I call to order the second panel of the Defence Committee’s evidence session on the impact on the defence industry of the delay to the defence investment plan. It is a pleasure to have representatives of trade unions with us. A warm welcome to Dominic Armstrong, who is the head of policy and communications at the Community trade union. Welcome back to Bob King, who is the national secretary for defence at Prospect. We also have Steve McGuinness from Unite the Union. Gents, we have an hour to get your perspective, and we think it is important for the Committee to hear from both trade associations and trade unions so that we can ascertain exactly the impact on everybody.

Morning all. What sectors are most affected by the DIP delay? What specific programmes are you most concerned about? Also, are we now looking at factory closures, job losses and production lines closing? If so, what is the timeline for that?

The DIP in relation to steel—and you have heard similar evidence given in the previous session—is around indication of long-term planning and what is coming along the pipeline. In terms of the specific delays of the DIP, obviously that would relate to what is in the defence industrial strategy and what the plans are there. Any sort of disruption to the pipeline and what the demand is going to be will have an impact on the steel industry. In terms of specific sectors within defence, I would not be able to speak as strongly to that, so I will pass over to Bob and Steve for those.

Good morning. In terms of specific programmes, it is going to be all of them. Sorry if that sounds like a generic answer, but it genuinely is. I am not going to repeat what my colleagues said in the earlier session about the reduction in demand signal but, essentially, it is driving individuals out of the defence sector. We have adopted a saying now, for when somebody leaves a defence company whether through redundancy or downsizing, that they leave the sector. They usually go into another sector. One of the questions earlier was about how we increase at pace if we have to move to a war footing: we don’t retain those skills. It is everywhere. The trade associations talked about people leaving the SMEs, but it also affects larger organisations. There are delays in programmes. Michelle will be very used to this, but delays in programmes mean that we have to upscale or downscale by thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of workers. When we try to do it the second time around, the workers are just not there because they have gone somewhere else. I think it is in every sector, and some that you have not talked about. Delays in programmes are affecting SKYNET—we obviously will not talk about the detail here—but it is a very significant programme that is really important for the whole of UK defence, because without intelligence and information, you can have all the great submarines and aircraft, but if you do not know where to send them, they are just very nice looking things. That affects the south-west; we nearly lost Leonardo. You talked earlier about the medium-lift helicopter. I think that if Leonardo hadn’t got that, we would have lost Leonardo. That is 3,500 jobs—650 directly on medium lift—in the south-west. The concern is that the delay affects everywhere. Not just through the lack of pace on the defence investment plan, we are losing ground that we are going to find it more and more difficult to get back.

My specialist area is the combat air sector. We are certainly seeing, as we have discussed with a number of MPs, a lack of orders for Typhoon. We have a precedent in the past from Barrow. Submarines were not ordered for a significant number of years, and when the Astute programme came back in, we had to get Americans to come in to train people in how to go into the business of submarines. That makes it longer and more expensive. It is our opinion that we are now facing that in the manufacture of fast jets, not just where I work at Warton, but at Rolls-Royce in Bristol, where they make the EJ engines that go in the Typhoon. There are only so many countries in the world that can make jet engines with reheat, and you need reheat to make fast jets. It is a real, big concern. Our worry is that we will not keep the skills, because if we do not have the aircraft being manufactured at Warton and final-assembled, we cannot teach apprentices how to do it. It is a very niche job. We will lose that skill base. I will reference what the gentleman said in the last meeting about building Spitfires in car plants in the second world war. It has to be understood that those days are gone because Spitfires, and Lancaster bombers, were very simple things that could be built. They basically had an enlarged car engine— an internal combustion engine. Building a modern fast jet that flies at twice the speed of sound is a very, very specialist thing. There are probably six countries in the world that can do it, and we are one of them. It is our opinion that if something is not done soon, we are going to lose the skills to be able to do it, and obviously that has a knock-on effect on GCAP.

I just want to get this clear in my head in terms of a timeline. Let’s take the Warton example you gave, Steve. How long will it be before it’s endgame there if the DIP does not come out and you do not get the orders and the investment?

