Mr Mark Francois
MP for Rayleigh and Wickford · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Secondly, what actions is he as Defence Secretary, no doubt in consultation with the Chief of the General Staff, taking to push back against these pernicious in-year funding cuts imposed by the Treasury?”
“Taking him at his word, I must press him on some extremely worrying reports—first published in The Times on 3 September, and amplified in the Defence Eye journal on Tuesday—that British Army training is being seriously curtailed in order to provide in-year efficiency savings— “cuts”, in pub English— at the Treasury’s behest.”
“I am sure that I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the Ukrainians for their fierce and determined resistance. They are fighting for the values of freedom and democracy, which this House has represented for centuries, so when we say, “Slava Ukraini!”, we mean it.”
“On behalf of the shadow Defence team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new Defence Secretary—Labour’s third in three months—to his place and to thank him for advance sight of this important statement.”
“Tragically, a number of innocent civilians were murdered in Kyiv last night. On supporting Ukraine and brave President Zelensky, there has been absolute solidarity between ourselves and the Labour party.”
“On housing numbers, there is no Reform MP present this afternoon, but Reform-led Rochford district council has just published its regulation 19 local plan.”
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“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and good luck in your new role. It is possible to have successful development, but from experience it has to be something done with people and not to people. This policy is the latter. These pernicious top-down targets have the practical effect at ground level of setting one town against another, one village against another and one local community against another; and given the Chancellor’s statement on public spending yesterday, who will pay for the tens of billions of pounds-worth of infrastructure that would be required to make all this work? All experience shows that, on development and house building, the man or woman in Whitehall really does not know best. Why then, is the Secretary of State going back to the old, failed way of doing it, which will not work?”
“As the hon. Lady knows, the new Government have intimated that they may decide to mirror much new EU legislation, which could well have budgetary consequences. She and I have not quite always seen eye to eye on Europe, but does she agree, in that context, that it is actually a bad mistake to do what the Government want to do tonight and abolish the European Scrutiny Committee?”
“I welcome the affirmation of the funding for Ukraine, which I presume was already fully allocated from the Treasury reserve, in the usual way. On the mainstream defence budget, the Chancellor has announced that all departmental spending will now be reviewed every two years. Given the speed at which Whitehall works, this means that the minute one review is finished, work will start on the next. All public spending, particularly capital spending, will effectively be under permanent review. This will not work. How can we commit to 10-year defence programmes, such as the vital new Tempest fighter, if all departmental budgets are up in the air every two years?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way. She is a Foreign Office Minister heading this up, I believe, not a Defence Minister, which is interesting, but it is an international agreement. Can she tell the House whether, because of the threat to the programme from the defence review, she has had any representations from the Japanese Government or the Italian Government, our two other major programme partners, to express their concern about any threat to GCAP?”
“My hon. Friend was a very good Defence Procurement Minister, and we on the Committee liked him because, crikey, he actually answered the questions. He will know from that experience that even the Americans, who have a new thing called the next generation air dominance fighter, are struggling to afford it; there have been media reports in the US that they may even cancel that programme, because even the Americans cannot afford to do everything unilaterally anymore. In the light of that, does my hon. Friend believe that a three-way programme represents good value for money?”
“I was a soldier, but the Royal Air Force has a proud tradition in the defence of this country and its interests, going back to the Battle of Britain and the first world war—when it grew out of the Army, I hasten to say.”
“I would submit that one of the first tasks of the GIGO, working with those industrial partners and the three Governments, is to come up with at least a realistic pricing envelope for the programme, which the Treasury can look at and, hopefully, take a positive view on. If they do not do that, there can be no blank cheque, even for this. To conclude, there is no such thing as an uncancellable defence programme—although I still hope for Ajax—but this comes close. To cancel this programme for short-term financial reasons would be a disaster militarily, politically, diplomatically and industrially. If it comes down to GCAP, AUKUS or Ajax, for me, Ajax has to go, and I say that as a former soldier. We need to understand how extremely serious the implications are of cancelling this programme.”
