Up early and into the House to prepare for another session of our Defence Committee. Today we took oral evidence on the progress on the Type 26, Type 31 and Fleet Solid Support programmes in the last year. The session took evidence from the Senior Responsible Owner for each programme about the decisions and actions they had taken to deliver the programme. The Committee was following up on our report: “We’re Going to need a bigger Navy”. Two distinguished naval officers gave evidence in person. The first was Vice Admiral Paul Marshall CBE, who joined the Royal Navy in 1988. His operational career at sea has seen tours in Frigates and Aircraft Carriers in the Far East (1992, 1997) including the handover of Hong Kong, counter-narcotics duties in the Caribbean (1994), the Gulf (1997), the South Atlantic (2002), Africa (1989, 2002) and in support of Operation Telic 1 (Iraq 2003). From 2010-2012 he was the Staff Marine Engineer Officer of the Portsmouth Flotilla, super-intending the operational engineering activity across half of the RN’s surface fleet. Ashore, he has completed tours in acquisition, training and support and has spent much of his latter career in joint appointments – most recently helping to establish the UK’s Joint Forces Command as the Principal Staff Officer to the 4* Commander. The second officer was Commodore Stephen Roberts, who has served 37 years as an Engineer Officer in the Royal Navy. He was appointed as the SRO for the Type 26 Programme in March 2021. From 2019-2021 Commodore Roberts was Type 26 Frigate Programme Director and Head of Ship Acquisition. In this role he led a Royal Navy and Civil Service team to procure and bring into service the Type 26, Type 31 and
FSS programmes. Before this he was Royal Navy Surface Ship Chief Staff Officer from 2017-2019. The two hour session can be seen on Parliament TV. The two men had quite a tough time, with questions coming thick and fast, not least on why our RN ships take so long to build. I had wanted to attend a Westminster Hall debate on council tax that my colleague in W Dorset had secured, but unusually we had another Defence Committee meeting in the afternoon. This was most interesting as we met members of the parliamentary assembly who sit on the NATO bureau. They are MPs representing many countries and we had a most interesting hour chatting through issues such as Ukraine and Taiwan. It was then on to a private, weekly get-together with a small group of MPs, where we chew the cud. Lots to talk about. The final vote came at 1900 at the end of the second Opposition Day debate.