Putting off the bulk of Britain’s planned increase in defence spending until the years immediately before the 2035 target would be a serious mistake, the Director-General of Make UK Defence has warned MPs.
Andrew Kinniburgh told the Treasury Committee on 3 June 2026 that the government should resist the temptation to make only small increases in the next few years before a late surge to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035. “We need to be really careful not to fall into the trap of saying we’ll back load this,” he said, warning against the idea of “tiny incremental increase for the next few years, and then at the end we’ll suddenly put a load of money in”. Such an approach, he said bluntly, would be “a disaster”.
His argument was that the value of later spending depends on investment made now. The research, science and technology funded today, he said, was what would improve productivity and capability later on, so deferring it would blunt the effect of the money spent at the end. He illustrated the point with a 30-person company that had designed an automated robotic welding jig expected to save a large defence firm £35 million over a decade, an investment in productivity made possible because the smaller firm could see an order book stretching ahead of it.
The session was examining how the UK will fund its defence ambitions, and the committee pressed Kinniburgh repeatedly on what a credible spending path would actually look like year by year. He was unable to give the profile of annual increases the committee sought. “I’m not sure I can answer that question, to be honest,” he said, arguing that the figures depended on what the equipment programme required rather than being a simple block of money. “We’re not just asking for a block of money, it depends what the capability is that we require to deliver for the military,” he said.
Lucia Retter, Assistant Director for Defence and Security at RAND Europe, supported the warning against deferral, framing it as a matter of credibility with allies and adversaries alike. She pointed to Germany, which she said had set out in some detail how its own spending increase would be profiled and what it would be spent on. A clear signal of that kind, she argued, was exactly what needed to enter the public domain, both to demonstrate commitment to NATO and to deter potential adversaries. Back-loading carried real risks, she said, including the possibility that programmes would later be cancelled under a future government or changed economic circumstances.
Max Warner, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, offered a more cautious view of long-range commitments. He said he could see the value of certainty for industry but did not regard a fixed 10-year spending plan as an unambiguously good thing, since governments generally avoid setting budgets that far ahead and like to retain the freedom to respond to changing economic and fiscal conditions. Even a published 10-year profile, he suggested, might not prove credible, since spending plans tend to shift over time, though he accepted there could be a case for some intermediate targets.
The committee said its next session on defence spending, held jointly with the Defence Select Committee, would seek to question the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and a defence minister directly, though no date had yet been confirmed.
Not much there that anyone here would disagree on. I don’t see how these sessions can influence government decisions, though as it’s all stuff the select committees should know anyway.
does he know something we don’t?
Labour won’t survive beyond 2029, so this 2035 Target means fuck all in the grand scheme of things.
Puts a lot of pressure on the next government to honour it regardless of their political affiliation. But quite rightly one parliament cannot bind another, every parliament is sovereign. That’s the law we have lived and prospered with for hundreds of years.
He is right about not backloading defence spending but there is also an argument to be made about not front loading. Massive increases in spending into an institution as leaky as the MoD would result in massive waste.
Sustained increases of 0.1% per annum of GDP up to 3.5% by 2035 seems about right.
There is every chance as well that Russia falls off a cliff and the threat dissipates. Countries like Germany and Poland that sucked far too deeply on the peace dividend and are much closer to the threat environment than the UK and France needed to panic buy. We need something different, sensible sustained investment.