Armed Forces Bill

The Minister shakes his head. I understand that there might be some vacancies coming up at the Department of Health shortly. I think that he might be up for promotion, so I could not possibly comment on whether he would be on the Front Bench next to the Secretary of State for Health—although the Defence Secretary is a GP, of course, and would be eminently suitable as a Health Secretary, if such a vacancy were to come up. However, having to wait until 19 July—the last day before the recess—is frankly not a comfortable position to be in. I understand why the Ministry of Defence did not wish to make an announcement during the period of purdah for the Scottish elections. When the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife had a debate in the House on RAF Leuchars in January, the Minister of State made it clear that he did not wish to do anything that might upset the election results—I should point out to him that putting that decision off did not do the Lib Dems much good in North East Fife. However, we are now well past the Scottish elections. There is no particular reason why the Government could not come to the House now and announce the decisions that we know they have made. The purpose of my new clause is to ensure parliamentary oversight of the decisions made by the Ministry of Defence. As I said earlier, we are talking about a unique set of closures. We have probably not seen anything like it since the days when Denis Healey was a Minister for the armed forces and we reconfigured and abandoned our positions east of Aden. Now, however, the decisions are being driven entirely by the Treasury. The purpose of new clause 1, which thankfully I will not read into the record, is not to affect the way in which the Ministry of Defence gathers information. It does not seek to make the process more transparent or, as the Minister said earlier, to tie the hands of the Government so that they cannot carry out these processes. The new clause proposes that, once the Ministry of Defence has determined which bases it wants to close or realign—for example, by switching their use from the Royal Air Force to the Army, or, as we read in Scotland on Sunday at the weekend, by switching the Condor base in Arbroath from the Royal Marines to the Army—the decisions would be subject to two conditions. First, the Secretary of State would be required to lay a report before the House setting out not only his rationale for making the decisions but the weighting he has given. Those colleagues who have attended the Adjournment debates on these matters here and in Westminster Hall will have noticed that there has been inconsistency between the views expressed by the various Ministers in the Ministry of Defence about what weighting is being given to each of the criteria: the Secretary of State, the Minister of State and the other Under-Secretary of State—he is the Minister for aviation, as far as I can tell—seem to have different views. One Minister will tell us that the finances are paramount; another will say that defence needs come first; yet another will tell us that the RAF's needs are the most important, while another says that the Army's needs are the priority. Then we get back to the arguments about the socio-economic arguments and the wider impacts of the decisions that the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) has mentioned. Those are all valid arguments, and the Ministry is right to consider the socio-economic factors, the financial costs to the Treasury and how best a base can be recycled for use by another service. However, that all needs to be done in a transparent and coherent manner.