I shall be brief, Mr Bone.
This is like wandering into a group of the last of the big spenders. I do not share the view of most of my colleagues that we should be spending more on defence. Moreover, I am always very suspicious of Members of Parliament who come and represent their constituency interests in these sorts of lobbying exercises. Therefore, I was loth to contribute to a debate that is about, from my point of view, the question of helicopters, which the leader of the Liberal Democrats raised, but I have looked into it a bit and I find, to my surprise, that I can reconcile what I want to say both with my views about defence expenditure and with the national interest rather than my constituency interest, which happen, on this rare occasion, to coincide.
I understand that, as part of the review, the Government are, rightly, considering reducing the number of kinds of helicopter that are run by the armed forces as a whole by at least one. I welcome that, because I am perfectly sure that we run too many kinds of helicopter, which is a very expensive way to do things. I understand that the choice may come down to one between the Puma and the Wildcat. As my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh) mentioned, the Wildcat is built in his constituency. Many of my constituents work in the Leonardo factories that produce it. It is a relatively modern—in fact, very modern—helicopter. It is highly flexible, small, agile, armed with the latest equipment and highly exportable. It is also highly usable on the new light frigates, which unlike most of the ships of our Navy, which I persist in believing will never be used in the whole of their lives, are likely to be used, because they are small and agile themselves and may be useful somewhere in the world. They would be a great deal more use if they had helicopters on them, and those helicopters are ideally suited to that. The Army also uses them. They are very new, as I said; they have many years of life ahead of them. We own roughly 60 of them.
The Puma, by contrast, is a much bigger thing, which the Royal Air Force loves. I bear the scars, as I think the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) do, of a previous defence review, in which we found a sort of gang of all the top brass. They appeared, with spaghetti all over them, at the National Security Council, and persuaded us to invest in cats and traps and things on those very large aircraft carriers, and to get rid of the vertical take-off planes that we then had, the Harriers, because the Royal Air Force loves big fast jets. I fear that the Royal Air Force may also love those large helicopters, but they are not built in Britain. They are aged. They will be disappearing quite soon anyway. They do not carry the latest equipment. We cannot put them nearly so easily on ships.
I think it would be a travesty if we ended up getting rid of the 60 modern, light, effective, flexible, British-built, exportable helicopters, for the sake of keeping 22—if I have the number right—ancient, foreign-produced, non-exportable, heavy RAF helicopters. I very much hope that the Ministry of Defence will not make that mistake.
4.3 pm