Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 4
32nd Report - The Future of the Equipment Plan
Published 20 Jun 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee The Future of the Equipment Plan All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The Strategic Defence Review (the SDR) has set out the government’s high-level policy and capability ambitions, but the Department will need to complete further work to prioritise what it must do to achieve them. The government launched the SDR in July 2024 and 5 published it on 2 June 2025, five weeks after our evidence session with the Department. The Department said that the SDR would try to balance ambition and resource, chart the direction needed to respond to the current geopolitical situation and ensure that the UK has the armed forces it needs, both now and for the future. The Department stressed that its existing equipment programme was already ambitious–including renewing the nuclear warhead, spending £40 billion on new equipment for the Army, and investing in a sixth-generation fighter–and that the SDR would build upon and develop this. As confirmed in the Spending Review on 11 June, the government has announced that it will increase defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product from April 2027, but the Department is only midway through the process of deciding how to invest the additional funding. Now that the SDR has been published the Department will have to work through the detailed capability choices, and it does not expect to have completed this process until the latter part of 2025–two years since this Committee was last able to scrutinise the Department’s spending plans. recommendation The Department should provide the Committee with: • a written update during Parliament’s September 2025 sitting on its progress in converting the SDR’s ambitions into a deliverable plan; and • an update on its final implementation plan before the Christmas 2025 recess.
From: Public Accounts Committee, 32nd Report - The Future of the Equipment Plan (HC 716), 20 June 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Thirty-second Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 20 August 2025).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Thirty-second report from Session 2024-26
Published 16 September 2025.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with five of the Committee's recommendations on Ukraine support, procurement reform, the Strategic Defence Review and annual reporting, and disagrees with the recommendation on detailed Defence Nuclear Enterprise cost reporting in the annual update.
- On Ukraine, the government agrees with the recommendation and states that the department will support Ukraine "for as long as it takes", expecting to provide £4.5 billion in capability support this financial year.
- It agrees to update the Committee by June 2026 on procurement lessons from Ukraine and on how procurement has improved under the National Armaments Director Group, with a target to agree key performance indicators "within the next three months".
- It agrees to turn the Strategic Defence Review into a Defence Investment Plan, to be published in the autumn, which the department "will ensure" is affordable, and says it will provide updates "as requested by the Committee".
- It disagrees on Defence Nuclear Enterprise reporting, saying it is "better" to provide the financial information within wider MOD financial reporting, and is "continuing to consider" an earlier proposal for a new scrutiny committee.