Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to Question 135844 on Defence: Expenditure, with reference to his Department's recent statement that it has yet to decide on allocating the £16.5 billion increase to the defence budget, what methodology his Department used to estimate the number of jobs that funding would create.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) publishes statistics which set out the number of jobs in the UK currently estimated to be supported by existing Defence spend.

The jobs estimate is based on the MOD job calculator that estimates the number of jobs supported per pound of MOD spend. The jobs estimate is based on a sector by sector analysis. Individual allocations could change as a result of the final decisions made as a result of the Integrated Review. The MOD is comfortable that the estimate remains within an appropriate range in the context of scenarios likely to be determined following the announcement of the Integrated Review.