I call to order today’s one-off session of the House of Commons Defence Committee on the defence investment plan. It is a pleasure to have in front of us again the reviewers for the strategic defence review. Lord Robertson was the lead reviewer for the strategic defence review, and General Sir Richard Barrons, who it is wonderful to welcome back, was also a reviewer of the strategic defence review. Unfortunately the other reviewer, Fiona Hill, could not join us today but no doubt we will welcome her in the near future to get her perspective on the DIP. Gents, we have had a lot of discussion about the defence investment plan over the last few months. I know that all of us have been pushing for its publication. Unfortunately, it was substantially delayed for several months. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the DIP itself, what do you think have been the key impacts of its delay? In your view, could some of those have been avoided or managed better?

The delay has caused a degree of confusion inside the Ministry of Defence and considerable disturbance in the industry, which had waited for the publication. That will be compounded by industry’s disappointment at the actual plan when it came out, and the plan’s inability to project forward the commitment to 3.5% that the Government have already said is their objective. Industry will undoubtedly have been affected and slowed down; in fact, some companies will have gone bust as they waited for the degree of certainty that was required. In our view, we built the strategic defence review based on an assessment of 10 years—that was our assessment at the time of when a peer opponent might challenge the United Kingdom. That timeframe has clearly now been accelerated. Quite simply, we are running out of years. The reality is that the challenge is now bigger, more serious and earlier than we had anticipated, yet the defence investment plan does not come up to it. I would say, however, that it is encouraging that our strategic defence review remains the model; it remains the outline plan for the future. It therefore does not need to be revised or redone. It is still there, it is still serious and it is transformational. If it is carried out properly, both industry and people in the Ministry itself will be given heart.

General Barrons, what are your views on the delay and the effect on industry that Lord Robertson just alluded to?

The delay was significant. The SDR articulated a narrative for the restoration and transformation of UK defence, as part of NATO, for war in the 21st century, and that built a sense of expectation and relief. Then there was a year where pretty much nothing that cost any money that wasn’t already programmed happened, so within the armed forces there was a sense of, “That looked good, but will it really happen?” The delay has also depleted the defence industrial base because the small and medium-sized companies that read the SDR and thought, “Well, they’re going to buy our thing now,” then found that any prospect of a sale was perhaps four years away, so companies such as Reaction Engines went out of business or found money in America or Germany and have gone. That will mean that when the MOD buys their stuff, it will be importing it from abroad in some cases. The delay caused consternation in the City, which is ready to help but could not get a demand signal—capital is very impatient and started to wander off. But by far the most dangerous consequence of the year’s delay is that the Prime Minister is saying that Russia could attack NATO by 2030, and we essentially lost a year of mobilising for that. That is profoundly dangerous.

Fair enough. I will raise that issue directly on the Floor of the House. Lord Robertson, we have mentioned the impact on industry, but what has the delay done to our relations with allies and partners?

I think our allies are dismayed at how long it has taken to go from the SDR. They thought it was brilliantly done and an ideal model, designed to inspire them as well as intimidate our enemies, so the delay in putting the flesh on the bones of that would have confused them. The Prime Minister is at the NATO summit in Ankara today. He will be sitting tomorrow morning beside President Trump in alphabetical order around the North Atlantic Council table. I think relations may well be quite frosty. The allies round the table are all stepping up to the mark and spending more on defence. Some of the bigger countries like Germany and Poland are spending considerably more than us. The delay and the reality will have disturbed a lot of our allies and made a lot of them uncomfortable. They expected more of the United Kingdom, given that we have always claimed to have a leading role in NATO.

General Barrons, let me play devil’s advocate. It could be said that you have come out to criticise the Government for something that you were very much a part of, in that you were involved—you were the Government’s team, you were involved collating everything and it was supposed to be a costed plan. You were given an envelope and everything was based on that, yet you were a part of the team that did not quite deliver on that. How would you respond to that?

I would totally reject it. We were asked two questions. First, “What do you have to do to fix UK defence for war in the 21st century?” That is the narrative of the SDR, which holds good in any setting. As Lord Robertson has described, it is regarded as globally pace setting. The second question we were asked was, “What do you get for this money?” When we started out in July ’24, the financial profile that we had was set to, “You’ll get to 2.9% of GDP by ’29-30 and then it flatlines. This is not an exercise in more money.” As we worked through the consequences of that in partnership with the MOD, which is the only place you are going to get the information from, it became clear that that profile meant a brilliant narrative and enormous cuts. Then, in early ’25, largely thanks to President Trump and his effect on NATO, that financial profile changed so that over 10 years, the narrative was broadly implementable, although there were going to be squeezes. When we signed off the review, we were clear that the narrative was the right one and it was accepted by Government. The programme that delivered that narrative over 10 years, and a bit more, got you to a minimal place in 10 years. We then said, “But we think the world will mean that you have to go faster and you have to find more money sooner.” As Lord Robertson has described, my goodness, over the last year that has been the case. We said that this SDR starts too late. Nothing happens for two years, then it goes too slowly in this Parliament and takes too long. That remains the case today.

Lord Robertson, you are saying that you are not to blame for this. You were part of Government’s SDR team, yet you say it is the fault of Ministers, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor for not delivering. Do you think that you are to be blamed for any of this?

No, I don’t see why we should in any way be blamed. We produced a prospectus based on what we knew at the time, but we said in the reviewers’ preface to the SDR: “We are confident that the transformation we propose for the harder world we now live in is affordable over ten years, given these promised new resources”—that is, the 3% by the new Parliament—“However, as we live in such turbulent times it may be necessary to go faster. The plan we have put forward can be accelerated for either greater assurance or for mobilisation of Defence in a crisis.” Since we wrote the report, while they were debating the defence investment plan, we have had the conflict in the Gulf, in which the United Kingdom is playing a serious part, and we have had the coalition of the willing invented and led by Britain and other European countries for following a ceasefire in Ukraine, as well as a number of other disturbing incidents that have all happened since then—

Further to your comment, just to confirm, you proposed to the Government that they should reach 3% by the end of this Parliament.

These were the assumptions we had to operate within—that it would be 2.5%, but the Chancellor was saying it would be 3% at the beginning of the next Parliament, so it would be beyond their control.

Because unfortunately, despite the likes of me and others in the House pushing and prodding, we have never got to a position where the Government have stated that they will reach 3% by the end of this Parliament, or indeed by 2030.

