MPs and peers have warned that the Government’s national security plans lack sufficient detail, particularly around funding, resilience and how strategy will translate into real capability.
A new report by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy says ministers must provide far clearer explanations of how commitments set out in the 2025 strategy will actually be delivered. It calls for “credible funding arrangements”, stronger civil resilience measures and more robust plans to develop sovereign capabilities.
The committee also raises concerns about how planned spending will be used. While the Government has set a target of spending 1.5% of GDP on security and resilience, MPs and peers say there is little clarity on what this will achieve in practice, urging ministers to prioritise “long-term resilience and new capabilities”.
There is particular focus on the UK’s defence industrial base, with the report calling for the Defence Investment Plan to be published as soon as possible. It says the plan should set out how firms, especially SMEs, will be supported and how the UK can avoid losing key capabilities to foreign ownership.
The report also highlights gaps in planning for critical national infrastructure, including how military reservists would be used to protect assets such as undersea cables and energy pipelines. It says more detail is needed on how these forces would be deployed in a crisis. On wider strategy, the committee argues the Government’s “whole-of-society” approach to security is not yet clearly understood, calling for more detail on plans for a national conversation around resilience.
Chair Matt Western said: “This report makes clear the tough choices the Government will have to make to keep UK citizens safe.” He added that while the strategy sets out a framework for dealing with a more volatile world, “the Government must now deliver.”
Can the defence select committee request the attendance of Cameron, Osborne, May, Fox, Williamson, Johnson, Sunak, Hunt in order to grill them on why they knowingly decimated our capabilities. They need to be held to account.
Starmer is no better he’s still not ordered a single FJ or additional capability.
Bravo!
There is no clarity or detail, as that would expose what little is going to happen, regards funds and actually buying kit and expanding the forces.
Add Wallace, add Brown, add Blair, add Hutton, add Des Browne, and all the others, such a thing needs to go back to 1995 Front Line First, which was the first unnecessary review after OFC 91.
Probability Oct 2001 is the first point of discussion as that’s when the war on terror started and the 1997 defence review was essentially derailed and hijacked to fund 2 invasions and a decade of COIN operations across the globe. Second point of discussion is the 2010 and austerity and what that meant making the country defenceless just as the geostrategic wins started to change.. and then 2014 the what the fuck are you doing we are heading to war in Europe moment, 2018 the we have been attacked with nerve agent do you need anymore hints moments and then finally the 2022 Russia is run by an imperialist nutter who’s know invading countries and threatening to nuc us….
I would like all those’d to be considered in a review…
Thirty years of nonsense and as usual we are waiting for yet another useless government to cover their collective arse before they dare publish anything.
MPs warn UK security plans lack, clarity and detail, because it is the only way of dealing with the total absence of any real £££££…..
Of course there is clarity and detail
Britain’s national security budget has been purloined by the Department of Energy, detail set out in the Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan, in a hopelessly misguided and unevidenced pursuit of ‘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.’
This is madness
‘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 but is consistent with expectations from the physics of energy flows, the empirical study of the capital and operating costs of both wind and solar, and the grid expansion and reinforcement and system management costs known to be imposed by renewables.
The figure indicates a 23% fall in consumption since 2005, the year in which the costs of renewables began to be salient (>£1.2bn).
It should be borne in mind that about one third of this total cost, £77 billion (2024 prices) has hit households through their electricity bills, with the remaining £153 billion being first paid by industrial, commercial and public sector consumers and then passed through to households in the form of increased prices for goods and services, in taxes, and in reduced wages and rates of employment.
In this context it should also be noted that subsidies to renewable generators result in an increase in the Treasury’s VAT receipts and thus an increase in the general cost of living. Electricity consumed by households is charged at the reduced rate of 5% and cannot be reclaimed. Businesses also pay VAT on electricity, but we can assume that this is fully reclaimed. However, as the renewables subsidy costs are passed through to end consumers of goods and services they will become liable to VAT, unless the goods and services are exported or exempted. The precise magnitude of this VAT uplift resulting from renewables subsidies is uncertain, but the potential is significant, amounting to around £3 billion a year at present, and to around £30 billion in total since 2002 (in 2024 prices).
There can be little doubt that renewable electricity subsidies are a significant factor in the much-discussed cost of living crisis and are very likely to be an important element underlying the weak growth in productivity in the UK economy since the financial crisis of 2008.
Renewable electricity generators have now enjoyed generous financial support for over twenty years without showing any significant progress towards independent economic viability. On the contrary, the requirement for such support seems to be rising. The public is surely entitled to ask when government will bring this extraordinary and insupportable level of subsidy to an end.’