The Ministry of Defence is working through a series of NATO mechanisms to secure British industrial benefit from the alliance’s push to expand collective manufacturing capacity, Luke Pollard has told Parliament in a written answer.
The Minister of State for Defence was responding to James Cartlidge, the Conservative MP for South Suffolk, who asked what steps the department is taking to ensure UK defence manufacturers benefit from the new NATO commitment.
Mr Pollard said the department is “leveraging NATO mechanisms, including the Defence Production Action Plan, the NATO Defence Industrial Production Board, and the Innovation Scale-Up Package, to boost an aggregated demand, improve interoperability, strengthen supply chain resilience, and provide clearer long-term demand signals to industry.”
He said the Defence Industrial Strategy and the Defence Investment Plan reinforce that approach by supporting collaborative programmes with allies, listing deep precision strike, air defence, autonomous systems, munitions production, future combat air and anti-submarine warfare.
Those programmes, he said, help British firms “access new export and multinational procurement opportunities and take advantage of the shift to ‘always on production’.”
The phrase points at what has become the central problem of European rearmament, defence manufacturing has historically worked to intermittent orders, with production lines opened for a batch and then closed, an arrangement that keeps peacetime costs down but leaves no capacity to surge when demand rises. The war in Ukraine demonstrated how long it takes to reverse that, particularly in artillery ammunition, where output could not be raised quickly because plants had closed, tooling had been scrapped and specialist suppliers had left the sector.
Aggregated demand is the mechanism NATO is using to address it. If several allies commit to buying the same equipment on a predictable schedule, a manufacturer can justify investing in capacity that no single national order would support, and smaller states gain access to production they could not sustain alone.
The commercial question for British firms is whether they end up as prime contractors on those programmes or as suppliers into consortia led from elsewhere. European Union funding instruments for defence production have generally restricted or discounted participation by non-member states, and Britain’s access to them has been the subject of negotiation since 2024, which is part of why the answer emphasises NATO mechanisms rather than EU ones.
Mr Cartlidge served as Minister for Defence Procurement in the previous government and now shadows the defence brief.
whatever m8. bonnie milligan i have nothing wa t bout that mrs be pleased sort of same taste comes women any way maunufacture what that isnt made by britain already laser system sabre capacity of aa ships challengers rest and the best so surely to manufacture weapons against materials high rrp price say that javlin and troops aa weapons programed reg codes americans more agreeable manufactured say ireland lol or uk hand a cheap effective weapon compensate lack of armour capable air force fielding more american tech as many do ireland is best placed of the north uk terotory with some eu conditions i could like of course have be ni possible 35 maitence airfiled diplomatic relations.
I like the comment about buying to a “predictable schedule”. We should try that.
Revolutionary thinking isn’t it, SMH.
😊👍
Pollard is a self-serving party hack, never happier than posing for a photo in front of work done by others.
Nevertheless, something like this must be tried and having the credit go to a politician is all just part of what it takes.
Sovereign capacity means having control over basic industries held in the U.K.
An E-NATO industrial strategy?
If lead by us that would make sense – but the point is access to a bucket of funding that is for europes defense, given our role in Europes defense it makes sense to take the route of nato
Btw seeing this collaborative bottleneck…Brexit is still so dumb imo, but who cares I guess, it’s 2026
As regards Brexit, we are where we are. Brexit was nature’s way of telling us that our problem is Westminster and Whitehall not Brussels. I think the future of the UK-EU relationship is bound up with Ukraine. No co-incidence Burnham’s first overseas visit ( after No10 North 😂) is to Kyiv.
Barry in recent times our water was French, airports Spanish and steel was Indian. Will ukdj be ever sold to a foreign buyer?
Yeah selling meggit, Cobham, ultra electronics to American asset strippers isn’t going to help. Foreign buyers of defence companies should always be blocked. There’s a reason why it’s allowed under WTO and EU rules, just the UK never uses it. Beyond stupid to allow BAE to sell their 20% ownership of EADS too. What’s point of government holding a golden share of they won’t intervene in such monumental stupid decisions that hurt out country and cutting edge defence aerospace manufacturing?
This is a forlorn hope by Cartlidge and Pollard.
There is no central, funded NATO arms programme. The only such programme is the EU’s SAFE. It is the financial mechanism that is loaning billions to European member states, at low interest rates over a long term. It is basically funding a lot of the bumper procurement deals we read about daily.
It is restricted to EU members. A third party like the UK can participate in a manufacturing partnership, but only as a minority.party, it has to be led by an EU member. We declined to pay up to join SAFE, our stake would have been something like £3bn. So we are, as usual, on the outside looking in, another big missed opportunity for UK manufacturing.
It’s fair enough from the EU’s viewpoint, we resigned from the golf club and declined to pay our membership dues, we can’t really turn up and expect to use the golf course and avail ourselves of the clubhouse. The damage from Brexit is everyday more evident.