Wes Streeting has been appointed Secretary of State for Defence, taking charge of the Ministry of Defence as Prime Minister Andy Burnham forms his first cabinet, the UK Defence Journal understands.
The Ilford North MP becomes the department’s third Secretary of State in a matter of months, succeeding Dan Jarvis, who held the role following John Healey’s resignation on 11 June, and he arrives at a department three weeks into delivering the Defence Investment Plan, the programme that converts the 2025 Strategic Defence Review into commitments spanning the naval base modernisation, the frigate programmes, the F-35A purchase and the Hybrid Navy. Jarvis’s brief tenure saw him sign the UK-Estonia defence roadmap in Tallinn and visit Sheffield Forgemasters as the first British-made artillery barrels in almost two decades began deliveries to Ukraine.
Streeting served as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care from Labour’s 2024 election victory until May this year, when he resigned citing a lack of confidence in Keir Starmer’s leadership following the party’s results in the local, Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections. He initially declared he would stand in the subsequent leadership contest, but declined to run and endorsed Andy Burnham after the former Greater Manchester Mayor returned to Parliament through the Makerfield by-election in June, an endorsement now rewarded with one of the great offices of state’s neighbouring briefs.
The appointment brings a minister regarded as one of his party’s most effective communicators to a portfolio he has not previously shadowed or held, with Streeting’s front-line experience built at Health, where he led the government’s NHS reform programme, and his political career before that spanning the presidency of the National Union of Students, Redbridge Council and eleven years as an MP. His arrival contrasts with the long defence apprenticeship of Healey, who shadowed the brief for four years before holding it, and the Streeting era begins with the strategic direction set by his predecessors’ review and investment plan, leaving delivery, and the defence of that plan’s funding, as the immediate task.
On funding, the new Defence Secretary faces an unusual dynamic across Whitehall, with Healey, the minister who resigned from Defence last month following a row over defence spending, appointed Chancellor by Burnham this evening, placing the Treasury in the hands of the man who left government over the size of the defence budget. The commitments Streeting inherits include spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence from April 2027, 3 per cent in the next Parliament and 3.5 per cent on core defence by 2035, alongside the £3 billion in annual military support to Ukraine and the UK’s co-leadership of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group.
Further defence ministerial appointments below Secretary of State are expected as the reshuffle completes.
Diabolical choice. Hopefully, this is just a holding post for him to liase with Healey in the Treasury.
An interesting choice. It looks like the funding will be there. He might lack military experience but I’m not sure he knew much about health either.
We will just have to wait and see.
Burnham has to make all this work. He is setting expectations.
If Healey can get the funds to the MoD, and Streeting lets the Chiefs and civil service run Defence (whilst serving as the figurehead), we might get something done.
That’s exactly how it is supposed to work.
Why couldn’t they’ve kept Mr Jarvis? Short interim gig for him. Got to laugh a bit, Mr Healey now in the seat of influence he would’ve liked more support from a while back.
Apparently there was some annoyance that Jarvis accepted the DIP with a giant gaping black hole in it.
Err, apparently (this is rumour) he wasn’t particularly liked for essentially forcing the DIP upon Burnham with a £4b chunk missing.
Leh,
I think that Jarvis is held in respect.
The official House of Commons library breakdown confirms that the £4.7 billion gap was a deliberate, temporary stop-gap kicked down the road to allow the DIP plan to launch. The plan had to be announced to give the defense industry and military commanders long-term certainty, the decision was made to explicitly defer the remaining £4.7 billion.
I see this as a deliberate pause on a minor fraction of the budget. The government couldn’t keep defense capability frozen in limbo forever over a single digit percentage dispute. They published a massive, highly detailed strategy to get the military moving, while formally putting the final £4.7B chunk on the backburner for a few months.
Dan Jarvis took a short term political hit to get a £298B national security plan over the line. While it cost him his seat at the Cabinet table for now, it bought him massive, lasting respect within the military establishment and parliament. He will remain an influential, powerful player in British defence and northern politics for years to come. Jarvis and Andy Burnham are not enemies … during Jarvis’s time as the Mayor of South Yorkshire, he worked close with Burnham to fight the Treasury for better regional infrastructure funding. Burnham knows Jarvis is a heavy hitting Northern voice with deep executive experience, and once the dust settles from the cabinet reshuffle, Jarvis is highly likely to be brought back into the fold as a key envoy for Burnham’s regional devolution and industrial strategy.
In the weeks leading up to the June 30 announcement, Jarvis was locked in ‘brutal’ negotiations with Reeves. He successfully forced the Treasury to increase their funding offer by an extra £1.5B compared to what they had offered Healey. However … once Reeves drew the line and left the remaining £4.7B unallocated, Jarvis faced a binary institutional choice …
Refuse to sign, and the plan collapses, the MoD remains in funding limbo, and the UK looks weak to its NATO allies.
