Speeches by Pollard.

“I do not want to give the impression that a year was spent with people just disagreeing. An enormous amount of work genuinely went in to identifying line by line, and during that process we discovered more unfunded programmes and unfunded requirements. For instance, we fairly frequently found a lack of funding for supp…”

“It is not acceptable. That is why in the industrial strategy we have committed to go after massively reducing the contracting times. We are already seeing faster procurement on a whole range of capabilities, and many of the new capabilities that we have set out in the DIP are being procured in different fashions. For i…”

“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…”

“Can I just talk about—”

“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.”

“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.”

“There were decisions on capabilities made in advance of that. For example, the Wildcat, the Type 83 and the Type 32 were decisions that were taken previously.”

“Yes, but when that is regarded as a cut to capabilities and framed as a negative, it is important that we are clear that the choice we have made is to pivot from old capabilities to new ones. The Wildcat is a good example of that, because it is designed to fly over a frontline, assess enemy positions and then fly back.…”

“There were changes in the choices. For example, one of those was around whether to proceed with new build Storm Shadow or whether to move to other munitions. That was set out in the DIP. That was an example of that. The high-low mix, between complex weapons and more low-cost—”

“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…”

“John Healey previously dealt with the Treasury negotiations, and I dealt with the capability choices in the DIP, so I was not privy to those conversations.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Generally speaking, it is the Chancellor and the Defence Secretary. That can be delegated to other people—”

“No, but on procurement, we have already made substantial changes to our procurement system to increase efficiency. To complete the point that you mentioned, I think we can drive further efficiencies in our defence procurement in our digital infrastructure. We have, in the last couple of weeks for instance, reduced dupl…”

“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…”

“Roughly two weeks-ish.”

“We recognise that there are a number of sectors where there are a lot of people trying to buy stuff, missile technology being one of them. In the pivot that I spoke about at the start of the sitting, one of the changes we have made around people trying to buy a lot of, say, high-end effectors—CAMM missiles or LMM missi…”