Cabinet Office

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)]

This debate is very timely, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing it. In recent months, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy has been joined by an ever-growing and increasingly anxious chorus of voices despairing at the Government’s failings on national security. Lord Robertson, who this Government commissioned and asked to lead the strategic defence review, warned in April that Britain’s security was “in peril” due to the “corrosive complacency” that was being shown towards defence. He went so far as to accuse the Treasury of “vandalism”.

Earlier this month, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey) resigned as Defence Secretary. He was clear that the reason was a defence investment plan—which, it appears, The Times newspaper has also had sight of—that did not give the armed forces “the resources they need”. He was followed out of the door by the Armed Forces Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), who said that the Government’s plans were

“neither transformative enough nor sufficiently funded.”

Given that the hon. Member had served in our armed forces, one would have thought that his warning might have been heeded.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Bearing in mind an item that has appeared in the news reports today, does my hon. Friend agree that either the right hon. Gentleman or the hon. and gallant Gentleman to whom she has just referred would be a far more suitable future Secretary-General of NATO than the present Prime Minister, whose lack of proper funding of a defence policy—among other deficiencies—has led him to be looking for a new job?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alicia Kearns]

I always found the former Defence Secretary to be very decent in how he engaged, how he worked across parties and how seriously he took the job. I do not think there is a vacancy for the NATO Secretary-General for at least another eight years, but the current Prime Minister, who has taken us from third place to 12th in NATO defence spending in the past couple of years, would not be the right man to lead NATO at this time or any other.

The shadow hanging over this whole state of affairs is the defence investment plan. It was due for publication in autumn 2025, and we have not yet seen it. As a NATO member, we are committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence and national security by 2035, with 3.5% on core defence and 1.5% on national security and resilience. Let us review where the Government are. On rearmament and the progress towards 3.5% and 1.5%, we are second to last—31st out of 32 NATO members. We have only moved to that place in the past year. We best only Iceland, a country that has no armed forces at all. That is where the Government have left us on the road to rearmament. On defence spending as a percentage of GDP, we have gone from third in 2021 to 12th this year. Both those things are on the Labour Government.

The failure of this Government to properly fund our core defence is not just a disaster, but an international humiliation, and the very same pattern is playing out across national security and resilience. Lord Harris, the chair of the National Preparedness Commission, has said that funds for these vital areas are currently being treated as a “creative accountancy exercise”. When we look at the figures before us today, we can see what he means. I recognise the headline increase in the Cabinet Office’s security-focused expenditure, but the vast bulk of that additional £130 million is simply the integrated security fund being moved from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office. It is not new money; it is the same money in a different pocket. Meanwhile, the figure that tells the real story is the budget for the national security secretariat, which has been cut to £18.9 million—down from £34.4 million last year. That has nearly halved—at a moment like this.

While little detail has been given to us to scrutinise, it is clear that Cabinet Office spending on national security and resilience is not at the level required, and nor will it match the threats that we face. I will press the Minister on specific areas shortly, but let us check in on whether some past commitments. Have they been fulfilled—or, like the defence investment plan, are they languishing out of sight, underfunded and promised but never delivered?

In February, the former Security Minister, the right hon. Member for Barnsley North (Dan Jarvis), promised a one third increase to the integrated security fund for Indo-Pacific threats: primarily, the Chinese Communist party. There is no sign of that increase. We were promised a £17 million increase in counter-terrorism funding and a further £10 million to address organised crime by the end of 2026-27. Are the Government on track to deliver those things, or have they, too, been quietly forgotten?

I will turn to the specific areas that demand the attention of the House. The first is cyber-security. As we have heard from various Members, 40% of British businesses have suffered a cyber-attack or breach over the past year, including iconic names such as Marks and Spencer, and Jaguar Land Rover. The Government brought forward the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill, which was welcome, but it was not sufficient. Indeed, it failed to name the threat of the Chinese Communist party. Extraordinarily, it excluded central and local government computer systems from its scope. The very systems that hold our citizens’ data have been left outside the Bill. What investment is being made to bolster our cyber-defences, and is that funding rising?

Secondly, the JCNSS reported last September on the risk of our undersea cables being targeted by hostile states. They carry 99% of our data. They are the arteries of our economy and our daily life. Closer co-operation with Joint Expeditionary Force nations, especially Norway, has been welcomed across this House, but specific plans and any funding remain elusive. These cables carry everything that we do, and there is no plan to protect them. When will funding come forward to do so?

