The Ministry of Defence set out plans to move away from annual budgeting towards a 10-year Defence Investment Plan and a new procurement model, marking a significant change in how the department plans and delivers military capability.
The approach was outlined during a Defence Committee session on 17 March 2026 on the MoD Annual Report and Accounts 2024–25, where senior officials were questioned on defence reform, acquisition and long-term planning.
Permanent Secretary Jeremy Pocklington told MPs the department is moving “away from the old annual budget cycle” towards a system built around longer-term strategy. He said the Defence Investment Plan would “set out a long term plan for the department” and be underpinned by an Integrated Force Plan linking military requirements directly to funding decisions.
Alongside this, the MoD is restructuring how procurement works. Pocklington confirmed that under defence reform, the military side of the department will define requirements, while the National Armaments Director’s organisation will be responsible for buying and delivering equipment. He said this is intended to “simplify those lines of accountability” and allow the department to “work faster and respond” to changing threats.
Rupert Pearce, the National Armaments Director, said this will be supported by a new portfolio-based structure. Programmes will be grouped into areas such as space and lethality, allowing the department to manage capabilities as connected systems rather than standalone projects. He said this would provide “a much stronger lens” for overseeing delivery across multiple programmes.
He also indicated a shift in how equipment is acquired as the department is aiming to rely less on bespoke development, with Pearce stating “we’re trying to avoid development, so we just go shopping instead of developing,” alongside efforts to introduce faster procurement cycles and more segmented approaches depending on the type of equipment.
The reforms also place greater emphasis on industry engagement and financing, Pearce said the 10-year plan is intended to give industry a clearer demand signal, enabling companies to invest with more certainty, and to support a more strategic relationship between the MoD and its suppliers. He added that work is under way to bring in private capital and improve access to finance, particularly for smaller firms.
Be a good idea if we ever buy any thing apart from spares and service contracts. Better to have a longer term plan of doing next to nothing rather than a yearly one.
I hope it works out better but there does seem to be a of lot talks, plans, projects, ideas, industry open days but not a lot else going on. That could be that the Military mostly the Army, is in such a mess that just chucking money at will not do much and some needs think and then act on how to fix it.
It’ll make it harder to cancel and easier to fund those big ticket items. The new submarines, GCAP, FADS – those are the three most important British development projects going forward, and each operates on a timescale of decades. It’s also good insurance against unpredictable leadership, both on the left (won’t somebody think of the fish in Faslane) and right (AMERICA, baby) of British politics.
Long term certainty of funding is what Defence needs.
Instead, rhe rug is pulled out from under it regularly for short term political needs.
Where is the accompanying 10 year funding ringfenced and agreed by all parties?
“We’re trying to avoid develpment:and go shopping.”
What, like the 12 billion or so you’re pouring into GCAP to develop it? Shopping sounds like more OTS?
Hasn’t the military side always defined requirements? And DE&S, previously DPA, previously the PE, bought the stuff.
Just because that area now sits under the NAD grouping how is it changed?
You are correct Daniele, this could work out 2 ways.
1. It’s a 10 yr plan that is backended with funded that does not materialise
2. With defence inflation indexing being applied (min 10% annual inflation) there will always be a black hole at the end of the 10 yrs.
3. It all needs to be ringfenced otherwise HMT can’t help themselves in dipping “in year” cost reductions.
4. Governance of this really does need to be through the Defence Select Commitee, it really is that important
Am I confident any of this will happen, no. If I was to place a bet it would be that they make a big announcement with funding commitments so far down the line that it becomes meaningless. This seems to be this governments speciality
I’ve followed Defence for 36 years, we’ve had defence “reforms” before. So sadly, I’m not confident that this will be any different, but hope to be wrong.
In theory 10 year cycle is a great step in the right direction and should result in less increased costs coming from having to delay stuff out of the current financial year.
However as with everything the devil is in the detail and I can’t see any movement giving a public sector entity that much freedom.
Hope it happens as ‘planned’, hope it’s funded properly at an enhanced level, hope it gets started quickly… a lot of hope, one more hope – hope it’s not wishful thinking.
‘Defining requirements’ usually means ‘business requirements’, which in the military context is e.g. ‘what we need to prevent’ or ‘what we need to destroy’. That has to be translated into mechanisms of achieving those effects, and those then need to be translated into procurement decisions. It is in achieving those translations that things can go wrong, and it doesn’t look too clear where those ‘lines of accountability’ will then lie.
So presumably the plan is not to order anything for ten years? 🤔
Only going to end in tears.
Since when have such activites run smoothly in the UK Snivel Service ?
This all means nothing without real £s.
No ten year plan for anything lasts more than a couple of years.
The world changes frequently, and often suddenly and dramatically (drones took about 3 years to do so), and so must our defence posture. This ten year plan will in effect become a rolling, 2 or 3 year adjusted plan. Not much better than the current annual events.
If it has the effect of preventing MOD delaying work in order to move the outlay into the next FY because they’ve spent their budget for this one (and incurring greater overall cost as a result), then that has to be a good thing.
Is the UK armed forces or any armed forces capable of viewing what equipment they will want or need in ten years from now. Does a ten year plan inevitably lead to the kind of slow grind MIC style process that takes a decade or more to deliver anything all because the ten year plan said so.
I don’t remember drones being mentioned in the SDR2015 much even though everything Ukraine is doing existed in 2015.
I like the idea of this fully worked out plan with cross party support but it’s not very democratic to be apparently committing parliaments two elections in the future to spending commitments today. If mad Vlad drops down dead tomorrow, the Ayatollahs give up and China suddenly becomes a democracy are you telling me that people have to keep sucking up higher taxes and major spending cuts to fund 5% of GDP on defence spending because a labour government took a decision in 2026.
The lead time on developing e.g. new frigates is of the order of 10 years, so they already have to plan over the relatively long-term. Aligning spending plans to the same time-frame is fairly logical.
Proof is in the pudding, but I see this as a good start. Never thought I would hear myself saying that. Just as long as it can roll over. The reason being that if the MOD wants something really expensive, like an extra 50 Challengers, for example, they can roll over unspent money from this year and combine it with the following year to order them all the next year without impacting what needs to be paid for that next year. My wife used to work in the US Defence industry and although their budgets are huge, many projects and Departments have an annual budget. If they don’t spend it all the lose that unspent money and their budget is normally reduced by that amount the next year. So what happens is they splurdge at the end of the fiscal year on stuff they may or may not really need right now so as to not lose their budget. That’s what I want to avoid.