Morning, both. Just a quick question: were you or Fiona Hill involved in the DIP planning and the discussions with Government?

No.

Did you ask to be?

It was made very clear when we delivered the review that that was the end of our remit, and the conversion of the strategic defence review into the programme of activity known as the DIP was always going to be done without us.

And are you happy about that? Did you not feel there was a bit of a disconnect? If you created the document that the DIP then flows from, should you not have been involved at some stage?

It was made absolutely clear to us by the then Defence Secretary—I think I repeated the statement to this Committee the last time we sat here—that our job was finished. So I was out, and so was Richard, proselytising about what we had actually come to, but we were not involved, apart from one briefing that we had on the delivery of the 62 recommendations. They invited Dr Hill, Richard and I to come to the Ministry of Defence, and we were given a fairly optimistic and convincing view about the recommendations that were being implemented. But at no point were we ever involved in the DIP process.

Do you know when you were invited in to discuss the delivery of the 62 recommendations? That was quite some time ago, wasn’t it?

I think it was in February or March.

Earlier this year—it was at a time when the MOD felt it was quite close to settling on the DIP, and in the end it was not.

I am interested in your determination that the SDR is still the right SDR for this time. You have listed a load of commitments that have been made since, such as the coalition of the willing. We also have commitments around the High North that we did not have when the SDR was written. How do you square the fact that the world has changed? Various people have said to me that the SDR is out of date already. What is your take on that?

I think that is nonsense. The strategic defence review articulates the transformation of UK defence for war in the 21st century. At the heart of it is the architecture of how you do war in the 21st century, which has been evidenced in the war in Iraq as well as the war in Ukraine. At the heart of the review is the articulation of the fact that we will build a fence around what this review calls a targeting web. The rest of the world calls it a digital kill web—any sensor connected by data to any effector. Those sensors and effectors are the evolution from people manning platforms to crewed, uncrewed and autonomous systems—increasingly autonomous systems—in a high-low mix. That is now broadly well understood. That is the heart of how the review transforms defence in the biggest transformation for 150 years. That holds good in all outcomes. What I think you are addressing here is not the direction of the SDR, but the speed at which it has to go and the volume of things it has to cover.

The challenge to that is this is supposed to be a costed plan. What we have seen in the last year are more commitments that cost money. You cannot have it both ways and say, “This is the right plan,” but also, “The envelope doesn’t meet the mark.”

That is not a problem of the SDR; it is a problem of implementation. But it is absolutely the vital issue.

You told us that this was a costed plan. I asked you that.

Yes. It is a costed plan for delivery over 10 years. That remains broadly the case. Now, that is no longer the issue—

But it does not meet the moment in terms of the things that we now need to do.

This is also true. The issue is that the SDR as it was settled, on the financial profile that it was given, was produced to get the UK to a minimal place by about 2035. We must remember that the DIP and the SDR are not the entire defence iceberg; they are the top half. What we are all talking about is a world that is on fire now. If you are ready by 2035, that is a shame, because the war may start in 2030. What we are talking about is not changing the direction of travel in defence, but accelerating and expanding it, because the world means you have to do it faster. That is a different, and very pressing, issue.

You coming in as an independent team was a novel approach—it has never been done before. You sat independently of the MOD to deliver the SDR. The Government were very proud of that approach, but has it failed?

First, we were never independent. We were working for the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary. We were external. We had to answer two questions: “What do you need to do?”, which is the transformational narrative, and then the harder question, “What do you get for this money?” We could not have argued that, “Okay, you’ll need more money sooner,” because it was not in our terms of reference, but that is the debate we are now having. There is a whole world of difference, as we found, between being independent and being external. We were not independent.

Had we been independent, it would have been just another think-tank report. But we were doing it with the Department, not to the Department. We had a team. We were able to be bold and imaginative about what we were proposing. It is a wholesale transformation of the Department, but we were working with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor as well as the Defence Secretary to go through that so that at the end of the day, we produced a report that was implementable and not simply a good think-tank report on the shelf.

The primary purpose of the strategic defence review was to chart the course, common to all outcomes, for how you transform defence for war in the 21st century. That takes you to the sort of architecture that I described. The operational challenge for the MOD remains that what they have today is a rather thin set of inventory as a result of the journey through the post-cold war era, so when their allies say, “We need to be ready sooner—by 2030,” of course they need to fill in some holes. That was always part of the debate, but we never would have countenanced, “Let’s not talk about transformation; let’s just fill in some holes,” or, “Let’s just do a digital kill web and not have any ammunition.” That does not work. At the heart of the review and its implementation is the fact that the world—our opponents and our allies—says that we have made commitments, including on Atlantic Bastion, a strategic reserve corps and contribution to the NATO air and space component. It says that we have an obligation under article 3, we have made alliance commitments and our Prime Minister says that NATO could be attacked by 2030, yet right now we are actually going backwards because we are not spending any money sooner. We have gone from major NATO spender to 12th in the order, and ranked against our capability targets, we are 31 of 32—just above Iceland, which does not have armed forces. The difficult debate is about how we implement the direction of travel of the SDR fast enough to deter our enemies, stay in step with our allies and be the leading influence that we keep claiming to be. That brings you back to the money. If you want to do that, find more money sooner. Make different choices. That is it.

I was outside this process at the beginning. On lessons learned, I would have thought that it would have been better if the DIP were done in conjunction with the SDR, to stop all the confusion with industry this year and to give industry clarity. What are the lessons learned from not doing it that way round?

In the execution of the SDR process, almost all day every day, we were having a conversation about how the money available to us was fitted in; that was essentially the precursor to the DIP. When the DIP process started, it was on the basis of the outcome of the defence review. It was just going to become more granular and deal with actual money over time; it would have to put money against specific programmes that you could contract against. The review was essentially concurrent with setting the parameters of the DIP. Then, there was this lost year. It was clear by August last summer that once they had looked at the figures again, added some new things and brought some things forward because of 2030, there was an enormous gap. There was a gap—let’s say it was £24 billion over four years—between what the review required for the 62 recommendations over the first four years and the amount of money that the Government wanted to find. Since we knew that there would be no new money for the first two years and only a dribble more for the rest of this Parliament, that was not a surprise, but what it exposed was a clear choice: if you want to implement this review, and you have said that you do, you will have to find more money sooner. If you won’t find more money sooner—and it is won’t, not can’t—what would you like to cut from the review you just announced? They went round that circle three times a week, every week, between September and basically the announcement. For me, that was just not good enough.