We are now in a position where we are not building fast jets—obviously, we have the welcome export order from Turkey for 20 aircraft. That will be coming through the factory in a few years. After that, we are in the fortunate position of not being like Leonardo; we don’t think we will see a factory close or job losses. The issue is the loss of skills. We have the work for Typhoons that have been ordered by the other partner nations: Germany, Italy and Spain. We are the odd one out that has not ordered the latest tranche of Typhoons. So we have the work at Samlesbury making parts for those aircraft. Even though it is a skilled job, it is a different job from final assembly of aircraft and seeing those aircraft off the line. When we get an export order or a domestic order, we are making that aircraft from start to finish. It comes into the factory in parts, and it flies off the airfield. That is a skill that we are probably in danger of losing.

I will leave it there, Chair, because of time. Thank you.

Members may wish to declare an interest if they are members of a trade union. I am a member of Unite the Union. If any other Members present are members of any of these three trade unions, please put that officially on the record. Let’s move to Michelle Scrogham.

Both Bob and Steve have referred to Barrow-in-Furness, and I think few MPs in this place would understand quite as painfully as I do the impact of delays to those contracts. We mentioned thousands of jobs. It was 10,000 jobs that we lost in Barrow, and we are now paying for those skills. We talk about the cost to the submarine programme and nuclear defence and just how expensive that programme is, but many will not understand the reality of why it is so expensive. That is because of the delays to the orders and the fact that we do lose those skills. Other than that, are there areas that you would like to give information on or is there historical background on what the impact of these delays is on the ground? I ask because apart from me and a few others, I don’t think people deeply understand that.

I have one. I will stick with submarines, if that is okay with you, which is the other end of the lifecycle. Delays in DIP mean that there is no funding for decommissioning. We have a lot of submarines. I gave evidence to this Committee when Sir James Arbuthnot sat in your chair, Tan, and I remember saying that you can’t put this stuff in wheelie bins. I will repeat my answer: when you decommission a submarine, a lot of the metals and all the rest of it is fairly standard, but a very precise and rightly very expensive process is needed to get rid of the reactor core, fuel rods and things like that. I was speaking to somebody the other day who does Lean Six Sigma, which is an efficiency process. They said, “How can you apply that to nuclear material?” I said, “You can’t.” We take it out very carefully, put it in a concrete box, in another concrete box, in a lead box, and we move it as far away from us as possible. That is a hugely expensive part of the process. As was widely reported quite recently, that is still waiting for money. I will pick on Fred for a minute, because I think it is in his constituency, or perhaps it is Luke’s.

Yes, it is in the neighbouring constituency.

We have submarines sitting in Devonport and Rosyth waiting to be decommissioned. All that needs money to be freed up. It is not only nuclear skills that are at a premium. You may be aware that, at the moment, in order to attract staff into the MoD in defence nuclear, they are paying what is called an NSQEP—nuclear suitably qualified and experienced personnel—allowance. Some of those allowances are up to £15,000 or £20,000 a year on top, in order to attract those people. There is a very real effect in terms of the submarines as well.

Going back to fast jets, when I first started, British Aerospace was making five different platforms. Now we make one: the Typhoon. We were building Hawk. That never got ordered again. That went from being a viable production line where there was a promise of exports and possible Red Arrow replacements. That is gone now. The Hawk production has stopped. We have one aircraft. Delays, non-orders or non-export orders mean that we are not manufacturing fast jets at that site. You lose skills on that. It is absolutely vital. It is exactly the same as it was in Barrow.

Bob, jumping back in on the decommissioning side, many boats have been waiting for decommissioning and waiting for funding on that. We have also had issues with areas to do the decommissioning or maintenance. We have a couple of graving docks. An Astute boat is sat there waiting for maintenance with no graving dock to go into while we refurbish it to do the decommissioning. If we are looking at jobs and skills and making sure that we are war-fighting ready, what should the Government prioritise: the decommissioning side or having boats available at sea?

