Defence Spending and Readiness

Lincoln Jopp Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Pinkerton]

The money is there. If we do not spend it up front, we end up spending it further down the line in not only treasure but blood.

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Dr Pinkerton]

I am going to make some progress.

The Liberal Democrat amendment recognises the reality that I have outlined on Europe, the United States, and Britain’s role at the heart of European defence. It speaks of the scale of the threat, the urgency of investment, and the need for deeper, pragmatic co-operation with European allies. The threats facing the United Kingdom are the greatest since the end of the cold war.

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[Dr Pinkerton]

The right hon. Gentleman clearly knew exactly the structure that I would adopt today.

This is where the consensus briefly ends. I contend that the Conservatives’ Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 failed victims, survivors and veterans alike. It removed legal avenues for justice, eroded public trust and, through its conditional amnesty, established a shameful equivalence between British service personnel and members of the IRA. Key provisions were found to be incompatible with the European convention on human rights, which matters because a country that asks its armed forces to serve with honour must legislate with honour, too. The ECHR is too often characterised as a threat to those who serve, but in truth it helps to protect service personnel, families and veterans who seek accountability when the state has failed in its duty, and withdrawing from it would remove a vital safeguard and route to justice for victims and families, such as those in the Snatch Land Rover case.

This is where the consensus returns. The Liberal Democrats are firmly on the side of veterans, which is why we voted against the carry-over motion for the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. As drafted, the Bill lacks the safeguards that veterans deserve, including protection against repeated investigations without genuinely new evidence. The Government’s Bill should be human rights compliant and rooted in transparency and independent oversight, upholding victim’s rights while importantly ensuring that no process is used to discredit those who serve with honour and integrity.

[Lincoln Jopp]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Given what he is saying about Northern Ireland, would he support a private Member’s Bill that would set out in law that there should be no further investigations, inquiries, inquests or prosecutions unless, in the view of a Supreme Court judge, new and compelling evidence has come to light? If so, I can only recommend that he come to the Chamber on 4 September, when my Northern Ireland Troubles (Criminal Investigations etc) Bill will have its Second Reading.

[Dr Pinkerton]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman—my near neighbour and friend—for his intervention. The private Member’s Bill that he describes sounds entirely consistent with the argument that I am making today. I shall take the opportunity to study the precise wording of the Bill before fully committing to it, but it certainly sounds consistent with my argument today, and I am grateful to him for bringing it to my attention.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) and I have engaged extensively with veterans associations. The amendments we will propose reflect their concerns by calling for enhanced oversight and the protection of veterans’ rights.

At a time of acute threat, our military needs urgent restoration, but Labour has previously moved too slowly to undo the damage. The delay to the defence investment plan has created uncertainty for our armed forces, our industry and our allies. I note that His Majesty’s Opposition failed yesterday to back our new clause 22 to the Armed Forces Bill, which would have required a report into the damage done to British business by the delay to the DIP. That was a missed opportunity.

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[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie), who was speaking a great deal of sense? He mentioned the threat that we face in the High North. He might be interested to know that the Defence Committee was in Norway last week. We went up to the Arctic circle, to the Combined Air Operations Centre at Bodø, where we were told an extraordinary story. When the forces there were doing a security exercise, they put a baddie on the roof of a sangar near the air base’s gate, and took a dog round to find the baddie. The dog did not want to know about the bloke they had put on the roof of the sangar; he would not stop indicating an issue with the sangar itself. He kept on indicating, “There’s something there.” They thought, “Oh blimey, we’d better go and get the keys.” They got the keys and found a Chinese spy, who had been in there for a week. He was arrested and is doing time in prison in Norway—pre-trial, I believe, on remand. That brings home exactly what the hon. Member said: we are talking about real threats and real enemies, and in that case, they were are literally at the gate.

I joined the Army in 1986, and it generously paid for me to go to university to study theology and philosophy—that was very broad-minded of it at the time. I went back to Sandhurst to confirm my commission in 1989. That was a significant moment. I was on college guard, polishing my boots, as I watched the Berlin wall fall. I did not really understand that the geopolitical glue that had helped keep the world safe for the last 40 years was coming unstuck, or what the implications might be for Officer Cadet Jopp, but the implications were certainly there. Those bonds, which had kept the cold war in stasis, did indeed start to melt, and that meant that I had a very busy military career.

