(New Forest East)
(Con): Where warships are concerned, quantity is a form
of quality because even the most powerful warship can be in only
one place at any one time. I therefore warmly welcome the
strategy, particularly its acknowledgement, in the section on
strategic context, that:
“There is a need for greater volume in the destroyer and frigate
force if we are to deliver the required operational flexibility.”
The Secretary of State mentioned the 1970s. He will know that in
the 1970s we had as many as 70 frigates and destroyers. In the
mid-1990s, we had 35 frigates and destroyers, and successive
Governments incrementally reduced that to 32, 31, 25 and our
current total of 19, which the Select Committee on Defence
described as “woefully inadequate”.
My right hon. Friend is entirely on the right lines in saying
that we need to grow the fleet. Will he do everything in his
power to ensure that what happened to the Type 45 destroyers, and
to some extent to the Type 26 frigates—as the build went on, they
became increasingly complex and expensive so that we ended up
with fewer ships at the end of the process—does not happen to the
Type 31e?
The Secretary of State for Defence (Sir Michael
Fallon): The light, general-purpose frigate is
specifically designed to avoid that fault, which, as my right
hon. Friend said, has plagued previous programmes.
My right hon. Friend took us back to the 1970s. Perhaps only he
and I now remember them and what happened then. I note his
comments about the number of ships. I gently say that today’s
ships are of course much more powerful than those that were
involved in, for example, the liberation of the Falklands, and
that although they can be in only one place at once, they can
fight conflicts at different ranges at the same time.
It is my ambition to grow the fleet. We are expanding the Royal
Navy. If industry can rise to the challenge and deliver the
frigates to time and in the price cap that we specify, it will
enable us to expand the Royal Navy beyond the numbers set out in
2015.
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