Andy Burnham’s Defence Budget: No Funds, No Defence

Andy Burnham’s defence budget seems confusing. Andy Burnham’s government is considering delaying the announcement of a roadmap to increase defense spending to 3% of GDP. Reports suggest the spending review might be postponed from the spring to the autumn of 2027. While the current Chancellor has dismissed this as rumor, the pattern of delay is evident. It reflects the deadlock situation that led John Healey to quit some months ago.

Being the Defense Secretary under Starmer, John Healey found the budget proposal unacceptable. This is because enemies do not follow the schedule set by the Treasury of the United Kingdom. The resignation of John Healey was one of the reasons behind the fall of Starmer. Now, Burnham is the Prime Minister while John Healey is the Chancellor.

 Wonder of Andy Burnham’s Defence Budget

Andy Burnham’s defence budget must provide a clear path. Britain needs to show “a credible path” of annual increases in its defence budgets to meet a NATO target of spending nearly £30bn more on the military by the middle of the next decade, the head of the alliance said on Thursday.

Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, said that Britain could not wait until just before 2035 to lift defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, in an unusually pointed intervention a day after he met prime minister Andy Burnham.

That has left Labour MPs and defense experts asking how Burnham will do what Starmer could not: find the money to meet Britain’s defense ambitions. More broadly, they are looking for signs of whether the new prime minister intends to change Labour’s defense policy — or recast it around his domestic agenda of jobs, industry and economic renewal.

 Andy Burnham’s Defence Budget: Delay in Boosting Defence Spending

Andy Burnham’s defense dilemma is just beginning. The UK leader wants defense spending to drive economic renewal. His first Budget will be an early test of whether he can fund growing military commitments.

There was a grim inevitability about this. ‘Whitehall sources’ is almost always code for the government rolling the pitch with the media to prepare for bad news. They have suggested that a decision about when to increase defence expenditure will probably not be made for another year.

The announcement will be part of the government’s Spending Review, which some had anticipated would be published in the spring. Now, though, the mood music from Andy Burnham’s administration is that it will take place in autumn 2027 so that it can sit alongside that year’s Budget.

To be charitable, the government’s case is as follows: there was no announcement on the timing of the Spending Review, so it is inaccurate to describe it as delayed if it is published next autumn; to suggest otherwise is ‘pure rumor and speculation’, as the date has yet to be determined; and the only formal commitment the government has made is to the NATO-wide target of spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defence and another 1.5 percent on wider security and resilience by 2035.

Andy Burnham’s Defence Budget: Longer Delays, Harder Situations

Delays are not just frustrating and disappointing. They are particularly damaging in the Ministry of Defence, where major acquisition projects are regularly scheduled over several years. The NATO summit agreed on targets at The Hague in June last year.

Not only would member states reach the agreed total expenditure of 5 percent of GDP, but they would ensure they played their part in fulfilling the alliance’s capability targets.

Then Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer signed up to the spending target. Moreover, he announced that the UK would buy 12 Lockheed Martin F-35A strike aircraft.

This variant of the F-35B already operated by the Royal Air Force is capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons and would allow the UK to join the United States, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey in supporting NATO’s nuclear-enabled Dual Capable Aircraft mission.

Andy Burnham’s defence budget plan is using a delay for more thinking or providing more support. There has been a pattern of delay and ‘clarification’ of policy since then. At the end of June this year, the government published its Defence Investment Plan. This was the financial ‘how?’ to the ‘what?’ of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, so was in effect a year late and a year lost.

Moreover, it did not provide the funding for elements of the SDR for which many had hoped. Shortly before its formal publication, the defence secretary John Healey resigned. He regarded its financial foundations as insufficient given the threats faced by the UK.

 More Defence Budget, Less For other Departments; Not an Easy Exercise

Andy Burnham will have to find an extra £4.7bn for defence in his first Budget. It is after Keir Starmer announced a £298bn defence investment plan (Dip) without fully identifying how to fund it.

A defence insider said it was “madness after all that wrangling to have left a £4.7bn black hole for someone else to fix”, while the Conservatives described the plan as a “delayed-action poison pill” for Burnham.

Helen Miller is director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank. She told the Times that delaying the spending review until next autumn would allow Burnham’s government more time to develop its plans. But she warned that it “wouldn’t make the exercise any easier”.

She said: “Under current plans, growth in overall spending slows over the rest of the parliament. Sticking to those plans would almost certainly mean that the spending review entails cuts for some departments. If defence spending increased to 3 per cent of GDP, it would take up all of the currently planned increase in spending in coming years.”