Nia Griffith: Labour will deliver serious leadership of our Armed Forces
From scrapping outsourced contracts to investing in equipment and recruitment, shadow defence secretary Nia Griffith outlines her priorities for the armed forces
It is not just recruitment. We must also address the reasons why so many personnel are deciding to leave the armed forces, writes Nia GriffithThis is a critically important time for the United Kingdom, our allies, our place in the world and our defence and security.
At a time of growing instability around the world and a range of threats to our security here at home, Labour is clear that the government has no higher duty than protecting our citizens and maintaining national security.
That overriding duty is at the heart of our defence policy, and the next Labour government is committed to doing everything necessary to protect the security of this country and of the British people.
This means not only using the UK’s influence as a force for good in the world, but also investing properly in the world-leading equipment and the latest technologies that are necessary to keep us safe. And we must match that investment with a commitment to the driving force behind our country’s defences – our armed forces personnel.
Sadly, on this government’s watch we have seen a disturbing fall in the number of servicemen and women across all three services. Despite the Conservatives promising at last year’s election that they would maintain the overall size of the armed forces, the number of personnel has fallen dramatically since then. Every service now has fewer personnel than last year, and they are well short of the targets set for 2020, with no plan on how to make up the numbers.
It is clear that the government’s costly recruitment contract with Capita is simply not fit for purpose. It is not doing its basic job of recruiting people to the army – with numbers continuing to fall, month after month, and nor is it making the savings that were promised. Labour is clear that we would scrap this failing contract and bring the service back in-house to be delivered by personnel who know what they are doing.
We will take a similar approach to other contracts that the MoD has outsourced needlessly to the private sector. Where they are failing, where they are letting down our service personnel or their families, where they do not deliver good value for taxpayers, we will have no hesitation in scrapping these outsourced contracts.
But it is not just recruitment. We must also address the reasons why so many personnel are deciding to leave the armed forces. The public sector pay cap means that our servicemen and women have endured seven years of real-terms cuts to their pay. I am pleased that the government has finally come forward with a pay rise for this financial year – something we promised back at last year’s election. But unlike Labour’s plan to fund the increase properly, the government has not provided any new money, meaning that the burden will fall on the MoD’s existing budget.
That budget is in total crisis. The equipment plan – which sets out the £178bn of kit that we need for the next 10 years – has a funding gap of up to £21bn. There are persistent rumours that the government will have to cut yet more equipment and personnel in order to try to balance the books.
The defence secretary should be using the ongoing defence review – the Modernising Defence Programme – to get to grips with these issues. But all we have seen so far is outlandish briefing to newspapers about his supposed bust-ups with various cabinet ministers over demands for funding that are then rebuffed. Like a low-budget version of Francis Urquhart in House of Cards, he has apparently even threatened to bring down the prime minister if he does not get what he wants.
These challenging times call for serious leadership that is focused on delivering the best for our nation’s defences and our armed forces – and that is exactly what a Labour government would deliver.
Nia Griffith is Labour MP for Llanelli and shadow secretary of state for defence
@JagPatel3
08:55 on 24th September 2018
In its latest policy statement on defence procurement, expressed in the Defence Industrial Policy document published in December 2017, the Government outlined its vision for the sustainment of a thriving and globally competitive UK defence sector, as an important part of the wider industrial manufacturing base. So it is unclear what else this Modernising Defence Programme will achieve. The Defence Industrial Policy makes it absolutely clear that, military equipment for the Armed Forces is to be procured through fair and open competition – the only exceptions being off-the-shelf purchases and uncontested, single-source development contracts. In its Defence Industrial Policy, the Government says (on page 23): “We strive to provide our Armed Forces with the capabilities they need at the best value for money, obtaining this through open competition in the global market, wherever possible. Competitive tension is the greatest driver for innovation, productivity and earning power in any economy.” Yet, in the very next sentence, the Government goes on to make this frank admission: “In 2016/17, 58% of new MoD contracts by value were placed on a non-competitive basis. This has grown from 36% in 2010/11 ……” So, it seems that less and less use is being made of the market-based instrument of fair and open competition – which happens to be the Government’s preferred policy on defence procurement. There is a suspicion that senior executives seconded from the defence industry and embedded within MoD, who remain in the pay of their employers, may have exercised their maligned influence to interfere with implementation of policy to serve their narrow business interests. Or is this a clear-cut case of the senior civil service subverting the will of the party of government and policy set by Ministers? What Trump calls the “deep state”. It would explain why the Defence Industry has failed so miserably to deliver equipment to the Armed Forces which is fit for purpose, adequately sustained in-service and constitutes value for money through-life. One of the main reasons for this appalling performance is that the Ministry of Defence’s preferred version of competition that is currently applied is the ‘sudden death’ competition, which abruptly reduces the field of Bidders from six to one, following a one-off release of the invitation to tender. See this illustration pic.twitter.com/xk0d8phEAJ. However, the ‘sudden death’ competition has been rendered ineffective by Defence Contractors, who are quoting identical bottom-line Selling Prices against the same Requirement – which amounts to price-fixing on a grand scale, with the active connivance of the Secretary of State for Defence. See this illustration pic.twitter.com/BQV4KUgdNg. This is completely at odds with protecting the MoD’s commercial interests, which is what Ministers are so fond of telling the public. Worse still, MoD’s Project Team Leader at Abbey Wood, Bristol is being denied the opportunity to choose the single Prime Contractor on the basis of price competitiveness, and therefore value for money. This has come about because MoD’s long-standing policy of disclosing the total budgeted expenditure figure or associated year-on-year financial funding profile in the ITT has resulted in Defence Contractors quoting identical bottom-line Selling Prices in their ITT responses – an entirely predictable result! It is not for MoD to tell the Private Sector what the price of a new equipment programme should be. Instead, it is very much the business of Defence Contractors to tell MoD how much each new equipment programme will cost, based upon the prevailing value of goods, services, labour and finance in the free market shaped, not by the interfering hand of people in the pay of the State who always get it wrong, but by competitive market forces. @JagPatel3