GEOFF HOON, the Defence Secretary, told MPs yesterday that he did not warn Tony Blair that part of the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons had been misunderstood because it was not seen as important at the time.

Mr Hoon asked his officials about the dossier’s claim that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons that could be activated in 45 minutes and was told that this probably meant battlefield shells.

He told the Commons Defence Select Committee that he had not thought it necessary to inform the Prime Minister, who admitted this week that he had thought the claim applied to longer-range weapons of mass destruction rather than battlefield munitions.

Mr Hoon said: “We both had access to the same intelligence . . . I asked within the MoD for an assessment of that intelligence in military terms. That is what this committee would expect the Secretary of State for Defence to do.”

He added: “I obviously brief the Prime Minister on a regular basis and, had this been a significant issue in terms of the decision to take the country to war, I am sure that this issue would have arisen between us. Since it was not a big issue at the time, it was not a matter we discussed.”

The MoD assessment was that the so-called 45-minutes claim, which the Government says was received as intelligence without specifying a delivery system, applied to chemical-filled shells with a range of up to 25 miles, Mr Hoon said.

Pressed by Peter Viggers, a Conservative MP, on why he did not correct media reports linking the 45-minutes claim with long-range ballistic missiles that might threaten Britain’s bases on Cyprus, Mr Hoon said he had been abroad at the time. From the morning of September 24, 2002, when Parliament was recalled to debate the Iraq dossier, he was in Poland and Ukraine, where he did not see his normal cuttings service of British newspaper reports, he told MPs.

The Defence Secretary told the committee that he did not see press reports about the 45-minutes claim, particularly one in The Sun under a headline “45 minutes to doom”, until he watched a BBC Panorama programme last month. This appeared to contradict his evidence to the Hutton inquiry in September when, asked if he was aware that the day after the dossier’s publication some newspapers ran headlines linking the claim to strategic missiles, he replied: “I can recall, yes.”

After Mr Hoon was pressed on the same question on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the MoD issued a note “to ensure there can be no confusion”, saying “you will see that there is no contradiction and no misunderstanding”. It said the 45-minutes claim became “an issue of public debate” only after the broadcast by the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan last May that accused the Government of “sexing up” the dossier and was the focus of the L:ord Hutton’s inquiry.

In other evidence to the committee, Mr Hoon admitted that problems getting supplies to British troops in Iraq had been worse than he had previously admitted on the basis of a study shortly after the war. Shortages of equipment were more widespread and in some cases more serious than the MoD believed at the time, he said, and blamed serious shortcomings in the ability to track consignments along the supply chain.

“As a result there were too many instances of the right equipment sitting in containers and not being distributed to units as quickly as it should have been,” Mr Hoon said.

• Geoff Hoon indicated yesterday that he might support a full public inquiry into the death of six members of the Royal Military Police in the town of al-Majar al-Kabir in southern Iraq in June last year, according to families of the victims. After seeing the Defence Secretary for a two-hour meeting at the Old War Office in Whitehall, the families of the soldiers killed during a mob attack on the police station said an inquiry had not been ruled out.

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