Ministry of Defence

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am grateful to catch your eye to speak in this very important debate. I congratulate the Chair of the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), not only on securing this important estimates day debate, but on his excellent speech. We face a common problem, so I am afraid that some of my speech will repeat what he said, but I can assure the House that we did not collaborate on our speeches.

The job of the PAC, as the House knows, is to look at expenditure right across Government. However, Ministry of Defence procurements and finances have too often been dysfunctional in the past. Indeed, the Comptroller and Auditor General qualified his opinion on this year’s MOD accounts because it could not provide adequate accounting records to support the value of assets under construction of £6.13 billion. It also incurred non-budget expenditure of £2.56 billion, which will result in an excess vote.

This debate could not have come at a more significant time, with the events in Ukraine and the middle east. When the PAC last examined the defence procurement budget, over two years ago, the 10-year programme was £16.9 billion in deficit, which the National Audit Office described at that time as “unaffordable”. In June last year, the Government announced a highly ambitious strategic defence review.

The defence investment plan—and I absolutely echo the remarks of the Chairman of the Defence Committee—has been continuously promised at the Dispatch Box, but we are still without the detail. We know that nuclear is consuming over 25% of the entire budget and growing, which is bound to have a knock-on effect on how much we can afford to spend on the rest of the procurement programme, so it is vital that we have the defence investment plan. I say to the Minister in the most gentle but persuasive way I possibly can that, if we achieve nothing else from this debate, will he confirm in clear terms when the defence investment plan will be published so that the PAC, the Defence Committee and the House can scrutinise it properly?

I note that, during today’s Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister did not answer the question from the Leader of the Opposition about the date of publication.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

Shocking!

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

It is shocking, as my hon. Friend says from the Front Bench. As the Chair of the Defence Committee said, not only is it terrible for defence companies wanting to be able to plan their manufacturing programmes, but it is not good for MOD personnel, because they do not know how to plan either.

Current events in the middle east have given a serious warning that we need to increase defence expenditure. It is therefore really important that we see the defence investment plan so that Parliament can scrutinise the latest plans. Without this information, the Office for Budget Responsibility has questioned whether the Government will be able to reach their target of 3% in five years’ time. That will also be too late, because we need to get the investment soon. As everybody knows—and the Minister certainly knows—it takes a long time to procure and manufacture some of these important bits of kit, so we need to get on with that now.

[Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions that, given what has happened in the past few days in the middle east, the country needs to spend more on defence, but does he agree with me that the country needs to spend differently on defence? When drones cost barely tens of thousands of pounds, we need to start buying or making capabilities to take down drones that do not cost the British taxpayer millions and millions of pounds.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The hon. and gallant Member has great experience in these matters. I think he must have been reading my speech. If he is patient, I think he will get exactly what he wants.

The PAC recommended more than two years ago that the Government should set up a sensitive scrutiny committee to examine confidential military expenditure. I am grateful to the Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister on the Front Bench today, the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, for their careful consideration of that matter. I hope it will now be possible to make real progress, but as the Minister will remember, I raised this matter in the estimates debate in June last year. I hope it will not be necessary to raise it again in another year’s time.

There is a commitment to increase defence expenditure from 2.2% of GDP to 2.5% by 2027, followed by an increase to 3.5% of GDP by 2035. In the Government spending review, the current budget is expected to increase by 18.2%, or £11.3 billion by 2028-29. Minister, we really do need to see those numbers incorporated into the Government’s expenditure plan in the autumn Budget so that we can be absolutely certain about them.

Many Members will know—certainly the Chair of the Defence Committee knows, because I have been a guest on his Committee—that the MOD has been reorganised into the Quad: the permanent secretary Jeremy Pocklington; the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton; the National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce; and the Chief Of Defence Nuclear, Madeleine McTernan. I sincerely hope, given their new powers, they will radically reform how the MOD functions. We need to take a more strategic view of systems that we procure—going to the point made by the hon. Member for Plymouth Moor View (Fred Thomas)—and consider above all the capability and speed we are able to acquire them.

Why is it, I say to the Minister, that the Japanese can procure their version of the highly sophisticated Type 26 frigate, a Mogami class, in a third of the time that we do? The consequence of that is that the Australians have just struck a deal for £10 billion to purchase those ships from the Japanese. Why is it that the Israelis can procure their military equipment with just 1,000 people, yet our procurement body, Defence Equipment and Support, employs 12,500 people? Our procurement system is far too slow, subject to mission creep, usually late and usually over-budget. As the Chair of the Defence Committee said, Ajax is a classic example of all those problems. We need to learn those lessons, move on and make sure they do not happen in future.