From the beginning, do you wish that we had had some quick wins with the SDR? When announcing the SDR, we could have said, “We could get some quick wins here” to give it credibility.

I do wish that we had had money set aside for some of the bigger transformations. I would have moved faster on the digital targeting web, for example, because I do not think that it is really difficult. I would have put more money into the attritable drones, which have just appeared in the DIP for the Navy, the Air Force and the Army; they are in the programme. What was far more disappointing was that it took months to appoint the National Armaments Director, who is the key figure in the delivery of this with industry. People could hide behind the fact that they had not got a DIP or a National Armaments Director. The loss of momentum was deeply regrettable.

The National Armaments Director gave evidence in the last few weeks to the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee, and he impressed us with his drive and enthusiasm, but there is no doubt at all that the early delay in the appointment of the National Armaments Director slowed things down. The other thing that the Committee needs to pay attention to at the moment is that our nuclear forces take up at least 20%—maybe even 25%—of the MOD budget. It is crucial to the security of this country, and indeed to wider Europe, that we have that independent nuclear deterrent—the only one that is committed to NATO. However, it is very expensive and that crowds out a lot of the other ambitions that the country might want to have at the moment. This needs to be seen in the broader context. If we are going to have an independent nuclear deterrent, we have to be able to pay the price of that and face the fact that it squeezes the conventional defence of the country and our wider contribution to NATO much more tightly.

If we want to be ready to face action, given what has been suggested will be Russia's aggression against NATO by 2030, then what integrated air and missile defence systems must we be developing in the next four years? Is £790 million good enough? I suggest not, but I would be interested in your thoughts.

The first important point that you raised is that the UK does not own the clock on when we need to be ready. I think that is set by Russia, likely on the back of an outcome in Ukraine, which is why people talk credibly about 2030 or even sooner. That is an uncomfortable view in Whitehall; you may have to make different spending choices faster than you are comfortable with because your opponents have decided that is how the game will be played. That removes the leisure from the 10-year programme. The subject of integrated air and missile defence also links to the absolutely vital point that gets lost so often: the defence investment plan is the articulation of the SDR—it is the things that made the cut for the money available. Given the legacy holes in defence, there is at least another half of the iceberg that never made it into the DIP, because it was not even remotely affordable. There is a £60 billion to £80 billion hole in defence infrastructure—falling down airfields, ports, housing, the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Associations. Most of that is not in the DIP, because it just could not get into the cut. Integrated air and missile defence is the iconic thing that did not make into the review. There is about £1 billion in the DIP for it, and that buys improved command and control—you’ll know better that you’re going to be hit by a missile—some improvements for the Air Force ability to shoot down cruise missiles, and some improvements to the Type 45 so that it has a better capability against ballistic missiles. Many people in the country assume there is a sort of iron dome over at least London, and that is not even remotely there. Even if you embrace the extraordinary technological change that some companies are producing in low-cost kills, whether directed energy weapons, DragonFire or cheaper missiles like Cambridge Aerospace and that kind of thing, the cost of an iron dome at entry level is probably £80 billion over 10 years—entry level. The IAMD of my dreams is probably £120 billion over 10 years. But we got £1 billion, because it sits in that bit of the iceberg that never got to be remotely affordable. We should not kid ourselves that if we have an argument about the margins of the DIP, we are somehow fixing defence. That is just not true.

In my 1998 review, we did not talk about homeland defence at all—“We’re an island, surrounded by water, so there is a moat around us and we’re a long way from trouble.” The reality now is very different. Article 3 of the north Atlantic treaty is relevant to us—looking after our own defence as a contribution to the collective defence. That is there—chapter 6 in the defence review—and I believe that the Government are going to produce some resilience plan next week—

We will come back to that later, Lord Robertson.

The fact is that technology and missiles have now changed. Iran, using an old, out-of-date Russian system, tried to fire a ballistic missile at Diego Garcia, 2,000 km away. We are now within range, in a way that we were not before. As Richard said, this is a huge iceberg, which was way beyond our capability and our terms of reference, but it is a problem that the nation will have to face in the future.

As a platform for delivering what UK defence needs, is the defence investment plan better or worse than the previous incarnation—the defence equipment plan?

It is way better. It does two really important things. First, it cleaves to the transformational narrative of the SDR. It regularly says that we are not challenging when it comes to the direction that we need to go in. If you watch the US hitting 1,000 targets a day in Iran, that is a digital targeting web in action, so we know we have to get down there. The second thing is that the SDR has, unlike its predecessors, accelerated the move into hybrid Navy, hybrid carrier air wing and, for the Army, the transition to the CGS’s 20:40:40 model: 20% crewed, 40% attritable and 40% consumable. It makes that transition and it starts—where it falters is that it does not do enough quick enough, by a long way.

I know your expertise in and advocacy of the digital targeting web. How do you place that in future warfare?

When it comes to what we are calling the digital targeting web, I regret that we had to settle on the word “targeting”, which implies that it just does targeting. Actually, the digital kill web—a word I prefer—is the architecture of command and control now. It is how you understand your operating environment, how you take decisions, how you decide what you shoot at, how you manoeuvre, how you support, how you co-ordinate and how you train. It is that architecture. Essentially, what the web does is to take in every form of thing or capability that senses the operating environment—whether it is satellite, aircraft, drone, mobile phone, ship, vehicle or database, it does not matter; everything that allows you to understand your operating environment—and networks that into a database and secure cloud managed by AI—without AI, you cannot manage it—supervised by clever people. That capability allows you to assemble an understanding of your operating environment to support decision making, including ranking targets and allocating them to weapons systems, whether they are kinetic, from any service, or non-kinetic, like a cyber-attack.

Thank you. We have to move on, or time will defeat us—we have less than an hour, as we have a hard stop at 11.30.

I have a quick one. Lord Robertson, you spoke about how the UK provides the nuclear deterrent for all our European allies. You said how expensive that is and how it squeezes the rest of our defence capabilities. We provide that for countries such as Poland, Germany, the Baltics and the Nordics. In Turkey this week, our Prime Minister might be coming under some pressure on our defence spending, yet it is us who provide that nuclear deterrent. Having been Secretary-General of NATO yourself, how realistic would it be to start a conversation where we say, “If you guys are all spending so well on defence, would you like to chip in? Would you like to support this pan-Europe nuclear deterrent that currently the British taxpayer alone provides?”

