During a Defence Committee session, David Williams, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, addressed concerns raised by Emma Lewell-Buck MP about potential troop reductions.
The question followed comments attributed to Lord Robertson, who is leading the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), suggesting that 20,000 troops might need to be cut if defence spending is not increased or aircraft carriers are not scrapped.
Williams dismissed the speculation, stating: “I’ve seen the reporting. I think when Lord Robertson was in front of this committee a couple of weeks ago, he made a point that he wasn’t yet at the position where he was making recommendations, and so I’d rather wait and see what recommendations the externally led review makes for us, rather than picking up on press reporting.”
When pressed by Lewell-Buck about the accuracy or likelihood of such cuts, Williams expressed skepticism: “I would be surprised, given the importance that the current government has attached to recruitment and retention of Armed Forces personnel, if we were likely to get recommendations to reduce the number of Armed Forces personnel.”
With government and mod stranger things have happened. I sincerely hope we get an increase in funding but i am not expecting much.
It’s the usual pre SDSR game plan. Leak news of major cuts to soften the blow when less major ones happen. It happens every time.
It’s primarily not to soften the blow, it’s primarily service chiefs trying to create political outrage to steer cuts outside the herd of sacred cows.
Jim, its usully senior CS who do the leaks rather than service chiefs – they do it so much better!
The government’s priority is foreigners.
It absolutely is not. Care to share your homework?
5bn quid a year and we end up scrapping our carriers for foreigners we don’t need when we have 10m Brits workless and only 800k jobs?
Can I keep the foreigners and get rid of you? With those dodgy maths skills I can imagine your adding much to the economy.
UK has over 30 million jobs and near full employment so what the fuck are you going on about.
Hear hear.
Robert, we won’t scrap our carriers (they should last for 50 or so years).
She’s just trolling, to bad you can’t flag her BS anymore.
Wait until the next firemen’s or dustbin men’s strike.
With no squaddies left who else will they have to wake up?
Dave, that’s very much a second order problem for HMG!
Cuts, cuts and more cuts, ministry of cuts, with russian agressión and chinese expansion the goal of this and previous governments is to leave Britain unarmed, traitors.
Agree with you there.
Since the 50/60’s, it’s always been CUTS CUTS CUTS
We have been cutting since 1944, cuts in the 50’s were the biggest. This is the first time in half a century the budgets going back up.
Alan, True. The regular army has been cut once or twice a decade, every decade, since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Not sure what the stat is for RN and RAF.
I see the government has bought back housing, its good move for some reasons but essentially they have lied(covered up) or not understood the real costs. Its cost 6 billion to save 230m per year. But because we live in debt as country the 6 billion is borrowed at market rates, lets use 4% as rough guide(bonds are currently 4.35%) so that’s 240m in interest so 10m more than it currently costs in rent and as there no plan to pay down debt that interest payment is just sat there. So they have not saved the tax payer anything just move rent payment to a debt payment instead and cost the taxpayer 10m more until bond rates reduce
You can blame Micheal Portillo for that disastrous decision.
I was at MOD main building when this was playing out, decisions are made end of as we were told.
Indeed Portaloo flushed away a lot of money with that bonkers decision!
Yep I’m not arguing the history just raising awareness that the latest development isn’t actually saving the government any money. No doubt Portillo made the same argument as todays government that its excellent value for the tax payer….. ermm nope.
Defence loses £6bn in-year, which means £6bn less for equipment purchases, running costs or spending on service personnel.
Defence still needs to pay for maintenance and improvements of accomodation – there is no change from the previous situation.
If the comment is accurately attributed, Robertson may just be highlighting the extent of a potential shortfall. Cutting 20,000 troops or mothballing/ selling the carriers are about the only things that would deliver big savings( nuclear would but has already got guaranteed funding).
I suspect his report is going to put real pressure on the government to increase funding sooner rather than later.
What other budgets get cut to provide the money is unclear. Obvious and popular targets would be foreign aid, including benefits for migrants, funding of green projects overseas and the subsidy to renewable energy here.
The 3 R’s= Repatriate, Reinforce the borders and Reject the ECHR.
Blair was threatening to do that in the early 2000’s, I can still see his face on TV uttering those words. “We might have to withdraw from the ECHR”
Empty words, like all politicians.
Why on earth would we want to withdraw from the ECHR, it’s the only thing keeping the peace deal in place in Northern Ireland and if that was removed we end up facing sanctions destroying our economy. Also required for the trade deal with the EU.
What benefit would leaving it bring? Not heard any one actually name one, they talk about immigration but that is based on UN treaty not ECHR and so we leave the UN also?
