KEIR Starmer has said that road and energy projects will be scrapped to pay for the £15 billion defence investment plan (Dip) – with a major investment announced to renew the Trident nuclear submarines on the Clyde.
In a major speech, the Prime Minister also said that annual defence spending will increase from £54 billion when Labour came to power to £80 billion by 2029.
This will fund a series of investments including creating a new £50bn defence export facility, more than £5bn into drones and autonomous weapons and a £64bn investment in renewing the UK's nuclear deterrent.
Specifically, the money will go into building new submarines, developing a new sovereign warhead and buying 12 F-35A fighter jets, to guarantee "British and European security", Starmer said.
Some of the money for the nuclear deterrent will also form part of a decade-long £26 billion overhaul of naval bases at Faslane on the Clyde – as well as England’s Portsmouth and Devonport – dubbed “Project Royal Oak”.
“When the world is arming and aggression is rising, the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it," he added.
“The best way to defend is to deter, to have the strength to make your adversaries think again before they act. And that is what we are doing.”
The plan reversed the “corrosive hollowing out” of the armed forces, Starmer said in the speech at a drone company in Berkshire.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who was also at the event, said the extra money for the Dip had come from “reprioritising spending” across Government.
Starmer set out where the trade-offs had been made, with the money found by raiding Whitehall capital budgets, as he acknowledged there were “no easy answers”.
He said if the Government had chosen to “slash funding to our public services in favour of defence” then “we would be fundamentally weaker as a nation, more fractured as a society, less able to defend ourselves when our enemies prey on social division”.
The Dip would not take resources away from day-to-day spending on frontline services such as health and education, he said.
“Instead, it is funded by reallocating spending from across Government departments, reallocating capital budgets by one penny in every pound, while still maintaining public investment at the highest sustained levels since the 1970s.”
He added: “Therefore, some capital projects, for example on roads and energy, which are important but not immediately vital, will no longer go ahead as planned.”