By and large, the Americans provide the real, big nuclear umbrella; we add to that because our nuclear deterrent is committed to NATO as a whole. The answer to your question is that other countries would then of course want to have a say. NATO bureaucracy would want to have a say over our independent nuclear deterrent. Up to now, we have said that it has to be under the control of the Prime Minister, even in a situation where we were committed to defending NATO as well. It is an area that should be looked at because other nations too often ignore and forget about the fact that we do that. The French force de frappe is very much under national control and committed to nobody else. Although President Macron has been talking vaguely in his last year about making it a European deterrent, he has not in any way specified how that might be done. Ours is committed to NATO as a whole, but some arrangement may well have to be made about the cost that we are bearing to ensure there would be a nuclear umbrella for Europe in the event that America was not seen as being ultimately reliable.

We must and we should. I have constantly reminded the Prime Minister over the last year, since our report came out, about the national conversation being necessary. There was a big debate going on in the background about the DIP and about the money that was going to be allocated and that seemed to divert attention, but unless the country knows how dangerous the world is and how dangerous it is for people in this country, they will not transmit to the Treasury the priority that should be given to defence expenditure. Remember, our report articulates a view of His Majesty’s Government that is quite explicit. We say that, “The UK and its allies are once again directly threatened by other states with advanced military forces. The UK is already under daily attack, with aggressive acts”. We have said that. The Government have said that. The Prime Minister made it clear in his speech at Munich that we needed to move faster into hard defence in order to be able to meet the challenges. It just did not get to the point where he said, “Therefore, we will pay the money.”

It is a very complicated question, because we are in the uncharted waters of this transformation and how you fight in the digital age. It is absolutely wrong to try to model the UK armed forces on what you see in Ukraine or what you saw in Iran; every war has its own features, its own geography and its own limitations. The important place to focus is on the jobs that the UK armed forces actually have in the review from NATO. To take the Atlantic Bastion, the Royal Navy has planned for the Atlantic Bastion to evolve quickly into a hybrid Navy—crewed, uncrewed, autonomous, above the water, under the water and in the sky. That is absolutely the right direction of travel. The challenge is whether it will be in a good enough place not just to fight, because it always will, but to endure by the time the enemy sets the bar, which is a possible confrontation with Russia. For the Army, which is in by far the worst shape of the three services, the thing that the current SACEUR wants more than anything else from the UK is the strategic reserve corps. He has said that again and again. That corps currently consists of about two brigades with a mixed fleet. The Challenger 3 tank does not exist yet; that will take a couple of years. The artillery is coming in a couple of years. The CGS’s direction of travel shows that they absolutely get this. Their problem is that they are looking at the clock and at their programme and they do not meet; they are out of kilter. It is the same for the scale and endurance of the Air Force. The prescription is good; the delivery versus the clock set by the opponents is where the flaw is.

To pick up on Lord Robertson’s comment about the Prime Minister telling people about the threat, do you think that saying it and actually articulating it in a way that the public understand are the same thing?

No, they are not, because a national conversation, as we envisaged it, would involve an articulation of what the threat was. The answer to the question is in the strategic defence review: it lays out what the threat is and where we are at the moment, and then it provides the answer through each of the services as well as acquisition, people, policy and the rest of it. We need to make sure that people know that there is an actual threat, in more than just the entry point of the strategic defence review, and that needs to be repeated. Some of us have been doing that, and I dare say members of this Committee are involved in that process, but it needs to be much bigger, much more ambitious and much more relentless in the message that it takes over, both about the threat and how we deal with it.

Do you think that not just the public in general, but colleagues and MPs on the Benches here, physically understand where the threat is coming from and what we are facing?

I recently made a speech in Salisbury that got a bit of notice. I will quote my words, because they got a bit distorted, but I pointed out that, “There is a corrosive complacency today in Britain’s political leadership.” That was taken by the Financial Times as an attack on the Government, but it applies to the whole political leadership. I wrote to the leader of the Liberal Democrats in December last year, and I finally met him a couple of weeks ago. I wrote to the leader of Reform UK in December last year, and I am still waiting for the meeting, although his Defence spokesman has said that he is interested in a meeting. There is a degree of complacency in the country as a whole, which is very dangerous. People need to be woken up.

My concern is that it is not coming from the top. When I asked the Chief of Defence Staff why we are not letting the public know what the threats are, his response was, “We don’t want to alarm people.” I would suggest that they should be alarmed.

I would agree with you. I think that we need to alarm people because, as the review said, we are under daily attack at the present moment, and that will be ramped up. Dr Jade McGlynn of King’s College, who is a great expert on Russia and Russian domestic opinion, points out that this country is being used inside Russia today as a proxy for all the forces that are ranged against Russia. That leads in many ways to the kind of rhetoric that we got about Ukraine before the invasion of Ukraine. Dr McGlynn says quite clearly that in the sub-threshold area, cyber-attacks, targeted assassinations and attacks on our undersea pipelines—all those things—are on the agenda because Russia sees the United Kingdom as being its principal, main adversary at the moment.

I am neither a public servant nor a politician, so I can speak my mind on this. First, I think we are dealing with a failure of politics across the piece—a failure of political leaders to commit to understanding this problem, because many people do not and do not want to. Secondly, and more egregiously, there is a failure to articulate it to their voters, because I think many politicians think there is no mileage or votes in that. But you cannot be in a world where, if you are the Prime Minister, you can say, “Russia could attack NATO in 2030,” and talk about a whole-of-society battle of wills, and then just let that dangle. In the absence of politics doing what I hope it could do, I think there are two courses left. No one will listen to a word I say—

We will.

I have basically given up expecting to get any traction, but events will get traction. We are attacked every day, so we are hostage to events. There is also the world of entertainment. If you look at the Netflix film “A House of Dynamite”, there are ways of reaching into the public consciousness that are more effective than anything I ever do, and I think that might work.

He and I have been involved in the Sky television plan that will be coming out in September called “The Wargame”. I think it will remind people how grave the danger is.

We have had well-documented conversations about the gap in funding for the DIP. The extra £15 billion has been provided and there has been a lot of criticism that it does not go far enough. How much do you see the relationship between the Treasury and the MOD being the problem in all of this? Do they communicate and work well together? What is really going on there?

