Contribution
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans), and I want to pick up his last theme, which was the defence of our country. Specifically, I want to talk about our readiness to fight a war. The Defence Secretary said just last week that we had to be ready within 1,000 days to fight a war against Russia, so this is really about preparing for the war that is in front of us, rather than for a war.
I want to make a slight digression and pick up on something the Chancellor said today. He said:
“In today’s Budget, I am fully funding the defence investment plan”.
I want to compare the figures in today’s Red Book with the figures laid by the previous Chancellor when the DIP announcements were made on 30 June. For 2027, in the DIP, we see a total budget for the MOD of £73.8 billion. In today’s Red Book we see a figure of £72.8 billion, so there is a gap of £1 billion. It is the same for 2028-29. I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard me, but perhaps the Chancellor would like to clarify his statement, because it does not seem that he is fully funding the DIP, according to the figures that were laid before Parliament.
Going back to readiness, the defence investment plan is, by its very nature, about capital projects. Over the past decade in the MOD, capital expenditure has gone up by about 130%, which is obviously very welcome, but day-to-day expenditure has flatlined in real terms. Looking at the Red Book today, and the RDEL for the MOD in 2027-28, we see that day-to-day expenditure in the MOD is actually being cut by 2%. Day-to-day expenditure in the MOD means spare parts, maintenance, munitions, training and operations.
I chair the all-party parliamentary group on rearmament, and we are currently running an inquiry into the state of the British military. What we are hearing is sobering stuff. We have no submarines that are at sea, which is in part a maintenance problem. We have aircraft that we are unable to disperse around different airfields because we do not have sufficient levels of stocks. We have the Navy cutting training courses for tank commanders. We have not run a submarine course for submarine commanders for many years. We have to send them to other nations to train them. This cut in resource expenditure, in day-to-day expenditure in the MOD, is having a real effect on our ability to be ready for war now, and that has a direct effect on our ability to deter Russia by 2030, which is exactly what the Government tell us we need to be doing.
I always apply the Granny Martin test to these things, which is to look at what people do rather than what they say. The Government seem to be saying that we need to be ready to fight a war by 2030. We have had a whole slew of announcements, with the Defence Secretary and the Security Minister saying that we need to stockpile food. I think we get it: it is a dangerous world and we need to be ready for war by 2030. But then why do we have a defence investment plan in which two thirds of the capital expenditure is after 2030, and that will deliver projects well into the 2030s?
If we really need to be ready for war by 2030, we need to focus on readiness. That means taking some of that MOD capital expenditure and putting it in the day-to-day budget, because that means we can train our forces, maintain our equipment, and have stocks, spares and munitions. Without that, our forces will wither, the training of our people will decline, morale will decline, and we will simply not be able to get ships out to sea or planes in the air.
Last week the APPG ran a session on the RAF, and we heard that for just £50 million we could build hardened shelters on our airbases. At the moment, we have exquisitely expensive planes that are sitting out in the open on the airbases. Do these people watch the news? Do they see what the Ukrainians are doing to Russian airframes? For relatively small amounts of money, we could get ready for the war that the Government say we face. That is what we should be focusing on, rather than projects that deliver after 2030.