Again, I am not really declaring an interest, but we have members in the Ministry of Defence as well as in the private sector. A significant amount of the difficulty is that if we do not fund the MoD and therefore do not have the intelligence or information we need to decide what is next, it is really difficult to decide what choices to make next even if the money is freed up. I had conversations this morning where someone said to me, “When are we going to build Type 83?”, and another person said, “We don’t need Type 83 now because we’re going to do everything with autonomous craft.” They were both eminent colleagues. I think it is the same decision with submarines. If we have boats, we need them out there, safe and serviceable. All that comes from an MoD process. I have given evidence on this before to Tan. To give you an example, one third of MoD staff are now on minimum wage and it is 30% understaffed. The issue around the burgeoning MoD is simply fictional. There just are not enough people to make these decisions. If you put something into that process, there is nobody there to make the end decisions. There are another two elements to the difficulty. One is attracting staff into those areas. We did this on the UK shipbuilding skills taskforce. The report is a few years old, but I think all the information is still extant. I said earlier that once people leave defence, they do not come back, and that is even more relevant now. You will be aware of protests in your area and at some of the BAE sites, where our colleagues and members are blamed for conflicts around the world. In particular with some of the BAE and munitions sites, people see a conflict that they do not like somewhere around the world, and they blame defence workers, because they are an easy target. You can take all those people out. The third point is the disintegration of contracts. That is not something, I am sure, that my colleagues from the trade associations will like, but significant contracts in Portsmouth and Clyde are essentially broken down. One employer used to control the contract, so in the logistics, everyone knew where everything was going and they could plan ahead, but now you have broken that down into five or six separate contracts, so if someone needs a part for a submarine or a warship, whereas it used to be X—the same company—they now outsource that to another company, who have a two-week lead time. When you need the emergency bit, therefore—for example, to be topical, for a Type 45 that was in Portsmouth, but now is not—and you need it, you have to go through about three different companies in order to get it. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer. I do not think that there is a simple solution. This Committee or someone probably needs to take a step back and look at how those contracts are organised, because they are not efficient in any way, shape or form.

I think we are underplaying the consequences of losing a programme like GCAP. The TSR-2 cost us the best part of a generation in the aerospace industry and about 20,000 jobs—unfortunately, that was the study of my MEng back in the day—so I think you are painting a rosier picture. Steel is a big challenge for us all. Last week, the national strategy on steel was put forward. To what extent has that alleviated some of the issues that we face? Is there more that we could do as an industry?

The new steel strategy is incredibly welcome. For a long time, the steel industry has not had any real co-ordination, so the new strategy provides that. The reduction in quotas by 60% is incredibly welcome, given the higher tariffs. The ambition to fulfil 50% of domestic steel demand through UK steel is also incredibly welcome. On how the defence industry, the MoD and Government can engage with steel, what we find is a lack of understanding of the importance of the steel industry within the Defence supply chain. We talk about the fact that we need to understand that we require primary steelmaking within the UK. The Government’s intervention to keep the blast furnaces in Scunthorpe open, for example, was incredibly welcomed by us, but we need to look at the long-term investment in the steel industry in order to ensure that we continue to have that primary steelmaking capacity. When we talk about the end assets being produced, the materials that need to go into those assets in the defence industry aspect are also incredibly crucial. If you rely too much on international markets and short-term savings, which has been a bit of a practice under previous Administrations, the challenge is that you are opening yourself up to international market forces. As we have seen with the war in Ukraine and the recent issues around the Strait of Hormuz, allowing yourself to be open to international forces can have a massive impact on your economy. A large amount of the steel that would be brought into the UK system and defence system comes either from China or India, and so goes through a number of key trade chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca, or the al-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal, which have their own challenges. Another issue is if other countries’ domestic steel requirements increase, our ability to buy steel internationally becomes much harder. You always have to plan for different eventualities, but if you were reliant on the steel being produced by NATO allies, for example, in the event of a crisis situation, you have the challenge that they will also likely be in that conflict and have their own steel demand. It is incredibly vital that we invest and grow our steel industry domestically to meet the needs that we require into the future. That should include a DRI facility to preserve that primary steelmaking capacity into the future and looking at a modern plate mill to meet the plate requirements we have. For example, the plate mill at Dalzell used to produce the plate for Challenger tanks. It does not do that anymore. However, it still provides steel for a number of UK contracts and there is that capacity there if we work closer. There is also a co-ordination element with the MoD in engaging with the UK steel industry to bring them in and talk about the demand that is coming in the long term. The DfT, for example, is very good at engaging with the UK steel industry in terms of their long-term demands so that the industry can pivot to the requirements. If the defence industry and the Ministry of Defence did the same with UK steel manufacturers and talked about the long-term demand that they are looking for, then the UK steel industry can also pivot to those requirements and provide for the long-term need that we have for domestic steel production when we hit those kinds of crisis points.

