Luke Akehurst

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) on securing this debate and on his well-informed speech. There were some fantastic world war two metaphors and terminology in it, which I will not be able to emulate. I welcome the chance to debate the RAF’s E-7 Wedgetail programme, as it is such an important capability—and not just for the RAF, because it will serve all our armed forces when it comes into service. This is not about three aircraft—or, preferably, five; it is about a force multiplier that will have a huge impact on the ability of all our other military capabilities, across air, land and sea, to dominate the modern battlespace. Wedgetail scans the battlefield using advanced radar and sensors. I am a bit perturbed by the idea that the venerable Hawkeye could somehow step into that; whatever the capabilities of the airframe, it has an older radar and does not have the kind of space inside it for command and control facilities that Wedgetail does. Wedgetail processes vast amounts of information to allow commanders to make informed and speedy decisions about where to deploy their assets. As the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway said, it is a proven technology that has been successfully used in combat in the middle east by Australia. The only production line for Wedgetail globally is here in the UK, at Meriden, between Birmingham and Coventry. The number of jobs involved is not huge—it is 190 across the UK, perhaps rising above 300 next year—but they are highly skilled. There is also export potential, whether or not the US sticks with its order, as NATO has selected the E-7 to replace its shared E-3 Sentry fleet. As many as 100 jobs could be created at RAF Lossiemouth for the sustainment contract. Everyone in this room—because we are all people who take a slightly geeky interest in this program—is aware that Wedgetail has been hit by a series of strange, unexpected problems, from the impact of covid to a hurricane hitting the site where the radar is produced. Most significantly, the 10-year gap between the order for the previous batch of Wedgetails by South Korea and their construction meant that some parts were no longer in production and had to be recreated from scratch. The production schedule was therefore wildly over-optimistic. It is commendable, given its fixed-fee contract, that Boeing, the prime contractor, has stuck with the programme even though it is making a loss on it because it is not the off-the-shelf product that the contract envisaged. That commitment has been recognised by Andy Start, the interim national armaments director, who told the Public Accounts Committee in April that Boeing “has leaned in with serious amounts of resource and stuck with that programme to make sure it is delivered.” Sadly, some of the issues with the programme were self-inflicted by the previous Conservative Government. I am reluctant to be too partisan, because one of the better things about debating defence policy is that there tends to be quite a bit of bipartisan consensus, but the belief in 2019 that the previous Government could rush through the original contract process in just nine months, when it would normally take two or three years, was naive to say the least, and meant that many assumptions made during the planning of the programme were incorrect.