Questions over the future of the new medium lift helicopter programme were raised in Parliament today, amid warnings that continued uncertainty could undermine sovereign aerospace capability and the defence supply chain.
Speaking in the Commons, Defence Select Committee chair Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi said defence small and medium-sized enterprises remained essential to national security and warned that indecision risked damaging the UK’s ability to build military helicopters. Citing reporting in The Times, he said there were concerns that the UK’s sovereign helicopter manufacturing capability could be under threat amid questions over whether helicopters remained a priority capability.
Dhesi asked whether defence procurement priorities were determined by the Ministry of Defence or the Treasury and sought clarity on when a decision would be made on the long-delayed medium lift helicopter contract. He told the House: “Defence SMEs remain essential to safeguarding our national security. And while drones remain an essential part of modern warfare, so are helicopters.”
Defence Secretary John Healey rejected suggestions that decisions were being driven outside the department, saying there was an active competitive process underway. He said MPs should be cautious about media speculation, adding: “There is a current contract process underway, and a competitive process for the new medium lift helicopter.” Healey linked the timing of decisions to the wider Defence Investment Plan, which he said was examining inherited commitments that were “hugely overcommitted, underfunded and in some cases unsuited to the threats that we face.”
He added that the review represented a significant shift in approach, describing it as “the Defence Department taking a line by line, building up our plans for the future” for the first time in nearly 18 years.
Liberal Democrat MP Adam Dance raised concerns about the knock-on effects for regional industry, particularly in Yeovil, where Leonardo is a major employer. He argued that failure to secure major contracts could have consequences well beyond a single prime contractor, saying that if companies like Leonardo missed out, “we risk losing not just Leonardo, but smaller defence firms too.”
Healey responded by pointing to recent awards to the company, noting: “Just the week before last, I was in Edinburgh awarding a £450 million contract to Leonardo for a really important part of upgrading our Typhoon jets for the future.” He acknowledged the importance of primes in sustaining smaller suppliers and said that since the election more than 100 major defence contracts had been let, with “84% of those” going to UK-based firms.
Ah we all thought DIP stood for
Defence
Investment
Plan
but in reality is was a clearly trailed dip in funding that was meant.
Another version SB…D.I.P. …Disasterous, Impractable, Pointless. Bet you this is close to the mark !!
Dependable and impenetrable procrastination
I think we are onto something here.
Bernard Woolley would be proud of us!
if they can’t order a base level of helicopters we are really doomed
the order for this should be trebled, not reduced. There’s a key lack of understanding on the role of helicopters and people in HMT should have no say in whether they have a place on the battlefield or not.
I do think it’s time that the UK gave funding of defence and law and order over to the select committees and make it a cross party commitment.
We can’t keep on like this
MOD certainly needs to get its act together as well & peoples careers must be based upon delivery.
Agreed. Cross party.
And it will continue like this I’m sure.
Morning DM. I believe cross party agreement is achievable. The Aussies do a pretty good job with a solid strategic plan.(especially re.the navy) . I suspect it’s all off the threat of the Chinese dragon.
Meanwhile back in South Africa – they just concluded a joint naval exercise with India, China, Russia and Iran. Yes Iran- god help us all!
I’ve read about the “joint” exercise. It turned to be an absolute clusterfeck for the South African Navy. The list of problems of not only trying to get ships to the exercise, but also trying to maintain and operate them in the exercise, is a lesson all Navies need to have a look at. Basically, if you want a Navy that is effective and not just window dressing! Then the whole supply chain, training, maintenance and sea time, needs to be part of a planned budget. But I suspect South Africa forces have a heap of other problems that need to be addressed, before they can be considered a player on the World stage again.
cheers Davey – that’s a pretty comprehensive analysis of Operation “Cluster f**k”! How the mighthy have fallen.
The MOD may well be at fault but it’s the politicians that call the shots. Healey and Pollard, ably assisted by Reeves and Starmer are the ones to blame. Rubbish, all of them.
So exactly who is in the ‘competitive process’ then? Didn’t everybody else get Jared with the delay and pull out!
Yes mate.
The trouble will be that it will be a tiny order that has been cheese pared below the minimum economically viable numbers so they will be eye wateringly expensive per unit.
Then add the inevitable Gucci kit and it will be unbelievably expensive.
Starmer wants a domestic job creation scheme so this is going to be the result.
Well, it’s not like he has to force them to build domestically… the only bidder left already has a factory in the UK from their days operating as AW now under Leonardo’s umbrella.
Well that was obvious from the start.
Which is why so many of us years ago wanted BH, which was been offered to the UK for peanuts, I recall it was 500 million, for 60.
OTS, instead, spent money on upgrading 24 Pumas.
I repeat, the MoD budget is PRIMARILY seen as a job creation scheme by ministers and the means to channel money to the MIC, not to provide kit and personal in the right amounts.
The other priority is having nuclear weapons for willy waving as a P5 world power.
When combined with the utter incompetence of HMG,the forces that remain are the result.
The DIP was clearly an excuse to delay, obfuscate and kick a can down the road.
Politicians?
All liars. The enemy within.
At least Mandleson has been found out.
Another scum who escaped for so long.
Mate there is a lot more believe me. These middle feeders are being fed to the lions, it goes way above them l reckon.
I loathed the Labour government of 97 to 2010, and he was one of the worst.
Most enjoyable.
I hope we don’t have the usual lack of accountability and graceful “retirement from public life” crap and he’s actually imprisoned.
They can throw Andrew and Fergie in for good measure as well.
All at the trough.
No wonder so many are either disgruntled at politics or move to Reform or the Greens.
Yup that club has so many get out clauses it makes me vomit. The present crowd of so called leader’s have it coming. I remember Romania and what can happen in 24 hours….who knows what the future holds eh?
