debates/debates2025-11-03b conversation_12
Source: hansard.parliament.uk (2025-11-03)

UK Parliament Hansard data: debates/debates2025-11-03b conversation_12

Phil Brickell:If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities. \p John Healey: Last week, I was in Turkey with the Prime Minister to sign Britain’s biggest fighter jet export deal in a generation.  The £8 billion contract for 20 Typhoons is a win for European security, the British economy and 20,000 UK workers. It comes just weeks after we won the biggest ever warship deal—a £10 billion contract with Norway that will secure 4,000 jobs over the next decade. These deals demonstrate defence as an engine for growth. Today we go further and publish our defence housing strategy, in which we plan to upgrade 40,000 forces family homes and build 100,000 new homes for military and civilians alike. This plan is backed by a £9 billion investment over this decade—more than double what was in the Tory plans. This is a Government delivering for defence and for Britain. \p Phil Brickell: May I congratulate the Secretary of State on the Turkey deal last week? A year on from his signing of the Trinity House agreement with his German counterpart, can he outline what progress has been made on implementing that deal, in particular to boost industrial collaboration and drive greater investment into integrated air and missile defence? \p John Healey: Indeed, we are a year on from the Trinity House agreement, and our co-operation over the next year will only deepen further. Within weeks, we will have German P-8s flying out of Lossiemouth. We have a new cyber programme to conduct joint activities. We have accelerated work on a new 2,000 km deep precision strike missile, and a new £200 million bridging deal to support the British Army. I have to say that this agreement is more important now than when we signed it a year ago. \p Lindsay Hoyle: I call the shadow Secretary of State. \p James Cartlidge: In the Secretary of State’s strategic defence review statement to Parliament on 2 June, he said that the defence investment plan would be

“completed and published in the autumn.”—[Official Report, 2 June 2025; Vol. 768, c. 72.]

Will he keep that promise? \p John Healey: The SDR quite rightly said that further decisions on investment plans were central to delivering the SDR. We are doing that work thoroughly at the moment so that we will no longer have what the hon. Member’s Government left: a defence programme that was overcommitted, underfunded and unsuited to meet the threats that face us. \p James Cartlidge: The Secretary of State did not answer the question. I am afraid the worry is that it is yet another delayed defence Command Paper. That prompts the obvious question: what exactly are the Government delivering for defence except delayed defence Command Papers? Is not this the truth: they are putting the British Army back in the dock, they are surrendering Diego Garcia for £35 billion, and all the while—they have not denied this today—they are cutting £2.6 billion from the frontline this year? Don’t the men and women of our armed forces deserve better? \p John Healey: The hon. Member’s figures are wrong, and his characterisation and description are wrong. We have put £5 billion extra into the defence budget in this, our first year, and we are raising defence investment  with the highest increase since the cold war. But the public expect us to manage better the budgets that we have got, so we are managing those budgets, which he failed to do. Alongside the strategic defence review and the defence investment plan, we are already acting and have let over 1,000 major contracts, 84% of them to British firms. Today, we are putting £9 billion into defence housing for the future.