Introduction

Abstract

The importance to the national economy of the defence procurement programme has been emphasised in recent years in successive statements on the defence estimates (SDE): even in 1977 it was absorbing about 7 per cent of the total British manufacturing programme, and annual defence equipment expenditure rose between 1979 and 1986 by about 40 per cent in real terms, according to SDE 1986. The number of jobs in the defence industry generated, directly or indirectly, by this ‘vast and long-term undertaking’ (to quote SDE 1980) has remained at about half a million over the last ten years. Within the programme, and taking up at present about 15 per cent of its budget (in 1987, a total of about £1275 million), is an area which increasingly is seen as vital to the future of the British defence effort and to the industry which supports it, namely collaboration with other countries in the development of major new defence systems.

There is no doubt that we cannot continue to afford expensive national developments and production programmes to produce relatively small numbers of equipments. Increasingly we must obtain new weapons systems in collaboration with other nations, to share development costs and achieve more economic production runs.

(The Lord Trefgarne, Minister for Defence Procurement, in an address to a Bow Group conference on 27 May 1986)