The Prime Minister has told the Commons that he has already committed to a pathway to spending three per cent of gross domestic product on defence, in response to a question pressing him to do so urgently rather than waiting for a future fiscal event.
Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough and chair of the Defence Committee, put the question at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.
He said: “The British people should be under no illusion that the nation faces a significantly increased threat level, especially from Russia, but also that we have a US leadership for whom European security is no longer a focus or a priority. That is why it is imperative that we invest in our armed forces in the here and now, rather than being sorry later. Indeed, defence is definitely one area where vibes alone just will not be enough.
“Rather than kicking the can down the road, waiting for a fiscal event in a future year, will the Prime Minister urgently commit to charting a pathway to reaching 3% of GDP being spent on defence by 2030? As his Chancellor rightly noted, that is critical to keeping our country safe.”
Andy Burnham replied: “I have made that commitment, I have made it very clearly, and I have done so for a considerable time. I was in Ukraine last week for a very specific reason: to repeat it on the world stage. My hon. Friend can be absolutely sure of that.”
He went on: “Alongside our commitment to defence, we also have to build the resilience of Britain. We need to ensure that the maximum amount of the funding committed to the defence investment plan goes back into the reindustrialisation of our communities. We should do more to maintain sovereign manufacturing and production capability here, and that will be a theme of my Government. We will make sure that British taxpayers’ money goes to supporting industry in our own country, to make us more resilient going into the future.”
The exchange turns on a distinction between committing to a figure and setting out how it will be reached. Dhesi’s question asked for a pathway, and specifically for one that does not wait on a future fiscal event, which is the point on which the government has previously declined to be drawn.
Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, has argued that announcing a spending figure without setting out how it will be funded invites a loss of market confidence and rising borrowing costs. He has said he has every confidence the Defence Investment Plan will be fully funded, and has not ruled out tax rises as part of the answer.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has previously put the cost of reaching three per cent at an additional £17.3 billion in 2029-30. Behind the domestic argument sits NATO’s push towards 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence by 2035, agreed at the alliance summit in The Hague.
The second half of Burnham’s answer picks up a theme the government, current and former, has been developing through the Defence Industrial Strategy and the Defence Investment Plan, which commits £298 billion to defence over four years.
The department has pointed to figures published last month showing that spending with industry supported 274,000 jobs across the United Kingdom in 2024/25, with £31.9 billion spent, including 12,200 direct jobs in Scotland where shipbuilding and submarines account for 7,900 of them. Jobs supported by spending on weapons and ammunition manufacturing rose 51 per cent across the country over the same period, an increase the department attributes to the drive to rebuild what it calls an always on pipeline of munitions supply.
Committed to producing a pathway to something not even in this Parliament. That’s an awfully long way from actually reaching 3%. First the commitment, then the pathway, which will be produced nearly three years into the five-year Parliament. Three years to get there of which two years will be in this Parliament. And that’s the easy part as there are still things that can/will be fiddled by bringing current spending under the defence umbrella, rather than actually increasing spending.
I’m minded of an old proverb about charity: what you give now is gold, what you promise to give in your lifetime is silver, what you give after your death is mere brass.
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