Parliament is not being given enough transparency over the Ministry of Defence’s fast-growing nuclear spending, the Public Accounts Committee has warned, calling for a new mechanism to allow proper scrutiny of programmes whose costs it says are currently too vague to challenge, the UK Defence Journal understands.
In its report on the department’s 2024-25 accounts, the committee said the department was “not currently providing Parliament with sufficient transparency over its ever-increasing nuclear expenditure”. The Defence Nuclear Enterprise accounted for 18 per cent of the defence budget, or £10.9 billion, in 2024-25, a figure expected to reach 20 per cent for 2025-26 once the accounts are finalised and to rise towards a quarter in the coming years. Nine of its programmes have whole-life costs of more than £10 billion each.
The committee said the department claimed the Dreadnought submarine programme, due to enter service in the early 2030s, remained within its £41 billion budget, a figure that includes a £10 billion contingency. But it said published information about other nuclear programmes was “too vague to allow Parliament to understand and challenge” the activities they cover, what they cost and how those costs had changed over time.
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review had identified the same gap in scrutiny and recommended that the government “develop mechanisms for enhanced Parliamentary scrutiny to provide confidence that taxpayer money is being spent wisely”. The committee said it understood the government had now agreed that a proper scrutiny mechanism would be established, and called on it “not to allow the current political uncertainty to delay this is essential parliamentary scrutiny”.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s chair, framed the issue in terms of long-standing concern. He pointed to “the ratchet effect of ever-increasing while opaque nuclear spending, about which both my and predecessor Committees have long warned”, and said a new sensitive scrutiny mechanism was to be welcomed. “Political uncertainty must not derail these arrangements, in order that the public may gain greater confidence that their money is being spent wisely,” he said.
In its recommendation, the committee said the Ministry of Defence “must set out how and when it will routinely provide Parliament with more detailed cost and performance information for the nuclear enterprise, so that Parliament can provide taxpayers with the confidence that the increasing DNE budget is being spent wisely”.
It would be far easier to justify the cost of the nuclear submarines if they were not broken and waiting maintenance. Looking at the current situation with the Astute class subs being in dock you have to ask if the cost is worth it? They maybe good boats on paper but we need them in the water protecting the UK. Scrapping these expensive assets must be under consideration. The money saved could be spent on other more reliable military assets.