Sign it anyway, and secure the massive £298B framework, protect the 60,000 industrial jobs, and let the future administration handle the final math.
As a pragmatist, Jarvis chose option two. But he isn’t stupid. It is highly likely that he picked up the phone, called Burnham, and gave him a heads up: “Andy, I’ve pushed the Treasury as far as they’ll go. I’m going to sign this to lock in the £298B headline for the military, but you need to know right now: Reeves is leaving a ‘front loaded’ £4.7B hole in the out years for you to fill.”
For Burnhan, being “blindsided” allowed his team to immediately brand Starmer and Reeves as fiscally reckless, giving Burnham a strong mandate to purge the Cabinet and rewrite the Treasury’s borrowing rules the moment he took power. Jarvis got to be the loyal institutional soldier who managed to finally get the defense blueprint out the door, knowing his friend Burnham would have a clean slate to fix the math later.
Magenta,
Thanks for the tutorials re both MoD and Treasury political and fiscal policies. Fascinating historical and political read for former colonials. Very best wishes for the collective success of the replacement/understudy cast of actors upon the grand stage. 🤔🤞
MoD finally has a principal advocate w/in HMG’s Treasury? Possible political pathway to 3% GDP expenditure on core defence this Parliament? Possibility that Andy Burnham is a sophisticated politician and more than a conventional liberal? This may prove quite interesting … 🤔😉
Absolutely I can see 3% by 2030 commitment and hopefully 2.8% 2028 2.9 2029 now!
Think this is the government defence needs.
This will really mean DIP2 when it’s announced , maybe this autumn with the budget we will see the review we wanted to see this time round
As per SPF, I think Streeting can be an effective minister if his job is mainly to keep the disparate parts of Defence playing nicely with each other but we have no idea what might happen if he was allowed to attempt a reorganisation of the MoD, for example.
The switch between Streeting, one of the candidates for Chancellor and Healey, who was tipped to return, is very interesting and has thrown my vague ideas of Burnham’s plans into confusion.
I had high hopes when Healey was made Chancellor, but this and making Milliband Foreign Secretary? FFS!
Let’s replace someone who used to bd in 1 Para with someone from the National Union of Students. Great idea.
Jarvis’ experience at cabinet level totals 6 weeks, Streeting has just run the Health Ministry for 2 years and presided over a big spending boost, he shadowed that role for 3 years before that.
Brave new world…..Burnham believes in giving people opportunities for character improvement…😉
Healey at the treasury has got to be a step up from Reeves but Sreeting? Not for me.
Congratulations 🎊! Ukraine is at centre stage.
Streeting in Defence – should have put Al Carns in, obvious choice
Healey a Chancellor, no, just no.
Two very poor choices for two really important positions.
Let’s give Streeting a chance. The role of a minister is to run and represent their department, working with the junior ministers and civil servants. Whilst having domain knowledge helps, and having a military background will help with empathy and understanding of the forces and garner respect, neither are essentials. It’s not like Streeting had to be a doctor to become Health Secretary, and plenty of Defence Secretaries haven’t had military backgrounds before. He should have a relatively benign Chancellor who a least understands defence.
More of a concern is the team below Streeting. Cairns quit alongside Healy, now Jarvis is out and Eagle has secured a promotion, leaving just Luke Pollard. Hopefully Jarvis will be offered and persuaded to take his old role to provide a bit of continuity, but a demotion might be too much to accept.
Congratulations 🎊! Ukraine is at centre stage.
DIMWIT,
“…Healey a Chancellor, no, just no.”
That’s a reductionist take that glosses over the nuanced, but deeply boring stuff …
John Healey has held three specific roles during his career under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which included Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor between 1999 and 2001. Before he was an official minister, he served as the direct political aide to Gordon Brown. He sat in on the foundational meetings where major budgets and fiscal strategies were hammered out, learning the internal language of the department.
Healy was then the Economic Secretary to the Treasury between 2002 and 2005. He was formally promoted to this junior ministerial position, where he was directly responsible for microeconomic policy, productivity frameworks, and regional economic growth.
Healy finally moved up to be the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, a senior junior minister position. Where he spent two years managing the technical side of the UK tax system, tax legislation, and the foundational economic modeling used for government wide Spending Reviews.
The only two jobs on the political side he hadn’t done before yesterday are Chief Secretary to the Treasury … the gatekeeper who explicitly manages public sector pay, infrastructure, and departmental efficiency role and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the top job, which he holds now. This five year run as a working Treasury minister is exactly why economists and bond markets viewed his appointment as a “safe pair of hands”, he has already spent half a decade running the lower gears of the exact same machine he is now driving.