“The GIGO will have to be a lot leaner and meaner to get the job done. The principal industrial partners—BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Leonardo, among others—will have a real challenge. Historically, the answer to such a dilemma might have been, “Look, it’s a very complicated programme. It will take years to achieve, and it all depends on how many countries join, how many aircraft they buy and what configuration they go for. Will the Saudis participate? Will they want it built in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia if they do participate? There are lots of imponderables, so we will come back to you in about five years’ time with a unit price.” That will not wash.”
“That has averaged roughly £6 billion a year. Again, what would be the threat to our exports and our reputation as a reliable supplier if we were to cancel the programme? What should we do? The GIGO, which this memorandum establishes, will incorporate prominent representatives from all three countries—the UK, Japan and Italy—and it will be headquartered here. If the programme is to survive, which I strongly believe it should, the GIGO has a vital role to play as the management organisation. It will have to be leaner and less bureaucratic than its predecessor organisations, which oversaw the Tornado and Typhoon programmes—two wonderful aircraft with a proud heritage in the Royal Air Force. I think everyone in the industry would admit that those organisations were a bit too bureaucratic.”
“Thirdly, it would make a nonsense of the UK’s so-called tilt to the Pacific, which was inherent to the so-called integrated review and was reinforced when the review was refreshed before the general election. How can we tilt to the Pacific if we then cancel a major collaborative programme with a critical Pacific partner, which faces challenges from Russia and China even more immediately than we do? Bluntly, our name would be mud in that theatre of operations if we were to do that. Fourthly, there is what one might call the prosperity agenda. As they said in the King’s Speech, the Government are very committed to growth—let us not debate building and the green belt now, but focus on this issue. In the last few years, about 80% of the UK’s defence exports have come from combat air—mainly sales of Typhoon or our 15% workshare on the F-35.”
“Secondly, given the scale and the prominence of the programme, there would be a serious risk that we in the United Kingdom would achieve a reputation as an unreliable partner in major military collaborative programmes—everything from AUKUS through to collaboration in space. In an era when things such as a sixth-generation combat aircraft are so expensive that, as I intimated earlier, even the Americans are struggling to afford one on their own, the reality for us as a medium power is that we need to collaborate. We would find it very difficult to find future partners if we suddenly cancelled such an important and sizeable programme for financial reasons.”
“What would be the implications of cancellation of GCAP? This is an international agreement and, as it says in paragraph 7 of the explanatory memorandum: “No external consultation was undertaken as the instrument implements provisions of an international agreement to which the United Kingdom will be obliged to give effect as a matter of international law once it enters into force.” The first implication were we to cancel it is that it would put back Anglo-Japanese relations and Anglo-Italian relations, arguably for decades. I would not want to be the CEO of a British company trying to sell something to the Japanese Government in the aftermath of the cancellation of GCAP.”
“The Japanese have to plan forward against a threat from the Chinese J-20 or the Russian Su-57. The risk is that by the mid-2030s those aircraft will be outmatched by those two powerful new combat aircraft. Reference has been made to the F-35. It is a fine aircraft, but it is expensive to buy and very expensive to run. The Americans have found that to their cost—the F-35 was nicknamed by the American media “the plane that ate the Pentagon”. It might not necessarily be the answer to the Treasury’s dream. Moreover, for the record, deliveries of the F-35 to the United States forces were suspended for nearly a year—they have only just been resumed—because of problems in upgrading the computers and the software. If we are to talk about the realities, the F-35 has been quite a troubled programme and, to some extent, continues to be so.”
“Secondly, we were struck by the willingness of the Japanese to consider third party exports of GCAP to make the aircraft affordable by increasing its production run. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk was always hot on that when he was the procurement Minister. For various historical reasons, I do not think that the Japanese would necessarily have taken that view even a few years ago; that is important. Thirdly, the Japanese have an absolute determination to achieve the in-service date of 2035, which is referred to directly in the memorandum. The Japanese air self-defence force uses a mixture of F-15J Eagle aircraft and the F-2, which is sort of a souped-up version of the American F-16. They are both good and capable aircraft, but they are getting rather long in the tooth.”
“We spoke to politicians, civil servants, industrialists and the Japanese air self-defence force—its military. We were going to write what I believe would have been a very positive report, and then someone went and called a general election. We cannot blame the Minister for that, but she and some of her colleagues did somehow appear to benefit from it. I would like to stress three themes from that trip, which came out strongly. The first was the absolute unanimity of purpose among the Japanese to deliver the programme. As one politician put it to us, “We live in a tough neighbourhood, including three autocracies with nuclear weapons. We need to strengthen our defences, and this programme is fundamental to that.” I think that is a very good summary of the Japanese perspective.”
