Ministry of Defence

Peter Prinsley Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to respond to the debate. I would have loved to go through all the speeches, but given a shorter time limit than I had expected and the consequent cuts in my speech—let alone the defence budget!—I cannot do that. What I will say, genuinely, is that it is always inspiring to hear constituency Members, such as the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae), talk about the defence industry and defence assets in their constituencies.

[Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[James Cartlidge]

As the hon. Gentleman is my constituency neighbour, I will.

[Peter Prinsley]

I am grateful to the shadow Secretary of State, who is, as he says, my Suffolk neighbour. Suffolk is home to the United States air force base at Lakenheath. The American air force has been our enduring friend since at least the second world war. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we must do all that we can to support these brave United States air force personnel at this dangerous time in the world?

[James Cartlidge]

When I was a Minister, I was privileged to meet General Campo, then the officer commanding two bases, and to go around them with him. I would just say gently to the hon. Gentleman that, in my view, we should have provided the use of American bases as part of the mission to attack Iran from the outset, not least because the nuclear programme in Iran is a threat to us. That is still the most important point in the debate about the current action.

Many Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown)—the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee—mentioned the need to learn lessons from Ukraine. I want to make one very important point about Ukraine. If we had not stepped up in providing weapons even before Russia’s invasion when we were in government, it is conceivable that Putin’s tanks could have reached Kyiv and Ukraine could have fallen. We were able to provide anti-tank weapons to prevent that column from reaching Kyiv because weeks before the invasion, Boris Johnson and Ben Wallace had the courage to ignore the advice of the Foreign Office and instead be bold to defend freedom. To put it another way, we did not wait for Putin to invade Ukraine before assisting so that we had a perfect case in international law. Thank God we acted pre-emptively. There is a lesson here.

The Chair of the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), made an excellent and eloquent speech, giving all the reasons why we need to increase defence spending. To be fair, I think we all know what they are, so I will not go through the details of the threat, but I have to say that it was shocking, with war raging on multiple fronts, that the Chancellor did not provide a single extra penny for defence in her spring statement yesterday.

There are five huge consequences of not setting a path to 3% and instead adopting Labour’s decision to prioritise welfare over the defence budget. The first consequence is that the priorities of the Department are now wrong. The MOD has no choice, with its current financial settlement, but to prioritise penny-pinching and in-year savings over rearmament. The fact is that instead of increasing the budget for rearmament, it is initiating £2.6 billion of in-year savings this year, which leads us to the second consequence: the operational impact. We all know that, shamefully, not a single Royal Navy ship was in the middle east when war broke out. That is because the Department has had to prioritise in-year savings and retrench its activity.

Last December, the Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), confirmed to me in a written answer that

“over the next four years, the Royal Navy will scale back its participation in overseas training outside the Europe, Atlantic, and Arctic theatres.”

That was a premeditated decision to pull our activity out of the middle east, and what have we seen this week? Drone attacks on the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus. As a direct consequence of the in-year savings, the Government are having to scramble to deploy HMS Dragon to Cyprus, when it should have been there weeks ago. As a Type 45 air defence destroyer, HMS Dragon will provide invaluable air cover around Cyprus against incoming missiles, but we know from BBC Verify that US Arleigh Burke air defence destroyers in the vicinity are providing cover for the time being. The shocking implication of this is that, until the Prime Minister’s U-turn on Sunday, he was preventing the US from using our bases while relying on it to defend them. It is an incredible situation.

The third consequence of Labour’s lack of defence spending relates to procurement, which has effectively been on hold since the general election as a result of the Government’s clampdown on in-year spending at the MOD. At the election, we had a fully funded plan to provide £10 billion extra for munitions. [Interruption.] Labour Members always chunter about that. The plan was to be fully funded by cutting the size of the civil service, and they do not like doing that. They did not like the way that it was funded, but that funding would have delivered the munitions strategy, which I was working on as the Minister for Defence Procurement. I want to be clear: it was a comprehensive plan to replenish our arsenal and, in particular, would have seen additional significant investment in air defence missiles, including for ground-based air defence and maritime defence, which are so critical for our country right now.

