Experimental Aircraft Project (Hansard, 14 February 1984)

§ 9. Mr. Warren
asked the Secretary of State for Defence what are the costs and employment penalties to the United Kingdom of international collaboration on the development of the experimental aircraft project.

§ Mr. Pattie
Since the experimental aircraft programme is not an international collaborative project, I assume that my hon. Friend is referring to the future European fighter aircraft. It is too early to say what the detailed implications will be if a collaborative procurement programme is agreed, as we hope it will be. We believe that such a programme would have considerable cost advantages over a wholly national project and would also create a large number of job opportunities for British industry.

§ Mr. Warren
While thanking my hon. Friend for his statement on the progress of the project, may I ask him to consider that industry is reporting that proposals being drafted and tested mean that this country will be paying twice as much as it needs for half the number of jobs that we would get if we did the job on our own? Has not the time come to study the way in which our collaboration organisation should be drawn up for the future? Tornado and Jaguar showed that they created industrial competition where none existed before. Has not the time come to study this expensive system of aircraft procurement?

§ Mr. Pattie
My hon. Friend would not dispute that it is more costly to carry out a national programme than to carry out a collaborative one. The question is how the collaborative programme could be managed in the final analysis, and how we divide the work. I ask him to be patient and bear with us while we are going through these difficult negotiations with our potential partners.

§ Mr. Johnston
Would it not have been better if the question had been put the other way round and the Minister had been asked what the costs and employment penalties of not being involved might be?

§ Mr. Pattie
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is always possible to ask the question that way round. Many people working in the British aerospace industry want to see such a project go ahead. They want to get as much work as they can for themselves, which is a perfectly laudable and understandable desire, but it is generally recognised that a collaborative project holds out the best hope of getting the programme going in the first place.

§ Mr. Wilkinson
Notwithstanding the fact that there will, in effect, be two experimental aircraft programmes—the British one and the French ACX—does my hon. Friend agree that the important thing is that five air forces in Europe have harmonised their operational requirements, and that if their industries can get together and build that aircraft there will be a greatly enhanced degree of standardisation and inter-operability, to the benefit of the operational effectiveness of the air forces of western Europe?

§ Mr. Pattie
As always, my hon. Friend has correctly outlined our aim. He is also right in describing the considerable achievement reached in December, when the chiefs of air staff of the five participating nations agreed an outline European staff target.

§ Mr. Campbell-Savours
Should not all information about the costs of weapons systems, including this aircraft, be made public? What possible justification can the Government have for sending information about the costs to Select Committees and instructing the Select Committees not to make that information available to the general public?

§ Mr. Pattie
Successive Governments have followed the practice of not revealing all the details of programme costs and individual project costs. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we went further towards helping in that regard in last year's White Paper, and in the previous year, than we had gone before. However, there are good reasons for not wanting to give an undue amount of information on somewhat sensitive matters.

§ Mr. McNamara
Is it not true that the greater the number of nations collaborating, the more expensive the end product? With the P110, there was a figure of 55,000 jobs. The three-nation ACA produced a figure of 38,000 jobs, and now the five-nation FEFA involves 20,000 jobs or fewer. The Government, quite properly, have a responsibility to the RAF, but, equally, they have a responsibility to British industry to maintain jobs and the industrial base.

§ Mr. Pattie
Yes, but it has never been the Government's position that the level of the defence industrial base has to be maintained regardless of cost. We have often argued—I have done so from this Dispatch Box—for the great importance of the defence industrial base, but we have to balance the programme costs against the other considerations that the hon. Gentleman has in mind.