Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a £5bn boost to the UK's military spending, aimed at modernising the country's nuclear submarine programme and replenishing ammunition stocks
depleted by the war in Ukraine. Speaking ahead of the unveiling of an updated "integrated review" outlining UK defence and foreign policy, Sunak said the funds would take British defence spending to 2.25% of GDP by 2025, with a longer-term ambition of increasing this to 2.5%. Sunak is in San Diego to discuss the next stage of the Aukus defence pact, which aims to counter China's military expansion.
The new funding falls short of what UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had sought to compensate for high inflation that has eroded the purchasing power of the £54bn ($74bn) annual military budget. Of the £5bn, £3bn will be invested in nuclear defence and to deliver Aukus's multibillion-dollar investment programme. The remainder will be used to bolster munitions stockpiles depleted by the Ukraine conflict and to invest in the resilience of the UK's munitions industry.
In response to what Sunak described as an "epoch-defining challenge" posed by China, the UK is launching various initiatives, including greater investment in Mandarin language training for civil servants, more focus on ensuring British access to rare minerals, and an extra £20m of funding for the BBC World Service. However, the country is also set to ban TikTok, the Chinese social media app, from government devices, following the lead of the US and EU institutions.
Sunak called China the "biggest state-based threat to our economic security", but critics such as Sir Iain Duncan Smith described the updated review as a "wasted opportunity to call out China". Successive UK prime ministers have said they want to increase defence spending since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including former prime minister Liz Truss, who pledged to increase it to 3% of GDP by 2030. Sunak said discussions on lifting UK defence spending to 2.5% of GDP would begin at a meeting of NATO allies this summer in Lithuania. He added that discussions were part of a push for NATO member countries to regard the alliance's current target of spending 2% of GDP on defence as a "floor" rather than a "ceiling". Photo: Andrew Linnett/MOD, Wikimedia commons.