Defence Readiness

Debate between Amanda Martin and James Cartlidge

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend has remarkable foresight, because I will be coming to the Chagos issue.

This is the key point: had the Prime Minister held his nerve and reformed the benefits system, toughening the rules for working-age benefits and keeping the two-child limit, as was his previous position, he could have found the billions to fund defence rather than entrenching welfare dependency even further. Given this total failure of nerve from the Prime Minister, he had some brass neck to use his response to the King’s Speech last Wednesday to accuse us of “defence austerity”. Let me remind the House that last year the Government insisted on £2.6 billion-worth of reductions to the Ministry of Defence budget. This year, they are insisting on a further £3.5 billion of cuts. They will say that they were the last Government to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence, in 2010, but they always omit the caveat that when that same Labour Government came to power in 1997, they inherited defence spending from us at 3%.

Indeed, in talking about so-called austerity, this Government also conveniently forget that the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that, had Labour won the election in 2010, it was planning to cut 25% from the defence budget. At least their Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time had the good grace to leave a note confessing that there was no money left, once again relying on us to clear up the mess of a Labour Government who had run out of other people’s money, not for the first time in history.

The worst thing about Labour’s resorting to history is that it is completely irrelevant. I have repeatedly accepted that defence spending fell under successive Governments since the end of the cold war. That is irrefutable, but it was because the world we lived in was one where we thought peace would last. Today, however, the threat is completely transformed and, instead of looking back, the public want us to confront the challenges we face right now, to be ready for battle and above all to be honest about the choices needed to find the cash for defence. That is why we have started to set out fully funded steps towards spending 3% of GDP on defence, as was last achieved under a Conservative Government.

Let us take the example of Chagos, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) did in his very good intervention. Labour Members may delude themselves that, like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, their Chagos deal is merely resting, and pining for the archipelago, but we know that the deal is dead. It is an ex-treaty. Even if they disagree, with no treaty legislation in the King’s Speech, it must be clear even to them that the hundreds of millions of pounds due to be sent to Mauritius during this Parliament, primarily from the Ministry of Defence budget, must now be available to be spent elsewhere.

That is why, earlier this month in Portsmouth, the Leader of the Opposition and I set out that we would use Labour’s Chagos cash for a better purpose: accelerating the construction of the 13 frigates being made in Scotland that we ordered when we were in government. The fact is, there is no other way to address the serious shortage of surface ships in the short term than by accelerating the build of those 13 fantastic new warships. Indeed, just a few days after we set out our policy to do exactly that, lo and behold, HMS Iron Duke was withdrawn from service, confirming the urgent need to act on defence readiness and to be willing to divert cash from elsewhere.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Member agree that, had his Government not got rid of shipbuilding in my city but instead put some plans into place, we may well have been able to continue to build ships there? Instead, they decimated it and left us with three incompetent Portsmouth Ministers.

[James Cartlidge]

I think the hon. Lady would be better focusing on the Type 45 destroyers. The former Labour Government were meant to order 12 Type 45s, but they slashed that order in half to just six. Worse than that, in an act of genius they inserted an engine that did not even work and we had to spend years trying to replace it through the power improvement project.

On the issue of welfare and defence funding, we have been the first party to explicitly set out how we would reduce benefit expenditure to increase defence spending, with confirmation that we would restore the two-child benefit cap and use the savings for our military. We have also set out plans to move £2 billion a year of research and development funds from other Government Departments to fund drones and drone tech across the board. However, if we are to become the world leader in uncrewed warfare that I still believe we can be, not least after our extraordinary support for Ukraine, we do not just need our services to have the cash to test and train; we also need to invest billions into transforming our defence industrial base.

Armed Forces Bill

Debate between Amanda Martin and James Cartlidge

2nd reading
Monday 26th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

The hon. Gentleman hits the nail on the head, and I need add nothing further. We all agree and we pay tribute to all those who served in Afghanistan.

