Oral Answers to Questions

Gavin Robinson Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Energy security is critical to food security, and the sprint to clean energy is the only way to get off the volatile international fossil fuel markets, cut bills and deliver energy security. Since we came into office, over £90 billion of investment into clean energy industry has come in, powering millions of homes. The Tories and Reform would throw all that away and cling to the failed policy that put everyone’s bills up throughout their reign.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

I associate myself and my colleagues with the Prime Minister’s remarks about Sarah Everard and about Iran.

My colleagues and I support our armed forces, but we lament how diminished the UK has appears over the past week among our allies and within the middle east. The Prime Minister is not responsible for our armed forces being able to squeeze into Wembley Park and Ibrox, but he is responsible for our posture. He is responsible for ignoring the request to deploy a Type 45 destroyer to the region two weeks ago, and we now learn that HMS Dragon will not leave, has not left and will not be in place to defend Cyprus for over a week.

Will the Prime Minister understand that I welcome the commitment for increased defence spending, but if we are planning only to get to 2.5% by 2027, it is not enough? It needs to be reconsidered. He needs to go faster where others before him did not, and he needs to take these steps not just for the protection of our values across the world, but for the protection of our consumers who are impacted by this conflict today.

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Member will have heard me set out what we did by way of pre-deployment, working in conjunction with and liaising with the US. So he understands the context in which those pre-deployments were put in place, and I think they speak for themselves as to why they were put in those places.

In relation to defence spend, obviously we are increasing it to 2.6% of GDP—that is £270 billion over the Parliament—but as I said in the speech I gave in Munich just a couple of weeks ago, we are going to have to spend more and faster after the years of under-investment and troop cuts that—[Interruption.] The Conservatives were the ones who hollowed this out. They were the ones who reduced the size of the Army. They were the ones who did not spend what was necessary on defence. Like everything else they left in such a mess, we are clearing it up, and through our strategic defence review we will make Britain safer.