The problem is that the incoming Government had a better idea: cancel the munitions strategy and put any orders on hold while conducting a strategic defence review that would give all the answers but which, as I warned, would in the meantime put procurement on hold. Having told us that the SDR would have all the answers, the Government did not make any specific capability choices, which were punted into the defence investment plan. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) and many others have said, the strategic defence review was months late and the defence investment plan, promised for autumn 2025, is still nowhere to be seen. When the Prime Minister was asked at Prime Minister’s questions when it will be published, he did not even attempt to answer the question. To paraphrase the Leader of the Opposition, there is no money for defence because the Government have spent it on welfare. Because there is no money, there is no DIP. And because there is no DIP, there is no procurement.

The fourth consequence of Labour’s penny-pinching approach relates to the lethality of our armed forces. The Defence Secretary and his Ministers like to mock the defence drone strategy that I produced in government in February 2024—the first ever from a major military player, as far as I am aware—but I gently remind them that, they confirmed in a written answer last April that it is Government policy to implement the defence drone strategy. The aim of the strategy is to procure drones

“at scale for both the Ukrainian and UK armed forces”.

The problem is that, since the election, the Labour Government have rightly continued providing drones for Ukraine, which we support, but they have not implemented the other side of the bargain: building a comprehensive UK military drone industrial base and procuring at scale for our military. Because the Treasury has agreed funding for Ukraine but not for our armed forces, the MOD has been buying brilliant drone and counter-drone technology made by British SMEs and sending it to Ukraine, while buying almost none of it in parallel for our own troops. That is why last December we announced the Conservative policy of a sovereign defence fund, which would deliver drones at scale for the armed forces and, crucially, take stakes in British SMEs to establish a strong UK defence industrial base, instead of losing the intellectual property abroad.

The hon. Member for Lewes (James MacCleary) asked where we would find the money, and I will tell the House one way that we would find it. Some £17 billion of public money would be transferred to defence, including £6 billion for drones from other research and development, and £11 billion from the National Wealth Fund to create a new national defence and resilience bank—a UK bank that would support the supply chain. We would also lever in public finance, as the hon. Members for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg) and for Aldershot (Alex Baker) argued for. I agree with them that we need to increase traditional defence spending, but we massively need to lever in private money and fire up the private sector for defence. Most importantly, our policy would put the world-leading technology that we have given to Ukraine into the hands of our armed forces, immediately boosting their lethality.

The fifth big consequence of Labour’s prioritisation of penny-pinching is on the defence industry, risking jobs in every constituency. In January, it was reported that there is the worst sentiment among UK defence SMEs for 20 years. For an industry already hit by a £600 million increase in employer national insurance, this is not good enough.

Of course, our constituents do not just want more money spent on defence; they want it spent well. That is why, in February 2024, I introduced the integrated procurement model in Parliament. Its main focus was to learn the lessons of our extraordinary effort to deliver capability to Ukraine at pace. In particular, a key element was the use of minimum deployable capability. That went live in April 2024, so it is fair to say we did not get a huge amount of time to put it into practice, but we did in one important case study.

A number of commentators have made the important point that, in the latest exchanges in Iran, our RAF is having to use expensive missiles to take down cheap drones, and I think that observation was made by the hon. Member for Plymouth Moor View (Fred Thomas). In April 2024, another of our Type 45 destroyers, HMS Diamond, was deployed in the Red sea when the Houthis, like Hezbollah, were receiving ballistic missiles from Iran. These were also used against HMS Diamond, and while her brave and brilliant crew defeated the threat at the time, I decided that we had to have a way of defeating those drones. I therefore not only procured the DragonFire anti-drone laser, but used the new procurement system to ensure it could be in service in 2027 rather than 2032, which means it will be with our ships from next year.

Given that you are making those usual familiar signals, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will just say finally that when I visited Leonardo—the factory in Edinburgh that makes DragonFire—I was very chuffed to be told that the minimum deployable capability approach had removed hurdles and red tape, so this cutting-edge capability is going to be in service much faster and is genuinely making a difference.

To conclude, all of this points to the crucial need for the Government to follow the lead of our party, and accelerate their plans by going to 3% in this Parliament, not in the next.