Recommendation 5

We are extremely disappointed that the Permanent Secretary did not have concrete suggestions for how the Department will provide Parliament with annual reporting on its plans. The Department last published a full Equipment Plan in November 2022. Since July 2023, it has written to both this and the previous Public Accounts Committee several times with excuses for why it has not produced any subsequent Equipment Plan reports, and it has questioned whether that format was best suited to explaining its future investment and support plans. The recent SDR says that the Department will develop a new ‘Defence Investment Plan’ to supersede the Equipment Plan, but provides no details. We held this inquiry in the sincere hope that by its end we would have heard clear proposals from the Department as to how this Committee, and by extension Parliament, will be able to scrutinise annually the crucial issue of its forward spending plans. The Department acknowledged that it works better with scrutiny from this Committee and the Defence Committee and told us that Ministers were clear that they wanted the Department to be more transparent than previously. However, the Department did not propose how it might present its plans to Parliament and could not give us a date for when it might be able to do so. These answers were entirely unsatisfactory. 6 recommendation During Parliament’s September 2025 sitting the Department must provide the Committee with a fully worked out proposal for how it will update Parliament each year about its equipment procurement and support plans. The Department should include in its proposal how it will: • ensure that the updates are timely; and • provide analysis of any variances from the Spending Review baseline.