Luke Pollard
Main Page: Luke Pollard (Labour (Co-op) - Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)Department Debates - View all Luke Pollard's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(8 months ago)
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Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
After 13 years of Tory Army cuts, serious and senior military figures are now questioning the UK’s ability to deliver our NATO obligations. While NATO is boosting the size of its high-readiness forces from 40,000 to 300,000 following Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, UK Ministers plan to cut the Army further to the smallest since the Napoleonic era. The last Conservative Defence Secretary told this House that the Government had “hollowed out and underfunded” our armed forces. Is that still the position of the Ministry of Defence, and will the Tory Army cuts still be forced through by this latest set of Ministers?
James Heappey
The former Secretary of State’s comment, which the shadow Minister conveniently quotes in a limited way, was that successive Governments had failed to invest in the enablers that underpinned our war-fighting capability. It is to the credit of this Prime Minister and the two Conservative Prime Ministers who went before him that commitments have been made to grow our defence budgets, including under Prime Minister Johnson a £19 billion increase to the defence budget and under this Prime Minister another £5 billion in the last year or so. The shadow Minister also ignores this: when he says that NATO is increasing its rapid reaction force, that does not mean that in NATO armies are growing; it just means that the armies in NATO are committing ever more of the forces they have to NATO’s high-readiness formations. The British Army is to the fore in that.