Strategic Defence and Security Review

I thoroughly agree with my hon. Friend. I was about to come to that as my fourth and final point, but let me first finish my remarks on capabilities. There is a very important reason, which Bernard Gray fingers exactly in his original report, for having a proper supplier-customer relationship. In the second world war, the Luftwaffe had a much more powerful research and development and industrial base, but the RAF, because it had a separate capabilities group, was able to make sure that all the pieces interacted so that we did not have problems with fighters that could not talk to bombers, and so on. The A300M is a modern example of where that structure has broken down because—Gray criticises this—the capabilities staff have got weaker, and they will get a lot weaker still if the Levene recommendations are adopted. This aircraft is being bought for the Air Force—I have huge respect for Air Transport Command because of the brilliant work it has done in Afghanistan—but the user is the Army. Bizarrely, we have managed to arrive at a point where we are choosing to buy an aeroplane that is much more expensive than its tried and tested competitor, the Hercules, on the grounds that it can carry one armoured vehicle per aircraft whereas the Hercules cannot. If asked, the Army would say that armoured vehicles usually go by sea—it has C17s if it has to move them by air—and that it could not afford most of the armoured vehicles it wanted anyway. A strong central capabilities directorate would probably have been able to get a grip on that. Furthermore, the problem is as much in the detail as in the big picture. That brings me to my fourth and last point, which was anticipated by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). Some countries, particularly on the continent, do not allow executives on to their company boards; we would say that their company boards are all non-executive. Putting those countries to one side, in all my years as a consultant—I worked on all six continents—I never came across a successful company anywhere in which the heads of the main operating divisions were not on the main board. Peter Levene's recommendation that the individual chiefs of staff should not sit on the Defence Board is bizarre. If one puts that alongside my third point about capabilities, with the greater powers that the individual services are going to take back from the centre to monitor projects, one can see that it is a recipe for increased in-fighting and for a reduction in interoperability. That is a big step away from joined-up defence. I should like to end on a more positive note. With Bernard Gray, who is probably the best informed and best equipped man in the country, being put in charge of procurement, there is a fair chance that he will manage to overcome many of these problems. Certainly, under his leadership the performance of the procurement function itself will move from being a little above average internationally to being among the best. However, if we simply implement at the centre the Levene reforms as they are constituted—I have mentioned two of the weaknesses, and I could go into some of the others in detail—there is a risk that, in this area and in several others, we may undermine long-term defence planning.