UK defence secretary promises delayed investment plan before Nato summit
Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, promised to publish the delayed defence investment plan (Dip) before the Nato summit in a fortnight amid indications he has already secured around a billion pounds more than his predecessor, John Healey.
Haggling between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Treasury is continuing – while a source in Andy Burnham’s team said he was happy for a final deal to be concluded while Keir Starmer serves out his last days as prime minister.
Jarvis, speaking at a military thinktank conference, said: “I’ve had 12 days, but I’ve made the most of all of them, and I’m now working to finalise and publish the Dip before I travel to Ankara with the prime minister.”
The Nato summit in the Turkish capital will be held on 7 and 8 July, in one of Starmer’s final international engagements as prime minister. Burnham would take over at the end of the following week on 17 July if there is no contest.
The minister emphasised that he would not get the deal done “at any cost” – but he also acknowledged that “no single defence review or funding settlement … can erase the legacy of accumulated neglect” from previous governments.
Healey resigned earlier this month after he failed to secure more than £13.5bn to plug an £18bn gap in funding for the plan, which covers the department’s major capital programmes for the next 10 years.
Jarvis is understood to have already obtained at least £14bn as part of the negotiations. But it is not clear that Jarvis has obtained any more money for the total defence budget. Starmer had offered to increase it by £2bn to 2.68% of GDP by 2030.
Nato has a long-term target for allies to reach 3.5% of GDP by 2035, but there was concern at the MoD that the proposed settlement would leave too great a commitment to be met after the next general election.
“We’ve got a job of work to do to map out that trajectory to get us to 3% and then get us up to 3.5%,” Jarvis said, adding that it was a conversation he hoped to have with Burnham during the next Whitehall spending review.
“My job is to carry the argument on to the next prime minister, to make sure that in that next spending review defence is the number one priority,” said Jarvis, who hopes to keep his job if Burnham takes control at No 10.
Little is known about Burnham’s thinking on defence, and there are worries in the MoD that the former mayor of Greater Manchester would reopen any defence spending deal agreed in Starmer’s final days.
But allies of Burnham said such concerns were wide of the mark, and that they would rather there was a resolution to the funding row – which has involved other departments taking a 1% cut to their capital budgets – and the investment plan published by the time he takes over.
Similar comments were made by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, though she gave no indication about whether more money had been offered. She told the Commons that she had met with Jarvis and Sir Richard Knighton, the chief of the defence staff.
“I am confident that the new Dip will be published before the Nato Ankara summit. It will involve more money spent more effectively and will meet the scale of challenges facing our country,” she said at Treasury questions.
Starmer’s spokesperson said that, while the business of government would continue as normal in his final days, there would be “no new major policy or spending commitments initiated during this period”.
But the No 10 spokesperson also reiterated that the Dip, the subject of more than six months of negotiations inside government, would come out ahead of the Ankara summit, implying it was not considered a new major commitment.
