Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 28
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 ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
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, would be able to scrutinise annually the crucial issue of its forward spending plans.58 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.59 However, the Department made no proposals for how it might present its plans to Parliament and could not give us a date for when it would be able to do so.60 These answers were entirely unsatisfactory.61 52 Correspondence from David Williams CB, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence, re Update - MOD Equipment Plan 2022 - 2032 in Session 2022–23, dated 21 July 2023 53 Revised correspondence from David Williams CB, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence, re Equipment Plan 2023–2033: Update on affordability, dated 4 December 2023 54 C&AG’s Report, Equipment Plan 2023, para 2.8 55 Committee of Public Accounts, MoD Equipment Plan 2023–2033, Nineteenth Report of Session 2023–24, HC 451, 8 March 2024 56 Letter from the Minister for Defence Procurement and Industry relating to the Ministry of Defence Equipment Plan 2024, 13 November 2024 57 Letter from the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence relating to the response on the Defence Equipment Plan, 12 March 2025 58 Q 1 59 Q 57 60 Qq 58 and 59 61 Q 60 16
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.