Thirdly, we have discussed the covid pandemic today, and the inquiry that followed, which laid bare the need for a greater focus on biosecurity. The Government promised that it would publish the Cabinet Office’s plan for biological emergencies this spring. That deadline has, like many others, been missed. When will those plans finally appear, and when will the £1 billion promise to establish a network of national biosecurity centres come into being?

Fourthly, on our critical national infrastructure, Putin’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine and the brutality that Russia has industrialised should serve as a warning. The Russian military has deliberately targeted power infrastructure—substations, pylons and cables. Drone warfare has made our energy networks a target for terrorists and hostile states. As the Member for Rutland and Stamford, I am dismayed by the Government’s plans to put a string—mile upon mile—of pylons across eastern England. One single drone could plunge huge swathes of our country into darkness, and Google Maps literally provides an online map—a targeting plan for anyone who wishes us harm. We have the capability to lay those cables underground. Instead, the Government have chosen to sacrifice our security to save a few pounds, when we should be learning from Putin’s daily attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure.

The fifth area—this matters more than any other line, and it has been discussed by every single Member—is whole-of-society resilience. The threats that we discuss cannot be tackled by Government alone, and it would be foolish to suggest so. They demand that each and every one of us is prepared and able to play our part, but the Government therefore have to kick off the national conversation that they promised. Here we must be honest that the failure is not Labour’s alone.

I agree with the chair of the JCNSS, the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington, that since the Iraq war it has suited the political class to say to the public, “You don’t need to worry about national security or foreign policy—don’t you worry your little heads; we’ve got it under control.” We have taught a generation or two that danger is someone else’s problem, that resilience is a job for the state, and that citizens do not need to think about it at all. We have allowed the public to abdicate their personal responsibility, be that choosing whether or not to be on TikTok—get off it!—the purchases they make or the way they live their lives. That is a fatal arrow in the heart of our national resilience. When the crisis comes—and it will come—a people who have never been asked to prepare will not suddenly know how to be ready.

The Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee in the Lords, the JCNSS and the National Preparedness Commission have all called for a single, simple step: the appointment of a chief resilience officer to co-ordinate across Government. It is a sensible suggestion and I am not sure why it has been ignored. That role would look at protecting everything, whether that is our research, our innovation, our education, our universities, our genomics, our charities or the information environment, and it would tackle such things as the use of organised crime, which led to that heinous attack on our Prime Minister. That has been exploited by foreign states, which have misconstrued what took place to harm the Government. That is a shameful state of affairs, and I agree that we should have discussed it more.

I will now turn to China. Before the election, Labour promised to take China to the international courts over the genocide of the Uyghurs, which is an issue that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I have spoken about consistently in this place. The Government promised a full audit of China policy to guide strategy across every Department, yet the China audit was never published, its contents have never been shared with this House, and we are now in a situation where the National Security Adviser travels regularly to Beijing to meet Chinese Communist party officials. We only find out about those meetings because the Chinese Communist party publishes press releases. It is more transparent than our own Government, and that is not least because the National Security Adviser will not appear before this Parliament, unlike all his predecessors, to face justice—apologies, to face scrutiny. Well, both actually, because does our country not deserve to know that things are being done right? How can we know that they are being done right, that our country is being protected, and that hostile states are being held to account, if there is no scrutiny?

Our own Government keep quiet while preparing to pay billions to surrender sovereignty over the Chagos islands, and the protections that we put in place are not used. We passed the National Security Act 2023 precisely to counter the threat from hostile states, yet Labour refuses to put China in the enhanced tier, and the results speak for themselves. In July, it will be one year since the foreign interference registration scheme came into force. How many organisations or companies have registered as working for China on the foreign influence risk register? Not one. Three have registered as working for Republika Srpska, a tiny little entity within Bosnia, but no one says they are getting any money from the Chinese state. Have there been any investigations about this failure of anyone to register themselves? No. Have there been any prosecutions? No. Why? It is because the Government are too busy wooing the Chinese Communist party to deter it.

When the Prime Minister went to Beijing, he even met Cai Qi, the very man who had been running a spy network targeting this Parliament. The Prime Minister did not apologise for doing so; he seemed to think it was the right thing to do. Since that case collapsed last year, there have been zero repercussions for the Chinese Communist party for spying on this Parliament. That is not deterrence; it is rewarding a state that attacked our Parliament. Why are this Government content to let our own laws be flouted by Beijing?

