Speeches by Pollard.

“I might ask colleagues to come in on the details of the metrics. I will take the broader piece about the journey that we need to be on and why metrics are an important part of it, and then I will ask colleagues to come in on the detail. When I came into office, I was quite surprised about some of the poor performance o…”

“Absolutely. It is one of those key bits. If our service personnel do not feel that the offer and their experience in service life is good enough, we know what they do: they leave. That creates gaps and is one of the reasons contributing to the fact that, when we took office, for every 100 people joining, 130 were leavi…”

“I am happy to take that work and look at it, and to write to the Committee. I suspect that the Committee will probably have views, which you can share with us.”

“I can entirely understand where you are coming from. For anything that we seek to publish, there is a difference in what we can track and what we cannot publish. I am very happy to look at the progress of that work to see what might be able to be shared with the Committee in a private capacity, due to the classificatio…”

“The SDR has identified protection of our CNI as an area that we need to do more in. The lessons that we are seeking to learn from not just that incident but others that have happened more recently—Brize Norton is an example—highlights that under-investment over a long period of time has meant that there are greater vul…”

“Securing our supply lines and resilience is featured in the SDR, and it is also important that we implement the spirit of what the SDR tells us. As a Department, we are very mindful that we need to look again at our resilience in the wider sense. That is what the SDR asks us to do in terms of warfighting readiness, hom…”

“First of all, the defence industrial strategy, which will cover some of these points, will be out later this year. Not everything that we intend to publish was in the SDR, because there are elements of detail and focus on sectors for which the defence industrial strategy is probably the better place. Those will be feat…”

“Procurement matters would be matters for Maria Eagle, so I would not be able to answer that question in detail. Certainly, preserving our capability to build high-end combat air platforms is absolutely essential to our national security; that is something that I think everyone here would agree on. It is not just about …”

“As that is a procurement matter, it is not within the area that I look after. I am happy to ask the Minister for Defence Procurement and Industry to write to the Committee with the details, but I do not have the knowledge of that, as it is outside my swim lane.”

“I know the workforce and I know the supply chain, having met many, especially in opposition, when I covered more of that brief than I do today. They are superb and that is certainly the reason why the Secretary of State and MinDPI have been working in this area. It is probably worth saying that a Typhoon buy and an F-3…”

“I can absolutely understand where you are coming from, but it is worth saying that an F-35 is a different platform with different roles than a Typhoon—”

“But certainly the SDR makes clear our commitment to GCAP. However, on the details of that point, I will have to write to the Committee, or ask Maria to do so.”

“An entirely fair question. The defence investment plan later this year will set out what we are buying and what our long-term signal to the sector is. However, we have been very clear that we want to invest more into integrated air missile defence. That is why the SDR not only sets that as a priority but allocates £1 b…”

“The defence investment plan will set out the spending priorities, and we certainly need to be on a journey towards having an integrated air and missile defence at a level that we can have more confidence in, based on the experience of what we can see Russia using. As part of that, we need to square a circle of how we u…”

“I can answer that one—the answer is yes. There is the Trinity House agreement with Germany, the refresh with Lancaster House is ongoing, and we are looking to strike agreements with Norway and Poland. There are opportunities for joint development. Certainly, one of the pieces we need to be very mindful of is that, in t…”

“Yes, but we are also having an approach where we are saying, “We need to have greater interoperability with our kits.” We need to have a built-in assumption of exports for the stuff that we are buying. That means not over-speccing UK kit to be Gucci for ourselves, but to have it exportable. That was, I do not think, a …”

“Sorry to reply to your comment, but one of the bits that NATO is very good at, which does not often get attention and we are putting more effort into, is the co-ordination of the national armaments directors. There is more of a role there, which could play into some of those European initiatives that we have now opened…”

“Absolutely.”

“That is one of many initiatives in a space that we are quite excited about. There is a real opportunity, when it comes to multilateral financing for some of these opportunities, to look at what the right model is. Both the Treasury and the MOD are working to look at those. A number of the models have been backed not on…”

“The benefits of the progress that we have been making with the EU reset are most acutely felt in defence. That is why it had such a large part of the security and defence partnership work that benefits us. The agreement that we have made with the European Union does not put us into SAFE at this point—as an example—but …”