Defence Spending and Readiness

Al Carns Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Lincoln Jopp]

My right hon. Friend and fellow Scots Guardsman makes a good point. The zeitgeist throughout that period of time was to say, “Look, wars are a thing of the past. We can take risk against defence.” That risk has rarely crystallised, so people have been tempted to take more and more risk.

We have also seen it in the hypothecation of defence spending. I get an Army pension, which contributes to the 2% of GDP being spent on defence. The last time I checked—despite the Minister for the Armed Forces having threatened to mobilise me more than once—my pension was not making a huge contribution to our ability to face down a resurgent Russia.

Everyone was taking risk and passing on that risk to one another. Now, I am afraid, that risk has crystallised in that we do face real enemies, and those enemies are very close. We do have to rearm—I should declare an interest as a founder of the all-party parliamentary group on rearmament—but unfortunately our record on that is not great. The numbers were run the other day and of the 32 NATO members recorded we came 31st for rearmament. The only trouble is, in 32nd is Iceland, which does not have any armed forces. That is not a great record for going over to Europe and trying to convince our European and NATO allies that we are pulling our weight.

One or two other things happened in that period of time. First, the MOD got pretty bloated, in particular in procurement. It is deeply unhelpful that we are now on our third Procurement Minister in less than 22 months, which makes it look like we are not taking it seriously. Equally, it shows no consistency in the building of approach. When the Government came in, they appointed the national armaments director, who will be the second-highest paid civil servant in the country. I hope that he is a massive success. I tried to set up the national armaments director up for success before his appointment by asking two Procurement Ministers whether the director would be given carte blanche to tear up the book when it comes to procurement. One of them said not only would he be given the ability to tear up the book but that they would hold him to account for doing so. I said, “The last thing anyone on the Defence Committee wants is for the national armaments director to come in front of us, after being in post a year, to say, ‘Well, we did want to change things, but I wasn’t really allowed to.’” The way is set fair: the national armaments director can rip up that book.

When the Defence Committee went to Ukraine last year, we were briefed on its procurement structure, which is extraordinary. Ukraine has put together an Amazon-like marketplace with 1,700 sovereign Ukrainian defence companies as suppliers and the customers being the fighting brigades, who simply write a requirement for a new bit of kit. For example, let us say that the Russians have got a new screen so the brigades cannot fly their fibre optically guided munition right into the Russians’ command post and have it blow up on the general’s desk. The brigade simply writes up that requirement, saying “I need a pre-charge of some sort to burst through that screen so I can fly my fibre optic guided missile in and get the baddies.” That gets put out to industry, which churns the problem; the record, from flash to bang—from requirement to kit delivery—is five days. That is what can be achieved.

Hon. Members must look at what is being bypassed to achieve that level of agility: the whole of the military chain of command above brigade level, bypassed; the Ministry of Defence, bypassed; the Treasury, bypassed; and equally, all the regulators, bypassed. That should give the national armaments director a sense of where we have to go to generate the relevance.

I think I heard the Armed Forces Minister—I cannot remember whether it was the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) or the current one—say the other day that it is rather tricky buying drones, because as soon as we have them they go out of date, so we will not buy any. That is pretty defeatist. We should redo the way in which we are thinking about things so that our land forces in Estonia have drones.

[Al Carns (Birmingham Selly Oak) (Lab)]

On my comments on drones, there is a requirement to bring drones into the system so that training tactics, procedures, doctrine and concepts can be taught. The point was about drones going out of date within six weeks. The innovation the hon. Gentleman just talked about was changing so fast that if we were to buy en masse, the drones would be out of date over time. The right context is that there is a requirement to teach and train our armed forces to interoperate with drones.

[Lincoln Jopp]

I thank the former Minister for his intervention. There is a huge challenge to us, in that we have to turn our ploughshares into swords rather than the other way round. We need industry that is sufficiently flexible to flick the switch and turn the lawn mower factory into the drone factory in double-quick time.