Armed Forces Bill

I will happily answer the hon. Gentleman's question. In fact, I would point him towards his colleague, the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), who has articulated exactly what is wrong with the defence review. What would normally happen is what happened in the defence review that Lord Robertson of Port Ellen carried out in 1998. The correct order of events is to begin by determining our foreign policy objectives and, as the hon. Gentleman knows, what the strategic defence risks facing our nation are. He and I would probably agree on the likely scenarios—one would undoubtedly involve Tehran; another would be terrorism. From those two decisions, we would determine the defence posture that we needed to adopt. Having determined that defence posture, we would configure our armed forces to deliver it. Finally, we would sit down and have a relatively civilised conversation with the Treasury about how best that could be funded. Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman's Government have done the absolute reverse. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has said to the Defence Secretary, ““This is your pot of money. Now you need to make your armed forces fit it.”” Our Front Bench team has made it absolutely clear that we would freeze this defence review and have another, fresh defence review based on the criteria and priorities that I have set out. We have made it clear that we would not close RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Leuchars or RAF Marham. We would also approach bringing home the troops from Germany in the following way. First, moving 18,000 soldiers and their dependants back to the United Kingdom would have to be in the best interests of the Army. Secondly, we would make the needs of their families the top priority. The hon. Gentleman has a long record of standing up for constituents at his local Army base, and he will know that we face housing challenges. When we debated the issue previously—in December, I think—he and I were at one in recognising that the previous Government did a lot of work to improve the housing of the families of those in our armed forces, but there is still a lot more to be done. Notwithstanding the redundancies that will take place, one of the greatest challenges in bringing back that part of the Army that is based in Germany will be in rehousing probably half the current number and their families at bases around the United Kingdom. I tabled a number of parliamentary questions earlier this year to ask the Government what discussions they had had with the Scottish Government and the Department for Education about how we would educate the 7,000 children who are currently being educated in Germany. It will probably shock the Committee to discover that the Government have had no conversations at all with either the Scottish Government or the Department for Education about how to move 7,000 children back from Germany into schools in this country. I do not know whether the Under-Secretary—[Interruption.] I know that he is paying close attention to this discussion, but will he update the Committee on what discussions he has had with the Scottish Government or the Department for Education in recent weeks. I suspect that the answer will be: ““Not much more than we'd had several weeks ago.”” Therefore, to answer the question that the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) asked—some time ago now—before we made any decisions, not only would we conduct a thorough, rational defence review, but we would ensure that the infrastructure was in place to house those armed forces personnel and their families. As we have debated the issue over the past eight months, it has become increasingly clear that the ongoing briefing, leaks and speculation coming out of parts of both the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury have been causing a great deal of distress in various parts of the country. I know that the Minister would dissociate himself from any such leaks or briefings against the Army or the Air Force, or about the thinking, but we have left those communities in a state of uncertainty and limbo for too long.