Luke Pollard

I thank the hon. Lady for her question and Martin for his interest in how we increase defence spending. She will know from our debates in this Chamber that it is not just the defence investment plan that we are working on currently. We are also looking at how, through a defence finance and investment strategy, working with our defence advisory group for City professionals, we can look at accessing new forms of capital, including patient, sovereign and a whole range of capital options. I know that the hon. Lady and her party are keen on the war bonds option, and I am happy to look at the detailed analysis of that if her party has any, but we do not just need investment in core defence; it is also about investing in the supply chain. That is especially true of those small and medium-sized enterprises with huge growth potential, and we need to ensure that they can compete for contracts. That is one of the reasons we are looking at new ways of procuring through the Commercial X procurement model and learning lessons from the Taskforce Kindred for Ukraine procurement. We are bringing those into mainstream UK armed forces procurement to speed it up, which means that more SMEs will be able to benefit from it. More capital injection into defence—both from the Government, as we are planning, and from private sources—is a good course.