The UK has long been promising to significantly up its investment into defence, and we're finally now seeing this come to fruition. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who may only be in office for a couple more weeks or a couple of months at most following his resignation, has laid out a £15 billion defence investment plan, with the caveat being the funding will come from trimmed budgets in other areas.
As per BBC News, this is part of a wider plan to increase defence spending to £80 billion a year by 2029. The plan is for much of this funding to come from road and energy projects that are no longer going ahead as intended, with supposedly £10.3 billion already laid out and accounted for, but a further £4.3 billion still needed to be found. It's likely this will become a challenge the next Prime Minister will need to solve, perhaps a job for Andy Burnham to tackle while at No. 10 North.
It should be said that this new plan is an increase on the £13.5 billion previously promised by former Defence Secretary John Healey before his resignation, but still pales to the £28 billion increase defence chiefs had been campaigning and pushing for.
As for how the wider defence budget is being spent, we're told £64 billion is going to improve the UK's nuclear deterrent, £5 billion to drones, £8 billion to build the next generation of RAF stealth jets, plus plans to evolve the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
