Q21 Chair: You are going to have to spend a lot of money on them, aren't you?
Vice-Admiral Lambert: Yes, but we have given our soldiers in Afghanistan the level of protection that no other country has got in their protective vehicles.
Q22 Chair: You dumped a billion and you spent £2.8 billion. Anyone with a little bit of common sense knows that there is something awry in that. You must see that yourself.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: The dumping of nearly a billion for going down the wrong route and for a whole variety of-
Chair: It was not the wrong route. It was a route you decided you could get out of when you had more commitments than you had money. It wasn't the wrong route in terms of defence capability. It was a route that you got out of as a short-term decision and you then got an extra dollop of money from the Treasury.
Comptroller and Auditor General: Can I make sure that we have this point clear? If I understood Vice-Admiral Lambert correctly, if we had gone ahead more quickly with procuring conventional vehicles at that time, the likelihood is that they wouldn't have been proofed against the blast devices that were deployed in Afghanistan and they probably would have ended up having to buy more vehicles anyway. Just for clarity, our Report is not suggesting that there is a direct crossover between the vehicles you might have needed in Afghanistan-you might have been able to use them-and the others.
Q23 Nick Smith: Your last question touched on the point that I was trying to understand, which is the business of overall performance. We were a bit disconcerted by Vice-Admiral Lambert's point about things in the round having gone "rather well". I would still appreciate the Department acknowledging point 6 in the Report, which is that the Department has managed to spend over £1.1 billion through the standard acquisition process since 1998 without delivering any of its principal armoured vehicle projects. Are you going to acknowledge that point?
Ursula Brennan: Sorry, could you quote the reference again?
Nick Smith: It is on the first page-excuse me, it is from our briefing.
Q24 Mr Bacon: It is on page 6, paragraph 4: "The list of armoured vehicles projects cancelled, suspended or delayed in Figure 1 suggests that...the Department's standard acquisition process for armoured vehicles has not been working."
Ursula Brennan: We have acknowledged that there were failings in our procurement of armoured fighting vehicles. Yes, we do acknowledge this.
Q24 Mr Bacon: Who has paid the price for that? Who has paid the penalty for that scale of error? Because for most of this decade-although we have had an enormous financial crunch since 2008 or late 2007-it was a period of rising Government spending. It is a huge failure. Who is paying the penalty for that? Is anyone?
Ursula Brennan: The reasons-
Q25 Mr Bacon: Apart from the soldiers on the ground, obviously, who has paid the penalty for this failure in the Ministry of Defence?
Ursula Brennan: The reasons-
Q26 Mr Bacon: No, no, my question is who? The answer must be a person or no person.
Ursula Brennan: The reason why I wanted to say the reasons is because the reasons why certain programmes were stopped or cancelled were to do with decisions that were taken, in some cases about the procurement routes, between Ministers and officials at the time about the way it was chosen to procure-
Q27 Mr Bacon: You are answering a question that is not the question I asked. You are giving me an explanation of how we reached this position through decisions having been taken. Plainly, some decisions must have been taken for us to end up in a particular position. There must have been bad decisions for us to end up in a particularly bad position such as this one. My question is who has paid the penalty for this in the Ministry of Defence? It's a simple question.Who?
Ursula Brennan: I can't point the finger at one person, because there isn't one person who was responsible for the different sets of decisions that were taken about individual vehicles.
Mr Bacon: Is there anybody who has paid the penalty for this?
Vice-Admiral Lambert:If I can-
Mr Bacon: No, no, no. I am looking at Ms Brennan. I am asking her a question. She is the accounting officer. She is the permanent secretary. My question stands; I've asked it three or four times now. It is very simple and very clear. Is there anybody in the Ministry of Defence who has paid a penalty for this?
Ursula Brennan: No. I don't think I can point the finger at anybody.
Q28 Nick Smith: What tasks outlined in the SDSR will the armed forces not be able to carry out due to the lack of armoured vehicles, given that we are going to wait so long for the ones that are planned to come through?
Vice-Admiral Lambert: In the whole gamut of capabilities, we are able to do all the capabilities we require, but maybe not at 100% in the way we'd like to. I will give you an example. Within the armoured vehicles is a vehicle for reconnaissance. You will see that we have a programme for the future for reconnaissance, but our present reconnaissance vehicles are fairly aged. Does that mean we can't do reconnaissance? No, because we can do reconnaissance using overhead assets. We can use helicopters and other vehicles. The specific vehicle has not been delivered in accordance with the programme, but it doesn't mean that the capabilities aren't there or being delivered in a slightly different way. We have to look at the balance of capabilities. The Report is specific about vehicles rather than the capabilities that those vehicles deliver. Another example is how we move people around the battlespace. There is a programme in here for a utility vehicle, which is all about how we move soldiers around the battlespace, but it doesn't mention helicopters, which is another way of moving people around the battlespace, or any other types of vehicle that we procured. Is there any capability that we can't do? No. Are there capabilities we would like to do better and in a different way? Yes. If these programmes had delivered, there would be different ways of doing it. That is where we are trying to get to.
Q29 Nick Smith: It sounds like you are saying that we are not going to have the capability and that we are going to have to do it in a different way, which may not be as effective.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: I won't disagree with you on that. I won't disagree.
Q30 Chair: And what do you feel, Lieutenant-General?
Lieutenant-General Coward: That's a fair answer.