Interview: James Arbuthnot

In the Ministry of Defence, long bombarded by critical reports and bad publicity over poor financial management and buying decisions, a bunker mentality can sometimes be detected. A wary defensiveness too often characterises the attitude of ministry officials and military personnel appearing before the defence select committee, says its Conservative chair, James Arbuthnot – a former MoD minister, who’s led the committee for nearly six years.

“There is a sense that the MoD treats the defence select committee as the enemy,” he says. “We are not the enemy and, although sometimes answering questions from the defence committee can be uncomfortable, the long-term result is that the product of the department improves – so people ought to be as open with us as possible.”

It is certainly true that the committee has a track record of making the MoD uncomfortable. Last autumn, for example, its report on the process leading up to the publication of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) was highly critical of the way in which the government carried out the exercise. The review saw billions slashed from the defence budget and the decommissioning of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the UK’s Harrier jets; the committee argued that such a significant downgrading of Britain’s arsenal should not have been carried out without a much longer and fuller consultation.

However, while Arbuthnot’s committee clearly does not pull its punches, he is keen to ensure that those the body is holding to account should not regard it with enmity. “Sometimes I joke and suggest the Treasury is the enemy,” Arbuthnot says with a wry smile. “Actually, the Treasury does a necessary job keeping the purse strings under control. But the enemy is not us.”

Polite determination
Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone less combative than Arbuthnot. Courteous, quietly spoken and earnest, he is a far cry from the stereotype of the bombastic, grandstanding select committee chairman. When I ask Arbuthnot where he would place himself on a scale between polite and belligerent in his approach to chairing the committee, he says: “I would say I’m at the polite end, but I try to be forensic. It helps having been a barrister, but I read a lot, I talk to a lot of people. The more you know, the more confident you feel with your subject; being on top of the subject is essential to asking the relevant questions.”

Yet Arbuthnot is well aware that his committee is responsible for scrutinising some of the biggest political issues of the day, and that with that responsibility must come some element of steel when dealing with witnesses. Consequently, he points out that civil servants appearing before him should not count on being treated with kid gloves.

“They should expect from us courtesy, yet determination,” he says. “We would want to get answers and would want not to be flannelled. So if people know their stuff and are prepared to tell it to us, they will have a very easy ride. If people either don’t know their stuff or want to withhold it from us, we will start getting really quite offensive.”
At the top of Arbuthnot’s in-tray at the moment is the ongoing matter of the SDSR. Following its report on the government’s rushed publication of the review, the committee announced a further inquiry looking at its outcomes – and this is still under way.

No ship of the desert
On the day I meet Arbuthnot, the topic is hot news. The senior Tory MP David Davis has broken ranks to say that the SDSR has left Britain with insufficient military capability to deal with the unfolding crisis in Libya. With a resolution to impose a no-fly zone under discussion at the UN, Davis told the BBC that, as a result of heavy cuts to military budgets following the SDSR, Britain would be “unable to act” effectively in Libya because it no longer has the necessary hardware. By Saturday night, of course, Britain had acted – but the fact that those strikes relied on submarine-launched missiles and just three Tornado aircraft, each of which flew non-stop from Norfolk accompanied by air-to-air refuellers, made the lack of an aircraft carrier painfully obvious.

Davis’s contribution to the debate is the latest salvo in a fast-moving story. Only the previous week, 50 senior military personnel, politicians and academics – including former Bosnian UN force commander General Sir Michael Rose, former first sea lord Admiral Lord West, and former defence secretary Bob Ainsworth – co-signed a letter to the Independent on Sunday making the same point. In the light of the Libyan crisis, they wrote, the security landscape had “radically changed”, and some of the assumptions underpinning the defence review should therefore be reconsidered.

Arbuthnot refuses to condemn the SDSR as obsolescent – his committee, he points out, is currently examining its outcomes – but he warns that the UK must reduce its military ambitions to match its capabilities. “If we do not have the power to do things on our own account, then we ought to be fairly diffident about the things we demand others to do – so I think it is quite difficult for us as a country to demand that other people take action in Libya,” he says. “If we don’t have the power to take action ourselves in Libya – and I suspect we probably don’t – then we ought to have a suitably modest approach to what we say should happen there. We’ve got to think very carefully about our role in the world. Reducing defence spending has consequences.”

The coalition promised early on that it would match its defence commitments to its resources, Arbuthnot recalls (see news, p1); and the spending review further cut the budgets of a department already desperately over-committed on its planned purchases. “The natural consequence must be to reduce our commitments further,” he says. “And so it is essential, it seems to me, not to take on additional commitments while we are reducing our resources.”

Previewing the next review
Arbuthnot is aware of the limitations of the select committee system in challenging policy decisions that have already been made, and as such feels there is little his committee can do to alter the SDSR now that it is being implemented. But he believes that proper scrutiny can avert future mistakes.

“We’re going to be unable as a committee to overturn decisions – that’s not really the function or power of a committee,” Arbuthnot says. “We want to make sure the next defence review gets conducted at less breakneck speed, with better information; better consultation; more discussion with the public. In the meantime, we’ll have some serious questions to ask about things like the size of the surface fleet – but it’s not going to be possible for us to come up with
easy solutions. We are in extremely difficult territory here.”

