Defence Spending and Readiness

Stuart Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for taking my intervention. I, too, served with 20th Armoured Brigade and was deployed in operations from Germany over to the Balkans. She talks about mismanagement. She is in a position where, unless more funding comes forward, the Government are about to make some of the biggest cuts to the armed forces during the most hostile situation since the second world war. How does she square that circle?

[Louise Sandher-Jones]

I am proud of what we have already achieved in government on defence. We have raised defence spending, despite the record of previous Governments. I am in a position to argue every day for our armed forces to get what they need to have, and I will continue to do so.

The Labour Government were elected in places such as Aldershot, Portsmouth and Plymouth to fix the Conservatives’ mess, and we have begun to do so. Recruitment is up, retention is up and morale is up. Personnel have received three above-inflation pay rises, and there has been real action to improve housing, enabling our armed forces to focus on national security.

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[Andrew Lewin]

Is the hon. Member therefore excusing the lack of investment between 2014 and 2022? That is what I am not sure of, because there are Opposition Members who have been clear and consistent—they did not serve in the Conservative Government and they thought it was wrong that defence spending fell. I appreciate that he was not here at that time—neither was I—but I do not know if that was his position.

[Stuart Anderson]

rose—

[Wendy Morton]

rose—

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[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst). He speaks with passion on defence, and he clearly wants to increase our defence presence.

I have listened to the debate and I am sounding an alarm. I grew up in a military family; both my parents were in the military. I left school and joined the military, and my brother served in the military. I spent my entire career in security and defence, and since coming to Parliament, everything I have done, outside traditional constituency engagements, is about backing security and defence. I am delighted to be graduating next month from the Royal College of Defence Studies. It has been brilliant to spend a year immersed in the best strategic command course in the world.

I reiterate the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith): we are in a very serious situation, but rhetoric, or party political lines, are overtaking that, and we are missing the fact that we need to rearm to face the current situation. In 2024-25, there were 54 to 55 conflicts around the world—those figures might be adjusted, depending on the source. That is the largest number of conflicts in any one year since the second world war. If we believe that we can stop a major conflict, why can we not stop minor conflicts? There is complete instability, and the whole geopolitical situation has changed. Discussions that we are having now would have seemed impossible—beyond the realms of fantasy—five or even three years ago. We need to put that in perspective and really think about it.

When Government Members start to talk about “14 years of hollowed-out defence”, they make an illiterate defence argument. They are taking a moment in time and comparing peace with war. We need to look at the situation over the past 100 years and learn from history. At the end of the second world war, Clement Attlee demobilised the military, because that was the right thing to do, as we did not need 5 million soldiers. Similarly, at the fall of the Berlin wall, the majority of the world de-armed and reduced the scale of their defence spending. However, the situation has changed.

In 2022, defence spending was 2.22% of GDP, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics, not 2.1% as the hon. Member for North Durham said. There is no denying that the whole world has changed since 2014, or even since 2022, and we are in the most volatile situation. The debate is about whether we should measure from the end of the cold war or the end of the second world war. I firmly believe that we should measure from the end of the second world war. I believe that we will see a global conflict in the coming years, but we are not prepared to defend our nation. I believe that, at this stage, we cannot meet our article 3 NATO commitment to defend the nation for the period of time expected.

Everybody talks about article 5, but there are three things that every Defence Minister and politician must look at when we speak about defence: readiness, lethality and survivability. Everything we must do is there. We talk about numbers, but are we funding the readiness of our armed forces? Are they as lethal as they can be? Do they have the ability to survive any conflict? We are not looking at the expeditionary side of warfare that we have seen in the middle east in recent years; we are looking at how we fit on the world stage, and how we prepare for a global conflict, while hoping that it never happens. We have to look at those three areas, but there is always a debate. Are we are ready enough? Should we spend more money on lethality, or should we look at survivability? The most important of those areas is readiness, but I am not saying that the other areas are not important. We have to be ready. If we are not, we cannot go to war.