We have covered some of the steel stuff, but in relation to Scunthorpe, which is costing the taxpayer many hundreds of millions of pounds a year, are we actually investing in the right thing? Should we be looking at a steel industry that has modern electric arc furnaces or is the traditional furnace producing virgin steel still very important to the defence industry? What should the taxpayer be investing in?

It is incredibly important that we keep our virgin steel production. We absolutely believe that the Government’s investment into the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe to keep them open is the right choice to have made. In our Steel Reforged report, we have outlined how we can move into the future of steelmaking within the UK. We talked about a modern DRI—direct reduced iron—facility to ensure that we still have that primary steelmaking capacity. However, it must be in a managed transition. What we cannot have is what we have had previously: short-term decisions made based on whatever is the cheapest option at the time. What we need is long-term strategic planning into a transition. In our Steel Reforged report we talk about what that plan could look like. The steel strategy puts us in a good direction for that in terms of ensuring that there is more demand for UK-based steel from the UK Government. However, it is vital that we retain that primary steelmaking capacity and that we have a proper plan and a managed transition to ensure primary steelmaking continues throughout and that jobs—particularly the skilled jobs required—are protected. Similar to what we have heard from colleagues from the defence industry, steel is an incredibly skilled workforce, and if you lose those skills, it is incredibly difficult to bring it back. There must be investment in skills, a modern DRI facility and modern plate mills, along with real protection of that primary steelmaking capacity within the United Kingdom.

I will ask all three of our witnesses about skills. It is important to make sure that we have the skills for the future in this country. Do the Government have the correct range of incentives—from STEM subjects at schools to apprenticeships and right the way through—to encourage the development of enough skills in our youngsters?

The Government have made good progress in terms of raising the importance of apprenticeships and STEM skill-based subjects. Again, I will keep coming back to long-term planning and demand and all those kinds of things. What young people look for when they leave education is the knowledge that the skills and jobs that they are developing are going to provide them for a long-term career. In many communities across the UK steel has been a career for life. It has been the lifeblood of communities in south Wales, the north of England and Scotland. We need that indication and we have it through the steel strategy and several Government programmes looking at apprenticeships and encouraging STEM subjects. However, we need to indicate that the demand will be there in the long term so that if people train for the skills of the steel industry they know they will have that job 10, 15 or 20 years down the line. I welcome the actions that the Government have taken, and I think that they are moving in the correct direction. It has been a positive direction, particularly with this recent steel strategy.

I would just echo my colleagues; it is a long-term job. Especially in the defence industry, these are long-term projects; you do not build a new aircraft or submarine overnight. People are expecting a long job. Without the planning that we are going to get, hopefully in the defence investment plan, companies are not going to make those long-term plans, so do not know how many apprentices they need to take on. Do we need more? Do we need less? This is not something that is an overnight turnaround. As I say, they are long-term projects and the skills are needed in the long term, so we need certainty about what is coming down the pipeline to get these skills in place.

One shortfall that the Government need to focus on—again, we identified this in the UK shipbuilding skills taskforce—is neurodiversity. There was a huge focus on how, to get into shipbuilding, people needed to go to university and get a degree. We did a presentation to the Committee with one of my colleagues talking about neurodiversity; he said that he was told at school that he had learning difficulties, but what he actually worked out was that the school had teaching difficulties, because he could learn in 10 different ways but the school only had this one method of teaching. You will find that people who are neurodivergent have the ability to learn vocationally, as opposed to academically. We need to focus more on that because I think we are wiping out a huge part of the workforce who could be doing practical work but, in actual fact, are written off because they struggle with the academic side of it. If there was one area that the Government could refocus on, it would be that.

Sir Geoffrey has talked about the graduate or youth entries into this; can we talk about the defence skills passport—this sort of smoother transfer for mid-career professionals—in moving between industries? How are you finding the Government’s approach to ensuring that the skills shortages can be filled throughout a career, not just from the pathways at the beginning? What are your thoughts on how the Government are looking at that?