I went to war when the Conservatives were in power, and when Labour was in power. I have had poor equipment. Both sides of the House have been responsible for part of what happened following 1989, as we started to manage decline. Do not get me wrong: I am so proud of the men and women of our armed forces, particularly those I led. I buried men from my regiment, and I try not to forget to always pay tribute to them and what they did; it enabled me to stand here and be their voice today. Essentially, from the end of the cold war, successive Governments started to take risks. This ticking time bomb has been passed on from Government to Government. Bad luck, Labour: it has gone off on this Government’s watch; that is the fact of it. Essentially, a very big lie has been told to the British public; they have been told that we can have the defence we want at the price that we are prepared to pay for it.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does he recall that at the end of the cold war a paper was written by Francis Fukuyama called “The End of History?”? Does he agree that on the basis of that, everybody believed somehow that no longer would there be war, no longer would there be pressure and no longer would we need armed forces? That was such a mistake, as has been documented, which has affected everything since.

[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.

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. For many people this would have been an obscure argument some years ago, but I genuinely think that how we procure drones is one of the most critical questions for the country. Does he agree that we need to think about SMEs as mission partners and that rather than thinking about the hardware, we effectively buy a service—a learning—from them? That way, the thing we buy is not the capability but the cultural change towards constant iteration, which is how we survive in a war such as the one we see in Ukraine.

[Lincoln Jopp]

The other group that has been bypassed, and which I did not mention, is the 18 prime contractors. This is direct to the SMEs. I am afraid that the model that we have developed since the end of the cold war has seen the 18 primes getting rich off defence pounds and SMEs getting legged over. The national armaments director should look seriously at the way in which that is done, in order to capture the innovative nature of SMEs that are doing some wonderful stuff. Ironically, they are not selling that to the MOD; it is all going overseas.

To the point made by the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar about showing honesty about the threat, I agree that we must be very clear about the threat and express it outside this place at every opportunity. The Prime Minister of Norway talks about defence about once a week in all his radio and television interviews. We met Norway’s joint forces commander, and even he goes on once a week and talks about the threat. Okay, Norway is nearer Russia, and it has a small land border and a very large sea border with Russia. The strategic defence review mentioned starting a national conversation; it seems to be a conversation of one line. If we are to get the investment that defence needs, we need to talk much more openly.

One other thing that happened during the cold war, I am afraid, is that the MOD became much more secretive. The Defence Committee always used to get things such as the major projects review and the equipment plan to see how the pounds were being spent. We do not get those any more. Similarly, James Heappey came to give evidence to the Committee on the Afghan data breach, but he got quite lyrical and started to say that he felt uneasy that, as Minister for the Armed Forces, he was getting lots of documents that said, “You can’t tell Parliament this” and “You can’t tell Parliament that”, because it was all highly classified. He claims that he wanted to be able to tell Parliament more but was constrained from so doing by the classification system. The Defence Committee used to do its own redaction. It used to get the full threat picture and was grown up enough to redact and not release secrets to the public. That would be a much healthier way of doing things as we go forward.

I turn finally to the moral component of fighting power. We have talked a lot about the physical component, and the moral is to the physical as three to one. We know that is true because Napoleon said it, and he was brilliant. I have had conversations with both former and current Ministers about the undermining of the moral component of fighting power with the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. That is why, when I came tenth in the ballot for a private Member’s Bill, I took the opportunity to attempt to put in law that there should be no further investigations, inquests, inquiries or prosecutions of Northern Ireland veterans unless, in the view of a Supreme Court judge, there is new, compelling evidence.

The Bill comes to the House of Commons on 4 September and I very much hope that I can get cross-party support for it. I fear deeply for the stain on the moral component through the constant hounding of our veterans; indeed, I declare an interest as I spent three-and-a-half years of my life in uniform trying to bring peace to that place. I was not shot and blown up there but somewhere else. When the children of the schools in my constituency hear that I have been shot, they all look at me and say, “Where?” I always say, “On the roof of the Mammy Yoko hotel in Freetown.” [Laughter.]

The moral component must be reinforced; it does not need resourcing. I hope that the new Secretary of State for Defence was only prepared to accept the job because he had some deal over Northern Ireland veterans. I look forward to finding out whether that is indeed the case, because our veterans need protecting from those prosecutions.

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[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

Corona muralis—I wager that few people in this Chamber, if any, have heard that term. Perhaps the odd classicist will have heard it. It was one of ancient Rome’s most coveted military decorations. According to Aulus Gellius, it was a golden crown, shaped like a city wall, awarded for bravery, much like the Victoria Cross. It was awarded to Roman soldiers for being the first up the ladder and on to the enemy castle walls during a siege. Whoever received it found fame, and the accolade could be leveraged as a political stepping stone. Survival might be unlikely, but the prospect of personal and political glory could motivate men to embark on a suicide mission, convinced that they would fare better against impossible odds than those who had tried and failed before them. In “The History of Rome”, Livy wrote:

“The men dashed on in the face of wounds and missiles, and neither walls nor armed men standing on them can restrain them from vying with one another in the attempt to climb”.

