The claim
“What I can say is that the costs should be modest compared to some other operations like Afghanistan, and the Ministry of Defence’s initial view is that this will be in the order of the tens of millions not the hundreds of millions of pounds.”
George Osborne, Chancellor, 22 March 2011
Cathy Newman checks it out
Shortly after Nato started military operations in Libya in March, the Chancellor attempted to play down the cost to the British taxpayer. Now we’re about to find out the truth.
FactCheck can reveal that figures being circulated in Whitehall suggest the bill to date is more than £200m. So rather more than George Osborne originally suggested.
Today the Chancellor attempted to rewrite Hansard, telling MPs: “What I told the House at the time was that the cost estimated at the time by the Ministry of Defence was in the tens of millions of pounds.”
But the figure is higher too than the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander estimated only this Sunday.
He told Sky News: “The campaign is costing tens of millions, potentially into the hundreds of millions as it goes on.” Well, it’s already costing into the hundreds of millions now.
And with no end in sight, that will inevitably worry the public – and indeed the armed forces, who are now openly complaining of overstretch.
Just today the Daily Telegraph obtained a briefing paper drawn up by the head of the RAF’s combat operations, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant. He warned that the ability of the Air Force to carry out future missions was under threat if our intervention in Libya continued beyond the summer.
“Should Operation Ellamy (Libya) endure past defence planning assumptions the future contingent capability is likely to be eroded,” he wrote.
Last night, in an interview with Channel 4 News, the Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was unable to put an end date on the Libya mission, though he denied it would last for years.
The entire bill has so far been met from the Treasury reserve, sparing the over-burdened budget at the Ministry of Defence.
Cathy Newman’s verdict
Britain’s military action in Libya is proving more costly than ministers first thought, though it is worth pointing out that the figures so far fall short of some of the estimates being bandied about by defence experts.
Francis Tusa, editor of Defence Analysis, has suggested the true cost of the campaign up to the end of April was about £300m.
He thought the bill would exceed £1bn by the end of September. It may well be that the figures the government presents to Parliament within days don’t tell the whole story.
But they will nevertheless lay bare the political and financial danger of the Libyan mission. Politicians have a tendency to underestimate the cost and length of military operations.
Remember the former Defence Secretary John Reid suggesting troops entering Afghanistan might leave without firing a single shot? Ten years on, we’re still pulling the trigger.
