James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and has been MP for South Suffolk since 2015
With the Government’s much vaunted Strategic Defence Review due to be published at some point in the coming months, 2025 promises to be a significant year for the future of our armed forces. As we await the final formal document, I will be writing a series of pieces for Conservative Home looking at some of the key issues and challenges for Defence, as we face up to a world far more dangerous than we have known for generations.
Inevitably, the starting point is Defence spending.
Since Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin forty years ago, ushering in the end of the Cold War, Defence spending has been on a broadly downward trajectory. We spent the ‘peace dividend’ on other priorities.
But our priority as Conservatives, indeed for any Government, should always be Defence of the realm – and that means spending rising as threats emerge to undermine our way of life. As such, the first significant, sustained uptick in post-cold war Defence spending took place with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak occupying numbers 10 and 11 respectively, and has averaged around 2.3 per cent of GDP since 2019/20.
We then went into the election with a fully funded plan to increase spending by another significant step, to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2030.
Having been involved in the MOD/HMT number-crunching that led to this major statement of intent, I cannot emphasise enough that what really made the difference with this plan was the multi-year certainty it offered Defence. With the urgent priority of rearmament – both replenishing the weapons we have gifted to Ukraine, and upgrading our technological capabilities to meet the latest threats – the additional £10bn for munitions, over a multi-year period, would have enabled the MOD to procure at the scale and pace commensurate with our most urgent military requirements.
Crucially, this would have set the kind of demand signal needed to fire up our defence industrial base and achieve the ‘always on’ production levels of munitions that is actually one of the most important steps towards greater war readiness. And yet, 2.5% should never be seen as an ‘end state’; rather, it is a further step along the road to the necessary increase in Defence investment we require in order to fully upgrade our overall deterrence posture – the best way to avoid war in the first place. In fact, given the mounting threats we face, it’s likely that we will need to go further – whilst ensuring that whatever commitments we make will continue to be fully funded.
In her leadership campaign, Kemi Badenoch recognised that we were spending far more during the Cold War, and our Defence policy programme will look both at how we deliver more resources to the military, and ensure more funding is well spent. Whilst we will always be prudent about the public finances, our approach to Defence will be fundamentally threat-driven, with a total focus on delivering a safe and secure United Kingdom. So, rather than picking some arbitrary percentage of GDP, we will construct a policy process both to reflect on the Government’s SDR findings, and then to set out our own view both on how much we need to spend to keep us safe, and what we need to spend it on.
But I cannot emphasise enough the need to ensure the Defence budget, whatever its quantum, is well spent. As a former Defence Procurement Minister, it’s fair to say I’m well aware of the low esteem in which many perceive our history of acquiring military equipment. That’s why last February I announced the Integrated Procurement Model, to shift procurement into the rapidly evolving, software-driven era that has defined much of Ukraine’s capability breakthroughs. Contrary to perceptions, the UK has had remarkable examples of SMEs developing truly cutting-edge capabilities that have succeeded in the ultimate test of the Ukrainian battlefield – but this needs to be commonplace in our Defence ecosystem, not an exception.
Encouragingly, this new approach has cross party support.
In this week’s Commons Debate on Defence AI, speaking for the Defence Select Committee, Labour MP Emma Lewell-Buck urged the Government to ‘carry forward’ the Integrated Procurement Model. Most importantly, there are signs it is making a difference in practice. My reforms included a new ‘Minimum Deployable Capability’ approach, what you might call ‘fast-track’ procurement, dispensing with layers of bureaucracy to drive more rapid delivery of equipment into the hands of our personnel.
I announced such an approach would be used for DragonFire, our anti-drone laser, and the Government recently confirmed in written answer to me that they would use the same fast-track route for another anti-drone Directed Energy Weapon, ‘RF-DEW’, the Radio Frequency version capable of taking out multiple drones with radio waves – at very cheap cost.
Of course, whilst talking about the undoubted need to pursue ‘cheaper’ uncrewed systems (defensive or offensive), this does not obviate the need for more expensive and exquisite capabilities. From deep fires for the army, to anti-ballistic missiles for our navy, we will still need a comprehensive plan to replenish our existing stockpiles, and procure technology capable of defeating the most sophisticated threats. And all of this is before you get on to the need to invest in the deterrent; in AUKUS and GCAP; in our platforms and enablers; in the defence estate; and to address comprehensively the issues of recruitment and retention.
Which brings me to the final point on spending – the need to get on with it.
Arguably, what makes this SDR special is that it should be taking place as the post-cold war trend of falling defence expenditure starts to unambiguously reverse. But Labour have never set a date to achieve 2.5 per cent and months after the election we still await a timetable.
Indeed, the Daily Mail recently splashed that Labour would delay 2.5 per cent until well into the 2030s. It seems hard to believe that we have a Government attempting to rush through a deal to surrender the Chagos islands – reportedly requiring us to find £9bn of public money to rent back the military base on Diego Garcia that is currently ours – whilst delaying the vital spending increase our armed forces need. What does this say about Labour’s priorities?
The problem is that delaying more spending makes it much harder for the MOD to procure at the scale and pace required. Thus, the fear lingers that Labour’s SDR has been led by the Treasury, prioritising short-term savings over accelerated procurement to meet the threats we face right now.
If the Government are concerned about how to pay for a higher Defence budget they could have adopted our plan – increasing spending to 2.5 per cent, funded by a combination of reducing the civil service back to its pre-pandemic size and by devoting a greater share of Government R&D to defence.
That was a fully funded plan, paid for by pan-Whitehall savings, because Defence is our top priority and requires a cross-Government approach to succeed. Labour rejected this way of paying for Defence because, in truth, they have other priorities – a larger public sector, for example, a faith that will now be sorely tested by bond market reality.
To conclude, I am immensely proud of how our Party in Government uniquely stood by Ukraine at the outset of its invasion, helping to avoid an early collapse which would have thrown our geopolitics into an even more dangerous storm than that which confronts us today. But those threats have not gone, and the British people – who have strongly supported our aid to Ukraine – rightly expect, in parallel to gifting munitions to Kiev, that our own stockpiles are renewed as a matter of urgency.
It’s time to prioritise Defence of the realm in action as well as words. That means the starting point for any SDR must be more investment in our armed forces.
Published by ConservativeHome.