For my entire adult life, there has always been a difficult relationship between the Treasury—juggling all aspects of public spending for 20 years with a stagnant economy in a very large public sector—and defence, which will always work out why it needs more money and has been criticised for not spending it well. I accept that; they just do not need to do it any longer. But I think that is the wrong level of argument. I am looking for a Government and a Cabinet that understand the strategic landscape and can realise that this is uncomfortable and they do not want it, but that they have to make some hard choices and can then make those hard choices stick across their Administration. Hoping that defence and Treasury officials will somehow work all this out themselves, without there being a major societal and political discussion about the choices that we make is, I think, doomed to fail.

At an early stage in our review, I said to our team, “You will remember that we have to convince the Treasury. More than anything else, we have to convince the Treasury that any extra money is going to be wisely and properly used, so put yourself in the mind of Treasury.” As part of our “review six”, we had six experts helping us, and we had a very senior Treasury official there; he was extremely useful during the process. They think that if you just give money to defence, it is wasted—it goes into programmes that are over-costed or over-elaborate, that get added to or are rarely delivered on time. We have to focus on that. I appointed Sir Jeremy Quin, who had been one of the Defence Ministers in the last Administration—a Defence Procurement Minister, one of the 16 they had from 2010 to 2024—to look at that. The strategic defence review looks at reforming acquisition to make sure that we do not have a situation like the Type 23 frigates that are being built in Glasgow today, which were the backdrop for the launch of the SDR last June. It is a basic, simple frigate that can be sold elsewhere; it is uncomplicated, but it took 20 years from the start of the drawing board to the delivery of the ships. We looked at that, so the strategic defence review and the acquisition side reform the whole way in which we do it. Giving evidence to the Lords Committee, the National Armaments Director was clear that that was one of his priorities, in order to solve the problem and therefore undermine the basic Treasury argument against giving money to Defence.

Do you think that has worked?

Well, it is working. I think that Rupert Pearce, who is the National Armaments Director, means well. He was able to articulate an argument to members of the Lords Committee that was highly convincing. I hope that that will be the case, but we still need to get the message over to the Treasury that actually the SDR solves the problem that they perennially see in relation to defence.

General Barrons, in response to Mr Roome, you intimated that the defence investment plan is actually better than previous defence equipment plans. However, there is a palpable lack of detail within the DIP. For example, there is no full 10-year expenditure profile, there is no breakdown between procurement and support costs and there is a lot of backloading going on. There is a serious lack of detail. Why do you think Government have failed in that endeavour? Is there something to hide by not giving us as a Committee and the wider public that level of detail?

You would really have to ask the Government where they drew the line on the level of detail, but the defence investment plan as an internal MOD document is an enormous spreadsheet and it will be classified as secret and UK eyes only, I imagine, because the detail that is in there is profoundly interesting to industry and capital, so it is commercially sensitive. It is profoundly interesting to allies and to opponents. I understand the dilemma of how much you put in the public domain and how much you keep in-house. They were never going to publish the entire spreadsheet.

It is not about publishing the entire thing. Previously we have had, on an annual basis, the defence equipment plan, which lays out that level of detail, including to our Committee and to our predecessor Committees. We are not looking for secret or classified versions—the Defence Committee can engage with the Ministry directly—but this is just a headline statement.

Perhaps if you were to ask, that level of detail would come next. I put one rider with that. If you look at the role that the National Armaments Director has, for the first time, and by design, he owns innovation, he owns acquisition in the tiered way that has been described and he owns logistics and infrastructure. The reason he has that set of things is that we have deliberately broken out of a world where you would buy a thing and then you would have a separate argument about the two thirds of the programme cost that was about its support. Nakedly, entryism would apply; you could buy a thing and then worry about how you pay for it. He has a much better tool set, and therefore he may be able to present the information about the life cycle of capability, particularly where capability is on a very rapid burn, in a different way. It is no longer just about buying big bits of kit in a leisurely cycle.

Good morning. I would like to talk about alignment between the SDR and the DIP. I have a couple of specific examples that I will come to, but in general terms, how well do you think the DIP is aligned on delivering the priorities that you articulate in the SDR?

Broadly speaking, it is. As General Barrons has said, the wholesale transformation and the creation of the digital spine and the targeting web and all that are there, and the commitment to it is there, so the structure of the transformation has been protected. The question is whether the resources are going to be attached to it. You do not want to see only gestures being made towards what we said.

The digital targeting web has only £7.5 billion spending before 2030, and a massively backloaded £17 billion after 2030 that is as yet unfunded. Would that be an example of that?

That question is probably more for me. If you take the constituent parts of the digital targeting web, you are going to start with the things you already have. Defence already has sensors, weapons and some architecture, in terms of data centres, early-use AI tools and services that providers such as Palantir can provide, so it is going to start by stitching together those things that it has. Then it needs to work out how to evolve that. Most of that technology will be the application of things that have been invented in the private sector—data, AI, those kinds of things—so there is not a whole lot of new innovation in there. There is an argument, a very vibrant one, about what the best mix is. What are you going to spend that £7.5 billion on? Do you mean sensors? Do you mean effectors? Do you mean the data architecture? Do you mean AI?

Do they articulate that in the DIP?

They do not articulate it in the DIP, and that is probably a good thing because, if they were sure right now, they would be wrong. They need to focus on gluing things together first—and, crucially, not just with the UK but with our NATO allies. The targeting web is an instrument of interoperability; it is not just a national exercise.

Back to the theme that I started with, Lord Robertson, are there any gaps in the DIP in terms of what you expected to see based on the vision of the SDR?

Are there gaps? In terms of the overall vision that we put forward it is all articulated, but the relatively small amounts being allocated to a lot of those things are an indication of future progress. The new combat ship is designed for delivery in the mid-2030s, which is beyond the 2030 date that we now have to work on.

On that, our current Type 45s are going out of service in 2035, yet we have a new suite with the hybrid navy of the CCVs and Type 9Xs that will cluster around them. Currently, that is a PowerPoint. Does nine years from PowerPoint to power projection on the high seas seem realistic? Does it speak to the SDR?

We should see this as an opportunity. Take the Type 45; it is probably the last of its kind. It is £1 billion and a bit more for a ship with a very impressive radar on it and a magazine that probably carries around 40 missiles. That predates the world we are now in, which is the crewed-uncrewed-autonomous mix. Given the speed at which the technology is changing, in the high-low mix of munitions in particular, the Navy is not arguing for a like-for-like replacement for the Type 45, but a replacement contribution to integrated air and missile defence. There will be a crewed ship in there somewhere, but most of the Navy’s bets will be on uncrewed and increasingly autonomous platforms that carry the radar or more missiles.

