Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Sarfraz Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sarfraz (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the review—I read the whole document—and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. The country is very lucky to have his expertise and leadership.

While I, like many noble Lords, am all for increased defence spending, I still cannot get my head around why the ODA budget was the only place we could find some of the money. The matter has been debated at length, but it is really hard to get away from the fact that the optics remain very poor, and this is not going to go away. But that is old news now.

The new news is our new slogan—“NATO first”. It is pretty catchy, but I think it is a communications mistake. There are 32 NATO member countries and none of them—not a single one—is using a slogan like “NATO first”. Why is it just us? It sends completely the wrong message that we are deprioritising other theatres, such as the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Just a couple of years ago we were travelling the world talking about the “Indo-Pacific tilt” and now it is “NATO first”. Of course, NATO is a priority and Russia is a threat, but why could we not have just stuck to something like “UK first”? Nobody would have minded that at all. Anyway, even if we accept the new branding, my single biggest concern is that we have not produced a single defence industry unicorn in this country yet—a tech company with a valuation of at least $1 billion. Not a single one has come out of the UK.

We have had many from the US, several in Germany and even one from Portugal, but none here. Whenever we talk about increased defence spending, we end up fattening the primes—that is what we do, each and every time. We need hardware, not just software, which is not from the primes. We need money to go to the smaller, innovative firms, not the primes. The review by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, in 1998 struggled with procurement, even back then, and today’s review still does. We do pilots with SMEs, but they never go into production. The fact is that spending money on defence innovation leads to advances across the entire economy. If we had not invested in the mid-20th century in integrated circuits and semiconductors for defence, we would have none of the consumer technologies that we have today.

Finally, while it is wonderful to see a renewed focus on tech and innovation, you cannot run a world-class defence force from a base where the wifi does not work and the plumbing is leaking. Let us please bring our bases into the 21st century. I have been to maybe a dozen across the country in the past 18 months, and almost all of them need help; from canteens to restrooms to social areas, we need a giant base renovation programme. I would love to hear the Minister’s views on that, and I am sure that he would agree that our soldiers deserve to come home to bases that reflect the pride that we have in them.