LONDON – The damage is already done. That was the verdict delivered on Sunday by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee in a forensic dissection of the Ministry of Defence’s accounts, one that cuts through months of ministerial assurances to reach an uncomfortable conclusion: Britain has gone years without a credible military plan, and the cost of that absence is no longer theoretical.
The committee’s report, published on June 7, targets the Defence Investment Plan – a document the government has repeatedly promised and repeatedly delayed. Originally expected in the autumn of 2025, the DIP was then pledged ahead of a NATO summit next month. As of the time of writing, it remains unpublished. The report does not merely criticise the timing. It maps out, with specificity, what the delay has already cost.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP chairing the committee, was not in the mood for diplomacy. He dismissed the argument that the government was simply taking time to get the details right. The DIP’s absence, he said, had caused harm to the nation’s credibility, its safety, its armed forces, and to the entire defence industrial base. Any minister attempting to explain away the delay, he added, should instead ask themselves what message the months of bureaucratic drift had sent to allies and adversaries alike – and simply apologise.
That phrase – bureaucratic drift – carries more weight than it might appear. The committee is not describing a routine administrative delay. It is describing a failure of decision-making at the highest levels of government: the Ministry of Defence has not resolved which capabilities, infrastructure and personnel are required to transform the armed forces into a warfighting-ready force within the available budget. Nor has it secured the cross-government sign-off the DIP requires. Neither problem is new. Neither has been fixed.
The consequences are cascading through the defence industrial base in ways that will not be easily reversed. The investment plan was meant to give industry a clear demand signal, encouraging firms to commit capital, expand production lines and build workforce capacity. Without it, that confidence has not materialised. Smaller companies, which lack the diversified revenue streams of the major primes, have suffered disproportionately – some have gone bust waiting for orders that could not be confirmed.
The PAC also notes that time is money in procurement in ways that compound over time. Suppliers are now adjusting their prices upward to account for the continuing deterioration of the international security environment. Every month the DIP is delayed adds cost to whatever it eventually contains – a self-inflicted premium on top of an already strained budget.
The committee’s report also lifts the lid on one of the defence budget’s more concrete failures: the Ajax armoured vehicle programme. Thirty-three soldiers have reported symptoms from noise and vibration after operating the vehicle; five remained under medical review as of March 2026. The MoD’s response – to require maintenance checks every time the vehicle is stopped – struck the committee as frankly unreasonable for a machine that may need to operate for extended periods in combat. An Ajax 2 upgrade package is now in development at an as-yet-unknown cost, and the committee is waiting, as it noted with pointed understatement, more in hope than expectation.
Nuclear expenditure adds another layer of complexity. The nuclear enterprise now accounts for 18 percent – £10.9 billion – of the defence budget in 2024–25, with the PAC warning that figure could rise to 25 percent in coming years. Parliament has long struggled to scrutinise this spending properly, given sensitivities around classified programme details. The committee welcomed a new parliamentary mechanism for enhanced scrutiny but warned that political uncertainty must not delay its implementation.
The report also flags what it describes as a completely unacceptable failure to maintain accounting records covering more than £6 billion of assets at the Atomic Weapons Establishment – a misclassification of historic expenditure that the PAC says means the MoD’s accounts do not present a true and fair picture of its financial position. The MoD has attributed the discrepancy to how payments made over fifteen years have been reclassified; the committee was unimpressed.
The broader strategic context sharpens each of these failures. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has himself said publicly that Russia could pose a direct threat to NATO allies by 2030, and has committed to publishing the DIP before July’s NATO summit. Defence companies and trade unions have warned that delays represent a threat to British jobs, skills and national security. The PAC report adds parliamentary weight to what industry has been saying quietly for months.
The committee does note one area of cautious progress: recruitment and retention in the armed forces. The latest figures, covering the year to October 2025, show the number of people joining the forces exceeding those leaving – a corner being turned, in the PAC’s assessment. The ministry does not, however, know whether that improvement stems from its own retention initiatives or from broader factors, and cannot yet demonstrate that the trend is sustainable.
Clifton-Brown closed his remarks on the DIP with a line that doubled as a warning and a bet. The plan, he noted, has earned the unwelcome distinction of being the most anticipated document of his entire political career. Whatever it contains, he said, it had better be good.
What the report cannot answer is the harder question: whether a plan published under pressure, timed to a NATO summit, and shaped around a budget gap that has not been fully resolved will provide the credible long-term signal that the armed forces and the defence industry are waiting for. The UK’s weapons funding crisis has been building for years, and the PAC’s message is that the window to address it without lasting structural damage may already be narrowing.
