Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, in trying to summarise the debate so far, I suggest, roughly speaking, that the sentiment of the House is huge support—with the exception of one contribution—for the strategic defence review, but with a big question mark about whether we really mean it: what would it actually take to get it done? The noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, did not like the “NATO first” slogan. I suggest an alternative might be “NATO for real”—in other words, we stop kidding ourselves. We knew that the claims we made in recent times about the capabilities we were declaring to SACEUR and other resources were essentially phoney. SACEUR knew they were phoney; our adversaries knew they were phoney; the only people we were not straight with were the British people. The defence review is straight with the British people: that needs to change.

For that to happen, we have been having a significant debate about what the phasing of the extra resourcing will look like. Unlike the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, I took the commitments that the Prime Minister made at the NATO summit to be a watertight commitment to 3.5% by 2035, rather than the prior aspiration around 3%. Picking up on the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, though, I wonder whether the Government can be clear with us as to the incremental spend that we are talking about. I think they are saying that, by 2027, we will be spending 2.6% of GDP on core defence spending and 4.1% on security in the round. That implies that, by 2027, we will already be spending 1.5% on the non-defence infrastructure and other security spending and, therefore, that we have 0.9% to add to core defence spending between 2027 and 2035.

The question for the Government is: when will they show their workings on that? Will we see in autumn what the incremental sequencing of the 0.9% is going to look like for the next three years over the balance of this Parliament? Without that, as the debate has revealed, we are quite unlikely to make progress.

In light of the announcements made alongside President Macron last week updating the 1995 Chequers declaration to include greater operational co-ordination of our strategic nuclear deterrent and—as the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and others referred to—the readoption of a tactical nuclear capability through the F35As, do the Government intend to clarify the United Kingdom’s nuclear defence doctrine? We all understand that nuclear deterrence is a subtle combination of explicit signalling and studied ambiguity, but are the Government planning to do more than these incremental announcements and actually set this out as a new UK doctrine?

Do the Government believe that legislation is required to implement any elements of the SDR? We have previously talked about the requirement for a new Armed Forces Act to help manage the permeable membrane between active duty and reserve members of the Armed Forces. Likewise, within StratCom there has been talk about the need for a new category of Crown servant—who would be non-military but not civil servants—to do some of the cyberwarfare. That presumably would take an Act of Parliament. Are we going to see that statutory framework brought before us in the next King’s Speech?

Finally, on the executional capability required to get the SDR done, there has been some mild criticism that there is a degree of ambiguity about when some things are going to happen. Actually, there are one or two extremely ambitious commitments apparently nailed in for next year and the year after, one of them being the digital underpinning of the integration between the different branches of the Armed Forces, the digital targeting web and so forth. This apparently is going to be an MVP next year and is going to be in place by 2027. It has taken the Americans 20 years of effort in this space, and they still have not got to a situation where a US naval vessel can communicate in real time with all the US Air Force jets that might be in the same battle space—let alone pilots of different planes being able to communicate with each other. So the idea that we will have at least a light version of this in place from next year is a truly laudable and ambitious goal. It would be superb to hear more about what it will take to get it done.

In a nutshell, like others I strongly support the direction set out by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and welcome the Government’s commitment to it. It is all about executional bandwidth, whether that is money, law or the sheer implementation muscle required across the military.