Speeches by Pollard.

“For me personally?”

“I think it was the speed of transition from old capabilities to new. You mentioned frigates; I am the MP who represents Devonport, where they are based. We took the difficult decision to bring forward the retirement of a number of Type 23 frigates, because the material state of the frigates is no longer suitable for th…”

“The former Secretary of State and the current Secretary of State were leading those negotiations—that was their task within it—and I was working on the capability side. The number that I felt was the most relevant in this was the uplift available to defence during this period. That is the £15 billion that we have discu…”

“When I saw the Treasury’s WMS. But that was not a piece of work that I was undertaking in the MOD; I was looking at capabilities rather than spending profile.”

“Yes, we are looking at that.”

“In the Ministry of Defence, that is a Secretary of State role that both the previous Secretary of State and current Secretary of State carries out in liaison with the Treasury, and they use the new Defence Oversight Board, which was established under this Government as the forum for those conversations.”

“Yes, because what we are not doing is moving everything to autonomy. We have deliberately set out in all the main domains a mix of crewed, uncrewed and autonomous systems, for instance. It is hard to look at the lessons from Ukraine and not see the substantial revolution on the battlefield that drones in particular, bo…”

“No, but on procurement, we have already made substantial changes to our procurement system to increase efficiency. To complete the point that you mentioned, I think we can drive further efficiencies in our defence procurement in our digital infrastructure. We have, in the last couple of weeks for instance, reduced dupl…”

“The shift to autonomy across all those domains is about strengthening homeland defence, power projection and lethality, and in so doing, increasing our deterrent capability. If you take the example, for instance, of uncrewed ground vehicles being alongside our land forces, that is about increasing the lethality of thos…”

“During this process the Treasury and the MOD worked together to establish a financial agreement around the funding for the Strait of Hormuz mission. When we talk about how the threat and the capabilities were set up, while the DIP work was under way, we undertook to procure new autonomous capabilities, expand our auton…”

“Roughly two weeks-ish.”

“I am not in the NAO, so I cannot comment on what they think about it, but they have been working with the Ministry of Defence throughout this period. We are working with them as part of the review process. Whether that gives them a Scooby Doo or not, I am not certain, but we are working with them.”

“On capabilities, which is the area I worked on for the previous year on this, we did adjust some of the capabilities in the period between the two Defence Secretaries. For instance, we brought forward more low-cost effectors, rather than having the spend largely being in the complex weapons space, which means more expe…”

“Absolutely. I have seen big changes in terms of the level of interactions. That is partly because it has become visible to me, as someone who was working on capabilities previously, with John Healey working on the financial settlements. I have become more aware of that. However, this is our second major defence spendin…”

“Let me put the changes in two buckets, as I see them personally. One was on capabilities. The tilt that took place between the two capability offerings was broadly about increased readiness—so moving money so that we have additional spend on readiness—which was a concern raised largely in the public domain. It was some…”

“Can I just talk about—”

“Yes, absolutely. The defence equipment plans dealt with a very narrow section of defence spending. The DIP has not just the equipment we are buying and sustaining, but sections on people—the armed forces personnel that we have in our civilian workforce—our estates and our infrastructure. We are moving towards warfighti…”

“I do not entirely buy the argument that there is not detail.”

“There were decisions on capabilities made in advance of that. For example, the Wildcat, the Type 83 and the Type 32 were decisions that were taken previously.”

“It is effectively being able to say that if you are investing in, say, submarine production facilities in Barrow, instead of investing just for Astute and then scaling down, you can keep the production level up.”