Oh dear. I get the impression that no matter what I brought to the House today, that speech would have been trucked out. This is not the defence review that usually takes place in an environment of cuts. The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) is wrong: there is not a cut to the resource departmental expenditure limit over the four years. It is flat, or if not, there is a tiny increase in RDEL. That slightly undermines the desperate attempt to make £24 billion-plus look like some form of cut. He asked what impact that will have. First of all, he obviously got the Command Paper delivered electronically, but there should be an insert in the printed ones that shows that the figure is actually £1.5 billion, not £1.3 billion. The impact of that RDEL is obviously wraparound childcare for £1.4 billion over 10 years. That is a plus, in case anyone missed it from the tone of his speech.
When it comes to the MOD budget, I have been very honest in this House. I would admit the role that former Conservative Governments have taken in defence reviews, but I have never once heard the right hon. Gentleman own up at all, or admit that the Government he served in produced what the 2010 NAO audit report showed was £38 billion of overspend; it was £3 billion in the last year. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who is shouting, was himself a Minister in the MOD. I have never heard Labour Members say, “Under our Government, we delivered lots of regiments, but we delivered our soldiers into Snatch Land Rovers.” I have never heard them say with a sense of apology or humility that they took soldiers into war ill-equipped, ill-trained and often unable to make the peace. That is really important, because behind all this are the men and women of our armed forces.
We are trying to strike the balance between our ambition, the funding and looking after those people. In defence, we are all ambitious to do more around the world, but if I let my enthusiasm get away with me, I would end up hollowing out the equipment the men and women of the armed forces have, and that is no legacy to leave those people. That is why, in this blueprint for a future force, we are almost setting out two parts of our forces: forces for war fighting, and forces to prevent conflict or help rebuild countries afterwards. We know we can win the conflict, because we usually do it with allies, and we can deploy our armoured divisions or brigades—[Interruption.] My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) is wrong. In Telic I, it was not a division but two armoured brigades—16 Air Assault and 3 Commando Brigades—that deployed.