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.
I like the comment about buying to a “predictable schedule”. We should try that.