, in the sense that our overall commitments have been reduced?

[Vernon Coaker]

I have given the hon. Gentleman the answer to his question, which he asked again. If he does not like or accept the answer, that is fine, but I will not keep repeating it. He was the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the previous Secretary of State for Defence when he made the commitment about uplift and about the relevant number of reserves having to be reached before the number of regulars was reduced. I wonder what comment he made to the then Secretary of State about that at the time.

Northern Ireland

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Lord Coaker

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

I thank my hon. Friend for what he said at the beginning of his intervention. I will go on to say something about the economy and the need for jobs and growth in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, but he is right to make that point.

The motion should enable Northern Ireland Members to speak with a great deal of flexibility on the many different issues that affect their constituents, as well as allow them and Members from other parts of the United Kingdom to put forward their views and wider considerations on the topic in hand.

Northern Ireland has been transformed in recent years. I am acutely aware of those on both sides of the House who have made such an enormous contribution to the cause of peace. The fact that many of them are in the Chamber is an indication of their commitment. I place on record my gratitude for their guidance and support in helping me to do the job of shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. I know there are differing views on the agreement within Northern Ireland and within the House, but along with parties in Northern Ireland and the Irish Government, Labour Members are proud of our role in helping to bring about that historic accord. We believe that the agreement and the agreements that followed have made Northern Ireland a better place, and we stand by them.

Good Friday 1998 was a hugely significant moment, when relations within Northern Ireland and throughout these islands were recognised as complicated and challenging, but intertwined and interdependent. The years that followed were difficult, but much good work was done despite the ups and downs of devolution. Hon. Members in the Chamber, including from the Social Democratic and Labour party, played a valued part in that, as did the Ulster Unionist party.

Six years ago, devolution was fully restored. Since 2007, Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson from the Democratic Unionist party have respectively served as First Ministers, alongside Martin McGuinness from Sinn Fein as Deputy First Minister. The transfer of policing and justice powers was another enormous step forward in 2010, when the Alliance party joined the Executive and took the position of Justice Minister.

All this shows that we have come a long way in Northern Ireland. As I say frequently, it is a privilege to hold my position most of all because I get to be in Northern Ireland often. The progress made in past years has given rise to a changed Northern Ireland, one that is confident, optimistic and dynamic, and a great place to live, work, invest in and to visit. This year, Northern Ireland gets the chance to show the world the real Northern Ireland; to show what it is really about. The UK city of culture in Derry is a packed 12 months of art, culture, sport, music and drama. I challenge anyone, anywhere to match the unrivalled programme of events that make Londonderry the place to be every day of 2013. The world will literally come to Northern Ireland for the G8 summit. I commend the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister for their work in bringing this prestigious event to one of the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom.

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

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The world’s spotlight will be on Northern Ireland when the G8 summit takes place in County Fermanagh in June. Does he agree that the summit is an opportunity for the world to see how Northern Ireland has moved forward? There is, however, a worry that those who choose to protest on other issues could do damage. Does he agree that every effort must be made to ensure that security measures are in place so that no damage is caused to Northern Ireland as it moves forward?

[Vernon Coaker]

I think that every right hon. and hon. Member would agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments. There is a right to protest in a democracy, but it has to be done lawfully and peacefully. I do not think that any of us would wish to see anything take place that would detract from an important world summit, and an important example of how Northern Ireland can demonstrate to the whole world the real Northern Ireland and how it has moved forward.