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Iraq inquiry: Gordon Brown evidence round up
Prime Minister Gordon Brown today defended his decision to curb defence spending after the Iraq invasion.
* Click here to read YEP political editor Mark Hookham's Westminster blog.
He told the Chilcot Inquiry that the move was necessary to prevent public finances spiralling out of control.
But he insisted he provided money every time defence chiefs asked for new equipment.
Mr Brown said paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - which have cost Britain about 18 billion in total - did not result in cuts to other services.
But he acknowledged: "It's a very sizeable sum of money."
In 2002, the Ministry of Defence used new Whitehall accounting rules to claim it had achieved efficiency savings of 1.3 billion which it had intended to spend on new equipment.
But Mr Brown said there was no proof that the savings had been achieved.
"The Ministry of Defence were planning to spend 9% additional cash that year. They had been allocated 3.6%. If we had every department doing what the Ministry of Defence was doing, we would have had the extra cost of 12 billion which would be the equivalent of raising income tax by 3p in the pound," he said.
Former MoD permanent secretary Sir Kevin Tebbit previously told the inquiry that, after Mr Brown instituted his "guillotine", he had been forced to run the department on a "crisis budget".
However, Mr Brown insisted that the MoD had still been left with more money than it had been allocated in the 2002 Government Spending Review.
"The Ministry of Defence ended up with more money than had been expected originally," he said.
Mr Brown said he assured Tony Blair in mid 2002 that money would be no object to military action.
"I told him that I would not - and this was right at the beginning - I would not try to rule out any military option on the grounds of cost, quite the opposite," he said
He went on to grant "every single request" from the armed forces.
"I said that every single request for equipment had to be met and every request was met," he said.
The Prime Minister was asked how much impact the conflict had on Britain's finances.
He replied: "I think the effects of the Iraq invasion are far less than, for example, the effects of the global financial crisis on the economy."
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Print this page- Politics: Mark Hookham's Westminster blog - 5.33pm
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Friday 25 May 2012
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