Speeches by Pollard.

“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…”

“Yes, we are looking at that.”

“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…”

“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…”

“I come from a naval family where I was taught from an early age that the Royal Navy has two enemies, the French and the Treasury. We are now good friends with the French, and we do a lot together as close NATO allies. I would say that the process between the Treasury and MOD has been on a journey. Relations between the…”

“I can see from having worked with the former Defence Secretary that there have certainly been a lot of conversations that related to spending levels and understandings around stuff. I have seen a substantial change in the weeks since his resignation between—”

“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…”

“Roughly two weeks-ish.”

“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…”

“I was not involved with those precise discussions because they were held by the former Secretary of State and the Treasury. That might be one that I could usefully hand over to the Chief Secretary to answer.”

“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…”

“May I briefly answer?”

“I think they do, but we will need to have a different relationship, and a different relationship with those people in Parliament who scrutinise it. I want all the kit I buy to work, but if we are buying brand-new novel technologies, we have to move to a fail-fast culture where we can iterate against new technologies an…”

“Any closer working relationship with the Treasury does help in delivering. If I look, on a practical basis, at where I need Treasury support during a procurement process, it is at the key milestones during that process, where we have established the capability need, the procurement and the budget, and we are getting th…”

“But if it is characterised as a year of arguing, that is incorrect. I want to be clear—”

“No, because that is not within my role. That was within the former Secretary of State’s responsibilities.”

“I know you asked the Chief Secretary, but on Astute, and the submarine enterprise in general, we as a nation have learned painfully from the stop-start nature of significant projects. That is why the defence investment plan sets out, effectively, a submarine production pipeline of many decades to come.”

“Yes, I think the broad target for the six and a half years is to get to about two, but it is not a switch that you can just pull to go from six to two. We are in the process of reducing it. That is also a process of understanding risk frameworks and, importantly, moving away from reams and reams of specifications. Cult…”

“I do not want to give the impression that a year was spent with people just disagreeing. An enormous amount of work genuinely went in to identifying line by line, and during that process we discovered more unfunded programmes and unfunded requirements. For instance, we fairly frequently found a lack of funding for supp…”

“I am saying that we need long-term planning to establish the baseline, which is what we now have, but when it comes to responding to national security situations, we did that during this process and it was successful and swift.”