Following that train of thought, I am going to keep referring back to the UK shipbuilding skills taskforce report, which is definitely worth a read. That was where we identified that young people will come into a job, get a qualification, get through the door, and the first thing they will want to be is a manager, because they see the manager. The difficulty with that was that we actually needed welders; we did not need managers. We found that people coming in mid-career were saying, “Well, actually, I’ll go and be a welder and I’ll stay being a welder. I’m not really that interested in the management chain or the career aspirations; I’m quite happy doing this.” Encouraging those people in to do that is good, but again the difficulty comes back to the fact that, if we do not have the demand signal—Dominic and Steve talked about needing that future and that demand signal—people are going to look elsewhere. It is the same as if you were now offering a qualification in making something that isn’t made any more, and I am trying to think of a good example—like basket weaving. Baskets are very nice, and I do not want to attract the wrath of basket weavers around the UK, but the future for baskets is probably not as big as for something like computers, PCs or whatever. There has to be a future market for this. The difficulty is, without the generation of that demand signal, people are not going to do it; they are going to go into other things. Once we lose them—I am sorry to keep coming back to Barrow—getting them back is incredibly difficult. So it could be a good idea, but I think it needs to be talked about considerably more loudly than it is at the moment.

I think, as we are approaching Easter, this is the one time of year when baskets are probably useful—for Easter-egg hunts and things like that.

Yes, possibly. Maybe I have missed a niche market.

As a Scottish MP, Bob, can I take you back to what you were saying about decommissioning submarines? Having been to Rosyth and seen how keen everyone is to get going with that, do you feel that delays to the DIP are compounded by the—I am not sure whether I want to use “dismissive” or “naive”—approach to defence shown by the Scottish Government?

I have alienated basket weavers; I am not going to alienate them too. The huge problem with that is, if you look at both the Clyde and Rosyth sites, and of course BAE at Scotstoun and Govan—huge employers and a huge benefit for the Scottish economy—the difficulty is, as you all have found out, there is an awful lot of myth around building ships, which is worth looking at. I also declare an interest: I have approximately 4,000 members at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, and we have the myths that build up around that as well. We need to publicise the record of how safe we have been in all those areas, civilian nuclear as well as military nuclear. It is very rare, because of the fact that we are so incredibly careful with it and because we are so well regulated. We have concerns about what the Government are currently doing in merging the regulators together. We were very happy with those individual regulatory bodies. The Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator is potentially being merged with the Office for Nuclear Regulation. We think that will reduce that specialist capacity. With a lot of those things, it is very much about public confidence. If we can show the public, as we do with security around these sites, that there is not any threat to them, that we are incredibly good at this work now, and that the level of incidents and issues that arise is so low, then it demystifies it. I am sure that everybody was terrified when electricity was first invented, but we have such a good safety record on it now. We need to publicise it a bit more.

It is more about the joined-up approach of the Government. I absolutely get the safety aspect, and I think we promote that well, but if you take nuclear—we have Rosyth, Barrow and Devonport—do you feel that we have joined-up UK approach to doing skills, or do you feel that devolution can sometimes get in the way of an industry such as defence? How do you feel that joined-up approach is working?

Going back to my earlier point about defence workers being vilified—particularly with current conflicts around the world, they are an easy target—I think we do not like to talk about it. I keep coming back to Barrow. We talk about Barrow, because it is like, “It’s great that we are building submarines. Isn’t it fantastic? Look at this industry.” But decommissioning is not so attractive or interesting—submarines not being in a very good state of repair. It is about attracting people into that. I am pleased to say that people want to do it. They want to go and build submarines or aircraft—it is interesting—but decommissioning maybe not so much. Nuclear skills, as opposed to defence skills, is the bit that we probably need to be more joined up on.

Can I ask about the speed with which we are investing in skills? The defence industrial strategy has a £180 million package of skills investment. When I went to Barrow to see what BAE was doing, it was almost like the industry is now bypassing traditional skills development and just doing that itself. In Barrow, you are seeing employability programmes being run by BAE Systems, when in the past that would have been run by local government. Do you feel that the pace with which we are approaching the need for skills development and the need for more skills is aligned enough with industry’s expectations?

No. I have sometimes been accused of being a BAE fanboy, which I am not, but look at the actual investment it has put in—as, to be fair, has Babcock. But then, it has the money to do it. I remember talking some time ago to Cammell Laird, who said—coming back to the defence investment plan—that if it had the demand signal, it would employ 800 apprentices tomorrow, but the board could not make the commercial decision to do that, because it did not know whether it was going to get the work. If you employ 800 apprentices, and then you do not get any of the work, what are you going to do with them? Those are the areas that the Government need to step into. BAE has filled a gap. That is not a new thing, by the way. It has always done that. It has an apprentice academy for the yards in Scotstoun and Govan as well. It has always done that, but essentially it can hedge, because of the scale. The SMEs, and even the second-tier companies, do not have the scale to do that. The Government should be filling those holes. The direct answer is no, it is not being done fast enough, but then we get back into this circle: without knowing what we are going to build, are people going to invest money and have apprentices? Are they going to go and do an apprenticeship in steel if we are not going to have a steel industry or a shipbuilding industry?

