Keir Starmer has said Britain “needs to go faster” on defence spending, though any increase to military budgets in this parliament would probably not be as high as the £15bn suggested in an overnight report.
At a press conference in south-west London, the prime minister was asked to comment on a BBC report that No 10 wanted to increase the defence budget to 3% of GDP by 2029.
In reply, Starmer said the threat from Russia was obvious and likely to endure even if the fighting in Ukraine could be stopped. “We need to be alert to that, because that’s going to affect every single person in this room, every single person in this country, so we need to step up.”
He then emphasised “that means, on defence spending, we need to go faster,” which was initially interpreted as a clear indication he sympathised with the 3% spending proposal, though the figure did not appear to have been signed off by the Treasury.
Downing Street sources subsequently clarified that did not mean it was likely that defence spending would be raised to the 3% figure before the next election. It would be possible to “go faster” using alternative methods, they added.
A government source denied there was a “concrete plan” to reach 3% earlier than planned, but did not deny that conversations to do so had taken place.
A row has been going on for several weeks between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury over the financing of the defence investment plan, which was originally scheduled to be agreed last year but for which no publication date has been fixed.
Key contracts hinge on the agreement of the plan, most notably a decision on a £1bn medium lift helicopter. Three thousand jobs at the Leonardo Helicopters factory in Yeovil, Somerset, depend on whether the UK will sign off on the contract, for which the company is the sole bidder.
Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite trade union, called for “definitive leadership” from Starmer on defence contracts. “The government’s dithering on the defence investment plan is leaving thousands of UK defence jobs at risk,” she said.
Defence spending is forecast to have amounted to 2.4% of GDP in 2025 and is scheduled to rise to 3.5% by 2035 in line with Nato targets. Most of the promised increases are planned for the next parliament.
A plan to increase defence spending to 3% by 2029 would mean lifting the budget by billions in real terms several years earlier. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculated last March it would cost £17.3bn, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies said it amounted to an additional £13bn-£14bn in 2029-30.
Bee Boileau, a research economist at the IFS, said the thinktank’s figure was based on comparing existing Treasury plans with the mooted target: “£13bn-£14bn is the cost of increasing defence spending from 2.6% of GDP in 2028-29 to 3% of GDP in 2029-30.”
On Saturday, Starmer told the Munich Security Conference that Europe “must stand on our own two feet” when it came to defence and not be dependent on the military protection of the US within Nato. It was the prime minister’s clearest acknowledgment yet of the changing security priorities of the Trump administration, and potentially an argument for a rapid shift in spending priorities towards the military.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the UK’s most senior military officer, and his German counterpart, Gen Carsten Breuer, warned that “we cannot be complacent” about the Russian threat on Sunday, as they justified existing plans to increase budgets.
“Moscow’s military buildup, combined with its willingness to wage war on our continent, as painfully evidenced in Ukraine, represents an increased risk that demands our collective attention,” Knighton and Breuer wrote in an article in the Guardian.
Last week, Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary for war, told Nato defence ministers at a meeting in Brussels that they needed to step up combat capabilities and take the lead in protecting their continent from the Russian threat.
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