While ministers don’t have to be experts, a Prime Minister will always look for institutional literacy when handing out the most critical jobs. The Chancellor John Healey isn’t a math academic! but he spent five cumulative years running the machinery of the Treasury under Gordon Brown, He knows how the building thinks. The UK cannot afford another fscking “Liz Truss moment,” where the markets panicked over government borrowing, causing interest rates to spike. The initial market reaction to Healey’s appointment is overwhelmingly stable. City analysts explicitly noted that his presence acts as a reassuring “check” on Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s more radical tendencies, signalling that the government will respect fiscal realities … one can normaly trust the ‘markets reactions’.
The incoming Chief Secretary … Healy’s new right hand ‘man’ Emma Reynolds spent five years as a Managing Director in the City of London financial sector and already served as a Treasury minister, as Pensions Minister and as Economic Secretary to the Treasury / City Minister.
Sure … John Healey is not an economic visionary who will invent a brand new economic theory, he’s a master mechanic who knows exactly how the massive engine of the British state operates under the hood. He is equipped to navigate today’s puzzles because he knows how to deploy the permanent civil service experts to model complex solutions and he has the institutional authority to say “no” to other departments. His success will entirely depend on whether his deep, traditional institutional discipline can adapt fast enough to the unpredictable, high-stakes crises of modern global finance.
He isn’t there to be the smartest economists in the room … he is there to manage the smartest economists in the room.
Politics, Religion and Football !
God I love this place 😁😁
Given that Burnham has no historical links with Streeting or Healy and neither are particularly popular or have any backing with in the party I suspect both of their resignations where set up by Burnham and this is their reward.
Healey might have dug himself a hole on defence spending. As much as I was not a fan of Rachel from Accounts she was not wrong about the country not borrowing more money. With a hysterical electorate and media complex, neither tax rises or spending cuts will be acceptable, no matter how much people claim to be in support of defence spending.
If Healey does secure the extra £4 billion over four years it won’t make a blind bit of difference to UK military outcomes. The defence budget over four years is around £280 billion so £4 billion is less than 2%. With an MoD addicted to the most high end American equipment I just don’t see what anyone thinks can be changed. The USA is trying to authorise a $1 trillion+ budget and its military claims to be desperately underfunded.
Unless we drop the high end global expeditionary all professional force ethos there is no amount of money the UK can ever afford to make a meaningful difference in defence outcomes. Even rising to 3.5% will barely add any frigates, no submarines and also it no additional fast jets men or armour. Just lots and lots of more support contracts for BAE, GD and Lockheed. £4 billion might be enough to add a singer capability like ABM but that won’t happen, it will be spread across everyone’s pet drone project or cap badge retention scheme and produce nothing of substance.
Countries that are rising budgets and making meaningful adjustments to defence outcomes like Poland and Germany are building major forces based on Reservists and conscription. The very same formats we use to win wars. The UK remains the country in NATO with the lowest ratio of active reservist to regulars and the SDR and the DiP did nothing to change that despite screaming at us war is imminent.
It was reported that Rachel from accounts was offered Defence but thankfully she turned it down! So I suppose we can be thankful for small mercies!
No one can say that DJ and AC didn’t have experience military experience, but given both came from effectively the “go at kick the sh*t out of the enemy” branches of defence, I think they both might have a narrow view of requirements.
Streeting has experience of trying to control and run a multi billion pound department which covers all aspects of the health spectrum. He should therefore understand competing interests from all areas: basic GP, A&E, Research and Development and every other branch that wants funding.
Let’s give him 6 months at least and see how he gets on.
Yes, some appointments I am not sure of, but Hermer, Lammy and Reeves have gone, and Milliband is no longer in charge of Environment, so I think overall its potential in a better place than it was last week
My position to. Starmer Hermer Reeves Lammy gone.
Milliband, hopefully won’t cause too much damage where he is.
We’ve had DS who were ex military and it made no difference to cuts.
He’s ambitious, so will want to fight for his department.
Agree here, but a slight note of caution in my mind remembers Gavin Williamson. At least he got money out of the Treasury I guess.
Give him a chance, lets see if he lets the military get on with it and sorts out the mess that is buying too little kit too late and cost over runs and kit that does not work still getting in to service.
Oreder two more Awacs, order a proper IFV to replace Warrior and fix or bin Ajax , and order some proper long range GBAD.
On the positive side Wes has lots of experience of running very large Department with continual money problems. Asking lots of questions, which he will have in this complex area may also get the experts thinking about problems from a different angle.