Yesterday in the Public Accounts Committee, we heard from the MoD that the mix of uniform skills and industry skills is what they really celebrate. They think that works very well. I would love to hear, from a trade union point of view, how you feel about that mix of uniform and civilians working together to create the right skills mix in this sector.

I think it can work. Unsurprisingly, as a trade union officer, I am going to bring up cost. The cost of putting a civil servant in a role is considerably less than putting a uniform in the role, because the terms and conditions are considerably worse. I am always giving this example, if you want a good external comparator: the head of risk for Barclays is paid something like 100 times the head of risk for the Ministry of Defence. I am not saying that the head of risk at Barclays does not have an important job, but I think I am more worried about the risk of the UK. The difficulty within the MoD and the civil service is that they are niche skills that aren’t anywhere else. For instance, we have intelligence officers, and there is no private sector or industrial comparator for that. Because there is not a comparator, the pay and the terms and conditions are relatively low, so we struggle to attract the best people. Unfortunately, the novelty value of “I came here to work to protect the country” does not pay the bills, the mortgage or rising costs, so the MoD has to look at that. In terms of the military and civilians working together, ‘twas ever thus in everything from air traffic control right the way through to defence intelligence. But the difficulty is that you are losing more and more of the civilian side simply because the MoD is not an attractive employer.

Last week, I was lucky enough to meet some of the cyber specialists who have joined the military; the military brought them in in a slightly different way. I am conscious of this because my children are teenagers at the moment. They are looking at universities and thinking about engineering, but they are also thinking about the costs of surviving—based on being teenagers and not really having a concept of the need to have mortgages and kids. Do you think that the Government have a sense of skills progression in terms of payment? Are they looking too much at the start of the journey and not enough at the life points as people go through their careers where they need to get the incremental pay grades properly fixed?

Obviously a lot of it is speculation, because you don’t know what is going to be next. I had a conversation with someone yesterday who said, “I am going to get into drones, that’s the future”, and I said, “No, that’s now—the future is more likely to be cyber.” Again, you need that intelligence analysis to say, “This is what the next 10, 15 or 20 years look like; these are the future skills that you’re going to need.” We need that analysis in the defence sector from within the MoD to say, “This is what we are going to need to build as a sovereign capability.” I am hoping it is going to be aircraft and warships that are going to need steel, but it is also going to be cyber and space, which is the new—

I am conscious that I have had a very good conversation with you, Bob. I have enjoyed it, but I wonder if Steve and Dominic want to add anything to what we have been talking about.

I would repeat what Bob said; I agree completely with everything he said.

I would echo the same.

So it was a very good conversation then!

I have a quick question. A growing number of people feel that we need to transition to a war footing, or certainly that we must be prepared to be able to scale up much more quickly following on from the DIP. But to do that, we would have to bring a lot of people into the industry quickly to up our production rate. I was interested in your point, Steve, about the difference between the Spitfire and the Typhoon. Back in 1939 or 1940, the Spitfire was state of the art and very technical, but we scaled up massively and had to change the way we worked on that and other projects to mass produce. As trade unions, how do you feel about the length of training that your members have to undergo now needing to change for new people coming in? How do you think that would work, and what would your role in that be, because it is about resilience, scaling up and reducing mass, which we don’t currently do?

I think my point still stands. The Spitfire was state of the art at the time, but it still was essentially an internal combustion engine that could do 500 miles per hour; it was not doing twice the speed of sound. It is a difficult question, and I do not think there is an easy answer. It is a product that takes a lot of years to build, like a warship or a submarine, and it is not—to go back to an earlier point—like the Lancaster bombers, where you can turn one out every day. On the skillset, aircraft with jets have been built in Britain since the beginning of the jet age, and it is passed down through the generations: “I learned off somebody who was older than me who learned off somebody who was older than him.” That is essentially it with the manufacturing work, and engineering is the same really. I do not think there is an easy answer to the question of how we could do it in volume. I will refer back to the steel point. Relying on external countries, even NATO partners—for instance, say we are relying on the Americans for our fast jets—means relying on their missiles. When we, heaven forbid, get into a war and another NATO country is doing it, they will prioritise their air forces over our air forces. If we do not invest now in things like Typhoon, then we will be in a bad position if war breaks out. We need to start looking at our members in the defence industry as defence assets for the country. They are strategic assets because our members at the beginning are the ones who build the warships, submarines, planes or, at MBDA, missiles. They need to start being thought of in that way.

