Speeches by Pollard.

“Roughly two weeks-ish.”

“Let me put the changes in two buckets, as I see them personally. One was on capabilities. The tilt that took place between the two capability offerings was broadly about increased readiness—so moving money so that we have additional spend on readiness—which was a concern raised largely in the public domain. It was some…”

“Yes, absolutely. The defence equipment plans dealt with a very narrow section of defence spending. The DIP has not just the equipment we are buying and sustaining, but sections on people—the armed forces personnel that we have in our civilian workforce—our estates and our infrastructure. We are moving towards warfighti…”

“I do not entirely buy the argument that there is not detail.”

“The defence equipment plan largely put categories of expenditure together. We have broken those down to line items of individual capabilities, but we have not gone into the full detail of those because much of that is not information that we would like in the public domain. In respect to the National Audit Office, we h…”

“I am not in the NAO, so I cannot comment on what they think about it, but they have been working with the Ministry of Defence throughout this period. We are working with them as part of the review process. Whether that gives them a Scooby Doo or not, I am not certain, but we are working with them.”

“I think it was the speed of transition from old capabilities to new. You mentioned frigates; I am the MP who represents Devonport, where they are based. We took the difficult decision to bring forward the retirement of a number of Type 23 frigates, because the material state of the frigates is no longer suitable for th…”

“For me personally?”

“There are effectively three questions that you have asked me. First, why the most amount of capital spending now? One of the really big reasons why we are doing that is because of the massive capital investment we are having to make in the Defence Nuclear Enterprise. We are renewing not just our hunter-killer fleet, bu…”

“Yes. We have a defence optimisation programme, which we inherited from the previous Government. That sets out broadly what we own, what we need to keep, what we need to invest in, and what we need to dispose of. The defence housing strategy that we published last year set out quite a lot of the land disposal opportunit…”

“I will first answer your first question around capabilities. I want to see more defence spending, just as the Chief Secretary has set out. We have an profile up to 2035 of increasing defence spending; over that period, the defence investment plan is deliberately designed to scale to be able to reflect that increased sp…”

“When I saw the Treasury’s WMS. But that was not a piece of work that I was undertaking in the MOD; I was looking at capabilities rather than spending profile.”

“Yes, we are looking at that.”

“In the Ministry of Defence, that is a Secretary of State role that both the previous Secretary of State and current Secretary of State carries out in liaison with the Treasury, and they use the new Defence Oversight Board, which was established under this Government as the forum for those conversations.”

“Yes, because what we are not doing is moving everything to autonomy. We have deliberately set out in all the main domains a mix of crewed, uncrewed and autonomous systems, for instance. It is hard to look at the lessons from Ukraine and not see the substantial revolution on the battlefield that drones in particular, bo…”

“Absolutely. I have seen big changes in terms of the level of interactions. That is partly because it has become visible to me, as someone who was working on capabilities previously, with John Healey working on the financial settlements. I have become more aware of that. However, this is our second major defence spendin…”

“The shift to autonomy across all those domains is about strengthening homeland defence, power projection and lethality, and in so doing, increasing our deterrent capability. If you take the example, for instance, of uncrewed ground vehicles being alongside our land forces, that is about increasing the lethality of thos…”

“I come from a naval family where I was taught from an early age that the Royal Navy has two enemies, the French and the Treasury. We are now good friends with the French, and we do a lot together as close NATO allies. I would say that the process between the Treasury and MOD has been on a journey. Relations between the…”

“A Defence Secretary resigning would naturally make people look at the rationale that he has given. John was a friend and a mentor; I worked with him incredibly closely over many years. I have an awful lot of respect for him. I stayed to make sure that we could get the job done and get a set of capabilities, using the e…”

“No, because that is not within my role. That was within the former Secretary of State’s responsibilities.”