- The UK government has missed its own deadline for publishing the Defence Investment Plan
- This long-awaited Plan will be issued after Parliament returns on 5 January 2026
- Both the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and National Armaments Director were grilled by parliamentary committees in the last two days
The UK government has missed its own self-imposed deadline to publish the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) in the autumn of this year, extending the still unspecified release date until after Parliament returns on 5 January 2026.
This long-awaited document will be the latest in a string of papers this year that are meant to outline the government’s policies for defence for the next decade. The DIP holds real sway, however, as the cost breakdown will determine the government’s defence priorities. This final text is still being composed at a time of deepseated geopolitical uncertainty.
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Britain is persistently confronted with Russian aggression online, at sea, and in space and these tactics verge on the threshold of war. It does not help that the US National Security Strategy, published in November, beyond prioritising the Indo-Pacific theatre, a move that came as no surprise in the early months of the second Trump administration this year, has cast doubt on the fidelity of the US in the Nato alliance.
Few details of the DIP have been confirmed with any certainty. However, it is understood that the government will not buy off-the-shelf defence equipment from foreign nations as part of the DIP.
Committee hearings
In this backdrop, the House of Commons Liasion Committee grilled the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on 15 December. One member had to remind the leader that “we need to prepare given the increased propensity and intensity of attacks”.
The First Sea Lord, General Gwyn Jenkins, only a week earlier, pointed out that Russia’s incursion in UK waters has grown by 30% in the last two years.
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By GlobalDataIn the same session, the Labour Chairman of the Defence Committee Tan Dhesi, exasperated by the lack of decision-making in Whitehall, said “that really is taking the biscuit.”
On 16 December, the Defence Committee also convened to further excavate the implications of the government’s inaction, hearing evidence from the new National Armaments Director (NAD), Rupert Pierce, who took up the expanded role in mid-October.
Pierce assured members that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) “are working flat out to finalise [the DIP] in its final stages”, he said, toeing the government line, “I can’t say anything other than that”.
Pierce reflected on the government’s approach to the DIP, arguing “the key is to resource properly, financially and in terms of human resources, and to be very disciplined in doing a few things really well as opposed to consistently taking on too much and hoping for the best”.
Trade-offs will be made; cancelled programmes seem likely. This statement comes in light of the the £17bn defence equipment deficit published two years ago, which the National Audit Office found to be 49% of the entire forecast defence budget.
A fight with the Treasury
The failure to publish the DIP has led some observers to point out divisions inside the government. Dhesi suggested “the way it’s being interpreted by all and sundry outside is that the government is still arguing about money.”
Until now, the Labour government has espoused that defence serve as an “engine for growth”. And this policy has brought Defence Secretary John Healey to work alongside the Chancellor Rachel Reeves to seize what Starmer described several months ago as the new “defence dividend”.
Yet no ostensible direction is being taken to this end. The Strategic Defence Review in tandem with the Defence Industrial Strategy both provide an abstract framework, and some of the policies are too ill-defined in some cases.
