Looking at the document published on Tuesday, it’s a little hard to see why it took more than a year. There are plenty of details about what’s being funded, but the hard bit – setting out where the money’s coming from – is very, very fuzzy.
In fact, we only know two projects that face being scrapped to pay for the much-heralded boost in investment for defence.
That’s right, two projects across every government department over the next few years, and they’re both in the Department for Transport. They are the A38 junctions at Derby and the A46 Newark bypass. That’s it.
Every other department has committed to finding 1p in every £1 from their capital budgets to put in the defence piggy bank (with the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero adding an extra couple of billion on top) but we still don’t know how or where.
Yesterday, a government spokesman said those details will come by autumn. He wouldn’t even confirm that the decisions about where the axe will fall have been made yet.
One clue might lie in the deep animosity between the Ministry of Defence, which was asking for money, and the Treasury, which was figuring out where to find it.
To show what sits behind that, we’ll need to dive into the murky world of defence funding.
The Ministry of Defence has an extraordinary talent for wasting money. And by ‘wasting money’, I don’t mean ‘spending money on things I don’t agree with’ – I mean waste.
Government spending watchdog the National Audit Office revealed in December that the MoD in 2024-25 reported £1.9 billion of losses, defined as ‘transactions where public money is spent but no benefit is received’. (A little over £1.45 billion of this appears to come from the early retirement of Chinook helicopters and other equipment in November 2024.)
And it’s more than that – a separate report from the NAO found the MoD is also pretty terrible at recovering the considerable amount it loses to fraud.
The government sets a target that every £1 spent on counter-fraud should save £3. Over the past four years, the MoD has managed just 48p for every £1 spent.
Then there are the major projects. The MoD handles more major projects than any other department – think building vessels and aircraft and large weapons systems.