Defence Spending and Readiness

Debate between Lincoln Jopp and Ben Obese-Jecty

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

Corona muralis—I wager that few people in this Chamber, if any, have heard that term. Perhaps the odd classicist will have heard it. It was one of ancient Rome’s most coveted military decorations. According to Aulus Gellius, it was a golden crown, shaped like a city wall, awarded for bravery, much like the Victoria Cross. It was awarded to Roman soldiers for being the first up the ladder and on to the enemy castle walls during a siege. Whoever received it found fame, and the accolade could be leveraged as a political stepping stone. Survival might be unlikely, but the prospect of personal and political glory could motivate men to embark on a suicide mission, convinced that they would fare better against impossible odds than those who had tried and failed before them. In “The History of Rome”, Livy wrote:

“The men dashed on in the face of wounds and missiles, and neither walls nor armed men standing on them can restrain them from vying with one another in the attempt to climb”.

With that, I welcome the Defence Ministers to their new roles, and wish them luck in the forthcoming reshuffle.

The new Defence Secretary tells us that he is working around the clock. That is another idiom to add to a lexicon that includes “flat out”, “at pace” and “laser-focused”—the perennial favourite. This Government’s failure to invest in defence, particularly given the high horse that they rode in on, while waxing lyrical about “hollowing out”, is farcical, given that we have already seen two experienced Defence Ministers quit. We now see two more take up the colours—both decorated former officers with an MBE, and each with an MBE for their service. Coronae murales all round.

The defence investment plan has entered the zeitgeist, but our duty in this House is to hold the Government to account. We can talk about top-level budgets and use exciting buzzwords, but unless we are actually talking about what is in the plan, that capability is largely irrelevant. The defence investment plan is not funded properly; it is not even close to being funded properly. An additional £10 billion, plus £3.5 billion of loose change that the Government found down the back of the sofa, will not touch the sides. The new Defence Secretary will need to make damaging and difficult cuts. Much of that will not be truly realised until the publication of the ’26-27 Ministry of Defence accounts at the end of next year—by which point he may be long gone.

There are projects that sit under the major projects portfolio, specifically Dreadnoughts and GCAP. The defence nuclear enterprise takes up 18% of the entire defence budget. To put that in context, it means that we are last in NATO for our spending on conventional forces. We spend less, proportionally, than North Macedonia and Luxembourg. We need to be mindful of the spiralling cost of Dreadnought. If we couple that with the cost of upgrading the Astraea warhead, and of the AUKUS commitment, we see that we are locked into a huge proportion of the available budget being spent on submarines alone. Last week, the Royal United Services Institute wrote that it anticipates the DNE may hit 25% of the budget within the period covered by this defence investment plan. Meanwhile, its aerial contemporary, GCAP, continues to be a costly endeavour—so costly, in fact, that despite the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry informing me last week that a new funding deal for Edgewing had been agreed, my sources at the MOD tell me that the deal is not the multi-year settlement that is needed. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the duration of the new funding deal.

With the demise of the future combat air system, GCAP and F-47 are the only NATO sixth-generation programmes left in town, yet the RAF is struggling to find the money for the platform, has apparently rowed back on committing to pillar 2, and is in danger of being superseded by events. The new uncrewed fighters currently in development are a fraction of the cost, and will be many iterations developed by the time we see the first Tempest. It will take something special to ensure GCAP is not a relic before it even leaves the drawing board.

Last year, the previous Chief of the Air Staff—now Chief of the Defence Staff—made clear that there were

“no major equipment programmes planned for the next 15 years. We have what we have for the near and medium term”,

despite the combat air strategy being about to undergo a refresh. What the RAF has planned now is what we will have through to 2040. We have taken delivery of 48 F-35B jets thus far, and the programme of record states that we are committed to 138. Does anyone genuinely believe that the defence investment plan will lay out the pathway to buying another 90, if we have only bought half that number since 2012 in order to fulfil a purpose—being carrier deployable—that now makes little strategic sense? For reference, the US has budgeted for 85 this year alone, at a cost of $21.4 billion.

Analysis by the US Government Accountability Office has shown that the full mission-capable rate of the F-35 is a lamentable 25%. Our own Public Accounts Committee reported in March that

“The UK F-35 fleet achieved approximately one third of the MoD’s target”

for the time it was able to fly all its required missions in 2024, and achieved only two fifths of the level of availability of the global F-35B fleet.

[Lincoln Jopp]

I do not know whether my hon. and gallant Friend has yet had the opportunity to go down to Speaker’s Court and meet the armed forces representatives there. I met the very improbably titled Fungus 1, who is an F-35 pilot, and I was appalled to hear that he had spent nine years in training and has only just done three months on the frontline. As well as all the other things we are giving Defence Ministers to think about, surely pilot training has to be one of them, if we are going to be ready.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. The UK military flying training system is on its uppers. I do not necessarily hold this Government responsible for that—there are longer-term issues with the flying training system. I believe the average length of time it takes pilots to qualify is somewhere in the region of six years; most of the pilots who are now hitting the frontline have spent as long in training as I spent in my entire military career, by which point I had done numerous operational tours. Significant work needs to be done in that area, and there are questions to be asked of the company that we have outsourced flying training to, as well as about the Hawk jets—which I will not cover in this debate. The Minister knows that that topic is a hobby horse of mine; I will not speak about it today, but he realises that there is a sense of urgency there.

Floating Solar Panels

Debate between Lincoln Jopp and Ben Obese-Jecty

Thursday 26th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lincoln Jopp]

I do, indeed. I was not 100% sure which Minister would respond to this debate, so I have had only the briefest of moments to look at the lake in Burgess park in the Minister’s Peckham constituency to see whether that may be suitable for floating solar.

We have talked about the opportunity costs and about doubling efficiency. I am sure hon. Members will have worked this out, but the 2,000 acres of reservoir in my Spelthorne constituency are raised, which means no one can see the top of them unless they are flying off to Torremolinos or landing from Dubai. Therefore, there would be none of the visual vandalism that people object to so much, and the carpeting of our beautiful country in solar panels would go away too.

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

I must declare that I share an office with my hon. and gallant Friend, so I know an awful lot about floating solar because he is so passionate about it. As a result, I would point out that Grafham water in my Huntingdon constituency is the eighth largest reservoir in the country by volume and the third biggest by area. It is also a raised reservoir, but, ironically, it is surrounded by solar panels to generate electricity that we can see from the ground. He obviously agrees with me that it would be a fantastic idea to use that enormous stretch of water for some floating solar.

[Lincoln Jopp]

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend for joining this merry band of evangelists for floating solar, and for seeking to get in on the ground floor with the inclusion of the reservoir in his constituency. Within minutes, he is immediately seeing the opportunity, and I congratulate him on that.