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Nimrod Review

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for repeating the Statement. I, too, greatly regret that Mr Haddon-Cave did not consider the role and responsibilities of Ministers. Following the SDR in 1998, the failure of the Government adequately to fund the proposed new defence strategy led to more and more extreme attempts to extract the required pint out of a half-filled pot. Where matters of flight safety were concerned—in which both those in the aircraft and maybe innocent people on the ground could be at risk—there should not have been presumptions of economies without far more rigorous consideration. There was not "a clear commitment and approach to safety", to which the Statement now aspires. The ministerial directives to amalgamate the single service logistics into the DLO, against the considered advice of the Chiefs of Staff, and subsequently further concentration of the DPA into the DE&S, proved to be an organisational overload in these key areas—so much so that neither were the anticipated 20 per cent economies in four years achieved, nor were key priorities affecting flight safety followed. The Nimrod accident is one but not the only failure that can be laid at, or will be attributable to, this ministerially misdirected policy. The MoD is once again facing a position where financial resources and aspirations are seriously mismatched. We learn that there is to be a new Military Aviation Authority of some 250 people, but will Ministers, considering how to resource this and the other connected new arrangements that they have undertaken to implement, accept that the current levels of funding for defence are inadequate for our commitments? Commitments must be cut back rather than expecting to find unrealistic and unrealisable economies to resource new large structures and balance the books. What cost do the Government expect to have to find to set up and run the new MAA? I also regret that the two senior officers charged by Ministers to restructure and achieve unrealisable savings should be held so personally to blame for the systemic failure of the MoD in setting out the policy they were to implement.