Got it. But specifically on my question about taking nine years from PowerPoint to being at sea—

Honestly, I think nine years is leisurely. Look at what happened in Ukraine. I think you are capturing there how this whole world is changing from episodic 30-year cycles to replace capital platforms to a world where the armed forces will constantly evolve at the speed of innovation, which is benchmarked by what your opponents have—in the near term that is probably Russia; in the medium term it is definitely China—and where technology can give you an edge. For the sort of money that we are talking about, if you give the Royal Navy nine years and you tell them, “It’s not like you did; it’s like you know you need to do now,” they will deliver on that, with industry.

If it is nine years, is £1.3 billion over the next four years enough to kick-start that project?

That is the more strategic question. If you look at the DIP, it captures the direction of the SDR, as we have discussed. It does that really well. It makes and accelerates some early moves, but they are small in number, and then a lot of it is too leisurely for the world we live in. There are two things that really matter. First, if your war may start in 2030 and you are planning to be ready in 2035, you go a bit quicker. Secondly, you have to keep your eye on the things that never made it into the DIP, because they really matter too.

For example?

IAMD, which we talked about.

That went down—it was £1 billion in the SDR, wasn’t it, and £700-and-something million in the DIP. That is just a factual drop.

I would not want to quote the ammunition figures—I would be wrong—but the amount of money that the DIP spends on munitions of all types is substantially less than the amount of ammunition the services want to hold. They would want 30-day stocks, including in infrastructure and in logistics. The thing that nobody ever talks about, which is the most hollowed-out bit of defence, is Defence Medical Services. If you are planning to put the strategic reserve corps in continental Europe, you must know how the casualties—and there will be casualties—that come from the back end of the SRC get to an NHS bed. That assumes that the NHS is ready to receive and that there is a system to move mass casualties. I can’t see where that exists; that’s not in the DIP.

My final question is to Lord Robertson. You have done two defence reviews, so you have a really interesting perspective on this. A very common criticism of the way the UK political class, to use your earlier framing, approaches defence, and particularly the reduction that we have seen since the end of the cold war, is that it salami-slices. We just cut a little bit off each thing and we end up with not much mass and there is not enough to do anything. Are we not now just doing the opposite but in reverse? We are penny-packeting—adding little bits to everything to build things up slowly—and it is going to end up with the same result. We are not going to end up with a force that we can fight with.

We will have a force to fight with when the day comes. It may well take a crisis to mobilise opinion and finance to do it. That is the horrible reality that we live with; 9/11 was a wake-up call on global terrorism and it changed a lot. It changed NATO, when I was there, quite substantially, and the way the enlargement took place. If people become aware of the dangers and risks that apply to this country, they will make the demands that will allow us to do it. The generals—this one not excluded—will always say, “We’ll take it on. We’ll do it.” But we might do it badly, and that is what I worry about. The Secretary of State, in the DIP, says: “The hard truth is that this government inherited a defence programme that was underfunded, overcommitted, and insufficiently attuned to the threats we now face.” That is the reality. You are two years on and the forces are still hollowed out, yet the Government is saying that we could volunteer them for a coalition of the willing in a post-ceasefire Ukraine.

Which is fanciful, right?

Well, it’s not fanciful, because the military would want to do it, and at that point maybe there would be a wake-up call. But we should not be taking risks in that way with human beings who are serving in our forces.

I have the great pleasure of having Standing Joint Command in my patch—Aldershot. That is the three-star headquarters that is the national headquarters for homeland defence. I took particular interest in chapter 6 of the SDR and the focus on homeland defence, but when it comes to the DIP and the commitments on homeland defence and resilience, it appears pretty sparse. Is that because much of the responsibility for delivering homeland defence sits not with the MOD, but with other Government Departments?

That is the first conclusion. We are now in a world where we have to take homeland resilience seriously under article 3, and we have to understand that resilience is the foundation of credible deterrence. We have not had to worry about that for 35 years, but now we do. The headquarters in your constituency will evolve to become a proper joint homeland headquarters. It will do the important job of contributing to the military defence of the UK—although that is a shared responsibility, including with NATO. The military support it provides to the UK’s resilience is crucial; it supports mobilisation and endurance. However, the great majority of homeland resilience is, as you describe, not a military thing; it is about cyber-resilience, the resilience of critical national infrastructure and cognitive resilience against social media manipulation. It was made very clear during the review that we should keep within our lane: what is it that the military do for the country, and what must the country do for the military? The missing bit in this whole-of-society discussion is the recreation of our national resilience, the vast majority of which is nothing to do with the MOD.

You talk about the whole-of-society approach, but my view is that we need to start with a total Government approach and work from there. I am doing a lot of work on NATO article 3 and our commitment to be prepared. Obviously, everyone knows NATO article 5, but nobody has much awareness of NATO article 3. How much awareness do you think Government Departments beyond the MOD have of our commitment to be prepared? What is your assessment, in a mark out of 10, of other Government Departments? Would call any of them out for being proactive? Conversely, are there any that are not on it at the moment?

I will answer at the practitioner level and leave the next level to George. The bit that works is the National Cyber Security Centre. As a source of advice, it is very good. However, it is a source of advice; it is not a fire brigade. If you look at the span of things that the rest of the Government must do to assure daily life in this country—we can get food, water and telecoms; we can have access to space for our GPS; our digital architecture can function; the population, who all have a smartphone, can recognise the nonsense that is been pumped out at them in information operations—and take that across Government, then on a good day I would give them two out of 10.

I certainly agree with that. I was at a briefing yesterday and the national resilience plan is going to be published next Monday. The home defence aspect, knitting together all the different Government Departments, is going to be articulated. That is good news. It is really excellent because it requires every Government Department to do what it has to do. I keep quoting something to people. I spoke at the Wigtown book festival last October. Wigtown is in the south-west of Scotland. It is a small town with a big book festival. I said to the audience, “Have you all got a wind-up radio? Have you all got cash? Have you got your torches in every room? Have you got canned food?” People went on at me later saying, “I’ve got my candles.” However, that was on the Friday night—a wild Friday night—and by the Tuesday, there were still 25,000 houses in northern Scotland without power. They went through the same experience that Spain and Portugal did last September when, for reasons that are still unknown, their whole power supply went down, and people found that they could not tap cards to make money and the traffic lights went out. All sorts of dislocation took place in society as a whole. That requires a whole-of-society approach to deal with it. We deal with the military aspects in the review. As Richard has said, there are very specific things that the military can and should be doing, but they have to be part and parcel of an overall policy. I am hopeful that next week the Government are going to produce something that will be convincing.

