Govt: UK defence spending hike tied to fiscal situation
A sweeping review of the UK’s defence and security will begin next week. The review will set out a “road-map” to increasing the UK’s defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, but no target date has yet been set to reach that target. Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard stated that the commitment is "iron-clad," but emphasised that the increase will adhere to fiscal rules, he added, "we won’t pretend the money is there when it is not." Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00We live in more difficult times and that's why next week we'll be launching the Defence Review
00:04that will look at the threats the UK is facing and importantly what capabilities we will need
00:09to match those threats to make sure that we can deter any aggression towards the UK and our
00:15allies and defeat it if necessary. Keir Starmer in Washington for the NATO summit is making clear
00:21that our commitment to get to 2.5% is ironclad but we will get there within our fiscal rules.
00:26What we won't do is pretend the money is there when it's not as the previous administration
00:32did. We need to make sure that we're modernising and updating our armed forces to meet the
00:36challenges that we're facing and the best way to do that is with a detailed root and branch review
00:42of the threats and the capabilities and that's what the Defence Review next week will do and
00:46that's the first step that will get us to the 2.5% of our GDP that we want to spend on defence.