Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness

Amanda Martin Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mike Martin]

The original sin is divorcing the strategic defence review from the DIP—divorcing the vision from the resources. For the past year, the Department has been arguing first with itself about whether it can downgrade some of the things in the strategic defence review—there are a couple of instances where that has happened, which I will come on to—and then with the Treasury to get more money to fill the gap. Effectively, it wrote a vision that was far too grand for the money that was ever going to be available.

Let me turn from the money to the metal and have a look at some of the capabilities. I could give a very long speech on military analysis about which capabilities should be in or out, but I will not do that. I think it would test—[Interruption.] I know that right hon. and hon. Members would like me to do that; perhaps I will set up a Substack or something.

Let us look at the Royal Navy—the senior service. At the turn of this century—as someone born in 1982, I still feel weird saying that—the UK had 20 frigates. By the end of this year, we will have five. Pre-DIP, they were scheduled to go out of service in 2035. In a little-noticed line in the DIP, we are bringing forward that date. All five frigates, which have well exceeded their service date, are going in 2033. Their replacements, the Type 26s and the Type 23s, will come into service—you guessed it—in 2030-35. We therefore have old ships retiring on a fixed schedule and new ships coming in on an unfunded one. My back-of-a-fag-packet maths—probably the same quality of analysis goes into the MOD under this Government—shows that we will have three frigates in 2030, the year, according to our intelligence assessments, of maximum Russian threat against NATO. We need a frigate to protect our cables, another to get the carrier group out to sea, and another for our deterrent. According to the rule of three—for every three ships, we have only one at sea at any one time—that is nine frigates. If anything kicks off in the middle east or anywhere else, there is no contingency plan. We can see straightaway that there is a huge gap—the frigate gap, as many call it—and the DIP has made it much worse.

The picture with our current Type 45 destroyers and their replacements is not much better. Our Type 45s primarily provide air defence. One was parked in the Thames estuary to defend the Olympics in 2012 because we do not have any other air defence. They go out of service from 2035. Their replacements are supposed to be crewed common combat vessels such as mother ships. Various autonomous ships, which provide missiles, sensors or underwater and above-water support, are meant to be arranged around them. A whole fleet of different ships is therefore meant to replace the destroyers and some other elements of our Navy. That is the hybrid Navy that was much touted last week in the media coverage of the DIP.

I am totally in favour of moving towards autonomy as fast as we can. However, it is worth saying that the maritime domain, particularly the High North, is the most difficult in which to do autonomy. I have spent a lot of time at sea and I can tell hon. Members that everything breaks all the time. There is a reason why the maritime domain is the last to be autonomised. We started with air because that is predictable and quite easy to do, although the aircraft still do not fly in bad weather. We then moved to the ground stuff for picking up casualties and dropping off ammunition. However, the new ships—the common combat vessels—are simply PowerPoints at the moment, yet we expect to move from PowerPoints to power projection on the high seas in nine years with not just one class, but several classes of ships that have to work together. That seems quite risky to me. If we take what is happening to the frigate fleet and what is happening to the destroyer fleet together, it is fair to say that the DIP spells the end of the Royal Navy as we know it.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

rose—

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

rose—

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[Mike Martin]

I will make some progress because I am having eyes made at me by Madam Deputy Speaker.

The DIP commits £8.6 billion to the global combat air programme, which is the sixth-generation fighter jet that we are building with Italy and Japan. Realistically, we will get the jets in service sometime after 2040. They are manned fighter jets. I ask hon. Members to cast their minds forward to beyond Putin’s death—he will probably be buried by that point—and ask themselves whether, in 2040, humans will be flying fighter jets. I think the answer is no. The Minister is a former pilot, so he will always argue for humans in fighter jets, but I will present my argument.

When we dig into GCAP, we find that it is a crewed rather than an uncrewed system because that is what our Japanese partners wanted.

[Amanda Martin]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Mike Martin]

I am afraid that I will not because I want to make progress.

We are privileging a good diplomatic relationship, which would weather the storm of our pulling out of GCAP, over military capability. We must consider whether we want manned fighter jets in 2040 or a Royal Navy right now. Do we want frigates and destroyers in the next four years? Do we want to transition effectively, in a funded way, to a hybrid Navy, or manned fighter jets in 2040?

