Govt sticks to guns on aircraft carriers

Tuesday, 30 June 2009 4:17 PM

By Alex Stevenson

The government has given a mixed response to the IPPR commission on national security's final report, insisting that Britain's aircraft carriers are here to stay.

Today's report calls for a strategic security review and defence resources to be reprioritised away from traditional military areas.

At the launch a number of commissioners expressed doubts about the carriers. Charles Guthrie, a former chief of defence staff, said they were "enormously expensive" and wondered whether "better ways" could be found of turning Britain's defence resources into hard power.

"How good are aircraft carriers at chasing Somali pirates in shallow waters in the Gulf of Aden?" he asked.

Defence minister Bill Rammell made clear on the Today programme this morning the government has no intention of backtracking on its commitment to the two new aircraft carriers announced last year.

But negative media coverage emerged as BBC business editor Robert Peston quoted a memorandum suggesting the carriers' costs had increased by £1 million.

"The Ministry of Defence constantly examined and re-examined the costings in all of these matters in a very rigorous way in order to ensure that there was best value for money for the taxpayer," the prime minister's spokesman said this morning.

"The MoD would publish their accounts next month, which would present their latest estimate and costings, but we should be clear that the new carriers would represent significant enhancements to our current capability, enabling us to deliver air power from the sea at a time and place of our choosing."

Downing Street said the IPPR report was an "interesting and useful contribution to the debate" but made clear No 10 only agreed with some of the points it had made.

The United Kingdom National Defence Association (UKNDA) went further, describing the IPPR report as "fundamentally flawed".

Chief executive John Muxworthy said the report's basic assumption that Britain could no longer afford a "full-spectrum armed forces capability" was wrong.

"In our view, what Britain cannot afford to do is risk making the swingeing cuts that the IPPR proposes," he commented.

"If we do, our military will be more thinly stretched and our country more vulnerable to external threats than at any time since WW2.

"Unlike other areas of government expenditure, funding for defence has been continually squeezed for the past two decades, with the result that our forces are already chronically overstretched. To cut them back further would be the height of folly."

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