Ministry of Defense Building, London, UK. Credit: Shutterstock/TK Kurikawa.
With Britain implementing major defense reforms through the Strategic Defense Review (SDR), the upcoming review will push the government’s annual equipment plan beyond 2025.
“With the SDR underway, it is unlikely that we will produce an equipment plan in the same way this year,” the Secretary of State for Defense, John Healey, admitted in a speech to the newly formed UK Defense Select Committee on November 21, 2024 .
Normally, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) releases details of the armed forces’ capabilities every year, covering the course of a decade, due to the long-term nature of certain defense programmes.
In conjunction with this, the National Audit Office (NAO), a government spending watchdog, will then publish a report assessing the budgetary impact. In December 2023, the NAO noted that Defense was facing problems biggest equipment shortage – worth £17.5 billion ($22 billion) – since the Equipment Plan was first launched 12 years ago.
“It is absolutely the intention to return to publishing the equipment plan and to get the NAO to review it and prepare a report, if that serves the purpose of parliamentary scrutiny,” assured the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defense, David Williams, the committee. .
When contacted, Defense did not explicitly indicate when the next equipment plan would be published. However, during the hearing, Williams stated that this will be sometime after the conclusion of the SDR in spring 2025, after which the government will present plans “for the remainder of this parliament.”
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Although no exact time has been set for this, a spokesperson has let us know Air Force Technology that the Labor government is “committed to improving transparency, including in financial management, and we will continue to make information on departmental spending available.”
A lack of clarity
Next year, much depends on the SDR, which will tackle a wide range of issues including procurement, global strategy and waste. Some of these are problems that the former Conservative government had begun to address with a new government Integrated purchasing model and an alleged plan to increase defense spending to 2.5% of UK GDP by 2030.
Since the formation of the new Labor government in July, the defense community has had to speculate and interpret its plans based on recent activities in the run-up to the long-awaited SDR.
Just this week, on November 20, Healey halted several defense programs in one fell swoop. This included the Watchkeeper UAV program and, most importantly, two Albion-class amphibious assault ships.
This comes at a time when the armed forces lack sufficient strength; perception is everything in a new era of strategic competition against autocratic regimes like Russia and China.
It is strange that a government that advocates transparency and accountability continues to operate on such an arbitrary and indefinite timetable before the SDR, even though it was conceived with good intentions.
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