Not to mention the obvious, human rights laws are also needed to protected us as uk citizens. Remove them and say goodbye to our way of life. Just look at multiple conservative policticans arguing we don’t need paid holiday or sick leave or clean water, that would just be the start.
Plus ECHR is just a court, like every court it just enforces applicable law, leaving the court doesn’t get around the international law we are a member of. The UK also the main driving nation for the ECHR for obvious reasons.
Please don’t state the ECHR is the only thing keeping the peace deal in place in Northern Ireland because that is just not true.
As for protecting our human rights I am afraid those related laws are being twisted and used as an Orwellian tool to suppress free speech and give people a criminal record for ‘non crimes’ by progressives of both the left and right mainstream political elites. We live in a very different country in just 20 years and not for the better.
Read the phrase “if the budgets not going up”
Do you think Robertson is talking to us, the public or the Treasury?
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If another 20k troops are cut, then we might as well not bother with an army.
I don’t think his purported comments mean cuts, I think they are to create pressure – this Govt can not cut troop numbers or the carriers, this is putting pressure on the Govt to increase Defence spending. They’ll be reports from US Generals soon…
Exactly
DB, the Government has always cut troop numbers, and cut the 3 Invincible class carriers without replacement for 10+ years.
So, the carriers are going…
Or the budget is increasing.
It seems to be a blunt and straight forward statement by Lord Robertson: unless the UK defence budget is increased then in order to make the SDR numbers add up the PM will have to make a decision between:
1. Cutting the British Army by 20,000 troops (and thus also avoid buying a lot of new equipment)
or
2. Scrapping the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers (and all the associated projects such as the extra 24 F-35B’s, the 3 FSS Ships, CrowsNest replacement)
Notably the RAF seems to be off the hook – the potential third of option cancelling GCAP/Tempest appears to have already been ruled out.
If option 1 is unacceptable, then it looks bleak for the RN given the refusal by Starmer and Reeves to even hint of any upwards flexibility on funding, baring a meaningless commitment to 2.5% eventually. RUSI calculated after the Budget Statement that the 2025/26 UK defence budget was set to be 0.1% higher in real terms than 2024/25, but that assumed 2% inflation – it’s currently 2.6%
Apparently they have already been told by Rachel from accounts there is no money for whatever they recommend and they are not happy because their remit has been changed!
RB, Did Robertson actually make this statement? When and where and to whom did he make it?
I don’t think starmer would cut 20,000 troops or scrap aircraft carriers these stories always get leaked. I think they will go for a slight increase in defense spending probably by raising taxes a bit
You cannot just keep raising taxes without crashing the economy and we may have already reached that point with the last budget.
There needs to be a serious rethink of what the state does and reform because the status quo is just not credible.
A serious effort to decentralise the U.K. is well overdue with the Treasury in particular, but Whitehall generally having far too much power to micromanage the state.
None of the above is coming from the current Government who have no real reforming zeal at all.
We need to get a grip on state pensions.
A fair system would make it means tested and based on how many children (i.e workers) you’ve produced, this also sidesteps the political hand grenade of ‘taking away grannies pension’ as granny keeps her pension.
Sorry but I don’t understand your comment regards children produced = workers …thats totally bizarre and ..by the way…inaccurate. Seems very Soviet Block-esque.
All comments like this do is embolden those who wish the UK no good and places doubt in the minds of serving personnel as to why bother service King and Country as it looks as under Major, Blair, Cameron etc. that Defence is being slowly eroded with Nil prospect for a career!!!! Pity we don’t speculate 650 MP’ job losses, the civil service and political adviers who adivse them and jump on the gravy train!!!
Ever since the end of the Cold War, every government has used that as an excuse to cut out defence capabilities, we have become a laughing stock, we can’t field a fully equipped battalion, no tanks not enough troops which are well and truly over stretched, we do not have enough raf squadrons to protect our skies, and being an island we do not have a navy capable of defending our shores or seas. The finest forces in the world unsupported and under equipped year after year and government after government
Can you write a list of countries laughing at us please, I would be very interested.
Every major western country seems to have the same issue as us and the others are in a much worse state(Russia,China,Iran). Who are these military economic powers not having problems?
If cuts have to be made then the Army is unfortunately the best place to do it. The UK doesn’t really need a large standing army. On a limited budget, it makes much more sense to invest in naval, air, amphibious and nuclear forces.
In a major war, a powerful enemy could blockade the UK and starve it into submission. The Navy must always be the first line of defence and everything else has to come second.
I agree, if we need a big army much better to focus the budget on reserves. Peace time professional army’s are never big enough for industrial war. Russia just learned that lesson.
