MPs hit out at ‘rushed’ defence shake-up

The recent overhaul of Britain’s defence policy was rushed through and peppered with bad decisions, says an influential group of MPs.

The armed forces, they say, will be unable to do what is asked of them after 2015.

In its report on Wednesday on the Strategic Defence and Security Review, the defence select committee identifies a series of policy problems and rejects the government’s line that Britain can maintain its current level of influence in the world while the defence budget is cut.

James Arbuthnot, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, told the Financial Times: “The SDSR was badly done. It was put into the straitjacket of the comprehensive spending review, which meant it had to be rushed and done without proper consultation.

“The purpose of this report is to make sure this does not happen again. The next SDSR must be much, much better.”

The report adds weight to growing calls for ministers to reopen the defence review – something the government has refused to do. Pointing to the Ministry of Defence’s reviews of aspects of the SDSR, including troop numbers and MoD finances, the committee said: “It appears to us that, despite statements to the contrary, the SDSR has to all intent and purpose been reopened.”

An MoD official denied this, saying such reviews had always been planned.

The report will weaken David Cameron’s position with a rump of his backbenchers who have accused the prime minister of giving insufficient support to the armed forces.

The committee said the assumptions built into the defence review would leave the armed forces permanently stretched.

Nick Harvey, armed forces minister, admitted on Wednesday that there would be “capability gaps” while the forces worked towards enacting the SDSR plans over the next decade.

“”The Defence Review last autumn defines what we want our forces to look like by 2020 which is the ten year timeframe that we normally plan our defences on, and the prime minister has said that by 2020 we will have recreated a full spectrum of capability,” Mr Harvey told Sky News. “But he and I and everybody else acknowledges that between now and then there will along the way be some capability gaps.”

The committee countered Mr Cameron’s claim that the UK would continue to have a “full spectrum” of defence capabilities, saying many types of mission would require substantial support from foreign allies, which could not be guaranteed.

Malcolm Chalmers, the research director at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, said: “There are areas of capability which the government should go back and look at again.”

Key decisions in the SDSR come under fire from MPs, including the scrapping of both the Nimrod surveillance aircraft and the Harrier fleet.

Getting rid of Nimrod will affect the UK’s ability to protect its nuclear submarines, and undermine other objectives such as intelligence-gathering and counter-piracy measures, the report says. It also attacks the move to end the Harrier force, which will leave the UK with no strike fighters on its aircraft carriers until 2020.

Liam Fox, the defence secretary, said last month that he had secured a guarantee from the Treasury to raise the MoD’s equipment budget by 1 per cent above inflation every year from 2015 to 2020.

But the committee said the rise could amount to little more than a recycling of existing money, with other parts of the MoD budget as yet undecided.

Prof Chalmers said that even with the extra money, it would be difficult to meet the commitments Mr Cameron has made over the make-up of the armed forces in 2020.

“The army is going to have some real problems, not only on personnel numbers, but also on equipping the force,” he said.

Jim Murphy, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, said: “This is a damning report. The rushed defence review has been much criticised, but now those who were disappointed will be dismayed, and the anxious will be angry.

“The decisions made in the review now clearly need themselves to be reviewed. The government must either change their ambition for Britain or change course on defence.”

The committee provided some ammunition for Mr Fox, however, arguing that the MoD should be given 10-year budgets, instead of the current period of about four years, to reflect the long lead time on defence projects.

MoD officials have been lobbying for longer budgets, but Treasury officials are reluctant to guarantee spending beyond the end of the comprehensive spending review, which concludes in 2014.