Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the level of funding for the procurement of military equipment.

We are committed to delivering large, complex and technologically challenging defence programmes to give our military the very best equipment. In November 2018 we published our most recent financial summary for the Equipment Plan, which explained that there is a significant level of financial risk in the plan and that forecast costs exceeded allocated funding by £7 billion across 10 years of the programme in April 2018.

As part of our work to modernise and transform the Ministry of Defence, we are revising our approach to improving military capabilities and improving efficiency to ensure we focus on delivery of sustainable savings for reinvestment in the front-line. We also continue to work closely with the National Audit Office to improve our management of the Equipment Plan. We will take careful note of the concerns raised in the recent Public Accounts Committee report on the Equipment Plan and will produce a formal response in due course.