Conservative and Unionist Party MP for South Suffolk since (elected).
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| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | MP | South Suffolk | – present | elected | — | Party history |
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As it is the first time we have debated, may I begin by welcoming the new Secretary of State to his position? On 26 July, he appeared on the Camilla Tominey show on GB News and was asked, “If the Chancellor of the Exchequer does not stump up enough defence spending, will he resign?” The Secretary of State replied, “Absolutely.” Is that still the case?
The Chancellor resigned then to go to 3% on defence. Bearing that in mind, on the same day, the Secretary of State also appeared on Times Radio and was asked by Adam Boulton if a failure to deliver on defence spending would be a resignation issue for him, as it had been for the now Chancellor. The Secretary of State replied: “It is. It is absolutely, for me, a matter of principle.” It begs a simple question. If the Budget does not deliver 3% for defence by 2030, will he resign?
I was chuntering.
May I echo your sentiments, Mr Speaker, about Sir George Howarth, and pass on the Opposition’s condolences to his family and friends? Also, for their first oral questions, I welcome the new Ministers to the Front-Bench team. Today’s reports of Russian provocation illustrate the scale of the threat from Putin, but they also show why Britain needed a defence investment plan that was fully funded, instead of one with a £5 billion IOU for the next Prime Minister. On that point, the Defence Readiness and Industry Minister, responsible for producing the DIP, admitted on the media round last week that he only found out about the missing £5 billion after the DIP was published. When did the Secretary of State find out?
This is not good enough. The defence investment plan has completely unravelled because, despite it being many months late, the Government still have not worked out where they are going to get the money from. Either the Secretary of State knowingly signed off a defence investment plan with a £5 billion poison pill for the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), or the Defence Secretary was, like his procurement Minister, kept in the dark by the Chancellor. Which is it?
On the day of its publication in June 2025, the headline promise of Labour’s strategic defence review was a commitment to buy “up to 12 attack submarines”. At the time, the Labour Government could not answer the question of exactly how many submarines that meant in practice, but they assured us that the detail of all their SDR promises would be set out in the defence investment plan, so exactly how many attack submarines are they going to buy?
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. After months and months of delay, we finally have the defence investment plan, but it is quite simply a case of too little, too late. It is too little because there is virtually no more cash than there was in the plan that led the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey), to resign because he believed that it would make the country “less safe”. It is too late not just because the plan is months overdue, but because much of the capability that it contains will not be in service until the 2030s, when the threat we face is right now. If Labour Members do not agree that this plan is too little, they do not need to take my word for it. The Chief of the Defence Staff said he needed £28 billion to fund the armed forces over the next four years, but this plan fulfils barely half that requirement. The right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, who was the Secretary of State for Defence until a few weeks ago, said that the proposed spending “falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time”, because “it rises to just 2.68% of GDP in 2030”.<span id="797" class="column-number" data-column-number="797"></span> Will the Secretary of State confirm that, under his revised plan, the GDP figure for defence in 2030 remains unchanged, at 2.68%? That begs the obvious question: if reaching 2.68% by 2030 was a resigning matter for the previous Defence Secretary, why is it good enough for him? This DIP is not just too little financially; it is too late. If Labour Members do not agree, they should remember that it was promised for last autumn and is now 10 months overdue. Most importantly, the drones that Labour promised in today’s headlines mainly enter service in the 2030s, when the threat we face is today. Autonomous drones to fly with the Apache, uncrewed surface and underwater vessels, and the prototype for the RAF’s autonomous fighter jet will all enter service in the 2030s—far too late in this fast-changing world of tech-driven warfare. On that subject, it was ironic that the Prime Minister announced the DIP at Malloy Aeronautics in Maidenhead, where I launched the MOD’s first ever defence drone strategy back in February 2024. Back then, we were world leaders in drone warfare, having supplied Ukraine with cutting-edge drone capabilities that were not on a press release. It was real kit used on a real frontline against Europe’s peer military threat, the Russian armed forces. So what happened? Labour came to power and put all that progress on hold, which paralysed procurement while we waited for the strategic defence review and then for the DIP. But the big question is, why all the dither and delay? In a word, money. Is the harsh truth not that the drones could come into service far sooner, but the Government are unwilling to commit the cash before the 2030s? Is this not the inevitable result of having a Prime Minister who is unwilling to cut welfare, and who is prioritising a bigger benefits bill over properly funding defence? That begs the next big question: where is the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) in all this? Can the Secretary of State tell us whether the putative Prime Minister has been consulted on the DIP? Most importantly, has he given it his blessing? If not, is the DIP even worth the paper it is written on? It is rumoured that the current Prime Minister may have ambitions to be the next Secretary-General of NATO. If that is true, might it have been advisable to include in the DIP a funded plan to get to 3% on defence? Can the Secretary of State tell us in which financial year Labour will spend 3% on defence? For all the focus on drones, our people—not just our regular personnel, our reserves and their families, but our cadets and our veterans—remain our most important capability. I was proud to make the decision to buy back the defence estate from Annington, a deal that the previous Labour Government left untouched. Given that I thought we all wanted to deliver homes for heroes, can the Secretary of State confirm—this is a critical question about the accommodation of those who serve our country—that the defence investment plan includes cutting hundreds of millions of pounds from the budget for forces housing, shifting it from this Parliament into the 2030s? Can he confirm that, and can he also confirm that he is cutting cadet funding at the same time and over the same period?<span id="798" class="column-number" data-column-number="798"></span> On veterans—I hope he has had a chance to think about this after my previous question—does the Secretary of State agree that a top priority for the new Prime Minister must be to back our former soldiers, and scrap the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill? To conclude, after months of dither and delay, it has taken the sudden end of his premiership for the Prime Minister to finally publish the DIP in a desperate search for a legacy, but it is a legacy of failure, with an underfunded defence investment plan that is too little, too late. The men and women of our armed forces deserve much better.
