Mike Martin MP: speeches

Speeches

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  The original sin is divorcing the strategic defence review from the DIP—divorcing the vision from the resources. For the past year, the Department has been arguing first with itself about whether it can downgrade some of the things in the strategic defence review—there are a couple of instances where that has happened, which I will come on to—and then with the Treasury to get more money to fill the gap. Effectively, it wrote a vision that was far too grand for the money that was ever going to be available. Let me turn from the money to the metal and have a look at some of the capabilities. I could give a very long speech on military analysis about which capabilities should be in or out, but I will not do that. I think it would test— [ Interruption. ] I know that right hon. and hon. Members would like me to do that; perhaps I will set up a Substack or something. Let us look at the Royal Navy—the senior service. At the turn of this century—as someone born in 1982, I still feel weird saying that—the UK had 20 frigates. By the end of this year, we will have five. Pre-DIP, they were scheduled to go out of service in 2035. In a little-noticed line in the DIP, we are bringing forward that date. All five frigates, which have well exceeded their service date, are going in 2033. Their replacements, the Type 26s and the Type 23s, will come into service—you guessed it—in 2030-35. We therefore have old ships retiring on a fixed schedule and new ships coming in on an unfunded one. My back-of-a-fag-packet maths—probably the same quality of analysis goes into the MOD under this Government—shows that we will have three frigates in 2030, the year, according to our intelligence assessments, of maximum Russian threat against NATO. We need a frigate to protect our cables, another to get the carrier group out to sea, and another for our deterrent. According to the rule of three—for every three ships, we have only one at sea at any one time—that is nine frigates. If anything kicks off in the middle east or anywhere else, there is no contingency plan. We can see straightaway that there is a huge gap—the frigate gap, as many call it—and the DIP has made it much worse. The picture with our current Type 45 destroyers and their replacements is not much better. Our Type 45s primarily provide air defence. One was parked in the Thames estuary to defend the Olympics in 2012 because we do not have any other air defence. They go out of service from 2035. Their replacements are supposed to be crewed common combat vessels such as mother ships. Various autonomous ships, which provide missiles, sensors or underwater and above-water support, are meant to be arranged around them. A whole fleet of different ships is therefore meant to replace the destroyers and some other elements of our Navy. That is the hybrid Navy that was much touted last week in the media coverage of the DIP. I am totally in favour of moving towards autonomy as fast as we can. However, it is worth saying that the maritime domain, particularly the High North, is the most difficult in which to do autonomy. I have spent a lot of time at sea and I can tell hon. Members that everything breaks all the time. There is a reason why the maritime domain is the last to be autonomised. We started with air because that is predictable and quite easy to do, although the aircraft still do not fly in bad weather. We then moved to the ground stuff for picking up casualties and dropping off ammunition. However, the new ships—the common combat vessels—are simply PowerPoints at the moment, yet we expect to move from PowerPoints to power projection on the high seas in nine years with not just one class, but several classes of ships that have to work together. That seems quite risky to me. If we take what is happening to the frigate fleet and what is happening to the destroyer fleet together, it is fair to say that the DIP spells the end of the Royal Navy as we know it.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House recognises the danger that Russia’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine poses to European and British security; further recognises the threat to the international order and the UK posed by China; also recognises the increasing uncertainty surrounding the reliability of the US as an ally within NATO; acknowledges the current shortfalls in the UK’s ability to deploy a credible fighting force; further acknowledges that this lack of military capability is resulting in the coercion of Britain and its interests in the international sphere; and calls on the Government to begin a programme of rapid rearmament to strengthen the defence of the UK and its allies. The key word of the motion on the Order Paper today is “rapid”—rapid rearmament, not eventual rearmament or rearmament with an asterisk. The reason it is the key word is that the clock is not ours to choose. Three weeks ago, before the defence investment plan came out, the Prime Minister said: “it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.” The deadline is not contested. Intelligence confirms it, NATO proclaims it—they are speaking of this in Ankara today—and our Government accept it. We must be ready by 2030. That is why the defence investment plan is so maddening. I have read it from cover to cover—I am that kind of guy—and I cannot wrap my head around it. It fails the test of its own threat assessment. It does not go far enough, and what it does do, it does too slowly. Large parts of it are also unfunded. It is too little, too late, and there is not enough cash. It is worth considering how this plan came into being. Lord Robertson, the lead author of the strategic defence review, wanted to have the DIP—that is, the money bit—as an annexe to the SDR. That is really good practice when making strategy: set out a vision, which is the SDR, and then set out the resources, which are the DIP. If a Government do not have the resources to deliver their vision, they need either to downgrade the vision somewhat or to increase their resources. The decoupling of the two documents by a year, with the vision coming a year ago in the SDR, and the money and resources just recently in the DIP, is the greatest failure of statecraft committed by this Labour Government in the two years they have been in office. First, allow me to speak about the money in some detail. Quite well ventilated in the media is the £4.7 billion that quite blatantly must be found in the next Budget, in the autumn. Although the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has said that he intends to fund defence seriously, he has not specifically said that he will find those sums in that Budget. As the Government repeatedly tell us, defence of the realm is the most important duty of any Government. So why is £5 billion of that sacred duty in the in-tray of the next Chancellor—a person unknown at this point? Secondly, I would like to talk about these efficiency savings—£10.7 billion of them. Speaking in this Chamber, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), called this the oldest accounting trick in the book. If we dig just one layer below, we can see the detail: £2.4 billion of that £10.7 billion is what the Ministry of Defence calls “high maturity initiatives”. I find that it is always worth really looking into what the MOD says, because the remaining £8.4 billion of that nearly £11 billion of efficiency savings is what the MOD calls “plans at lower maturity”. Lower-maturity plans, Madam Deputy Speaker, is MOD-speak for “we have not worked out how to deliver those savings yet.” Thirdly, and most egregiously, is a theme that I will keep returning to: the fact that this is a DIP of two halves. The first period is from now until 2030, which is covered by the current spending review, subject to the caveats that I laid out earlier. However, the second part, which covers 2030 to 2035, has to be confirmed in the forthcoming spending review. If the future Chancellor or Prime Minister do not agree to those sums going into the next spending review—due, one assumes, in the spring of 2027—the DIP will then not exist. It will just be an unfunded piece of paper.