Select committee: Defence Committee
Conclusion 96
First Report - Ready for War?
Published 4 Feb 2024
Addressed to Ministry of Defence
Defence Committee Armed Forces Readiness All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
General Lord Houghton told us that the UK Armed Forces have maintained high levels of readiness for standing commitments (to domestic security and overseas non- discretionary tasks) and contingent commitments (commitments to allies and alliances such as the commitment to deploy forces to NATO at varying levels of readiness). Therefore readiness for these tasks (as opposed to warfighting readiness) was unlikely to be an issue because the Armed Forces had long been subject to demands to engage in significant 200 Oral evidence taken on 4 July 2023, HC (2022–23) 1689, Q44; Oral evidence taken on 12 December 2023, HC (2023–24) 54, Q95 201 Oral evidence taken on 4 July 2023, HC (2022–23) 1689, Q43 202 HC Deb, 26 October 2023, HCWS1097 [Commons Written Ministerial Statement] Ready for War? 39 operational activity, geographically widely dispersed and across a range of tasks.203 The First Sea Lord also acknowledged this, and when questioned about the range of tasks carried out by the Royal Navy noted that: You will always have more tasks for a Navy than there are ships, by dint of the fact that we are a maritime nation. … I don’t own the task allocation; I am merely forced to generate forces against that. The range of tasks would be a question for Ministers. As for whether I have sufficient forces to meet the full range of tasks all the time in the way they would wish, as I said at the beginning, there is always a desire to do more than the fleet is actually capable of doing. What we pride ourselves on is the degree of agility that will allow us to rebalance against what the ministerial priorities are at the time.204
From: Defence Committee, First Report - Ready for War? (HC 26), 4 February 2024
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 25 April 2024 (deadline 4 April 2024).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees there is no regular mechanism to scrutinise readiness and offers an annual open session, releases some Defence Planning Assumptions headlines, and sets out its position on stockpiles, recruitment and procurement.
- On transparency, the government "recognises that the Committee should have public access to more information on planning assumptions and readiness" and releases headlines from the 2023 assumptions, committing to release "as much as possible" of the next iteration "when national and NATO planning processes have matured".
- It agrees the response time for the inquiry was slow and "will make every effort to ensure this is not repeated".
- On the £1.95bn from the Spring Budget 2023, it states the money "will be spent in full on measures to address gaps in our capabilities". It says exact stockpile holdings are "not releasable on the grounds of national security".
- On recruitment and retention, it says a formal response to each Haythornthwaite Review recommendation "will be published during 2024", with next steps for delivery and implementation for each.