James Cartlidge

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is an absolute champion of the defence industry in Northern Ireland. He is right: one of my last visits was to the Thales factory in Belfast, which of course is home to the next-generation light anti-tank weapon, the lightweight multirole missile, and other key munitions. In terms of aerospace, the first small and medium-sized enterprise forum that I held as Defence Procurement Minister was in Larne in Northern Ireland, on Armed Forces Day last year. Spirit was one of the attendees, and I am confident that it has a strong place in the future of British aviation in the defence sector, as long as we put the funding in place and keep with the programmes. Having said all that, there must obviously be debate when we are spending this amount of money on a capability, and I understand why there are those who question the sums of money involved, the timeframes and so on. To be clear, as a former Defence Procurement Minister, I would not support a programme that was purely about spending such a vast amount of money just on a new core platform to replace Typhoon. That brings us to what GCAP is really about, which the Minister mentioned in her opening remarks, to her credit. On one of my last visits to a land company—a company manufacturing armoured vehicles for this country—the chief executive I spoke to referred to the GCAP of land. The point is that, although the “A” stands for air, when we talk about GCAP in military capability terms, it is equally about how we work with autonomous and uncrewed systems. That is the key to the sixth-generation concept. I am very passionate about this issue—I was proud to bring forward the first defence drone strategy at the Ministry of Defence—and although there are those who are concerned about the timeframe, I would just make the following points. First, the timescale for delivering GCAP is very ambitious compared with that of Typhoon; secondly, we can gain capability benefits from GCAP on a much shorter timescale. We have heard the Chief of the General Staff talking about the need for the Army to be able to fight a war within three years, and when I was Defence Procurement Minister, I was keen to ensure that all the services were looking at what they could do to boost lethality and survivability in the near term. Surely, the key to that is how we make use of uncrewed systems. The United Kingdom is incredibly well placed in that regard: we jointly lead the maritime coalition in respect of Ukraine alongside Norway. Of course, Ukraine’s greatest military success has been naval, having pushed back the Russian fleet using what we might describe as innovative weapons rather than traditional naval deployments. Likewise on land, the incredible importance of drones cannot be overstated, including the psychological impact on those who are fighting out there.