Luke Pollard

I have a lot of time for the former Defence Secretary and the former Armed Forces Minister, and I agree with much of the argument they have made about the importance of increasing defence spending. That is why today I have set out continually from the Dispatch Box that I want to see more defence spending, and I want to see it directed at British companies. I want to see us prepare to deter the next conflict. To do that, we need to invest more in drones, and that is what the defence investment plan will set out. However, as I have said, the defence investment plan is a deliberately scalable document that can reflect an increasing defence budget. That is what we are projecting over the coming decade, delivering our commitment to 3.5% on core defence by 2035. Spending more on the new capabilities, though, does mean retiring old capabilities. It means doing something that the armed forces have not done for a very long time: discarding some of that kit and equipment that has been around for many, many decades and investing in newer technologies. That is a difficult argument for Ministers to make—it is difficult for those people who are attached to old equipment in particular—but when we have armour that has been in service since before the Vietnam war and ships that are decades past their decommissioning date, we need to be honest about the need to retire old equipment and buy new equipment. The hybrid Navy is just one example of what we will be setting out in the defence investment plan.