Is there a £28bn shortfall in the defence budget?published at 13:05 GMT
By Anthony Reuben
At Prime Minister’s Questions, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch
said: “last week… the head of the armed forces warned that our military
faces a £28bn shortfall.”
She was referring to a report in The Times that Head of the Armed Forces Richard Knighton had warned the prime minister at a Downing Street
meeting before Christmas about a shortfall over the next four years.
A few days later, Knighton was asked about these reports, external when he appeared before a
committee of MPs.
He definitely did not confirm the figure, describing it as
“speculation in the media” and stressing that the meeting being reported
on was classified.
When pressed on whether there was a shortfall he said:
“the cost of the programme depends on a whole bunch of assumptions that we
might make, and ultimately it will be a matter for ministers to make those,
based on the advice that I and others offer.”
When I asked Bee Boileau from the Institute for Fiscal Studies
think tank about the £28bn figure, she pointed out that we don’t yet have
published plans for defence spending over the next four years, so it’s hard to
assess whether there will be a shortfall.
Earlier, my colleague Ben Chu crunched the numbers to see how much the Chagos deal might cost the UK.
