Former defence secretary questions broadband as defence spending

Last week, we reported that the review on national security was going to include government spending on rural broadband as ‘defence’ spending to bring the UK up to the 5% of GDP target on defence spending. This originally was based on a report in The Telegraph.

Resilient ubiquitous telecommunications infrastructure can play a key role in defence of the country, however this type of re-classification has opened some eyes (one of the anonymous commenters called it ‘cheating’ to claim this was defence-related spending. There was the suggestion that there should be ‘core defence’ spending and then infrastructure spend, which could include items like strengthening physical as well as cyber-security infrastructure. There is certainly some merit to cyber-security spend being quite critical to protect the country and its economy.

The Prime Minister is expected to sign a deal to spend 5% of GDP by 2035 at the NATO summit today, however there is no clarity on how this will be paid for, and this may still be some years from being confirmed.

Writing in The Times (subscription required), former Secretary of Defence Ben Wallace called for NATO defence to become a ‘subscription service’ and that hiding broadband and similar projects in the 5% target simply wouldn’t fly:

“When I was at the MoD the Treasury even tried to include spending on asylum seekers against my budget. Nearly all these tricks are actually against the rules set out by Nato and none of these funding streams fool the Americans, nor deter an enemy.”

Ben Wallace, Former Defence Secretary (writing in The Times)