With that, I welcome the Defence Ministers to their new roles, and wish them luck in the forthcoming reshuffle.

The new Defence Secretary tells us that he is working around the clock. That is another idiom to add to a lexicon that includes “flat out”, “at pace” and “laser-focused”—the perennial favourite. This Government’s failure to invest in defence, particularly given the high horse that they rode in on, while waxing lyrical about “hollowing out”, is farcical, given that we have already seen two experienced Defence Ministers quit. We now see two more take up the colours—both decorated former officers with an MBE, and each with an MBE for their service. Coronae murales all round.

The defence investment plan has entered the zeitgeist, but our duty in this House is to hold the Government to account. We can talk about top-level budgets and use exciting buzzwords, but unless we are actually talking about what is in the plan, that capability is largely irrelevant. The defence investment plan is not funded properly; it is not even close to being funded properly. An additional £10 billion, plus £3.5 billion of loose change that the Government found down the back of the sofa, will not touch the sides. The new Defence Secretary will need to make damaging and difficult cuts. Much of that will not be truly realised until the publication of the ’26-27 Ministry of Defence accounts at the end of next year—by which point he may be long gone.

There are projects that sit under the major projects portfolio, specifically Dreadnoughts and GCAP. The defence nuclear enterprise takes up 18% of the entire defence budget. To put that in context, it means that we are last in NATO for our spending on conventional forces. We spend less, proportionally, than North Macedonia and Luxembourg. We need to be mindful of the spiralling cost of Dreadnought. If we couple that with the cost of upgrading the Astraea warhead, and of the AUKUS commitment, we see that we are locked into a huge proportion of the available budget being spent on submarines alone. Last week, the Royal United Services Institute wrote that it anticipates the DNE may hit 25% of the budget within the period covered by this defence investment plan. Meanwhile, its aerial contemporary, GCAP, continues to be a costly endeavour—so costly, in fact, that despite the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry informing me last week that a new funding deal for Edgewing had been agreed, my sources at the MOD tell me that the deal is not the multi-year settlement that is needed. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the duration of the new funding deal.

With the demise of the future combat air system, GCAP and F-47 are the only NATO sixth-generation programmes left in town, yet the RAF is struggling to find the money for the platform, has apparently rowed back on committing to pillar 2, and is in danger of being superseded by events. The new uncrewed fighters currently in development are a fraction of the cost, and will be many iterations developed by the time we see the first Tempest. It will take something special to ensure GCAP is not a relic before it even leaves the drawing board.

Last year, the previous Chief of the Air Staff—now Chief of the Defence Staff—made clear that there were

“no major equipment programmes planned for the next 15 years. We have what we have for the near and medium term”,

despite the combat air strategy being about to undergo a refresh. What the RAF has planned now is what we will have through to 2040. We have taken delivery of 48 F-35B jets thus far, and the programme of record states that we are committed to 138. Does anyone genuinely believe that the defence investment plan will lay out the pathway to buying another 90, if we have only bought half that number since 2012 in order to fulfil a purpose—being carrier deployable—that now makes little strategic sense? For reference, the US has budgeted for 85 this year alone, at a cost of $21.4 billion.

Analysis by the US Government Accountability Office has shown that the full mission-capable rate of the F-35 is a lamentable 25%. Our own Public Accounts Committee reported in March that

“The UK F-35 fleet achieved approximately one third of the MoD’s target”

for the time it was able to fly all its required missions in 2024, and achieved only two fifths of the level of availability of the global F-35B fleet.

[Lincoln Jopp]

I do not know whether my hon. and gallant Friend has yet had the opportunity to go down to Speaker’s Court and meet the armed forces representatives there. I met the very improbably titled Fungus 1, who is an F-35 pilot, and I was appalled to hear that he had spent nine years in training and has only just done three months on the frontline. As well as all the other things we are giving Defence Ministers to think about, surely pilot training has to be one of them, if we are going to be ready.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. The UK military flying training system is on its uppers. I do not necessarily hold this Government responsible for that—there are longer-term issues with the flying training system. I believe the average length of time it takes pilots to qualify is somewhere in the region of six years; most of the pilots who are now hitting the frontline have spent as long in training as I spent in my entire military career, by which point I had done numerous operational tours. Significant work needs to be done in that area, and there are questions to be asked of the company that we have outsourced flying training to, as well as about the Hawk jets—which I will not cover in this debate. The Minister knows that that topic is a hobby horse of mine; I will not speak about it today, but he realises that there is a sense of urgency there.