Reserves cost five times less than regulars. If we are short on numbers then draft people.
Draftees don’t make good soldiers. History has made that clear many times over.
The Army Reserve failed to create a single formed unit in… what… a decade of Herrick?
Toplop, do you really think 73,000 amounts to a large standing army? It is tiny for a medium size European nation with a global expeditionary approach. An army that size could put 40-45k troops into the field, that’s all. It would have zero chance of deploying a regular brigade on an enduring operation.
Certainly not large by 20th century European standards. But the WW1/WW2/Cold War force was an anomaly for Britain. In the 18th century, the army was even smaller than it is today.
There is no empire to defend any more. The only use for a land army is to intervene in a European war, and the last two times we did that did not go well. In WW1 we got bogged down in trench warfare and had to be bailed out by the US. In WW2 the British Expeditionary Force was defeated by Germany very quickly, and we had to be bailed out by the US again (note the pattern).
In a scenario where Russia invades NATO allies in Eastern Europe, those countries will need to be the ones fighting on the ground. And they have – or should have – significant land forces for that reason. Britain should play to its strengths and bring a strong navy and air force to the fight.
For home defence, if we are fighting a major war on home soil then something has already gone very wrong. And then Trident comes into play.
Toplop, WW1/WW2/Cold War may have been an anomaly but it accounted for 54 years of the 20th Century.
I am aware that the British Empire is no more! I am not arguing for a large army to police a non-existent Empire.
We have used our army for a lot more than intervening (or being prepared to intervene in a European war). Gulf War 1 and 2 and the Falklands conflict are just 3 examples. Our army has often been used for expeditionary operations outside Europe.
In WW1 trench warfare was not just a form of warfare that affected British forces – it affected all nations engaged in the conflict. We invented and deployed the tank to break from trench warfare, by introducing manouevre. The US did not bail us out in WW1 – their contribution was late (first significant actions in March 1918) – they bailed out the French if anything as it was their country that had been invaded.
In WW2, the BEF was certainly outnumbered and surrounded by the Germans in the Dunkirk pocket but it was far from a total win for the Nazis – the BEF together with many French and Belgian allies were evacuated and survived to fight another day. The Germans failed to press home their advantage. The American Army did not immediately ‘bail us out’ or either bail out the French Army; the US Army did not of course pitch up in France or the Low Countries in June 1940! It was not until 3 years later, July 1943, that we saw the US Army on operations in Europe (Sicily, Op Husky).
NATO was created in 1949 in response to the possible scenario of Russian (then the USSR) from invading Eastern Europe. We then committed most of the combat power of the British Army to defending our European allies, and we still do that to this day. Now you suggest that we do not commit the British Army because we are a bit further away than other ENATO nations?! That won’t wash. What do we do with 3(UK) Div, 16 AA Bde etc if Russia attacks? Keep them in the UK for ‘Home Defence’? How does this very strong navy of ours stop Russian armoured divisions roll westwards?
The answer is very simple. The army personnel go to France and on the way back throw their passports into the sea. Then claim asylum and persecution. They will be housed, fed and given money far superior their current conditions. Solved.
The answer is neither. The answer is additional funding and managing defence better. If Labour succeed in increasing defence (slightly) whilst simultaneously reducing defence capability (greatly) and over promising to the world then they will be seen for the lightweight disingenuous clowns that they are.
If we can’t afford to tax anymore then we have to redistribute resources from other areas of government. Government will need to stop doing some “nice to have” functions or learn how to do those things more efficiently and/or cheaply. Foreign aid is not a core function of government and we can take a capability gap from that until finances improve. Net zero targets are arbitrary and political. Whether we meet targets at 2035 or 2040 make no difference to anything.
We need rational leaders who can make good decisions based upon reality. Not utopians who view the world through the lens of student politics.
Pre SDSR leaks again, by design, from either the RN or the Army.l, and I’d guess Army.a
At least the RN actually has 2 Carriers for its money.
I think I read its 11 billion and counting for the Army which had resulted in a late, controversial Ajax, and the most expensive wheeled APC with minimal weaponry, all packaged in a force structure that mixes the two and leaves us with no IFV and only 4 Battalions of infantry outfitted.
Unfortunately the army has made a spectacular mess of this project. This is unfortunately also why the treasury is not keen on handing over extra funds to the MOD due to some of the planning and procurement disasters that have gone on. ( paying £500 each for RJ11 network socket to be installed for example ) it is a simlear situation to British Rails 1955 Modernisation Plan which due to its failure caused a distrust of BR management by the treasury
They ignored the WASPI recommendations, they can ignore Robertson…