“The debate takes on some additional resonance, however, because we now have a defence review, which some people have interpreted as a sword of Damocles hanging over this important programme. My fourth welcome is to the new Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who represents a military constituency; it is good to see him in his place, too. A few minutes ago at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister described GCAP as a “really important programme”. It is. It is good that he was able to go to Farnborough, see the mock-up of the aircraft for himself and receive a briefing. When I served on the Defence Committee in the last Parliament, in March 2024 we travelled to Japan to examine the programme as best we could from the Japanese perspective.”
“As today appears to be a day for people taking up nominations, I will gladly accept that and announce that I am going to run—for that Committee. I also point out that in the explanatory memorandum the policy context for the order—this is important—is described as follows: “In December 2022, the Prime Ministers of UK, Japan and Italy launched GCAP to deliver a next generation aircraft by 2035. The signing of the GCAP Convention between the partners took place in December 2023 and was conducted by the respective Defence Secretaries of the three nations. The GIGO will function as the executive body with the legal capacity to place contracts with industrial partners engaged in the GCAP.” So far, so good.”
“] The purpose of the order is laid out clearly in paragraph 4.1 of the explanatory memorandum, which states that it “gives effect to the Convention between the Government of the Italian Republic, the Government of Japan and the Government of the United Kingdom…establishing the Global Combat Air Programme International Government Organisation signed on 14 December 2023”. It points out that “The Convention was negotiated by the Ministry of Defence.” My third welcome is to the Minister; it is good to see her in her place. However, as the convention was nominated by the Ministry of Defence, could she explain for clarity why the FCDO and not the MOD is handling this statutory instrument? The Minister kindly nominated me for a place on the House of Commons Defence Committee.”
“Madam Deputy Speaker, may I begin by congratulating you on your election and welcoming you to the Chair? I am sure that you will chair our proceedings excellently. We wish you all good luck. May I also thank the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) for a fine, fluent and—if I may say so—at times poignant maiden speech? He spoke well on behalf of his constituents. I have it on good authority that when my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) was the procurement Minister, the hon. Member took him on a tour of Brize Norton and helped to brief him on the A400M. My hon. Friend has asked me to pass on his thanks. As a former Army officer, may I say to a former RAF officer what a great pleasure it is to see the RAF turn up on time? There is indeed a first time for everything. [ Laughter.”
“And the Navy, in which my father served, for completeness. The Royal Air Force needs this aircraft. We need it. The Japanese, the Italians and the west need it. By all means, let us control the costs, but let us keep it. We are not going to scrap the Spitfire of the future.”
“The hon. Gentleman is quite right to highlight what happened to TSR-2, which was a generation ahead of its time and a world beater. It was scrapped because the Treasury wanted to buy the F-111 instead, which was an American aircraft, and then it did not end up buying it. There is a lesson from history there too, is there not?”
“On the matter of mandatory housing targets, having been a constituency MP for 23 years and seen them tried in a number of different ways, may I humbly offer the Chancellor this, with all sincerity? There is such a thing as good development, but it only works if it is something that we do with people and not to people. This Stalinist approach will not work.”
“The proposals at a place called Dollymans Farm in my constituency, which I was re-elected with a mandate to oppose, are precisely the opposite of that. We all want to find somewhere suitable and appropriate for people to live, but we have to do that in the right way.”
“That is an issue I campaigned on heavily at the general election, so I hope Heriot will be able to announce something definitive this summer. My message to Heriot is simple: “You have had more than enough time—get on with it.” Finally, over two decades I have seen examples of both good and bad development in my constituency. Young people cannot live at home with their parents into their 50s and 60s, so it must be possible to build some houses in a sustainable manner to meet the housing need. Crucially, however, the infrastructure required to accompany them has to be built first. To put it another way, from long experience, if development is to be successful—and it can be—as I said earlier, it has to be done with people, rather than to people.”