Last week, as the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) mentioned—he is no longer in his place—I joined a group of 20 MPs who visited Ukraine. We were in air raid shelters several times during our visits to Odessa and Kyiv. On one night the Russians fired 290 drones: 220 were destroyed but 70 got through, causing a significant amount of damage, and a few injuries and fatalities as well. Ukraine’s technology and digital capability in tracking and destroying those drones is some of the most sophisticated in the world. The drone operators’ experiences are directly and rapidly informing their procurement decisions. The Ukrainians are able to change the specification of their drones within a week. I suggest that it would probably take us some months to do the same thing.

One of the top Ukrainian military experts told us that the future of warfare was following three domains: drones, cyber/electronic and space. I think, hearing those words, that some of our capabilities in those areas need bolstering pretty rapidly. We and NATO need to learn the lessons of the war in Ukraine. Without being too specific, there are severe gaps in NATO’s anti-drone technology.

The experts also made the telling point that modern main battle tanks can cost between $4 million to $9 million per unit, but they can be destroyed by a swarm of drones costing less than $20,000 each. They say that tanks are effectively redundant. The Ukrainians inform us that 80% of their kills are as a result of drone strikes. Modern warfare is changing rapidly, and the MOD needs to be sufficiently agile to adapt.

From the recent activity in Cyprus, and other lessons learned from the conflict in Ukraine and ongoing war in the middle east, we need to invest in comprehensive counter-drone systems and training across our armed forces. As an example, we use the Sky Sabre air defence system, which can shoot down drones, but can cost up to £250,000 a shot. We need to invest further in anti-drone technology to ensure we can do this far more rapidly and cheaply.

As I am sure the Minister is aware, last Thursday the PAC visited RAF Marham, which houses two F-35 squadrons. I have four main takeaways from that visit, all of which stem from the lack of urgency to be ready for war according to General Walker’s three-year timescale. First, the accommodation for our servicemen needs urgent upgrading. It is a disgrace that servicemen can be sent on long tours while their families do not have proper accommodation.

My second takeaway was the effect that has on retention. We were told that pilots and training instructors for the F-35 programme are 50% below optimum levels, which is highly unsatisfactory for a project of this importance.

Thirdly, it is difficult to plan the whole operation when the timing and procurement of the additional 27 F-35s are unclear. Hopefully, that will be revealed in the defence investment plan when it is published.

Fourthly, one of the squadrons had recently returned from the highly successful Operation Highmast to deploy around the world, ending up in Japan. Now, in a matter of a week or two, they have had to redeploy to the middle east. This is a good illustration of how some of our servicemen face considerable stretch. This is to be expected in wartime, but more resources must be deployed to support them and their families. Another example of that is that our submarine crew on HMS Vanguard recently served a 204-day deployment.

The MOD budget is going to grow considerably, but the money is not going to purchase military hardware in the most strategic or cost-effective way. That will happen only if the Quad radically reforms the way the MOD has been run, especially with smarter recruitment of personnel and procurement of equipment.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is really interesting to hear the hon. Gentleman speak about personnel. We have spoken a lot about spending in the MOD, in particular on the need for improved technology; I wonder whether he could touch on spending on personnel and the support we give them. What more does he think we could do to support our service personnel, who obviously do a brave job every day?

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. In the reorganisation of the MOD into the Quad that I have talked about, the critical person is the Chief of the Defence Staff, because he has now assumed responsibility for all personnel matters. I am sure that he will be looking at this very carefully.

We need to look at recruiting people with different skills from those we have recruited for in the past. To operate drones, for instance, as the hon. Gentleman knows, we need people with good computer and dexterity skills. That may mean recruiting youngsters, who have the brains to be able to do this work, but who are not necessarily the people we would traditionally have recruited to be running around the battlefield 100% of the time. It might mean different things; it might mean retraining some of our existing personnel to operate these new weapons.

Above all, our armed forces are at the lowest they have been for decades—the Army in particular. We will need to bolster the numbers somewhat because of the reason I have just given: the overstretch of our personnel. We cannot go on doing that to them. We need to have enough people available on rotation so that next time a long deployment comes around, different people—different regiments and different squadrons—are deployed.

There are a lot of things we need to think about when it comes to personnel. One is that we must have a pipeline in the future. The PAC did an inquiry into reserves and cadets, and it seems to me that we need to do a little better in both categories. [Interruption.] I can see that you are urging me to finish, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have overrun, but I did not wish to try your patience. Simply put, we cannot go on doing what we did in the past. We need to do things differently and better in the future.

[Several hon. Members rose—]