Ben Wallace steps back from Liz Truss’s 3% defence spending target

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The defence secretary has walked away from a Liz Truss commitment to spend 3% of GDP on defence by 2030 – just a few weeks after signalling he might resign from the government if the target was not met.

When asked if he still supported the pledge, Ben Wallace, speaking at a meeting of European defence ministers, said he was “taking it budget by budget at the moment”, acknowledging the changed economic situation following Truss’s disastrous premiership.

Rishi Sunak, her successor in No10, has not committed to the 3% figure – which would represent a real-terms increase of ?20-25bn from the current 2.1% – and it is widely expected to be shelved or sidelined in next week’s autumn statement.

Last month, Wallace, one of the government’s more popular ministers, indicated he would be willing to resign if the 3% commitment was not retained by Truss. But Thursday’s remarks underline he is no longer willing to fight hard on the issue under the new prime minister.

Instead Wallace lobbied for an unspecified above inflation increase. “I’m keen to increase defence spending on the trajectory it’s been on and make sure that we continue to have a real-terms investment in our defence,” he said at a meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force in Edinburgh.

When pressed again, he said: “We have a new prime minister, a new cabinet. Of course my aspiration is for, you know, a 3% headline at some stage.”

Boris Johnson, in one of his final acts before being ousted as prime minister, committed the UK to lifting defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade, an increase of about ?12bn in real terms, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

But with Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, believing he needs to announce ?60bn in spending cuts and tax increases in next Thursday’s autumn statement, it is unclear if even the commitment made by Johnson at the last Nato summit in June can be maintained.

However, there could be some flexibility because defence budgets have been fixed until 2024-25, meaning any uplift to meet 3% or 2.5% targets would happen after the next election, in the second half of the decade.

Labour and the Lib Dems have warned that rising inflation, caused in part by the war in Ukraine, in fact means defence spending is falling in real terms during this parliament, regardless of any longer-term pledge. An analysis by the House of Commons library warned of a ?2.5bn shortfall by 2025.

Britain has already committed to spend ?2.3bn on military aid for Ukraine in 2023, Wallace said, matching this year’s levels – and this week the UK said it would supply a further 1,000 surface-to-air missiles to Kyiv and more than 25,000 winter kits to help troops get through the winter.

The minister acknowledged the death of Simon Lingard, a Briton killed fighting with the Ukrainian armed forces on Monday. Wallace said he understood some people’s “strength of feeling” that led them to sign up to fight for Ukraine – and that “we regret the loss of life” in his case.

Wallace added that many thousands of Ukrainians had been killed in the more than eight-month-long war, and said that if Britons wanted to contribute to the war effort they could join the UK armed forces. British personnel have been engaged in training Ukrainian military in the UK, with 10,000 due to have completed five-week courses by the end of the year.