Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord De Mauley Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley (Con)]

My Lords, I offer my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for his role in leading the strategic defence review team and for delivering such a thoughtful and important contribution to UK defence policy. I am particularly grateful to the review team for appearing last week before the International Relations and Defence Committee, which I chair, to discuss the findings and recommendations of the review. Before I go further, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McCabe, on his maiden speech, to which I listened carefully.

I welcome the Government’s recognition that national security and defence must be the first duty of government and that today’s threat landscape requires an integrated response. The SDR’s recommendations come with serious financial indications, but defence is the best insurance policy we have. As General Sir Richard Barrons convincingly told the committee, the costs of war, both in human and economic terms, are considerably higher than the price of preparedness. If we fail to invest now in deterrence, resilience and technological advantage, we risk being outpaced by adversaries who will not wait for us to catch up.

The committee welcomes the ambition and breadth of the SDR, and we are pleased to see it echoes many of the conclusions in our report, Ukraine: A Wake-up Call. However, laudable ambition must be matched by credible delivery. There is, as yet, no comprehensive funding profile aligned to the SDR’s recommendations, or clear pathway to the Government’s ambition to spend 3% of GDP on defence, let alone to the Prime Minister’s NATO pledge of 5%. Without this, delivery of the SDR’s recommendations is at best uncertain. The defence investment plan due this autumn must address this and set out the trade-offs involved if the 3% of GDP target is not achieved.

The SDR rightly commits to a NATO first posture. Meeting NATO’s evolving investment benchmarks, enhancing interoperability with allies and reinforcing our forward presence in eastern Europe and the high north must follow. Domestically, the SDR’s emphasis on home defence and resilience is timely, but can the Minister set out what the Government will do to ensure that the

“more substantive body of work”

needed to the UK’s critical national infrastructure will be undertaken promptly?

Regarding the billion-pound commitment to homeland air and missile defence and the creation of a new cyber and electromagnetic command, how can the Minister be confident that this funding will be sufficient for the SDR’s objectives?

The SDR’s focus on innovation and digital skills is essential. The war in Ukraine has shown the importance of rapid procurement cycles and scalable technologies. We welcome the £400 million identified for defence innovation and the doubled investment in autonomous systems, yet SMEs still face major challenges in engaging with the Ministry of Defence. Radical procurement reform is essential, and concrete timelines for this are still lacking.

To return to the essential theme of resilience, defence in the 21st century is no longer confined to the battlefield; it requires the full mobilisation of society—an integrated approach that connects the population, industry, infrastructure and education. While there is much in the SDR that reflects a broader understanding of defence as a collective national effort, which the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to, the MoD continues to show its complete misunderstanding of Reserve Forces, such an important part of connecting to wider society, and the pressures on those who seek to train while holding down civilian jobs. Can the Minister guarantee that the Reserve Forces will not be singled out, as they so often have been in the recent past, for cuts and so-called in-year savings?

The MoD is persisting in its efforts to neuter the Reserve Forces and cadets associations, whose council I chair, which could and would, if encouraged, rather than deliberately constrained as is proposed by converting them into a more costly NDPB, do so much to promote the resilience that the country so desperately needs. I know that Ministers simply do not understand the damage that they will be doing, especially to the SDR’s aspirations for the reserves and national resilience, if they follow what their officials are pushing them into, and I ask the Minister to look again at that.

To conclude, notwithstanding what I have just said, the shift in the strategic approach set out by the SDR is welcome. To turn its ambitions into reality will require strong and continuing commitment, especially on funding but also on improved relations with industry and sustained engagement with the public. I emphasise, though, the need for a fully costed road map and ask the Minister what plans he has to keep Parliament updated on the implementation of the SDR’s recommendations.