If it is useful, a report has been launched this morning, which has all the trade union affiliates’ support, from the Alex Ferry Foundation, which is a charitable trust—“Defending the Nation, Growing the Economy” by Dr Tim Page. It actually looks at the question of how we invest in skills to upscale, if we need to do that, and downscale, without the need to build Spitfires in car factories. The important point on that is how, if we are not using the steel in the steel mills to build warships, what other industry do we have that we can put in there in order to fill the gaps and maintain those skills, so that, if we do need to turn the tap back on for warfighting, we can do that. There is a whole set of people from Prospect who I know from the other trade unions have gone through the just transition thing, so we are quite used to this question of how we take a whole set of workers and skill them to do something else. There is transferability and adaptability. This means identifying the skills that are required in aircraft manufacture and what other areas they can be applied to, so that we can maintain the workforce and, if we need to turn the tap on or off, we still have the skills. I remember going to Rosyth, and the complexity of changing just from the production of one type of warship to another means you basically have to rebuild the entire yard, so those kind of agilities need to come into it. While we are rebuilding the yard, could we be upskilling the workers to do whatever the next bit of work is? I think we just need to have flexibility. I actually think that the willingness from the workforce now to learn new skills has changed completely from when I came through in my early working life. I am old. The attitude when I came through was like, “No, I do that, and that is what I do, and I am not doing anything else.” That demarcation has gone completely now and people are really keen to have new skills.

On the point about having people learn new skills, the problem is that, as far as fast jet production goes, we are the only game left in town, whereas, as I mentioned previously, when I started in ’97 we had six different sites making five different platforms. That is not the case any more. As I have said, it is a very niche job. Especially when you are looking at the actual flying aircraft and waving them off the line, working on a complete fast jet is a highly skilled job, and there is not a massive pool of people who can do it. We have a situation at the moment where the people who do that job are doing something else, but it is a completely different skillset to what is needed to do the final assembly of fast jets, which is a problem we are facing at the moment.

May I add an example further down the steel supply chain? Dalzell is the only plate mill with ship-grade approval, which means it is the only plate mill that can supply plate for naval defence ship projects. That is highly skilled work and, again, you are talking about the ability to ramp up production. That means that we have to invest in modern plate mills now to grow that workforce and support them going forwards. Echoing the point around the Spitfire, that was possible to do in world war two because, although it was the most advanced technology at the time, compared with today it was still relatively basic technology. It is the same within our steel industry: as things have become more complex in the way in which you develop and make them, it is very difficult to retrofit something else in the short term. To get somebody skilled up to be able to do it takes time, so we have to put that investment in now to meet the potential crisis points in the future and be able to ramp up. Arguably, it would have been better to have invested three, four, five, six, seven or eight years ago, but now is the best time to start that investment, ramp up that scale and improve those industries now to meet future demand and skill requirements.

I want to go on to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In its very useful study, it notes that Ministry of Defence spending is becoming much more investment heavy. Capital expenditure, for example on equipment, has been increasing, but at the same time spending on resource, particularly personnel, has been reducing. In your opinion, Mr King, is that the right approach, or should there be a different approach?

I have swotted up on RDEL and CDEL because—

I don’t want to get into the acronyms of RDEL and CDEL but I am glad you have done it.

I am not going to take credit for this example, and it does involve an aircraft. This is straight from my representatives within the MoD. Basically if you put all the money in CDEL, you can buy an aircraft. If you take it out of RDEL, you cannot train the pilot, you cannot do in-service support, you cannot put munitions on it and, more importantly—I keep coming back to this point—you cannot pay the defence intelligence analysts to tell you where you need to point it. Essentially, you end up with a very nice, incredibly professional, well-made aircraft that you cannot actually use. That goes right the way across the board. I listened to some of the questions in previous sessions of this Committee where there was a significant downer on civil servants, saying, “This is a significant cost, and what we need is more guns, more soldiers, and all the rest of it.” I do not disagree with any of that, but if you do not have the purposing for them, or the intelligence and infrastructure to train them, you end up with a very big army, loads of equipment and no idea at all what to do with it and no way to support it.

