Ministry of Defence

Luke Akehurst Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Luke Akehurst (North Durham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Chair of the Defence Committee on securing this important debate. I find it disappointing that parties have been missing and have not contributed to it—Reform, which has an ambiguous position on the threat from Russia; the SNP, which does not support our nuclear deterrent; and the Greens, who do not support our nuclear deterrent and have an ambiguous position on NATO.

How did we end up in this frankly terrifying situation? Well, 14 years of austerity did not just wreck every other public service; it wrecked the fundamental public service that protects everything else we do as a society. It has put us in a very risky situation where we do not have enough air and naval platforms to be in every place that we need to be in, as we can see from a ship not already being in position in the eastern Mediterranean. We do not have enough mass in our Army. We do not have enough reserves. We do not have enough air and missile defence assets—we know the impact of that; we can see what it does to civilian targets, both in Dubai and in Ukraine—and we do not have deep enough magazines of missiles and munitions. Depth of magazines is causing problems for the United States, let alone us.

However, I do not think anyone should be in doubt about the political commitment of this Government to increasing defence spending, because we already took the very difficult decision to slash our overseas aid budget in order to increase spending on the MOD. That was a painful decision, but we will need to take other painful political decisions in the future. I welcome the Prime Minister making all the right noises in Munich about moving the 3% target forwards from his original deadline.

My primary plea in the minute I have left is to move forward with the defence investment plan. The strategic defence review contains excellent proposals about capabilities we need, but every month that we drag on with this is a month in which industry does not have certainty about their order books and businesses are perhaps laying off people with skills when they should be recruiting people. More to the point, it is a month where, three years down the line, we might not have the kit in the hands of our troops that they will need in the event of a hot war with a potent opponent that can rearm to the levels of February 2022 if it has a three-year gap after the combat in Ukraine. My message to the Minister is to take back into the Whitehall system the support on both sides of the House for seeing the defence investment plan sooner rather than later and the message that further delay is not acceptable to Members across the House.