Defence shut out as overseas students fill UK courses

The defence industry is being cut off from a significant portion of the UK engineering graduate pipeline because a large proportion of students on advanced engineering courses at leading universities come from overseas and cannot obtain the security clearances needed to work on sensitive defence programmes, a senior industry figure has told the Scottish Affairs Committee.

Cathy Kane, LTPA Portfolio Director at QinetiQ, told the committee on Wednesday that the scale of the problem was visible from her position on an industry advisory board at University College London, saying that “a vast number of the students on the course come from overseas countries” and that for the defence industry, “being able to pull in people coming off those courses and bring them into our industry is a challenge, because we work on sensitive programmes.”

The issue compounds an already significant skills challenge facing the sector, in which the defence industry is competing for a pool of UK-born engineering graduates that is considerably smaller than the total number of people studying engineering, while simultaneously trying to persuade more young people to choose engineering over more financially attractive careers in financial services and other sectors. QinetiQ’s Kane said that encouraging people in the UK to continue with professional careers in STEM subjects was “really key” and that the industry needed to help people see “the attractive careers in defence that are available.”

Babcock’s John Howie reinforced the point from a different angle, noting that the industry needed more UK nationals for work that could not be done remotely or overseas and where staff needed to be physically present on secure sites, saying “it is not work that we can do overseas or farm out, even for people to do from home necessarily.” He said the cultural challenge of making defence an attractive career for a broader range of UK graduates remained significant, noting that it was still true that more engineering graduates in the UK joined financial services organisations than engineering companies, describing that as something government and industry needed to work together to turn around.

QinetiQ’s Kane also flagged that delays in domestic orders caused by the strategic defence review and defence industrial strategy had already slowed the company’s growth in the first half of 2025, and said the opportunity to have a long-term strategic vision was the most helpful thing government could provide to allow the industry to adapt, plan and ensure it had the right pipeline of skilled people in place to deliver what was needed.