So that approach is the wrong one; they need to change course.

I believe so. What we really need is the defence investment plan to tell us, “This is the amount we are going to send.” There are lots of different numbers—I think it was 40:40:20 in terms of the split between traditional expenditure, and then the 20 was how we look at the future stuff. Somebody needs to make the decision on that. The decision will be made by defence analysts working for the Ministry of Defence, advising and informing Ministers, who will say, “We have all of this information. This is the decision that we are going to make.” That information is available. There is no need for the delay in the defence investment plan—it could be published. To come back to what colleagues said here, and what was said earlier by the trade associations: if you have only done 50% of it, publish 50% of it, because we are not going to have the people to do any of it if they leave it much longer. We celebrate Leonardo—it is fantastic—but I think it was a lucky escape, because Leonardo would have left the country.

Mr Armstrong, what are your views on resource versus capital? Is the current approach the correct one?

I am going to keep praising the steel strategy. The steel strategy puts us in a good direction. We have also seen a large amount of money designated towards steel from the Government, so that investment and that drive‑in is right. What we would like to see—again, it has been echoed here—is more engagement from the MoD in terms of forward planning. With the DIP being published, and with an understanding of what resources are going to be going in and what the demands in the supply chain are going to be, that allows the opportunity for the steel industry to adapt to meet that need domestically. Referring again to the report that Bob raised, it talks about the fact that there is a bit of a lack of understanding within the MoD about the steel capability in the UK. It is not just about pumping money into the system. We obviously want to see that investment, but it is also about embedding a cultural change in the way we do procurement in the UK, in order to ensure that the MoD, the defence industry, etc understand the capability and have a joined‑up approach, so that it all flows through seamlessly.

Mr McGuiness, do you have anything to add?

I would just echo the points around the supply chain, especially for air combat. It is such small numbers of orders. With the lack of a plan or the defence investment plan, it is very difficult to plan in the supply chain because the numbers are so small. The gaps make it even more difficult to restart the production line again. It is exactly what my colleagues were saying.

I think we all appreciate that the delay in publishing the defence investment plan is having a huge impact, as we have heard during this session. I note that the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary have said that the Government want to spend much more, faster. Mr King, I want to ask about capacity. If we end up spending much more, faster, what are your concerns around capacity and value for money? The Institute for Fiscal Studies has run three different scenarios—a linear increase, or a lightly or heavily backloaded option. Which would you prefer, and do you see issues around defence inflation if we went with one or t’other?

It has to be frontloaded, but with the caveat that the frontload has to be skills investment. We could have a longer‑term plan that comes out of the defence investment plan. We were talking to Steve briefly, but I cannot remember: how long does it take to build a Typhoon now? A couple of years, is it not?

Five years.

We keep coming back to Spitfires and car factories—we are not going to make more of these overnight. That initial investment was found out when we went to munitions suppliers—the main one in the UK being BAE Systems under the next generation contract—and said, “Can we have your stockpile?” there were quizzical looks. “We don’t have a stockpile. We produce what you pay us to produce, on a relatively low‑level basis.” There has been investment, as you will be aware, and evidence has been given to this Committee about the upscaling of munitions. I have alienated basket weavers; I am not going to alienate munitions producers, but those are far easier to produce than an incredibly complex fast jet. That was difficult as well. It needs to be frontloaded for skills, but it also needs that longer‑term, slow‑drip investment plan in order to produce the products.

Any views, Mr Armstrong or Mr McGuiness, on this?

Not particularly, other than to echo what Bob said, especially where GCAP is concerned. In the Financial Times yesterday, it was reported that Japanese allies are getting a little worried because the money has been there, but the next level of investment has not yet been announced by the Government. It is not even just us any more; these are multi-country partnerships, as AUKUS submarines are. We need that spending to keep the confidence of our industrial partners and allies.

Definitely, and rest assured I have raised that with the Foreign Secretary on the Floor of the House. Gents, it has been an absolute delight; it has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for your contributions, which have meant that we have been able to highlight the impact of delays to the DIP on industry.