James Cartlidge: The Government can raise Defence spending but we need to know how it’ll be spent

James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and has been MP for South Suffolk since 2015

Labour’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) is due ‘in the spring’ – though exactly how imminent is currently a matter of speculation.

But this being my third in a series of thought pieces for ConHome on the SDR – focused on procurement – it’s worth reflecting on what I wrote in the first such piece, back in January, on the key issue of defence spending and our then commitment to reach 2.5 per cent by 2030. I said: “given the mounting threats we face, it’s likely that we will need to go further”.

Fast forward and in the last weekend of February, with President Trump rightly calling on NATO nations to do ‘more of the heavy lifting’ on Defence in Europe, Kemi Badenoch wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to go ‘further and faster’ than 2.5 per cent, confirming he would have our support if he took the ‘difficult decisions’ to increase defence spending – including looking at the aid budget and welfare for the necessary savings. On the media round that weekend, I stressed that considering welfare was not just about finding the money to fund defence, but also ‘building greater national resilience’.

A few days later and, sure enough, Keir Starmer stood up in Parliament to confirm he was going to go further and faster than 2.5 per cent by 2030, committing to 2.5 per cent by 2027 – funded by reducing the aid budget – with an unfunded aspiration to hit 3 per cent next Parliament. Throughout the leadership election, Kemi Badenoch stressed how much more we were spending in the cold war, and she is clear that we will need to hit at least 3 per cent this Parliament, rather than the next.

But this is far from the end of the debate. Our soldiers cannot fight with promises. They need spending commitments rapidly converted into real-world procurement, delivering capability into the hands of our war fighters at the pace and scale required by the threats we face.

Whereas Labour have wasted the last 250 or so days since the election, using the SDR as a fig leaf to put critical procurement progress on hold in most areas – delaying the essential replenishment our single services require. I can assure readers that no matter what the SDR concludes, there will be a need to order a whole of load of core munitions to replenish our stocks, not least to replace the weapons we rightly gifted to Ukraine.

So, whilst we wait for crucial details – such as how much of Labour’s spending increase will go on their Chagos deal – one way or another funding is finally going up. The question is, when will UK defence companies see the colour of that money in the form of new orders to drive up industrial output?

A key issue is risk. Last September, the Government invited external views on the SDR, and my response focused on two main themes: the case for increasing defence spending; and the need for a less risk averse MOD. Spending is increasing; now we need to see a Department acting boldly to rapidly fire up the UK defence industry.

An important aspect of the ‘risk’ approach is the horizon that informs procurement. The principal way of viewing the MOD’s procurement programme is through the Equipment Plan, a ten year forward view of what the department plans to spend on capability and kit. Putting aside that the Government haven’t published an Equipment Plan, as Defence Procurement Minister, I was always concerned that this time frame inculcated a sense of an unhurried ‘business as usual’ drumbeat, which contrasts with the rapid way that we have procured a vast amount of munitions for Ukraine.

So my September 2024 SDR response stressed the need to focus far more on near term lethality, advocating three year ‘War Readiness Plans’ for each single service, so that there was no hiding place from the need to pull every lever to restore warfighting capability in a few years rather than waiting decades. By the same token, the overhaul of procurement I announced last February – the Integrated Procurement Model – sought to establish a ‘new normal’ pace that was somewhere between the pedestrian speed we all agree is too slow, and the inherently accelerated nature of ‘Urgent Operational Requirements’ (ideal in war time, but not sustainable for an entire equipment plan).

In particular, this included ditching very time consuming and complex ways of measuring progress – Initial Operation Capability, followed by Full Operating Capability that is often never reached – in favour of a simple ‘Minimum Deployable Capability’. This is what you might call ‘fast-track’ procurement – being prepared to sacrifice the pursuit of the perfect in exchange for getting capability into use as fast as possible, and then subjecting it to continuous spiral development once in service. This is how software companies work day to day; and it’s how the war in Ukraine has been fought.

Fundamentally, it’s all about giving greater priority to military risk over ‘civil’ risk (health and safety, risk of judicial review etc). It’s not about being cavalier – just taking proportionate steps to boost our deterrence, rather than being bogged down in bureaucracy.

For example, this means shortening certification processes. When I announced the procurement of DragonFire, our anti-drone laser weapon, we were able to shift its target in-service date from 2032 to 2027 by stripping down the target Minimum Deployable Capability and literally removing a series of red tape hoops that we would have otherwise had to spend many months jumping through. This prioritises military risk because we’ve seen in the Red Sea, where our own naval ships were threatened, how important it is to conserve missile stocks – rather than denude them shooting down cheap drones.

It’s also about the role of UK SMEs. The procurement debate has long featured a corps of experts who think that we should ‘buy off the shelf’ – often meaning foreign manufacture, rather than buying British. However, not only is this view looking unfashionable with growing calls for greater strategic autonomy, but gloomy assumptions that ‘buying British means slow and clunky’ is far from true. I’ve seen real life successes first hand, such as UK SME drone manufactures who have produced cutting edge long-range one-way attack drones on swift timescales, that have been highly effective in Ukraine’s truly challenging theatre; and then constantly spiralled them in response to frontline performance data.

Certainly, with their relatively low cost and fast speed of production, uncrewed systems like drones will need to feature heavily in the kind of rapid procurement mode we need to shift to if we are to enhance our near term lethality and do so at scale. This is the future – it is possible in the UK, and our firms can deliver, with the Government’s backing.

To conclude, whilst these are challenging times, rearmament offers the upside to higher defence spending of greater prosperity through large-scale procurement of British-made sovereign capability – but we need to get on with it. Whatever the Government’s eventual SDR timetable, in the meantime we will be getting on with our own policy work.

I’m delighted that Kemi Badenoch launched our Policy Renewal Programme this week, and our Shadow Defence team looks forward to engaging with party members, Parliamentarians, veterans, the defence industry and many others as in time we set out our own response to the SDR, including any plans to once again go further and faster – not just in spending, but in our ambition for procurement, rearmament and the necessary revitalisation of our entire Defence enterprise.

You can read part 2 of James Cartlidge’s ConHome pieces here