The same story is repeated wherever we look: deep precision strike missiles are due in the early 2030s; nuclear-enabled F-35As are due in the early 2030s; putting 76,000 soldiers in the British Army to reverse the Tory cuts is an investment through to 2035. [Interruption.] I know that hon. Members were waiting for that—I had to get one little elbow in the ribs. Time and again, the capability that the threat demands by 2030 is scheduled for after 2030, funded by a spending review that has not happened and has been signed off by no one.

That leaves one final question: does the current Prime Minister believe his own threat assessment? If he does and he is not funding it—not putting his money, or our money, where his mouth is—that is highly negligent. Perhaps he does not believe his own intelligence chiefs’ assessments and those of his partners. In that case, he should tell us. I fear that future generations will look back at this Labour Government’s approach to defence with their heads in their hands.

--- Later in debate ---

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

We live in an increasingly unstable world. From Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine to the conflict in the middle east, the threats to our national security have grown, and families across the country have felt the consequences through higher bills and rising prices. We cannot afford to ignore the reality of the world we face, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) so eloquently put it, the question we need to address is this: “What does warfighting readiness actually mean to this Government, to our forces and to our country?”

It is worth reminding the House and our constituents—as it would not have been thought from the opening speeches today—that this Government inherited armed forces that had been hollowed out by years of under-investment, overstretch and a failure to keep pace with modern warfare. Let me point out to the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) that this destruction was a result of initiatives such as the coalition Government’s 2011 defence basing review, which reduced the number of times our Type 45s were serviced, thus giving us this challenge.

Ships, aircraft and tanks, and indeed personnel, are not built overnight, so I am proud that this Labour Government are beginning to put that right—and to put it right across Government, because this is not just the role of the Ministry of Defence. This Government deserve credit for changing course. Over the next four years, we will invest £298 billion in defence. The defence investment plan will help us to modernise our armed forces by investing in drones and autonomous systems, building at least six new warships, and strengthening the capabilities that our services need to respond to today’s security challenges. It reflects and learns from the lessons of recent conflicts, and ensures that our defence capabilities will keep pace with the changing nature of war. Although I do not agree with the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells that this is too little too late, I do agree that we need to move and ensure that the sector is more rapidly equipped for national security and for growth.

We know that increasing defence spending alone is not enough. We also need stronger industrial bases and a system that allows for swift procurement, and that means backing British defence manufacturers and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises with better access to finance so that they can grow and create skilled jobs and apprenticeships and strengthen our national resilience. In my constituency, for instance, defence jobs and national security go hand in hand.

That is why I would like to ask the Minister whether the Government will look again at joining the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank. Spearheaded by Prime Minister Carney in Canada, the DSRB could help unlock private investment for the defence sector and support the industrial capacity that our armed forces really need. We should seize every opportunity to work with our allies to strengthen our defence industrial base, and we should seize every opportunity to ensure that we can not only have research and development here, but have the opportunity to scale up British companies so that they choose to invest and grow here and not abroad.

Defence is about far more than equipment and technology. Our greatest strength is the people who serve this country. That is why, as well as improving defence design and manufacturing, we must continue to improve the support that those people receive. When we extend the armed forces covenant across Government, we must ensure that our people know about it, and we must continue to deliver the £9 billion defence housing strategy to improve service homes. As I have constantly argued, we should also seek to improve paternity service leave for fathers and families. If we are serious about national security, we must also be serious about recruiting, retaining and supporting the people who keep our country safe.

Britain faces significant security challenges, and meeting them requires sustained investment, a strong defence industry, and a firm commitment to those who serve our country. It also requires—as my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) so brilliantly argued—an open and honest conversation with the public, so that citizens in the United Kingdom can really understand what warfighting readiness means; so that they can understand the challenges and the very real threats that we face in the UK, the priorities that we may need to make, and the misinformation and dangers that the cyber world holds out there. These are conversations that we know are happening in our allied countries, such as Norway and Finland—conversations that will make us all warfighting ready.

This Labour Government are rebuilding our armed forces, they are backing British defence jobs, and they are strengthening our national security for the future. Much has been done, and there is still much more to do, but I have every faith that we as a Labour Government will rise to the challenge.