Cosford loses out in jobs bid

RAF Cosford has lost its bid to win a £14 billion contract to be the defence supercentre for training Britain's armed forces.

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The contract, revealed in the Commons this afternoon, will go to the Metrix consortium at RAF St Athan, in South Wales.It is a hammerblow to Cosford and the West Midlands economy, which would have benefited from up to 5,000 new jobs.

Defence Secretary Des Browne failed to give MPs any details as to why the St Athan bid had been successful or provide any figures for the cost.

Tory MPs immediately cried "foul" and called for a probe by public spending watchdogs into the way the decision was reached.

Mr Browne said the decision would be "keenly felt" in the West Midlands, but he insisted that there were no plans to close RAF Cosford.

He said current training would continue there until 2011, and the Ministry of Defence was exploring a number of proposals for the potential future defence use of the base.

"Metrix proposes building at Cosford a learning resource centre, developing a national training research and development support centre," said the Defence Secretary.

He said the consortium and the Government would examine how this might support the establishment of a national manufacturing skills academy.

Cosford lies in the constituency of Wrekin MP Mark Pritchard, who said: "This is a massive blow to Shropshire and the West Midlands.

"The Government has clearly ridden roughshod over all the independent advice that the contract should have gone to Cosford."

West Midlands MPs demanded that, at the very least, Cosford is chosen as a new "super-garrison" to house Army regiments due to be pulled out of Germany.

By John Hipwood

Your views: "This was decided months ago. The goverment have more to gain politically by siting the new base in South Wales. They know whatever they do, the Labour seats are safe in the West Midlands. We had no ministers supporting the bid of Cosford. Yet another case of England being a second class country compared to both Wales and Scotland. It is about time the people of the West Midlands see that this government and the local Labour MPs are taking us all for mugs, and we get rid of them all at the next election." Graham

"The bid process was always a sham. Politically, the government was always going to place the contract at St Athan after the previous Red Dragon fiasco. It would have been better for everyone to recognise that fact from the start and to have minimised the amount of time and money invested in trying to win the bid for Cosford." Alastair Somerville

"This decision is chickens coming home to roost. The residents of surrounding areas have shown outright hostility to any kind of economic development, as evidenced by the damaging campaign against a local airport, yet they expected to be taken seriously. How would anyone expect any kind of development in an area so clearly and heavily committed to NIMBYism? This base would have been a mixed blessing in any event. It represented an overdependence on the public sector and its vulnerability to sudden and dramatic changes of policy with attendant cuts. The museum at Cosford is, probably, a far healthier investment which will bear fruit. " PJW Holland