Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, whether his Department has made an assessment of the merits of potential locations for the establishment of new domestic weapons manufacturing facilities.

The strategic aim of this Government’s Defence Industrial Strategy is to make sure the imperatives of national security and a high-growth economy are aligned. The Defence Industrial Strategy will signal to industry the areas we want to grow our onshore production capability, and where we will work with allies. This will ensure the UK has the industrial base needed to meet the potential threats of the future, as well as maximise economic benefits to the UK, ensuring UK suppliers get more value out of our procurement spend. In March this Government agreed a £1.6 billion deal provides thousands of air defence missiles for Ukraine, boosting UK jobs and growth through a trebling of Thales’s Belfast based production of lightweight multirole missiles. BAE Systems has announced that it will deliver a sixteen-fold increase in production capacity of 155mm artillery shells when its new explosive filling facility at Glascoed, South Wales, becomes operational this summer.