Britain’s defence spending will double to £100bn next year after Liz Truss’s pledge to raise the UK military budget to 3 per cent of GDP, Ben Wallace has said.
The British armed forces are “actually going to grow” for the first time since the Cold War ended after decades of “shrinking budgets”, the UK defence secretary said in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph.
Over the course of her long-fought bid for No 10, Ms Truss promised a multi-billion pound boost to defence spending from 2.1 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent by 2030 – 0.5 per cent higher than the hike proposed by Boris Johnson, set to arrive by the end of the 2020s.
“On current forecast, that’s roughly a defence budget of £100bn in 2029-30. We’re currently on £48bn. So that’s the difference. In eight years, that’s a huge amount,” Mr Wallace told the newspaper.
The defence secretary insisted he could not make suppositions as to how the money would be spent, but said it was “highly likely” the army would grow in numbers. The extra cash could also be used to expand anti-drone warfare, signals intelligence and artillery, he suggested.
While heaping praise on Ms Truss’s new spending commitment, the MP for Wyre and Preston North hit out at former chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Treasury over its “corporate raid” of the armed forces since the 1990s.
“To the point of Rishi’s Treasury trying to stipulate the size of the Army,” he added.
“My department has been so used to 30 or 40 years of defending against cuts or reconciling cuts with modern fighting, they’re going to have to get used to a completely different culture, which is we are actually going to grow, we’re going to actually change.”
Mr Wallace managed to maintain his grip on the role after backing the former foreign secretary in the Tory leadership race –a stance he took when Mr Sunak failed to heed his requests in the 2021 Integrated Review (IR) of defence and security.
“The reason I supported Liz Truss was that the risks we were prepared to tolerate in the middle of the decade are not risks I want to tolerate anymore in light of Russian aggression,” he explained.
“There are certain risks we can’t really take anymore. And that’s why I wrote to the chancellor last March to say, the stuff that we didn’t get in the IR that we’d asked for, we do need it.”
Mr Wallace also suggested a more amicable relationship between defence and the Treasury departments could be on the cards with Kwasi Kwarteng at the helm in No 11.
“The reality is we will be working with the Treasury to ensure we have a budget that grows to meet the threat and our ambitions,” he said.
“Kwasi is going to be a great, open Chancellor ... He’s not going to shut the door to No 11 and hide behind it.”
Mr Wallace’s interview comes after Ms Truss repeated her campaign promise to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 to fellow world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Shortly before leaving for the US, Ms Truss revealed she had commissioned an update to the IR which was published in March 2021. Unveiled by Boris Johnson, it had seen the size of the Army reduced by 9,500 and a third of its ranks scrapped.
The update, which is expected to be published by the end of 2022, will be led by the PM’s special adviser for foreign affairs and defence, Professor John Bew.
In a statement which mostly focused on her UN speech, Downing Street also revealed a “refreshed strategy” of the IR “will ensure we are investing in the strategic capabilities and alliances we need to stand firm against coercion from authoritarian powers like Russia and China”.