“For commercial reasons Heriot asked me not to name the supermarket in this speech, something I have agreed to respect—although I have to say that the name of the company in question is now effectively an open secret, and was even being reported back to me on doorsteps by my Wickford constituents during the general election. I spoke to the directors of Heriot in advance of this debate, who assure me they are seeking to bring their commercial negotiations to a conclusion as soon as possible. They are well aware of my frustration at these three years of delay, which I conveyed to them again this morning, and they have asked me to relate that they realise that my Wickford constituents have already waited a long while for a new supermarket.”
“Suffice it to say that the site was bought several years ago by a development company named Heriot, which originally came up with a plan in conjunction with the supermarket chain Morrisons to redevelop the store, with an underground car park and some flats above. I always had doubts about the commercial viability of those proposals, especially the underground car park, and the scheme collapsed some months ago. Nevertheless, Heriot is working on what might be called a plan B, and for some months has been in what it describes as “advanced talks” with another major supermarket chain.”
“For the record, I have also been working for some time to try to expand Riverside medical centre in Hullbridge, and I will be pursuing that with the NHS as well. Secondly, the town of Wickford has suffered a dearth of supermarket capacity in recent years. My constituents endured something of a perfect storm last year when the Aldi supermarket was closed, while at the same time the old Co-op nearby has effectively stood semi-derelict for three years. During that supermarket vacuum, my constituents were forced to fall back on the small Iceland in the high street and Wickford market. I was very pleased to reopen the enlarged Aldi last autumn, and it is now doing a brisk trade. However, the Co-op still remains undeveloped and, while boarded up, is occupying valuable spaces in the town’s principal car park. It is a long and complicated saga.”
“In essence, the plan is to expand the practice, with a first-floor extension to create eight new GP consulting rooms and additional training facilities. Rochford district council recently approved planning permission for the extension, and the senior partner, Professor Dr Mahmud, and his active practice management team are now seeking approval from local NHS bosses to support the scheme. It is my intention as the recently re-elected local MP—for which I am very grateful to my constituents—to lend weight to these positive proposals. They are designed not just to expand capacity, but hopefully to provide training places for graduates from the new medical school at Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford.”
“Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for kindly calling me to contribute to this important debate on the King's Speech, after 11 very good maiden speeches and 11 very promising—even fabulous—starts to parliamentary careers. Those who have been in this House a little longer will know that our great friend the late Sir David Amess, whose plaque now rightfully hangs on the wall, had a great talent for managing to combine a very large number of topics into one speech. I lack Sir David’s skill, so I will seek to confine my remarks this evening to three topics, all development related. The first topic relates to an expansion in medical capacity for the NHS, and specifically to proposals to expand the Jones family practice in Hockley. I declare an interest: my wife Olivia has worked in the NHS for nearly 20 years.”
“T6. That is a smart tie you are wearing, Mr Speaker. How can it be that despite spending billions of pounds on 22 A400M aircraft, we have only one available for D-Day 80? If there are more, let us hear about it. Why did we retire a highly reliable aircraft in the Hercules, for a highly unreliable one in the A400M? Have we sold the Hercules aircraft? If we have not, can we put them back in service?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker, I think my hon. Friend the Minister for Defence Procurement may have—inadvertently, I am sure—just misled the House of Commons. Pegasus bridge was captured in a glider-borne assault by the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, not a parachute assault. I know that because I was at the D-day 70 with the then Prime Minister David Cameron at 12.16 am to commemorate the assault. I am sure it was an error by my hon. Friend; no one will want to believe that an MOD Minister tried to change the history of D-day because the aircraft did not work.”
“We in Britain, relative to the size of our Army, have given more military equipment to Ukraine than anyone. We have now given the Ukrainians all our heavy artillery to help them fight. Kharkiv cannot be allowed to fall. But let us be honest: all the kit that the Ukrainians needed to have won this war already—from F-16s to long-range missiles—has been sitting in American storage depots for two years. When will we get it through to the occupant of the White House that if he carries on dithering and the Russians take Kharkiv, not only do the Ukrainians lose, but he loses, too—literally?”
