Gerald Warner: Never mind buying British, just give our soldiers what they need

Published on Saturday 17 October 2009 19:50

NOT since the Luftwaffe braved the anti- aircraft batteries of the Red Army to drop supplies of sun lotion, courtesy of the Führer, to the beleaguered and frostbitten German forces at Stalingrad has there been an example of incompetence comparable to the history of British defence procurement over recent decades.

The Ministry of Defence has become more lethal to British servicemen than to the Queen's enemies.

The deficiencies in Britain's defence procurement system, highlighted last Thursday in the report by Bernard Gray to the Ministry of Defence, hardly came as a surprise, since the contents had been leaked last August. That does not make them any less shocking, when one bears in mind that what we are looking at is not only appalling waste of taxpayers' money but the avoidable loss of servicemen's lives in Afghanistan.

In common with every other institution under New Labour, the defence procurement apparatus has undergone successive restructuring. On 1 April (an appropriate date) 1999, the organisation known as the Procurement Executive was replaced by the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA), as a consequence of the Strategic Defence Review. On 1 April 2007 the DPA was merged with the Defence Logistics Organisation to form a new agency known as Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S). It employs 22,500 people and has a budget of 13bn.

Although the profligacy and incompetence of UK military procurement policies have been a concern for decades rather than years, it was the human face that the Afghan fiasco put on this back-room scandal that alerted the general public to the plight of British troops. The growing volume of complaints from commanders about the inadequate equipment issued to frontline troops was complemented by stories of soldiers forced to spend 750 on lightweight body armour or 125 on quality desert boots, out of their own pockets, to improve their chances of survival.

At a more macroeconomic level, last February the Commons Select Committee on Defence denounced as a "fiasco" the management of the Future Rapid Effects System (Frem) project, designed to replace thousands of outdated armoured vehicles by this year. It had emerged that the replacements would not be available "even in the early part of the next decade". Two years ago the Committee had already condemned the project as "a sorry story of indecision, changing requirements and delay". Now the situation has further deteriorated.

The roots of the fiasco lay in the MoD discovering, after it had awarded the contract to General Dynamics UK, that the company had a "different concept" from that of the ministry. The vehicles had to be redesigned. The "buy British" mentality has too often channelled procurement policy towards unsuitable and more expensive equipment, when foreign manufacturers offer a better deal.

Governments must make up their minds whether they are running a defence policy or a 1960s-style system of industrial subsidy. In March, MPs criticised the bungled Chinook helicopter deal after the MoD spurned ready-made American aircraft and determined to fit cheaper British equipment into Chinook Mark 3s. Eight helicopters ordered 14 years ago are still not in service, while costs have escalated from 259m to 422m. If the MoD had accepted a US deal for Black Hawk helicopters in 2007, there would be 60 of them now in service; instead, it opted to refit 33 Puma helicopters. Lord Guthrie, former chief of the defence staff, described his own experience: "In the past, ministers wanted to buy British at all cost, sometimes at the expense of not having the kit we desperately needed."

The Gray report asks: "How can it be that it takes 20 years to buy a ship, or aircraft, or tank?" That is precisely the question many people have been posing with mounting anger. Gray found the average project overran by 80 per cent, or five years, with cost overruns amounting to 35bn.

Gray's recommended solution is to bring private-sector management into defence procurement. It certainly could not do worse than the sclerotic civil service culture that has created the present debacle. Unhappily, by the time any real reforms might be implemented, our army will be long gone from the killing fields of Afghanistan, to which it should never have been dispatched in the first place.

Of course, this is an issue of defence, foreign and fiscal policy; but it also has an imperative moral dimension. That aspect is epitomised by the seemingly unending procession of Union Flag-draped coffins along the high street of Wootton Bassett. These brave men were killed by the Taleban; but faceless pen-pushers polishing chairs in offices and squabbling inter-services politicians bear responsibility too.