Starmer Announces £15bn Defence Spending Hike Funded by Investment Cuts

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said a £15bn increase in military spending will be funded by cutting investment budgets in other areas, as he set out the UK's long-delayed plan to invest in defence.

In one of his final acts as prime minister, Sir Keir said some road and energy projects would not "go ahead as planned" to help raise defence funding to £80bn a year by 2029.

In a speech, he said the defence investment plan (DIP), initially expected last autumn, would reverse the "corrosive hollowing out" of the armed forces under the Conservatives.

He said the plan would be built on by his successor, widely expected to be Andy Burnham, who is yet to comment on the plan.

In his speech, Sir Keir said he had chosen chosen not to further increase government borrowing or cut day-to-day spending on public services to pay for the extra defence investment.

Instead, he said the money would be found by cutting the long-term investment budgets of other government departments by 1%.

A document outlining the specifics of the DIP is expected to be published on Tuesday afternoon.

The extra £15bn in spending over the next four years is more than the £13.5bn reportedly secured by John Healey, who resigned earlier this month in protest at the plans, but less than the additional £28bn sought by defence chiefs.

The MoD has given some details of the plan:

Sir Keir has pushed ahead with the DIP despite his impending departure from Downing Street after announcing his resignation last week. Tense Whitehall negotiations over how to fund it have been ongoing for months.

But the row over increasing military funding has seen two defence ministers resign, with Armed Forces Minister Al Carns joining Healey in resigning over the scale of the proposed uplift.

Sir Keir said the plan would now increase the military budget to 2.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2029, and put the UK on track to meet Nato's core defence spending target of 3.5% of GDP by 2035.

The prime minister said the UK was on track to spend 3% of GDP on defence in the next five-year Parliament - but he did not set a more specific date on this target, something Healey had called for.

The DIP follows the wide-ranging Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which was published in June 2025 and pledged billions in extra spending to fund a shift towards "warfighting readiness".

General Sir Richard Barrons, one of authors of SDR, told the BBC earlier that the lengthy delay to the DIP highlighted "how hard the conversation has been between the MoD and the Treasury".

Sir Richard said while the publication of the DIP "does count as progress", it would not "crack the issue" defending the UK "sufficiently well and quickly".

"More has to be done sooner and that requires more money than is currently on the table," Sir Richard said.