Oral Answers to Questions

Noah Law Excerpts

Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)]

4. What steps he is taking to increase innovation in the defence sector.

[Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)]

16. What steps he is taking to increase innovation in the defence sector.

[The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry (Luke Pollard)]

As we move towards warfighting readiness, the Government are investing more of our rising defence budget in new technologies and innovation, and the need for more innovative solutions to address emerging challenges is paramount in these darker and more dangerous times. On 1 July we launched UK Defence Innovation, a £400 million fund, and we will spend 10% of the equipment budget on innovative technologies that will deliver for defence.

[Luke Pollard]

As a fellow south-west MP, I know just how important it is for us to invest in defence skills in the south-west and across the United Kingdom. The defence industrial strategy includes the £182 million package that we will deliver via defence technical excellence colleges with our colleagues in the Department for Education, but we need to go further, encouraging all our defence businesses—big and small—to invest in skills so that we have the workforce of the future, able to deliver those cutting-edge technologies. I shall be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss what more we can do in Somerset.

[Noah Law]

While I greatly welcome the focus on innovation, cyber-warfare remains one of the areas in which the lines of responsibility may at least appear to be less clear. Given the threats that are proliferating—both abroad, for instance from Russia and the Sahel, and closer to home, even in many of our own in-trays—will the Minister specify where that responsibility for cyber-warfare really lies?

[Luke Pollard]

Keeping our nation safe in the air, on land and at sea requires cyber and space capabilities. Defence was attacked 90,000 times in the cyber domain, which amounts to roughly 250 attacks a day. That is why we are investing not just in the National Cyber Force but in the defence cyber and electromagnetic force that we are setting up, working with our colleagues in the private sector, to enhance the ability of defence not only to repel attacks on the defence infrastructure but to harden UK resilience in the private and public sectors. There is more work between the MOD and the Cabinet Office in that regard, but we need everyone to step up to defend our country in the cyber space, and we can all do something by simply updating our operating systems, which will make everyone who does so safer and more resilient.