“On the Windsor framework, we told you so. On the judgment itself, legally, all roads lead not to Rome but, in this case, to Strasbourg and the European convention on human rights. The convention was drafted for perfectly honourable reasons in the aftermath of the horror of the second world war, but that was over 70 years ago. It has now clearly been overtaken by events and international migration flows. Has not the time now come for a Conservative Government to include in our election manifesto a clear commitment to seeking to negotiate that convention with our European partners, and, should those negotiations fail, to leave it? If we are not prepared to walk away, they will never take us seriously.”
“I, too, participated in that Westminster Hall debate. For the record, this urgent question has been running for well over half an hour, during which not a single Labour Back Bencher has been present in the Chamber, let alone asked a question, even though we are discussing, in effect, the medical sovereignty of the United Kingdom. As there are a lot of Conservatives in the Chamber, may I say to the Minister that we would probably be better not signing this treaty at all? That is not least because many of us have concerns about malign influences on the WHO. If we were to sign it, although I would rather that we did not, will the Minister give us a cast-iron commitment that we will have a vote—dare I say, a meaningful vote—on it in this House before it comes into force?”
“Well, at least it wasn’t Capita. This will be very worrying for service personnel and their families and for veterans, who will feel disrespected by the fact that the Government seem to have briefed that it was China overnight and then not had the nerve to confirm that in the House today because someone rang up from the Foreign Office and said, “Don’t do that.” When, oh when, will we start standing up to the Chinese in the way that they are clearly not frightened of doing to us?”
“If I heard the Secretary of State correctly, a few minutes ago he said that we have now gifted all our AS-90 howitzers to Ukraine. We are buying 14 new Archers. We are then buying a completely different system based on Boxer, which will take some years to come into service, and our multiple-launch rocket systems are being refurbished. What is he doing to ensure that the British Army is not left without heavy artillery for the next few years, because what he is talking about is a dangerous risk?”
“I appreciate my right hon. Friend’s desire to look forward rather than back but, just for the record, does he remember, as I do, that at one point the Liberal Democrat policy on Trident was to maintain the submarines but to send them to sea without any missiles?”
“Governments should be judged not by what they say, but by what they do. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Wedgetail. If Labour were in government, would it specifically commit to going back to the original five Wedgetail AEW aircraft, rather than the three that are now on order? Is that what Labour would not say, but do?”
“Not only would that come at very little expense, but it would constitute a reserve air wing of up to three squadrons in time of war, not least as the Tranche 1 Typhoon, armed with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and advanced short-range air-to-air missiles, is still more than a match for Russian long-range bombers, which might attempt to assault the UK via the back door over the north Atlantic, carrying multiple long-range cruise missiles.”
“As a comparator, the US keeps thousands of retired combat aircraft, some very recently retired, in a giant desert boneyard, as it is known, in the Mojave desert, in hot and high conditions where aircraft do not rust. The Americans regularly rehearse taking aircraft out of the stockpile and refurbishing them to return them to the frontline. It therefore seems to me that it would be madness to sell off over 20% of our fighter force. Surely it would make much greater sense to put those aircraft into storage, either in the UK or in the Mojave desert, to begin to constitute a warfighting reserve of our own.”
“Moreover, both Russia and China have had a long-standing policy over many decades of putting older equipment into a war reserve that can be drawn on in times of conflict to replenish stocks. That is exactly what the Russians did in the Ukrainian conflict, when they pulled mothballed tanks out of depots from as far away as Siberia, to make up for the very large number of losses of more modern fighting vehicles at the hands of very spirited Ukrainian defenders who, one might add, were armed in many cases with British manufactured NLAWs. Conversely, the UK Ministry of Defence has virtually no concept of a war reserve, although events suggest that we should rapidly be developing one.”
“Considering that the Russian air force still possesses thousands of combat aircraft, that would be an act of absolute folly, and one that I personally have likened to selling off our Spitfires prior to the battle of Britain. As I was told by BAE Systems executives on a visit to Warton a few years ago, because of the extremely complex supply chain that goes into the manufacture of Typhoons, it would take at least four years to build one from scratch, or three years if, as they put it, we hurried it all up in an emergency. If, therefore, the UK were to fight what some strategists describe as a “come as you are” war, in which people have to fight with equipment that is immediately available or can be reconstituted at short notice, there would be no prospect of building additional Typhoons in time to fight.”
