Trade union Prospect represents 17,000 defence industry workers including scientists and engineers and is concerned about the potential of government cutbacks to harm the sector.
The union has recently published new research into the impact of the government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) – which was launched in October – on the armed forces and the civilians who support them.
The research, which is expected to inform Prospect’s comments on the defence Equipment, Support and Technology Green Paper published before Christmas, was completed in advance of the SDSR but the report’s authors were able to predict many of the cost-cutting measures contained within it.
There were some areas of divergence: the authors predicted that the Harrier would be withdrawn from service – which has already led to the loss of jobs at BAE Systems – but were surprised that the government made the decision to take the fighter out of service as early as this year. They also believed that only one of the two new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers would be built: but the defence review confirmed that both are scheduled to enter service later in the decade. The review also confirmed that the overall defence budget will be reduced by 8%, and not 10% as the authors had expected. It is still thought, however, that this will mean the loss of around 20,000 defence industry jobs. Twenty-five thousand civil service posts are also under threat at the Ministry of Defence.
BAE cut more than 1,000 jobs late last year in response to the demise of the Harrier and Nimrod MRA4 programmes. The decision to scrap the fighter and reconnaissance aircraft has already aroused considerable anger in the defence industry. In this era of austerity, the cuts are already having an impact. Prospect is concerned about the impact on not only defence sector workers and the industry, but on the ability of civilians to support our armed forces effectively.
Prospect’s deputy general secretary Mike Clancy says: “Civilians play a crucial role in ensuring our armed forces can close with the enemy.”
Jim Campbell, an independent consultant and former REME officer, is one of the authors of the Prospect report. He acknowledges that the cuts “could have been worse”. But, noting that the Charles Haddon-Cave review into the loss of a Nimrod over Afghanistan in 2006 had found military cutbacks to be a contributing factor, he warns that a terrible accident of this kind could occur again if budget cuts are not thought through. “Could there be another Nimrod?” he asks.
Campbell argues that military cuts are being made without sufficient risk analysis taking place. Many civil servants will lose their jobs, but there is little idea on the part of government of where, say, the inefficiencies lie or where the civil service is underperforming. Further, there is confusion as to which defence tasks could be carried out by uniformed personnel, civil service or private-sector contractors. For example, it is unclear exactly what role civilian contractors should play in theatres of war such as Afghanistan.
The defence industry, Campbell says, contributes £35 billion to the economy but we may have to reassess “what the UK can do as an operational defence entity” if industrial capacity is lost and too many jobs cut. This could entail working more closely with other countries and sourcing “off the shelf” military equipment to the detriment of OEMs in Britain and their suppliers. There is a danger, if this happens, that Britain could be left at the “back of the queue” and dependent on other nations when it comes to sourcing weapons, aircraft and ships. The MoD needs to “recognise that national defence capability requires reliable access to defence industrial capacity,” says Campbell.
Labour’s shadow defence minister Michael Dugher defends the previous government’s commitment to defence and questions the wisdom of the SDSR, which he claims was “rushed through and utterly driven by the Treasury”. Britain would now have to “punch above its weight” to maintain its operational tempo, he says. He describes the decision to scrap the Harrier fleet as “absurd” as it will leave the new aircraft carriers without fixed-wing aircraft to deploy on them until the introduction of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Dugher says a more prudent option might have been to take some of the RAF’s Tornado fleet out of service. Once defence industry skills and capacity are lost, he says, they are “difficult to resuscitate”.
Prospect’s Clancy argues that the government cuts are not consistent with projections of what the future might hold in terms of defence and security. The SDSR, he says, assumes that less conflict will take place when we are actually heading into a rather uncertain future. He echoes Campbell’s assertion that the lessons of the highly critical Haddon-Cave report have not been taken on board. He questions why Qinetiq is being downsized when cyberwarfare is expected to pose an increasing security threat. “It is self-evident we are losing engineering expertise,” says Clancy. Those claiming that the creation of private sector jobs would fully mitigate the impact of public-sector losses were living in “dreamworld,” he adds. If the UK was to maintain the status quo in terms of defence activity we would have to “march in step with international partners”.
Bob Keen, head of government relations at BAE Systems, admits that the decision to scrap Nimrod and Harrier is “disappointing”. But other areas of the SDSR, which retained the Astute class submarines, the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, a modernised Typhoon and the JSF, were welcome. “The SDSR has given us a good deal of the certainty we were looking for, especially in the maritime sector,” says Keen.
But he says decisions need to be made on how the UK is to maintain the ability to design and manufacture fixed-wing fighter aircraft with no national combat jet in development. The development of unmanned aerial vehicles also needs continued support, he says. The contribution of defence companies to the economy is not always acknowledged, Keen argues, but BAE contributes £3 billion to GDP and employs 20,000 engineers, supporting a further 80,000 jobs in the supply chain.
While Keen is philosophical about the cuts, others see them as part of a long-term trend in which defence is persistently neglected by government. This is the view of Tony Edwards, director of the United Kingdom National Defence Association, who says that defence spending as a proportion of GDP is lower than at any point in history, at around 2%. The proportion is set to get smaller as GDP recovers in the next three years, he says. He believes that Britain is set to enter what he calls a “post-post-imperial phase” in which it drops into the “second division” of military nations, behind France, Russia, Germany, China and India because of huge gaps in funding. “Buying off the shelf would be a strategic disaster and a long-term disaster for the defence industry,” says Edwards.
Whether the cuts have the impact on British industry that some fear remains to be seen. But the Prospect report certainly offers food for thought for anyone working in the defence industry or civil service – and within the armed forces which depend on them.