Buying powers
Another area where Arbuthnot hopes to keep the government “on its toes”, as he puts it, is on the matter of the apparent crisis in the MoD’s procurement budget. In 2009, a government-commissioned report by businessman, journalist and former special adviser Bernard Gray revealed that the MoD’s equipment procurement programme was £38bn over-committed and five years behind schedule. He blamed endemic “incompetent” procurement practices in the ministry – and defence secretary Liam Fox has now hired Gray as chief of defence materiél, the most senior civil servant overseeing MoD procurement.

Arbuthnot is pleased with the appointment, he says. As a former minister in charge of defence procurement in John Major’s government, he’s well aware of the gravity of the problem: “The procurement nightmare exists – and it’s a nightmare that wasn’t only created by the Labour Party. I was in charge of procurement myself, and the nightmare was as bad when I was in charge of it.”

For years, says Arbuthnot, there have been “perverse incentives inside the MoD to behave really badly” when buying weapons systems. “I don’t blame any one person, but I do blame a system which has led to a conspiracy of optimism,” he comments.

Under this system procurement officials responsible for each military service are, he explains, always keen to secure spending approvals “because they know that their career prospects may well depend on how well they are seen to have supported their service”. They also know that very expensive projects won’t be approved – and because the defence contractors know this too, “everyone is conspiring to deny the reality of the cost of a project”.

When the spending is approved, he continues, “the really bad bit starts. The Treasury starts putting intense pressure on the MoD to reduce costs, so people start to take costs out of that project: they delay it, they cut numbers, they reduce the capability – and the consequence is that, because of the delay, the programme costs significantly more.” Eventually, he concludes, the chickens come home to roost – but by then, “The people who took those decisions have left to go off and do something completely different.”

On guard against excess
Quite apart from the fact that the procurement problem is wasting money that should be spent on equipment for our armed forces – and therefore putting lives at risk – Arbuthnot says that the issue needs rectifying because these poor practices will make future increases in military spending harder to justify to the Treasury. “Unless we get on top of this, the Treasury will always be able to say: ‘You keep saying you want more money for defence, but until you spend the money you are given rather better, why should we let you have it?’”

Arbuthnot concedes that procurement reform will be a “huge area” for the committee to stay on top of, and is likely to be a theme running through many of its future inquiries. Most obviously, once the current inquiry into the SDSR is out of the way, the committee is planning to hold a further inquiry specifically looking at the £38bn gap between the MoD’s buying commitments and its planned budgets. “Reform of the acquisition process [is] something we’ll want to do a discreet report on,” he says. “But then we’ll do further reports and inquiries over the coming years into individual MoD programmes.”

Asked whether the committee may examine the topic of personnel movements between the MoD and defence industry, Arbuthnot is cautious. The issue came to the fore at the end of last year, when the leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, said he would examine an apparent “revolving door” between Whitehall and the defence companies.

A number of senior officials have taken up senior posts in defence, including Sir Kevin Tebbit, former permanent secretary at the MoD and now chairman of Finmeccanica UK, and David Gould, the former chief operating officer of the MoD's procurement division, who is now chairman of Selex Systems, part of Finmeccanica.

Arbuthnot says the issue has been raised to the committee in evidence submitted by at least one organisation in the course of the ongoing defence inquiry, and the committee may pick it up in future evidence sessions. However, he says, there are rules laid down by the Cabinet Office as to what civil servants can do after leaving public service. “It is a matter for the Cabinet Office and prime minister to work out whether those rules are working well,” he says. “For myself, I would enormously doubt whether senior civil servants were skewing defence procurement decisions to line themselves up with decent jobs at the end of their careers. But that is open to question, and if people want to raise that they can.”

Success in spotting failure
In all of his select committee’s inquiries, Arbuthnot says, his overriding objective is to maintain what he regards as its proud track record of illuminating shortcomings in the MoD and encouraging improved performance. He points to a report produced last March on defence equipment: it was perhaps the committee’s “finest hour”, he says – and something he aspires to repeat.

“It was one of our most incisive reports, and referred to a number of really serious failures in the MoD,” he says. “We had been building up to it over the course of the last Parliament; during the course of this Parliament, I want to build up to something similar, which if we are even partially successful will really show how the MoD could improve, but if we are wholly successful will show that the MoD really has improved.”

As a former minister, thrown out of office at the end of the Major government in 1997, does Arbuthnot wish he was back in a ministerial office under the coalition? It seems not. “This is the best job I’ve ever had; much better than being a minister in the MoD – because unless you’re actually in the cabinet, you have much less influence than people think, and you have to follow the party line, which I don’t have to do,” he replies. “In fact, I am obliged not to follow a line and instead to do what is right in the interests of the country. It’s the most liberating experience I’ve ever had.”

CV Highlights
1975    Begins work as a barrister
1978    Elected councillor, Kensington and Chelsea
1987    Elected MP for Wanstead and Woodford
1992    Made assistant whip, then junior minister in Department for Social Security
1995    Becomes minister of state for defence procurement
1997    Moves to become MP for Hampshire North-East, and made opposition chief whip
2001    Joins intelligence and security committee
2005    Made chairman of defence select committee