Let us be honest about what has been described. A retailer that sells our groceries has been halted by hostile actors. A car maker that employs thousands of our constituents has been brought to its knees. Undersea cables carrying 99% of our data have been shadowed and mapped by Russian vessels. A spy network was run from Beijing against our own Parliament. Our Prime Minister was attacked. Luckily, he and his family were not hurt, but the Government answer all this with a transferring of budgets, missed deadlines and an audit they will not publish.

These are not isolated incidents. We are not at peace, but we may not be in the same state of war as our grandparents would have recognised. There is no declaration, no frontline, no army massing on our borders—thankfully—but make no mistake: we are under sustained, deliberate and co-ordinated attack every single day. Call it what you will, but previous generations understood their duties when the nation was under threat, and they put our country on a war footing. They found the money, told the public the truth, and did not hide behind “creative accountancy”—not my words, but those of an expert. We are 31st out of 32. We have a National Security Secretariat that has been cut in half. There is no resilience officer, no investment plan, and no published audit. That is not the posture of a country that knows it is under attack. So my challenge to the Minister is simple: fund what must be funded, and protect what must be protected.

Given that this is a debate about the money, let me end by asking about what the figures cannot show. Once we strip out the transfers of function and the accounting changes, what is the real-terms trajectory of spending on the security and resilience functions of the Cabinet Office? If it is rising, by how much and how fast is it rising? The first duty of the state is to protect its people, and on the evidence before us today, based purely on the figures, it is a duty in which the Government are failing. History will not forgive those who saw the danger, named it and looked away. We therefore hope that the Government will take away our request and act to fund our defence, fund our national security, and step up and fund our national resilience.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

The hon. Lady points out that adaptation is a cross-Government, cross-departmental thing. The way that the UK Government are organised means that Departments that are responsible for school buildings or transport deal with the adaptation issues that crop up in those Departments. I do not disagree with the hon. Lady’s analysis, but while the Cabinet Office does have a co-ordinating role, I do not necessarily think that having a Minister co-ordinating it would make an awful lot of difference.

[Alicia Kearns]

Since as early as 2013, when I was working with the Cabinet Office—specifically with the Joint Intelligence Organisation and others—climate change has been included in the matrix that it is required to plan for, respond to and seek to mitigate from a national security perspective. It is very much reflected in the national —I have forgotten the exact words, but it is the one that does not have an acronym. That is what happens when you work on something for too long. Climate change is in there and has been in there for a very long time, even way back when I was a civil servant.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

The hon. Lady is correct, and she talks about mitigation. There is also an adaptation issue here, which I was addressing, but clearly the cross-departmental nature of co-ordination happens within the Cabinet Office.

Our country’s resilience is front and centre of our approach to national security. Without security and resilience at home, we cannot deliver economic growth or any of our other missions to improve the lives of the British people.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) gave a good speech about what happens if corruption is allowed to get out of hand and people who defraud the public purse of money are allowed to get away with it. I thank him for asking important questions about Tom Hayhoe’s recommendations. I promise to make inquiries with colleagues in Government, and commit to writing to him about the specific issues that he raised in his speech.

The Government inherited a resilience landscape that had too often been neglected, leaving our nation exposed to the shocks of an increasingly volatile world. The resilience action plan, published last July, sets out the Government’s strategic approach to creating a stronger and more resilient UK, and the steps being taken to deliver it. We face a rapidly changing global risk landscape. From severe weather to geopolitical instability, the risks are complex and numerous. We must be honest with the public about the challenges while demonstrating our resolve to address them head-on, and we have to strike a balance by giving an appropriate warning without panicking people. Building a truly resilient society requires a fundamental cultural shift in the way that emergency preparedness is thought about. That includes being clear about the risks we face and the actions that we can all take to improve collective resilience, as the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) said from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench.

In summary, our No. 1 priority is to keep the country safe. The Government are undertaking plenty of work within our own shores to strengthen our stance, which is further bolstered by our unshakeable commitment to Europe-wide security. That responsibility has been spread right across the Government, and it is emblematic of the good work that can come when collaboration is at the heart of planning. Thanks to this work, the risk landscape is not an unknown country; we have made it familiar terrain through rigorous mapping of what could harm us and our citizens, and of what our response should be. It is through level-headed planning that we will create resilience at home and, through that work, create a secure foundation for families, businesses and economies to thrive.