Cabinet ministers have been asked to look for more money in their departments to fund an increase in defence spending after the resignation of the former defence secretary John Healey.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the BBC that her department was among those still in conversations with the Treasury about finding further sums for defence. Healey resigned last week over a far smaller than expected settlement for the defence investment plan (Dip).
The ex-defence secretary said in his resignation letter he “could not accept a Dip settlement that does not give our forces the resources they need”. Though Starmer said in February that Britain “needs to go faster” on defence spending, all he was prepared to offer Healey was an extra £2bn or 0.08% of GDP by 2030.
Starmer was reportedly not then willing to put a target date on when spending would reach 3% of GDP, expected to come after the next election.
Speaking on Sunday, Nandy said that departments were being asked to find more for the settlement. Dan Jarvis, who replaced Healey as defence secretary, has been given until the Nato summit in Ankara in a fortnight’s time to offer up an alternative plan which would see more investment.
“It’s the responsibility of all of us to do what is the first duty of any government, which is to keep this country safe,” Nandy said.
“I’d last spoke to the prime minister about this on Friday. I’ve spoken to the chancellor this week as well. I’m having discussions with my own officials in my own department about the amount of funding that we make available,” she said. “We’ve got a new defence secretary who is looking at the defence investment plan in its current draft form and having those discussions with the chancellor and the prime minister as well.
“These discussions are ongoing. We are looking very carefully at how we achieve it.”
Nandy said there were some areas in her department that would not face cuts because of the need for national resilience. She said there would be no cuts to the BBC because of “the need to tackle the sources of myths and disinformation, which is actively harming our national resilience”.
Asked why Healey had resigned if the conversations were not finished, Nandy said: “I can only tell you from my point of view as somebody who is actively involved in these discussions that these discussions are happening in real time.
“We have a new defence secretary who served on the frontline himself and has been an outstanding security minister, and I know he wouldn’t have taken the job unless he felt that we could meet this moment, and we are working together constructively in order to achieve that.”
Nandy said that she did not accept difficult decisions were not being made in order to fund higher spending on defence – especially when the Ministry of Defence had seen large uplifts at previous budgets. She said she had been among ministers who “expressed private reservations” about the decision to cut international aid but said that it was “clear that was a decision that [Starmer] was going to make, a decision by which he would stand”.
Al Carns also resigned as armed forces minister later on Thursday after Healey had quit. Carns – who has expressed a desire to run for the Labour leadership – told the Telegraph that the amount of funding was inadequate and Whitehall could not move nimbly to counter the evolving threats.
“I tried to change things from within the system. I made the arguments and pushed where the machinery allowed me to push. But the machinery is not built to move at the speed the world now demands,” he wrote.
“Spending 2.68% of GDP by 2030 is not a serious answer to a world where the character of warfare has changed fundamentally. That figure was not set by the threat, but by the Treasury, which treats defence as a cost to be contained.”