Moving on to the Bill, given its necessity to ensure that we have functioning armed forces, we will not seek to divide the House. Indeed, on national security, we should always strive for consensus where possible, as has particularly been the case on Ukraine. We have presented a united Parliament to our adversaries, which should be a source of national pride. However, as with any major piece of legislation, there will be many issues of detail that we will want to tease out in detailed scrutiny in Committee.

While we inevitably have concerns about the underlying issue of defence funding, there are many aspects of the Bill that we support in principle. In particular, I welcome the Government’s commitment to strengthening the armed forces covenant. Having been the party that first introduced the covenant, it will be of no surprise that we support moves to strengthen both its purpose and delivery. That said, when it comes to our veterans, we remain resolute in our total opposition to the Government’s policy in respect of those who served in Operation Banner to protect all of us from terrorism. The House surely cannot ignore the fact that as we debate this Bill, which is designed to strengthen our armed forces, Labour continues in parallel with its plan to repeal our legacy Act—the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023—and threaten a new era of vexatious claims against former soldiers. It is fair to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) will say more about that in his winding-up speech.

On the Bill’s proposals relating to the service justice system, there is recognition on both sides of the House that we have massive lessons to learn. Work to improve the system began under the previous Government, as the Secretary of State recognised. After publication of the Atherton report, which identified cultural failings in the forces, the then Secretary of State, Ben Wallace, took steps to enforce changes so that we could better protect women in the armed forces. In 2022 we introduced a series of new policies—for example, clamping down on unacceptable sexual behaviour by introducing a zero-tolerance approach and banning instructor-trainee relationships of any sort. We also established the defence serious crimes unit. As a result of the changes we made, more people have been empowered to come forward, and service personnel who have breached those policies have been discharged or convicted as a direct result.

I particularly welcome the steps in the Bill to ensure that the service justice system protects victims of the most serious offences from further harm. The reality is that implementing cultural change in any large organisation does not happen overnight, but we will work with the Government in the forthcoming sittings on the detail of their proposals to ensure that we find a better way to deliver justice in the armed forces.

Let me move on to the proposed changes to the reserve forces. I pay tribute to all those serving as reservists, including, as was pointed out, those on Operation Interflex—they are a critical part of our fighting strength. That said, given the heightened threat level that we face today, we can surely all recognise that nations geographically closer to the Russian threat, such as Finland, draw a major part of their overall military strength and, thereby, conventional deterrence from possessing a large and active reserve.

As such, it is important that we understand more of the detail about the Government’s plans to increase the number of active reservists by 20%. That is stated in the strategic defence review, but with a vague timeline—

“most likely in the 2030s”.

We can all see that there is a big difference between 2031 and 2039, and that the threat we face is nearer. In his winding-up speech, can the Minister for the Armed Forces tell us if that will be in the next Parliament or the one after that?

We also welcome proposals to make reservist life more flexible, particularly incentivising regulars to stay in the reserves as they explore new careers. In fact, that is exactly what was suggested in the Haythornthwaite review, which was commissioned under the previous Government and delivered by my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison). It made the important recommendation for so-called zig-zag careers, enabling far greater flexibility between reserve and regular service. We welcome that and will look at it further.

Let me move on to the Bill’s proposals for armed forces accommodation. Buying back the defence estate was my top strategic priority as Minister for Defence Procurement.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

You didn’t do it!

[James Cartlidge]

The hon. Lady says from a sedentary position that I did not do it. The deal was done in 1996. Who was in government between 1997 and 2010 and did nothing about this issue?

Let me speak openly. When I got the job, I went to visit defence accommodation. As I have said many times, I was ashamed, but I said, “I am going to do something about this.” My former colleague Jeremy Quin, who was the Minister before me, had brought test cases, but there was no work, and nothing had happened under successive Governments. I started the work with the Treasury and with people across Government. That deal, which took a heck of a lot of negotiation, was under negotiation with the Annington group when the general election came.