John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary should serve as a wake-up call to those inside government still blocking the acceleration of defence investment, with delays to the Defence Investment Plan having already driven companies out of business and pushed innovative firms to consider leaving the country, the trade body Make UK Defence has said.
The organisation’s Director-General, Andrew Kinniburgh, issued the statement on Thursday afternoon following Healey’s departure from the Cabinet over the funding settlement behind the plan, calling the resignation “a significant moment for the UK defence sector” and describing the outgoing Defence Secretary as “a serious political figure” who “fundamentally understands the dangerous moment the UK and our allies face.” The trade body, he said, had enjoyed working with Healey and his advisers for nearly two years in government and four years in opposition.
The statement reserves its sharpest language for the heart of the dispute that brought Healey down. “His resignation today should be a wake-up call for those inside Government still blocking the acceleration of defence investment our country desperately needs,” Kinniburgh said, pointing out that while the United Kingdom has agreed the new NATO spending target of 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, “we have no fiscal plan to reach this target.”
The consequences of the resulting delay to the Defence Investment Plan, he said, have been felt hardest among smaller firms. The hold-up has “left so many of our members to struggle, especially SMEs”, Kinniburgh said. “We’ve had companies go bust, hiring plans put on hold, and innovative SMEs seriously make plans to move abroad due to the lack of work.” The United Kingdom, he warned, is in “a global race for private defence investment” and yet investors are being told to go overseas “because the UK is not moving fast enough.”
Make UK Defence has been campaigning publicly and privately for defence spending to rise and has provided the government with what it describes as credible plans to deliver the increase, with Kinniburgh saying Healey and his team “have always taken these ideas seriously” and thanking them for their work.
The statement closes with a direct demand of the government in the wake of the resignation. “Now is the moment for the UK Government to finally rise to the challenge,” Kinniburgh said, by accelerating defence spending, setting out “a clear fiscal plan to 3.5% of GDP as soon as possible” and publishing “a credible Defence Investment Plan before the NATO Summit next month.”
Bang goes any optimism for the long awaited Defence Investment Plan.
Seems our national priorities are the boat people £7 billion a year on benefits and costs.
Welfare bill. Exploding.
The priority is net zero:
‘In the period 2002 to the present, the total cost to the electricity consumer of those renewable electricity subsidy schemes that we can quantify has amounted to approximately £220 billion (in 2024 prices), equivalent to nearly £8,000 per household.
The annual subsidy cost is currently £25.8 billion a year, a sum equivalent to nearly fifty per cent of UK annual spending on defence.
Subsidy to renewable electricity generators now comprises about 40% of the total cost of electricity supply in the United Kingdom.
The total subsidy cost per unit of renewable electricity generated has risen by nearly 50% in real terms since 2005 and now stands at approximately £200/MWh. This contradicts government and industry claims that renewables are becoming cheaper.’
Either the energy secretary or the defence secretary had to go. The Prime Minister decided for reasons not unconnected with his political future that his best interests lay with keeping the energy secretary in post…
What your describing is feed in tariffs and contractors for difference incorporated into energy bills. Not taxation or government spending. Do you understand the difference and why we can’t use people’s gas bills to cover defence spending?
Why not come back tomorrow and try again?
You never know, you might make a better shot of constructing a sentence after a bit of a lie down.
Defence??? £6 Billion for two aircraft carriers and £100 Billion for a choo choo train line.
It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Take a look what happened to AERALIS the UK company who were hoping for a contract from the MOD to build the next generation jet trainer for the RAF . Only a couple of months ago I seen an interview with the company Director saying unless the government give a decision soon they will go under and needed a deal soon and were hanging on by a thread. Sadly I found out a few weeks back the company are now in administration. No comment from government.
AERALIS didn’t exist except on PowerPoint slides
Powerpoint slides are cheap, hence we can look forward to many more.
Bit like a big piece of the defence investment plan then. Jokes aside i think you’ll find every single airframe ever built started as concept on the drawing board. Difference is in the 1950s the government used to back some of them.