It will be interesting to see what is in that. I think every Government Minister should have their national security responsibilities laid out within their brief, so that it is clear what each and every role in Government is accountable for.

But every citizen as well. Everyone says, “Leave it to the Army.” When a crisis comes up, such as floods or ticketing for the Olympic games, we want to pass it on to local authorities or whatever, but we all have an individual responsibility. Just as in Finland, Sweden and Norway, where it is baked into the national psyche, we in this country need to get used to the fact that we are no longer immune and we are actually being targeted.

I just want to touch on the defence readiness Bill, because obviously that was part of chapter 6 of the SDR. Various members of this Committee were disappointed that the King’s Speech did not have a defence readiness Bill in play in this Session. What do you want to see within that Bill when it is introduced?

The defence readiness Bill is part of the articulation of how we return to a whole-of-society understanding about war in our time—an understanding that it is no longer something that you just outsource to the uniformed military. The first thing that the Bill must do is enable daily life to continue when the country is under assault, whether it is confrontation or conflict above the threshold of military conflict, which is military stuff, or, even more than that, below the threshold. It must be possible for the Government to drive daily life in conditions of crisis where you cannot allow everyone to make up their own mind as to whether they co-operate or not. The second thing is that the Bill must support mobilisation. It must enable the armed forces to go from a position at ease today, relatively speaking, on to a war footing where you are drawing in reserves, dispersing people, moving equipment and people to the continent, and beginning to take casualties. Then, it must endure, because if you look at the experience of Ukraine, this is year 5 of that conflict now. This is not like sallying forth into Libya or even an Afghan campaign, which was neatly bounded; this is war that could run for years. It is very likely that there will be mass casualties and big damage to the built environment. Readiness and resilience are about endurance as much as getting started. All those things matter. I think that was once common—during the cold war, people understood that that is how war is—but that understanding has completely evaporated. We are resurrecting it pretty much from scratch.

Lastly, I want to touch on the suggestion that the Government have reached the 1.5% NATO target on resilience spending. In your view, is that investment sufficient or is more needed?

It needs to be spelled out; we would all like to know. The Prime Minister has made the bold statement that 1.5% has actually been achieved. He uses other articulations to do with 3.5% that are not particularly convincing, and indeed led to John Healey’s resignation. He confidently says that the 1.5% target has already been met, but he has not actually told us how it has been met. I, among others, would be very interested to know precisely how. Perhaps he will tell President Trump around the North Atlantic Council table tomorrow,.

From the perspective of defence infrastructure, it is clear what the money has not been spent on. It has not been spent on making places like Brize Norton secure and effective; it has not been spent on mending the military ports and expanding them; it has not been spent on gearing up the NHS to deal with mass casualties; and it has not been spent on enabling mobilisation or forward-basing stock. Whatever the money has been spent on, it is hard to see in the military lane.

You have both indicated that the DIP broadly implements the SDR recommendations, but also that there are important things missing from it. Should a new Prime Minister and Cabinet relook at it, or add to it and produce a DIP part 2?

Speaking as a politician, I think the new Prime Minister is going to have to look at the DIP again. Whoever the new Prime Minister is, they are going to be confronted by allies in NATO and especially by the American President who is going to say, “This is the letter that John Healey sent in resignation, so the new Secretary of State has allegedly an extra £1.5 million—0.2% more than John Healey got—what is this story about? Where is the plan that takes you to 3% or 3.5% by nine years’ time?” We keep talking about 2035 as if it is a long distance away. The end of the decade is just three and a half years away, and 2035 is nine years from now, and we are supposed to get to that point. When you actually talk about the figures, to get to 3% would require an extra £21 billion a year on the defence budget, which is £70 billion at the moment. To get to 3.5% would require £36 billion extra a year on the defence budget. The assumption by NATO and by the Americans is that we are going to have to plot and plan our way towards that. That is where the DIP is unconvincing. John Healey made it absolutely clear in his letter that it falls well short of what is required for defence in this country at a dangerous time. That letter will be widely circulated among the people who are attending the NATO summit in Ankara tomorrow.

As a citizen taxpayer, I would want a new Government to stop just talking about the ways and resources around defence—“A bit more DIP. A bit less DIP. Open the SDR. Don’t open the SDR”—and instead talk about the outcomes that we have to get to. If the outcome is that we the UK, as part of NATO, must be prepared to deter Russia from thinking it could attack European NATO at some point—let’s say that point is around 2030, linked to an outcome in Ukraine—and we have three or four years to be part of NATO credibly deterring Russia, which I think is pretty much what the Prime Minister has said, then you have to work back from that outcome. The DIP delivers a minimum outcome five years later than that. There is nothing wrong with the direction of travel; it is the pace and the volume that would have to step up. That is going to include the stuff that is in the DIP but a bit shaky, so you have more of that, and then the stuff we have to look at that is not in the DIP. All of this means having a very unfortunate and difficult discussion about how we didn’t ask for it, it is very unpalatable, and it is going to cause us to take money out of things that we like, but this is the world that we live in. If a new Government fail to accept that imperative, they will be confronting, in three years’ time, potential strategic failure—a failure of deterrence; potential operational failure, if they put forces in the field as part of NATO and they lose; and a moral failure, because they will be sending today’s armed forces, who are all somebody’s children, into the field knowing that they decided not to prepare them properly, and as a result of that more of them get killed and wounded than was necessary. I think that is an underrated thought.

I draw Committee members’ attention to an article in Sunday’s Observer by Sir Bernard Gray, who used to be head of procurement in the Ministry of Defence and was, at one point in distant history, my special adviser. It is a well-informed and somewhat worrying article, which I hope any new Prime Minister will read and take on board.

We have mentioned before that some countries do a better job than us at informing citizens of the need to be resilient. A couple of weeks ago, the Committee was in Norway, where they do that much better. In Norway, they mandate that everyone should have seven days’ supply at home—that is similar to what you were saying, Lord Robertson, but it is mandated. I cannot remember what they reckon the uptake is—maybe 50% or 60%, with less in the cities and more rurally, for obvious reasons. Another thing they do in Norway is pass a budget for defence through Parliament. We as a Committee travel among our allies—America, France and so on—and they pass budgets through Parliament or Congress or the National Assembly. That makes an enormous difference, because the budget has cross-party support, it is a demand signal for industry and it takes the decision-making pressure slightly off the Government Department. Also, in terms of our conversation about informing the public, it forces people’s representatives to publicly debate defence spending. In our Parliament, we on the Committee do that, but anyone outside of the Committee does so only by choice, normally because they have a constituency interest in a particular part of the supply chain. Lord Robertson, should we do that in the UK?