Man- it;s such bad look! I think there is plenty more to come!
Problem is they have essentially raised costs for the every business in the UK. Defence industry isn’t immune and now all the kit costs more and being politicians they didn’t have the IQ to realise they were creating a bigger hole in defence spending and their DIP needs rework, essentially political decisions like raising employer NI is a grab of a % of defence budget back to the treasury. It also erodes UKs ability to compete domestically and internationally on competive tenders. The next cost that will hit industry is employees rights, no matter how noble the cause failure to cover the costs through increased defence budgets means something will have to be cut.
Let’s face reality here,we are NOT going to get any more helicopters! The RAF are muddling through and covering the MH mission with what they have got.
HMT are going to say your coping why do you need more helicopters!
Reading between the lines in Healey’s statements, I think the reasons for the delay in the DIP and the uncertainty over the NMH are pretty clear.
We have a big legacy of old and gapped equipment that needs.replaced, plus years of underfunding the foundations – service pay, service housing, base infrastructure and weapons stockpiles. Just to replace the old equipments, we have a £17bn black hole in the procurement budget, another legacy from the last 14 wilderness years. So we have a mountain to climb, just to get our small forces anywhere near properly equipped. And now we have to fund the ‘transformational’ drive to acquire umpty drones and unmanned equipments, for which there is no budget line
The services have an extra £12bn to play with over the next 2 years. That is all that HMG can provide from a skint Treasury under pressure from all sides. It is a welcome increase, but is clearly nowhere near enough. So hard choices need to be made.
The Services’ wish-list of new kit is £28bn over budget. It is being left to the service chiefs and MOD civvies to prioitise what they can afford, what is borderline and what is going to have to be gapped or cancelled. The decisions at this point are not down to the politicians, it’s down to the staffs to propose. The politicos will join in later.
We can see the above reflected in the NMH debate. The rotary procurement budget is small, too small to even buy the 8 or 9 helis we need each year just to maintain the current strength of the RAF/Army rotary fleet. A little chunk has already gone on the 6 new Jupiters for Brunei and Cyprus. Next in order is the 24 new extended-range Chinooks, at over £100m each. That is the rotary budget used up for the next 4 or 5 years. Then JAC has to fit in 30 or however many NMH, if Westland is still in business by then. Even that is about a third of the medium utility helos we need to equip RAF and 3 Division aviation bde. But even getting a small batch will be in competition with transformational drones, the RN’s grab for the major slice of the pie and of course the suffocating dead weight of the ever-soaring nuclear programme.
I would not fancy being head of JAC for one minute, as rotary is a good way down the pecking order. It is fashionable to bash the current ministers for all this, but they have done their best to provide a bigger budget and start to address the many foundational shortcomings they have inherited.
Where I would fault them is not looking more widely at where additional money could come from for defence. Reform’s petty little list of grievances and savings wouldn’t scratch the surface of the defence black hole. HMG needs to be looking at the EU”s SAFE fund or setting up its own version of low-interest, long term loans for defence kit. Along with introducing defence bonds to raise public money. These are the kind of wider financial levers that our ENATO allies are using to increase their procurement. We are trying to do it out of revenue, which is never going to be equal to the need.
14 new extended-range Chinooks, not my mistyped 24…
Your probably not to far off but don’t kid yourself it was just the 14 yr ‘peace dividend’ under the last lot!
Even in the 70’s in BAOR we operated under strict track mileage,fuel allocation for AFV,s.The only way you could get some spares was to wait to just before an exercise and put in a priority one request for them! Helicopter training fuel etc had to come out of our Regt fuel allowance otherwise you didn’t get the helicopters!
It’s ALL govts that have been loathe to spend money on defence even when the enemy was a few miles anway across the IGB!
Let me remaind people that the £28bn is over 4 years. So it’s £7bn per annum over budget, and if all of the real £6bn extra that’s coming from the foreign aid budget went to real defence (as opposed to redefined spending going nowhere), it would still not be quite enough to fill the black hole.
I think you may be double-counting there Jon, or else my brain is muddled.
We know that the defence spend is set to increase from £60.2 bn in 2024/5 to £73.5 bn in 2027/8. The latter includes all the new money from the aid budget and elsewhere. Even with that pretty big increase, we will still be £28 bn over budget over the coming two years, thefore £14 bn a year. That is a massive amount of money in procurement terms and the services are going to have to cut the cloth substantially to fit.
One problem for the staff planners is nobody knows what the budget is going to be after March 2028. If we are to get to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, it will need to rise by upwards of £4bn each year for 7 years. I imagine the staffs will just have to delete as much of that £28 bn as possible and delay decisions on the remainder until 2028.
I’m pretty sure the £28.8bn hole is quoted over four years, not two.
You can’t subtract the absolute 24/5 budget from the 27/8 one to get a number, because you need to do everything in the base of a particular year. Let’s take the 27/8 figure, beloved of Mr Healey (remembering there’s another 15 months before that kicks in). That will give the biggest number.
So we convert £60.2 bn using GDP ratios x3.09/2.89 = £64.4bn. Then we can subtract 73.5 – 64.4 = £9.1bn over three years. It’s still a substantial amount. These are the MOD budgets figures, not the overall defence headline figures, which are somewhat higher.
However, if we did the same thing between last year and next, working in the base of 26/27: £60.2 x3.02/2.89 = 62.9. 65.5-62.9 = £2.6bn real increase over two years, which small though it may be is still more than I’d thought.
As you say, after 27/28 nobody knows what the government will do. I hope you are right that we’ll see steady real growth.
The problem with NMH is they keep getting the wrong answer
MOD want UH-60’s, HMG want a euro helicopter, any euro helicopter bar Blackhawks