I beg to move, That this House regrets the chaos in Government which means a temporary Prime Minister will be attending the NATO summit; further regrets that at such a dangerous time globally this country is not being properly governed; calls on the Government to spend 3% of GDP on defence by the end of this Parliament, or at a minimum to act to provide the £28 billion that the Ministry of Defence has asked for primarily by cutting welfare and to publish the Defence Investment Plan immediately to deliver this; agrees with the former Secretary of State for Defence that any Defence Investment Plan which included a rise in defence spending of 0.08% from next year to 2030, with no date for raising that spending to 3% and no path to an increase to 3.5%, would fall short of what is required, particularly as intelligence assessments note there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030; further calls on the Government to ensure that the Defence Investment Plan prepares the UK for future conflicts; and also calls on the Government not to proceed with the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 (Remedial) Order 2025 and the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill which is unfit for purpose as it fails to protect veterans who risked their lives to protect this country. It is a pleasure to open this Opposition day debate. Before I commence my speech, I wish to respond to the point of order made by the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry yesterday—not least as neither myself nor the Leader of the Opposition were able to respond to his point of order because we were not given advance notice of it. That may not be mandatory, but surely it would have been in the spirit of proceedings, given that it related to the urgent question to the Secretary of State for Defence tabled by the Leader of the Opposition last Monday. As a reminder, last Monday’s urgent question from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition concerned the extremely serious situation regarding the previous week’s resignations of the two most senior Defence Ministers at the time. In her questions, my right hon. Friend asked why the Secretary of State was not responding, given the severity of the circumstances. The DRI Minister said at the time: “The Defence Secretary is currently with His Majesty the King”.<span id="vol787_col571" class="cross-reference" data-house-id="1" data-column-number="571" data-volume-number="787" data-external-id="7594F842-C1FE-4B58-9B9B-FF2638724096">—[<em>Official Report</em>, 15 June 2026; Vol. 787, c. 571.]</span> That point was repeated a little later in good faith by you, Mr Speaker, in response to a question from the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). In the DRI Minister’s point of order yesterday, he admitted that that was not true.
The DRI Minister admitted in his point of order yesterday that what he said last Monday was not true. He said that the Secretary of State “arrived back in London from Windsor earlier that day, prior to the UQ.”<span id="vol788_col71" class="cross-reference" data-house-id="1" data-column-number="71" data-volume-number="788" data-external-id="8C006EFC-4B77-4D0A-B1A3-7810614C07E9">—[<em>Official Report</em>, 22 June 2026; Vol. 788, c. 71.]</span> That begs the question: why did the Secretary of State not respond? To quote chapter 21, paragraph 20 of “Erskine May”, His Majesty “cannot be supposed to have a private opinion, apart from that of his responsible advisers; and any attempt to use his name in debate to influence the judgement of Parliament is immediately checked and censured.” Given this, not only should a Minister of the Crown surely desist from raising the monarch in the Chamber in such a context; it is particularly inappropriate to do so when the facts prayed in aid are not correct. Mr Speaker, this is cowboy stuff—very sloppy, very disrespectful to this House—and it is not the first time. The Armed Forces Minister, in her previous role as Veterans Minister, also had to correct the record from the Dispatch Box after saying at oral questions that my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) was “not a details man” and that the Prime Minister had not worked with disgraced lawyer Phil Shiner. In fact, as she admitted at the Dispatch Box, the Prime Minister did indeed work with that traitor to the British Army, who tried to have our soldiers put away for war crimes on the basis of fabricated evidence. Finally, the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey), had to correct the record after he justified not giving me prior sight of the strategic defence review because I had supposedly not allowed him prior sight of the defence Command Paper refresh when I was a Minister. Petty as this was, it was also—again—wholly untrue. This is not acceptable; Ministers must tell the truth from the Dispatch Box. I said that I had the greatest respect for the new Secretary of State, and I meant it. I hope he will ensure that his Ministers show—
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I informed your office about this issue earlier, because we feel it is very important.