As the UK undertakes major defence reforms through the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), the forthcoming assessment will push the government’s annual Equipment Plan beyond 2025.
“With the SDR underway, it’s unlikely that we’ll produce an Equipment Plan in the same way for this year,” admitted the Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey, addressing the newly formed UK Defence Select Committee on 21 November 2024.
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Typically, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) releases details of the capabilities in the Armed Forces each year covering the course of a decade due to the long-term nature of certain defence programmes.
In conjunction, the National Audit Office (NAO), a public spending watchdog, will subsequently publish a report reviewing the budgetary implications. In December 2023, the NAO found that the MoD faced its largest equipment deficit – worth £17.5bn ($22bn) – since the Equipment Plan was first launched 12 years ago.
“There is absolutely an intent to return to publishing the Equipment Plan and getting the NAO to review it and to produce a report, if that’s what serves the purpose of parliamentary scrutiny,” the Permanent Secretary to the MoD, David Williams, assured the Committee.
When contacted, the MoD did not explicitly address when the next Equipment Plan will be published. However, during the hearing, Williams stipulated that this will be at some point after the SDR is concluded in the spring of 2025, after which the government will present plans “for the rest of this Parliament.”
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By GlobalDataWhile there is no precise time set for this, a spokesperson did inform Naval Technology that the Labour government is “committed to improving transparency, including around financial management, and we will continue to make information available about departmental spending.”
A lack of clarity
A lot rests on the SDR next year, which will tackle a wide range of issues including procurement, global strategy and waste. Some of these are problems the former Conservative government had begun to address with a new Integrated Procurement Model and a supposed plan to boost defence spending to 2.5% of Britain’s GDP by 2030.
Since the new Labour government formed in July, the defence community has been left to speculate and interpret their plans from recent activity in the lead up to the long-awaited SDR.
Just this week, on 20 November, Healey shut down several defence programmes in one fell swoop. This included the Watchkeeper UAV programme and, more significantly, two Albion-class amphibious assault ships.
This comes at a time when the Armed Forces are lacking a sufficient force posture; perception is everything in a new age of strategic competition against autocratic regimes such as Russia and China.
It is strange that a government that champions transparency and accountability continues to operate on such an arbitrary and indeterminate timeline ahead of the SDR, even if it is devised from good intentions.