“It is true that we might also be able to rely to some degree on NATO assets or other specialist assets from elsewhere, but certainly in terms of fixed NATO radar stations they might also be subject to the same cruise missile attacks, and the precious NATO airborne early warning and control system—AWACS—aircraft could be tasked elsewhere in war. In terms of fighter aircraft for the defence of the UK, the Royal Air Force currently possesses 137 Typhoon aircraft in three tranches, the oldest of which—in tranche 1—are, on present policy, due to be retired in the spring of next year and either cannibalised for parts or sold off to foreign buyers, likely for a pittance compared to their initial acquisition cost.”
“I am pleased to note that in the last few years we have reinvested in some of our radar stations in Scotland and along the east coast, which I warmly welcome. Nevertheless, the experience from Ukraine strongly suggests that if it were ever to come to a shooting war with Russia, which has made great use of mass cruise missile strikes, most of those fixed radar sites would likely be lost to cruise missile attack in the first 24 to 48 hours of hostilities, in addition to threats from ballistic missiles. Against that eventuality, we retain a small number of mobile radars—the number is classified, but it is small.”
“As someone who has previously expressed a great deal of frustration about the bureaucracy and tardiness of our procurement system, I can only wish the Minister for Defence Procurement and the head of DE&S Godspeed in implementing these reforms as fast as possible, particularly as the international outlook continues to worsen. We urgently need a sense of urgency, as it were, and it appears that, finally, we are starting to develop one. All that said, I would like to highlight one area in which I believe we still remain both operationally and strategically vulnerable: the realm of air defence. Given the concentration, over more than 20 years, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we effectively disinvested in the air defence of the United Kingdom relative to other priorities.”
“Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), who is in his place beside me, have discussed several times the need not just to change policy in terms of procurement, but crucially to change culture if the reforms are to have real meaning. I note that the dynamic head of Defence Equipment and Support, Andy Start, when speaking at the Royal United Services Institute recently, explained that the reforms began in March and that the operating model will reach what he calls a “minimal viable product” by the autumn, with the whole programme in full flow by next year.”
“For someone who has always believed that the first duty of Government is the defence of the realm, I warmly welcome what one might call this new type of clear-eyed realism, which now seems to be infusing our defence planning in a way that, at least with regard to wars of necessity, has arguably been absent for many decades. For instance, we are now recreating across Government a national defence plan, akin conceptually to what was considered everyday normal business during the cold war. I hope that I am not betraying a confidence when I tell the House that the Minister for Defence Procurement and I, and others such as my hon.”
“If I were asked to characterise it in one sentence, I would say that it represents moving from a bureaucratic peacetime model of procuring equipment to a much faster wartime model. Indeed, in Poland the Prime Minister spoke powerfully about putting the UK defence industry on to a war footing. That is very much in keeping with the Secretary of State’s speech at Lancaster House in January, in which he said that we are now moving from a post-war to a pre-war world—about which I fear he may yet be proven right. Taken together, this suggests that after years of concentrating on wars of choice—in Iraq or Afghanistan —we are now again focusing on the possibility of having to fight a war of necessity, and perhaps even, ultimately, a war of national survival against an adversary on the scale of Russia and/or China.”
“A lot seems to depend on where we draw the baseline in making the calculation. Nevertheless, the declared increase to 2.5% indisputably represents billions of pounds of extra investment over the six years in question, which helps to send a powerful signal both to our allies and to any potential aggressors that the United Kingdom is prepared to defend itself, its values and its interests, both across the globe and at home. Allied to that, we also had the recent announcement by our very proactive Minister for Defence Procurement of a wholescale reform of how the UK plans to procure its military equipment in future. The new system, known as the integrated procurement model, was announced in February.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to participate in this important and timely debate on defence. It comes at an exciting time for defence, following the Prime Minister’s welcome announcement that we will now increase the UK’s defence spending from a little over 2% of GDP at present—more if we include Ukraine —to 2.5% by the end of the decade. Moreover, that welcome increase is linear in nature, rather than the traditionally back-loaded version, so it provides a solid path against which both our armed forces and our defence industry can appropriately plan. As ever with these announcements, my colleagues on the House of Commons Defence Committee will want to scrutinise in detail the Secretary of State’s claim that that represents an additional £75 billion for defence over the period.”