14
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE
21 January, 1975.]
Mr. DAVID GREENWOOD.
is insufficient detail in what the provi- sional conclusions of the Review show to be able to assess what that bur- den is. What one can say is that in recent years that element was not a major source of expenditure, until the acquisi- tion of the United States aircraft and mis- siles in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Even then the actual burden on the current balance of payments was to some extent mitigated by the elaborate credit arrange- ment which meant in effect we got those things on hire purchase so far as the foreign exchange costs were concerned. On stationing costs in a written answer in July the breakdown of figures was given as £434 million for 1974-75. What I have done in my summary, the annex to the paper, is to calculate on the basis of a withdrawal from Singapore, from the Indian Ocean, from Malta after 1980, and some reductions in the outlays in Cyprus, a
slight one in Gibraltar, and a slight one elsewhere in the world. I thereby arrive at an estimate of about £350 million as the balance of payments costs of the post- 1980 programme. Such a reduction of £84 million in the actual outgoings on stationing costs would yield, I estimate, a true benefit to the balance of payments of the order of £60 to £65 million. The one is less than the other because of various offset and clawback arrange- ments that arise which I can go into at greater length if you wish.
14. Given a deficit of the balance of payments that we have at the moment this is large, but relatively trivial in rela- tion to a deficit of £3,000 million?- That is exactly what I meant when I used the word trivial ".
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15. The question you come to at the end of your paper is the relative supply of information. You refer to the information supplied to
to the German parliament and you are no doubt aware, too, of the information supplied to the American parliament. How would you say the House of Commons and the British people are provided with informa- tion in comparison with other legisla- tures in democratic countries in con- sidering defence matters?--In the first place I think it really is rather impor- tant that we get a defence White Paper every year because certainly those of us who are defence watchers from outside
[Continued.
Whitehall and Westminster rely on the information we get from that source to enable us to form our views as to how things are evolving. My impression more generally is that the amount of information in, for example, the annexes to typical defence White Papers is illuminating and useful and has generally got better over the years. Second, on the amount of information that exists in other government papers, more latterly has been teased out of the Ministry of Defence by this Sub-Committee and has improved the view one can take. But I have two points. First, much of this information is not ordered in a way which renders it readily intelligible either by Parliament or public, including we professional defence watchers, and, second, it is not so extensive as that which is available in most other Euro- pean countries and certainly the United States. The French of course are rather tricky here in that they had not given their public defence white papers until two or three years ago. What they have done, however, is to provide an enor- mous pile of information in other ways which really does help to elucidate the content of the defence programme, defence priorities and the economic dimension of defence too.
Chairman.
16. Would you say we are getting far less information as Members from the Government of the day, whatever Gov- ernment? When I came to the House 20 years ago you got a great wad on each of the three services. Now you get a thin bit of paper dealing with the Mini- stry of Defence. Taking the ordinary backbencher, I think he is getting very sparsely treated by the Ministry of Defence?I think the defence White Papers pre-1964 were very often essen- tially brochures and part of a public relations operation of the armed forces. They had glossy pictures and so on. Then with the centralisation we got what I call "Healey" defence White Papers containing, usually, discursive material about defence policy and posture, and then detailed information about the con- tent of the defence programme with im- proved statistical information at the back. We then, and this is how it looks from a university setting, received rather more cryptic "chairman's statements to
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