§ Lord Swinfenasked Her Majesty's Government:
What is the current status of the Army's Challenger 2 programme.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe)The Challenger 2 Development Programme was successfully completed, with all reliability targets achieved on development tanks. Following a series of trials on early production 7WA tanks, we identified a need to improve the reliability of some of the elements of production vehicles to meet the very high standards set. An agreed programme to achieve this is being undertaken by the contractor, Vickers plc, at no additional cost to my department. Central to the programme is a sequence of Production Reliability Growth Trials with agreed technical milestones.
The company has met the requirements set in the first of those trials, which was held in July. Challenger 2 has already demonstrated an impressive capability. We are confident that Challenger 2 will fully meet all of our technical and reliability requirements in 1997. In order to ensure that the comprehensive logistic support arrangements that we require are properly established, we have agreed that the In Service Date for Challenger 2 will be June 1998.