Yes, we should have a broader debate, on a constant basis, about defence; that is the only way that you will get a focus. A couple of weeks ago, when I spoke to Labour MPs at the parliamentary Labour party meeting, I pointed out that the DIP was coming—at that point, it had not been published—and that domestic Departments would basically be reduced to pay for it, so they had better be ready for that. There was a huge row the first time around, when the Government used development money to boost defence, but people need to know what the trade-offs are. The Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish model is good for involving the whole of the public in it. Germany are having that debate presently: they have abandoned their very strict limitations on borrowing to borrow more to increase defence expenditure, so there is a live debate going on. Unless there is a live debate, those who are making the allocations and the trade-offs will be oblivious to the dangers and risks.

I agree with that. Would you support a very radical change in how we in the UK come up with decisions on defence spending, so we have a budget that is passed through Parliament each year? Obviously, that would be hugely different. Even in the defence investment plan that we have had through in the last couple of weeks, there is very little detail in it—much less detail than you would have put into something for it to pass through Parliament. If you compare it with how the Americans and French do it, they put much more detail in their documents. In the UK, we have a culture of the MOD being very close-hold with information, not just around classification but in general. It is much more circumspect about sharing decision-making processes, for reasons partly of reputational protection and partly of classification. Having been an MP for the past two years, I am of the view that we are a massive outlier among our allies on that. In theory, would you support such a change?

I would certainly be in favour of having a greater degree of transparency and of a wider debate taking place. You have to keep some things relatively secret. If you take the 20%, which may rise to 25%, of the budget on the nuclear enterprise—

Sorry to interrupt, but we are a bit tight on time. America do it: they do not have a problem with classification in the Pentagon; they still put a budget through Congress. The French put a budget through the National Assembly; they do not have a problem with classification. In my view, the classification issue is more of a cultural thing in the UK.

In my personal view, we are far too secretive about things that do not require it. Practically all the documentation we had was “Official-Sensitive”, so the moment it falls into somebody’s hands it becomes a newspaper story. But “This is Tuesday” could be “Official-Sensitive”, so you might think, “What the hell is this?” There is undoubtedly a culture there. If you take the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, I have been arguing for a very lengthy period of time that there needs to be a greater degree of supervision of that budget. It takes up 20% of the whole defence budget. It is huge and it is big, but it is, inevitably, very, very confidential. It is only now that the Government as a whole have decided that there will be a specific Committee set up to look at it.

We await further details on that. General, if I could ask you a different question entirely about taking the SDR and the defence investment plan as one and putting them together, and your views on priorities. I asked the previous Defence Secretary this same question. There are 62 recommendations in the SDR, and we have all looked at the DIP recently, so it is fresh in our minds. What is the most important thing in there? What do you think the least important thing is in there? I know that you might want to respond, “Well, that’s the wrong question and we should be asking a different question.” That is the question I am asking. You said several times that you are not a politician, so we are going to get a non-politician answer from you.

That is a very difficult question to answer, because it implies that within the current state of UK defence there is much left to give. The honest truth is that the current state of defence reflects that journey through the post-cold war era, which means that everything that could have gone has gone. In many cases, it is held together by Sellotape and good will. You ask the question, “What would you give up?” Well, setting aside the nuclear deterrent, which is 20% to 25% of the budget, we have made three big commitments: the Atlantic Bastion; the strategic reserve corps; and the contribution to NATO’s air and space command. We are not planning to make those contributions, as viable as the alliance needs them to be, in time. We will get there in 10 years, but we should be there in five. The attempt to solve that problem by trying to skim things off has been exhausted; it was exhausted in the debate that ran from August last year until the DIP came out. We have done that now. The second thing, which is currently sterile, is trying to find more public money. It is not that, with £1.4 trillion this year, there is not enough money in the public sector; it is just that the way our politics works means that nobody is willing to make the hard choices to rebalance from something—I would say welfare—into defence. That is why we found half the money that we needed to find to have £28 billion for the DIP. The conversation that I think is much more productive, but which is a struggle to get going is: if you have exhausted the public sector and you cannot cut anything else, you now have to engage the private sector. There is some resistance to that, philosophically perhaps, but if you ask the City to find £50 billion over the next four years for things such as infrastructure and logistics, they are ready to go. They are ready to go not with a repeat of the old PFI and bad outcomes for the taxpayer; they are ready to go with new commercial vehicles and new ways of working, but they need some new rules from the Treasury. Our rules are the most restrictive in Europe. I think the better answer to this question about how we go faster, sooner—and I mean right now, before recess—is for the new Government to engage with the City in the way that Governments have done for 2,000 years when they have needed to pay for their wars.

The Government have made a lot of the additional £15 billion of investment in the defence investment plan. In your view, is it sufficient? Are you as concerned as I am that that £15 billion is based on over £10 billion in efficiency savings? We have all seen that movie before. Lots of Governments in previous years have offered lots of cuts and efficiencies that then do not materialise. Secondly, almost £5 billion is based on money that needs to be found in future Budgets. Are you happy that the extra £15 billion is sufficient, and are you concerned as to where that money is being found from?

I do not think it is £15 billion anyway; the new money in that amount is maybe £11 billion. Then there is the huge figure of efficiency savings, which has been the traditional way for the Treasury to sandbag the Ministry of Defence. But John Healey, one of the best Defence Secretaries the country has ever had, felt obliged to resign on the basis that this did not do what the strategic defence review said needed to be done at a time when the Prime Minister is saying that we might face an attack from a resurgent Russia.

Where are you getting your £11 billion figure from? You said it is not an additional £15 billion; it is only £11 billion.

The new money is only around £11 billion, then you have various things about relief, the Ukraine money and the rest of that. But I do not think that that is generally accepted to be the overall position.

We are bang on time—11.30 was our initial proposed hard deadline. Thank you very much to Lord Robertson and General Sir Richard Barrons for your evidence today on the defence investment plan. With that, I bring today’s proceedings to a close.