UK Parliament / Open data

Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

Thank you for calling me early in this debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. I want to start by talking about a couple of the points mentioned by the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), which I completely agree with, on mindset and attitude towards defence. He was nuanced and careful on that. As everybody knows, I have campaigned on defence issues for a long time. I am no expert on procurement and I pay tribute to this Minister, whom I worked alongside when I was a Minister, for his attitude towards it. I have found that there has been a significant step change there. When it comes to finance and investment the figures are undeniable and show that over about 50 years, roughly through to the 2020s, there was a decline in investment in defence, by Governments of all colours—we have seen that across the pitch. As this Prime Minister keeps mentioning, we have seen small increases between 2020 and 2022, and the projected increases as well, but I really want to get across to Members here today and to other Members that these increases are in CDEL—capital departmental expenditure limits. The problem with that is that our RDEL—resource departmental expenditure limits—which is our spending on people, continues either to flatline or decline. That means that the experience of those serving in the military continues to go down. Despite valiant work by lots of people to try to improve it, the reality is that if we continue to ask our people to do more and more with less and less, that affects the experience and the “elastic band” in the middle that is taken up by people who do it because they are patriots and believe in defence, as many Members of this House do. That is fine, but they get worn out and are then pushed into society, and a new group comes in. If we continue to have that mindset—that we can burn these people out because new ones will come in—we will see a degradation of defence capability, which we have seen, and we will end up with an integrated review such as we saw.

I thought some aspects of the IR were good, but I have said, both in public and in private—even though it is not easy to say—that aspects of it were dishonest. I do not think we can truly focus entirely on our capital spend and say that our defence capability has expanded so much because we have all this high-tech weaponry and suddenly have this huge shift to high-tech warfare, while also talking about contributary pensions in our armed forces for the first time in the UK’s history. Again, we need to look at what that means for people who are serving. I remember some painful discussions about that, and it was quite a lonely experience. Although the capital expenditure is exciting, we have to be really careful on our resource spend, which is incredibly important.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
710 c399 
Session
2021-22
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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