I said we would hear from my right hon. Friend, and indeed we shall. He is absolutely right. We are incredibly careful as a Committee to keep to the right the side of the line. There are a lot of facts in our report that make for very, very unpleasant reading. I do not have time to list them all today, with the clock whirring as it is, but I commend the report. It goes through some of the problems we face in great detail. As my right hon. Friend says, they will be well known to our adversaries. If we do not front up to those problems, we will be fooling no one but ourselves.
Obviously, I have a personal interest in this matter, but I believe that over the past five years we have seen a real determination from the MOD to get better, and there are structural changes that will embed improvement. The defence and security industrial strategy moved the MOD away from competition by default and towards viewing our defence sector as a critical strategic asset. That has proved a timely intervention, placing more emphasis on building sovereign capacity and greater reassurance of our supply chains. DSIS has marked an improvement in the relationship with industry. Companies large and small are more engaged than they have ever been in the early thought processes around capability requirements and specifications. There is better investment in senior responsible owners to exercise control and authority over projects.
When the Department and industry work together—for example, on Poland’s defence expansion or on novel technologies for Ukraine—it is a formidable combination. Baking exports and industrial co-operation into procurement at the earliest stage works for industry and for the UK. Above all, achieving minimum deployable platforms early and allowing for spiral development, if properly invested against, will generate not only routinely upgraded state-of-the-art platforms, but industrial partners that are able to retain and invest in their workforce and their research and development. It means going beyond feast and famine, and towards long-term co-development.
I believe that the Minister’s recently announced reforms are excellent. They institutionalise reforms that really will improve our procurement, but for them to work as they deserve, there needs to be cultural change. Uniformed SROs need to recognise the profoundly different skillset that applies to procurement. They need to be encouraged to seek commercial and legal advice early in order to escalate problems. Above all, they need to be willing to recognise that when a project will not work, they should take the learning and call it a day. If we are focused, as we must be, on cutting-edge solutions, we must recognise that some will not work. For any commercial entity, that is not a sign of failure; it is a recognition that, in a portfolio, some risks will be taken that do not succeed.
In Defence Equipment & Support there are many good people doing a difficult and demanding job, but I believe it is absolutely possible, as part of the current reforms, to instil and reward greater entrepreneurialism and productivity. DE&S has the pay freedoms to do so. With cultural change and proper investment, the reforms will move us from peacetime lethargy, influenced by staccato funding, closer to the urgency and realism that the threats demand.
It is clear that no one on either side of the House should think that we can get to where we need to be against the current threat simply by being a bit better at procurement. As our report makes clear, significant
improvements are required in everything from stockpiles to housing simply to retain and maintain the size of our current force structure, let alone increase it, as we should.