Why is it so hard to pull together a Defence Investment Plan, anyway?
Looking at the document published on Tuesday, it’s a little hard to see why it took more than a year. There are plenty of details about what’s being funded, but the hard bit – setting out where the money’s coming from – is very, very fuzzy.
In fact, we only know two projects that face being scrapped to pay for the much-heralded boost in investment for defence.
That’s right, two projects across every government department over the next few years, and they’re both in the Department for Transport. They are the A38 junctions at Derby and the A46 Newark bypass. That’s it.
Every other department has committed to finding 1p in every £1 from their capital budgets to put in the defence piggy bank (with the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero adding an extra couple of billion on top) but we still don’t know how or where.
Yesterday, a government spokesman said those details will come by autumn. He wouldn’t even confirm that the decisions about where the axe will fall have been made yet.
So, back to that initial question – why did this take so long?
One clue might lie in the deep animosity between the Ministry of Defence, which was asking for money, and the Treasury, which was figuring out where to find it.
To show what sits behind that, we’ll need to dive into the murky world of defence funding.
The Ministry of Defence has an extraordinary talent for wasting money. And by ‘wasting money’, I don’t mean ‘spending money on things I don’t agree with’ – I mean waste.
Make sense of politics
Hello, I’m Craig Munro: Metro‘s man in Westminster and writer of our weekly politics newsletter Alright, Gov?
If you like what you’re reading, you’ll enjoy my newsletter, where each week I break down the latest government policies and bring you insights from behind the scenes in the Houses of Parliament.
Government spending watchdog the National Audit Office revealed in December that the MoD in 2024-25 reported £1.9 billion of losses, defined as ‘transactions where public money is spent but no benefit is received’. (A little over £1.45 billion of this appears to come from the early retirement of Chinook helicopters and other equipment in November 2024.)
And it’s more than that – a separate report from the NAO found the MoD is also pretty terrible at recovering the considerable amount it loses to fraud.
The government sets a target that every £1 spent on counter-fraud should save £3. Over the past four years, the MoD has managed just 48p for every £1 spent.
Then there are the major projects. The MoD handles more major projects than any other department – think building vessels and aircraft and large weapons systems.
There were 45 in 2024-25, of which just three appeared ‘highly likely’ to be successfully delivered according to the government’s infrastructure agency NISTA. The successful delivery of a further 10 ‘appears to be unachievable’, the body said.
With all that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine that Treasury officials might see sending money to the MoD as the equivalent of throwing it in the Thames. Defence bosses were asking for £28.5 billion – who knows how much of that would end up leading to tangible results?
But here’s the thing: defence boils down to having better tech than those who wish to harm us. That means constantly upgrading, which means innovation, which means experimentation, which means waste.
If 10 out of 45 projects are destined to fail, then so be it. We’re not talking about high-speed trains here. The UK need to keep finding new ways of keeping Russia on its toes – after all, it’s not just a matter of supporting Ukraine. They’ve been targeting our Prime Minister with arson attacks.
Much more will be said about the investment plan in the coming months, as Andy Burnham faces working out where the hammer will fall. No doubt, though, there are many people behind the scenes who are relieved it’s out in the world at last.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.