The Ministry of Defence’s failure to publish its Defence Investment Plan has seriously undermined efforts to modernise the armed forces and is weakening the country’s defence industrial base, the Public Accounts Committee has warned.
In its report on the department’s 2024-25 accounts, the committee said the continuing lack of a deliverable long-term plan was “seriously undermining the Department’s efforts to modernise the Armed Forces and achieve value for money for the taxpayer”. Three years had passed since the 2023-2033 Equipment Plan, which the department has said it will replace with a more holistic Defence Investment Plan, and which followed the first zero-based review of its budgets in 18 years. The new plan remained unpublished, the committee said, because the department had not decided which capabilities, infrastructure and people it needs to make the armed forces ready for warfighting within the available budget, nor secured the cross-government agreement the plan requires.
As a result, the committee said, the department had “been unable to move quickly and assuredly to provide a stronger deterrent to our adversaries and to equip our Armed Forces for the modern battlefield”, a battlefield it noted had changed enormously over four years of war in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East. It warned that delay carried a direct financial cost. “Time is money in procurement, and suppliers are increasing their prices to take account of the international situation’s continued deterioration,” the report said.
The committee was particularly concerned about the effect on industry, warning that the delay “risks weakening the UK’s defence industrial base”. The department spends 85 per cent of its budget in the UK, a share it hopes to maintain or grow as spending rises, and the committee said that scale of expenditure could provide a considerable stimulus to the wider economy through infrastructure and skilled jobs, as well as positioning British firms to benefit from a growing export market. The UK’s support for Ukraine, it added, had shown the speed and innovation of the domestic defence industry, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises.
The investment plan had been intended to give industry certainty and a clear demand signal, encouraging firms to invest for the long term in their capacity and capabilities, the committee said. Its continued absence undermined those aims, “with smaller companies suffering more than their larger counterparts”.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s chair, said the issue went well beyond the recent delay. “The nation has now in fact gone years without a credible plan for UK military capability,” he said, dismissing the argument that the department was simply taking time to get the details right. “Whatever the content of the DIP when it eventually does appear, the damage from its absence has been done – to the nation’s credibility, to its safety, to its Armed Forces, and to certainty within its entire defence industrial base.”
He said the plan had become “the most anticipated document in my entire political career”, and that any minister seeking to explain away the delay should instead consider the message it had sent to the public, allies and adversaries, “and simply apologise”.
The committee made two recommendations flowing from the delay. In the first, it said that once the department has published the plan, it should write to the committee within three months “setting out how it will use the Plan flexibly to take account of the changing international context when making ongoing decisions about expenditure and capabilities”. In the second, it set a far tighter deadline, calling on the department to write “urgently, within two weeks of this report, to explain how it is mitigating the impact on suppliers of the delayed publication of its investment plan”.
