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Boris Johnson agreed to a £ 16.5 billion increase in four years in defense spending at a time when Britain’s public finances have been hit by the pandemic and a day after it emerged that thousands could be cut. of millions of pounds from the foreign aid budget.
Experts said the windfall represents the largest increase in real terms in the defense budget since Margaret Thatcher’s tenure and will be spent in part on a National Cyber Force from hackers and a new Space Command designed to protect orbiting satellites. and launch their own rockets.
It comes weeks after ministers resisted spending extra money to fund free school meals during the holidays, and days after it emerged that the foreign aid budget will be cut by billions, from 0.7% of income. national gross at 0.5%, which generated criticism. of the older Tories.
Johnson said he had made the decision to increase spending on the military “in the midst of the pandemic” because “the defense of the kingdom must come first.” The prime minister is also keen to show the newly elected president of the United States, Joe Biden, that the United Kingdom wants a strong military capability after Brexit.
Insiders said defense funding, which will be detailed by Johnson when he speaks to the House of Commons on Thursday, had been assembled at breakneck speed as Downing Street seeks to reassert control after last week’s 10th collapse, which led to the departure of Senior Adjutant Dominic Cummings and his ally Lee Cain.
You will see an additional £ 16.5 billion being spent on defense beyond the commitment to increase the existing budget of £ 41.5 billion by 0.5 percentage point above inflation. Taken together, the increase amounts to £ 21.5 billion through March 2025, and defense sources said it would mean the UK remains Europe’s biggest defense spender.
Aid experts said the announcement showed that there was no need to cut the aid budget. Simon Starling, director of Bond, the British network of organizations working in international development, said: “What today’s announcement shows is that when the government needs to find the money for certain areas, it can.”
A battle inside Whitehall had raged for about a month after Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, suddenly announced that a planned intergovernmental spending review would be abandoned due to the pandemic.
Ben Wallace, Johnson’s longtime defense secretary and ally, lobbied for a special multi-year agreement that would allow the Ministry of Defense (MoD) to negotiate long-term weapons and systems contracts, which would be more expensive if purchased. year to year.
It had been speculated that the Defense Ministry had waited up to an extra £ 20bn, but defense sources said the £ 16.5bn would allow “modernization without painful cuts”, claiming the final figure represented a victory for the Secretary of Defense.
Some of the extra defense money will be spent to create a National Cyber Force, a group of hackers who will carry out offensive operations; a Space Command that intends to be able to launch its own rockets from 2022; and a new agency dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Although Wallace and Cummings frequently clashed, the ousted senior adviser had supported a multi-year funding deal. But Cummings had also been a fierce critic of the MoD’s waste, writing in a blog post last March that the acquisition process “has continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting the public. public life through the revolving door of officials ”. lobbyists ”.
Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute said the end result was “a much larger increase for defense than most analysts, myself included, had predicted. It is the largest increase in real terms in the defense budget since the first years of Thatcher’s presidency, an increase of between 10 and 15% in real terms. “
The Labor Party said the spending announcement marked “a welcome and long-awaited update to Britain’s defenses after a decade of decline.” Shadow defense secretary John Healey added that since 2010 “the size of the armed forces has been reduced by a quarter, defense spending has been reduced by more than £ 7 billion.”
But Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Labor MP from Brighton Kemptown, said that while “funding our armed forces is imperative … people will wonder if our national security can properly get money, why does the government allow the advice they offer? child protection and social assistance go to the wall “.
The Defense Ministry already has a £ 13bn deficit in its equipment budget, according to the National Audit Office, and would have been forced to cut planes and lose the use of its own hospital ship unless the gap.
The funding deal was intended to be linked to an integrated post-Brexit defense and foreign policy review, but the delay in agreeing to the financial deal, coupled with Cummings’ recent departure, means the exercise has been postponed to late January or early February. .
The final review is expected to see cuts in the size of the British Army and a reduction in the use of tanks that are rarely deployed, in addition to commitments to invest more in armed drones and improve the Trident nuclear weapons system.
On Wednesday, the government came under fire for failing to extend the £ 20-a-week increase to universal credit payments beyond April, despite the pandemic and rising child poverty. Extending the recharge would cost approximately £ 9bn.
Anna Feuchtwang, Executive Director of the National Office for Children, said: “If the government can find significant additional funding for advocacy, it will surely be able to find money for children in crisis. It’s appalling that struggling families have to rely on food banks to survive, and that services that could prevent them from slipping into a new crisis are being cut back year after year with local authorities facing bankruptcy.
“We need the government to take seriously its responsibility to the next generation and have a proper strategy to invest in children.”
Torsten Bell, executive director of the Resolution Foundation, told MPs that ministers were “delaying the semi-inevitable” by refusing to point out whether they would continue with the recharge, which was introduced last April as a 12-month boost for millions of people. families struggling. Not doing so would be “crazy,” Bell said.
Bell said much of the fall had been spent debating the “relatively small issue” of providing food support to children at free school meals during school holidays, a campaign led by footballer Marcus Rashford, in which the government eventually changed. rather than addressing the central issue of universal credit.
