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The UK government has no “credible plan” to deliver the military capabilities it seeks and the country’s armed forces will have to cut some of their programmes unless overall defence spending is raised, according to a cross-party group of MPs.
The hard-hitting report by parliament’s public accounts committee comes two days after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government unveiled a pre-election Budget that prioritised tax cuts and provided no real increase in defence spending for the coming year.
The committee said the Ministry of Defence faced a £17bn deficit in its plans to equip the military over the next 10 years and warned that this figure could grow by another £12bn — a shortfall that MPs said left the UK in an “alarming place”.
The report added that the MoD’s approach to closing this funding gap rested on hopes that the UK government would hit its “long term aspiration” of spending 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence annually even though there is “no guarantee on whether this will happen”.
UK defence spending is currently just under 2.3 per cent of GDP once military aid to Ukraine is included and the government has said it will only increase to 2.5 per cent “if fiscal and economic circumstances allow”.
“In an increasingly volatile world, the Ministry of Defence’s lack of a credible plan to deliver fully funded military capabilities as desired by government leaves us in an alarming place,” said Dame Meg Hiller, chair of the committee.
“This problem is not new,” Hiller added, but “not only are the same problems we’re used to seeing on display here . . . they also appear to be getting worse.”
The biggest single reason for the shortfall in British defence spending was a £38bn, or 62 per cent, increase in costs in the UK’s nuclear deterrent programme, according to the committee’s report.
The report acknowledged that spending for the programme has been ringfenced as it is “the MoD’s highest defence priority”. But the MPs warned the prioritisation carried “a risk that this will further squeeze budgets for conventional capabilities” — and these are already £9bn over budget. They added that the MoD may also need “more money for nuclear programmes”.
According to the Budget, defence spending will increase by 2.6 per cent to £55.6bn next year from £54.2bn, after allowing for unspecified Treasury reserves, according to the MoD.
However, this is below the 2.75% rate of inflation forecast by the Bank of England for the end of this year, meaning that defence spending could fall in real terms.
The need to increase defence spending across Europe has taken on extra urgency as Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its third year. British defence secretary Grant Shapps recently described the UK as being in a “prewar phase”.
Sir Jeremy Quin, chair of the House of Commons defence committee, said on Thursday that this description did “not appear to be reflected in [the MoD’s] budget allocation” and asked to meet Shapps “urgently”.
A recent series of embarrassing shortfalls and scathing reports has revealed an increasing dissonance between the UK’s military ambitions and its capabilities.
While the UK prides itself on having a global military presence, one senior defence source admitted this week that many in the UK armed forces felt “overstretched, tired and understandably fed-up” and needed more funding.
The MoD said: “We are delivering the capabilities our forces need, significantly increasing spending on defence equipment to £288.6bn over the next decade, introducing a new procurement model to improve acquisition, and confirming our aspiration to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence.”
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