Select committee: Defence Committee
Conclusion 114
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)
Describing the key components of strategic readiness, the Minister for the Armed Forces highlighted the importance of the industrial base and its ability to increase its capacity; enablers which project and sustain the force (not just in terms of equipment and warfighters but also medical services, signallers, logisticians and engineers as well as Reserves who can form part of the second echelon force); and resilient (and therefore dispersed) warehousing and stores.228 He acknowledged that the Government needed to consider all of this as part of its future thinking: The MOD generates a first echelon force to get us into the fight. A war of national endeavour requires a whole of government, whole of industry and whole of society mobilisation to sustain us in the fight thereafter. No private business has a peacetime contractual obligation. So, thinking through how we mobilise the UK industrial base to sustain us is a really important piece of work. … We just simply have not had to think about this for a really long time. What is the skills base? What is the capacity to generate a second echelon force? How do you mobilise industry? How do you assure your supply chains? What are your access to the critical minerals, the semiconductors, and all the other things that are needed? The consideration of our national resilience and our ability to war fight will require us to consider what we need to be sovereign and then to start making policy to do so.229
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.