Letter: Aircraft carrier contracts 'no compensation'

Now that the Ministry of Defence has revealed how pitifully little small and medium-sized Scottish companies benefit from UK defence spending ("Scots firms squeezed out of defence cash", 25 June), it is also time to dispel the myth that the contract for the two new aircraft carriers compensates Scotland for this.

To be clear, most of the 7 billion-plus being spent on the carriers is being spent in England. This includes: all the expensive and particularly lucrative bits of equipment (combat systems, radar, sensors and communications, engines, auxiliary machinery, weaponry and weapons handling systems); large portions of the hulls; the bulk of the high level design and consultancy studies, which the MoD chose to award to consultancies based close to its Abbeywood Headquarters in Bristol; all the raw steel for the hull (Scunthorpe steelworks receiving the sort of "soft" government support that Ravenscraig was denied); plus the really expensive things - the aircraft and helicopters that will fly from their decks.

It is also inevitable that English consultancies and equipment manufacturers will be the main beneficiaries of the Tories' foolhardy decision to fit the ships with "cats and traps".

It is fair to say that Scotland's share of the work on the carriers amounts to the lower margin, less profitable work. The bits that English yards and suppliers can't do, don't want to do, or lack the capacity and skills base to do themselves.

Low-tech, low-investment hull assembly and commissioning work that will leave the Scottish yards high and dry, starved of work once the ships sail and their English parent companies have creamed off (rather than reinvested) the profit.

The unspoken truth is that the Tory government's grandiose decision last October to save the carrier contract was driven solely by the desire to keep the gravy train going for English defence manufacturers, and to prop up the UK's wobbly permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, not out of heartfelt concern for Scotland or any desire to prop up Scottish industry.

Those "south of the Border" should not lose sight of this, begrudge Scotland its modest workshare on the carriers, nor use carrier work as a hollow excuse for denying smaller Scottish businesses their fair share of UK defence subcontracts.

Mark Campbell-Roddis

Pont Crescent

Dunblane, Perthshire