In 1999, after I got married—I celebrated my 27th wedding anniversary on Friday—I said to my wife, “See you in six months,” and deployed straight to Kosovo. When we arrived in theatre, there were no Army barracks. We found derelict, flea-ridden accommodation—blokes were covered in flea bites—and we moved into houses that had been abandoned, as people were still being ethnically cleansed. We did not have the kit, but we were about the most lethal bunch of soldiers you could see. We adapted. The readiness came from what Field Marshal Slim described in the Burma conflict as spiritual morale. You can take equipment away from soldiers and break everything, but if they have the spiritual morale to fight, they can get through everything. We are burning out that morale in the military over time, bit by bit.

Let me go back to when I was on the Defence Committee, from 2020 to the middle of 2022. My name is on many reports that absolutely destroyed the Government of the time. That gave me many difficult conversations with the Whips, but calling out the Government was the right thing to do, because we were not able to procure equipment. We were not ready and able to prepare for the world as it was at the time.

The Chief of the Defence Staff has recently said that we will have to cut operational services and training capability. Those are big issues, but he has also touched on something that most people do not mention: the resource spending. We have resource departmental expenditure limit spending and capital departmental expenditure limit spending. CDEL buys the ships, tanks, planes and big items, but they have to be run, and we have to pay our troops, so we have to look at the resources around that. Resource is about 62% of defence spending at the moment, but it is nowhere near enough—the balance is off. We are looking at big projects. It is great to be looking at issues such as how we fund new submarines and the Type 83, but will the global combat air programme be crewed or uncrewed? That is another debate; I have some good views on that that I would love to share another time.

At the moment, the debate is about what war we are preparing to fight. The hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) has mentioned that the DIP did not fund enough preparation for wars that we may be fighting in the future. It is always hard to predict the future of warfare. It is easy to take lessons from Ukraine, and just think that that is what warfare will be, and while we should take those lessons, we need adapt and prepare, moving forward.

My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) mentioned the 18 defence primes. On the scalability of technology, I believe a disruptive model is coming, or is needed, in the defence industry. Two weeks ago, I was delighted to be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with NATO, discussing nanotechnology—even though I left school as a lad with no GCSEs, and joined the armed forces as a rifleman. Time has moved on.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

Do you know what it is now?

[Stuart Anderson]

No.

Let us look at how technology and innovation are moving forward. In some ways, we need to think differently. We need an understanding of how we prepare for different warfares. It is not a matter of nanotechnology on the one side and aircraft carriers on the other; there is a bit in the middle. We should look at the scalability of new technology, as artificial intelligence develops and quantum computing comes online. The battle space will be completely different, and we have to move into that space. People often say that the nature of warfare is changing, but it is not. The nature of warfare is brutal, and will always be, but the character of warfare is changing, and we have to be prepared for that.

Let me go back to my point about readiness, lethality and survivability. All the things that happened on our watch, on Labour’s watch before us, and on Labour’s watch now, are chipping away at the spiritual morale of troops. I have a son who is a serving soldier, and I am watching that happen bit by bit. He is told, “That exercise is cancelled because we cannot afford it,” “You have to do extra time on deployment because we cannot rotate you through,” and “We are not going to order equipment, because the DIP is not ready.” All those things chip away at spiritual morale.

There is one issue that we are dealing with that cuts to the heart of every veteran. I sat with a load of veterans watching the football last week—I will be watching football tonight with serving personnel, and spending time with veterans and colleagues—and I have heard at first hand what they are saying. I served for 18 months on Op Banner during the troubles, and the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 is cutting through. Regardless of the political debate here, serving soldiers believe that they will not be protected by the Government when they go on operations. We can argue the issue, and go back and forth on it, but that is what is landing, and what they believe. A change to what we have in place would be a betrayal to our veterans. It would remove spiritual morale—that British fighting spirit that I have spoken about. It would make us not ready, not lethal and unable to survive. Unless the DIP comes forward with the correct funding for the correct defence products, we will be in a serious situation, and I do not believe that we are ready for what is coming over the horizon.