Kevin Tebbit
Sir Kevin Tebbit is a former senior civil servant.
Contents
GCHQ
Tebbit headed GCHQ from January to July 1998.[1]
Permanent Secretary at the MOD
Tebbit was appointed Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence in July 1998.[2]
During his tenure he testified to the Hutton Inquiry on 20 August 2003.[3]
He retired from the Civil Service in November 2005.[4]
Iraq Inquiry
In his evidence to the Iraq Inquiry said that Gordon Brown's handling of defence expenditure left the MOD in a 'crisis period' in 2003:
- The Treasury felt that we were using far too much cash, and in September 2003, the Chancellor of the day instituted a complete guillotine on our settlement, and we were then, from then onwards, controlled by cash, not by resource.
- This was, in fact, reopening our settlement against the terms of the original letter, and it meant that we had to go in for a very major savings exercise in order to cope with what was effectively a billion pounds reduction in our finances.[5]
Sir Lawrence Freedman asked whether these cuts had a long term impact on British capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tebbit responded:
- I think it is very difficult to say that it did have a long-term impact. For example, we had to reduce the allocation in our forward programme for helicopters. But these were not specific programmes
- As you probably have seen in the Green Paper published yesterday by the Ministry of Defence, they now intend to give ten-year forward perspectives of allocations for broad areas of capability. We had never published those before, and still don't at the moment, but, were we to do so, we would have seen that the helicopter provision for the future was reduced.
- Now, that would not have made an effect on Iraq or Afghanistan, in my view, because the programmes would probably only now just be coming on-stream. So this was a longer term resetting of the defence programme rather than an immediate or early effect on helicopter availability, for example.[6]
Private Eye noted of this exchange that: nobody, least of all the Chilcot panel members noted that in 2007 Sir Kevin had been appointed UK chairman of the Italian helicopter maker FinMeccanica, owner of AugustaWestland - a position that gave him every reason to want to stress the importance of the MoD spending money on helicopters like the AugustaWestland Lynx and other aircraft made by his firm.[7]
Affiliations
- Finmeccanica UK - Chairman
- Smiths Group - Non-executive Director
- JCB - Advisor
- UKTI Defence and Security Organisation - Chairman, Defence Advisory Group
- Queen Mary, London University[8]
External Resources
- Iraq Inquiry Oral Evidence - Sir Kevin Tebbit, 3 December 2009.
- Iraq Inquiry Oral Evidence - Sir Kevin Tebbit, 3 February 2010.
Notes
- ↑ Press Association, Profile: Sir Kevin Tebbit, guardian.co.uk, 20 August 2003.
- ↑ Press Association, Profile: Sir Kevin Tebbit, guardian.co.uk, 20 August 2003.
- ↑ Damian Whitworth, Mandarin speaks superior language, The Times, 21 August 2003.
- ↑ Board of Directors, Smiths Group, accessed 10 July 2009.
- ↑ Sir Kevin Tebbit, Iraq Inquiry, 3 February 2010, p.5.
- ↑ Sir Kevin Tebbit, Iraq Inquiry, 3 February 2010, p.5.
- ↑ The Missing Lynx, Private Eye, No. 1256, 19 February - 4 March 2010, p.5.
- ↑ Profile: Sir Kevin Tebbit, Finmeccanica UK, accessed 10 July 2009.
