Ben Chu

Sure.

Well, OK, look, I looked today at the NATO official estimate of what the UK is spending on defence.

And that's the more relevant measure because obviously it's a NATO target, which the government has set itself.

The UK's figures are slightly below.

But going on NATO's figures, in 2025, it estimates that the UK would be spending about £70 billion on defence.

on qualifying defence spending, which is about 2.4% of GDP.

And for context, the government set a target to get that up to 2.5% by 2027.

And to do that, it's had to cut, well, it chose to cut the foreign aid budget by about 0.2% of GDP.

So it's basically, as a result, that decision is spending in today's money about another £6 billion.

billion pounds on defence to get to that 2.5 percent target and it has a target to get to three percent by the end of the next parliament although there's a lot of pressure for the government to do that by the end of this parliament put that in context that would require another roughly 15 billion pounds extra on top of that six billion pounds already spent so you're getting into considerable uh figures there in terms of the extra spending to be uh that would be needed to hit those those targets

And just to put some numbers on that welfare point, because we were asked to look into it for Verify today, and looking purely at the working age welfare bill, so not including the state pension, which I think is probably a more relevant comparator to the point that George Robertson, Lord Robertson, was making.

In the mid-1980s, the government was spending more on defence than working age welfare.

And as of today, it's spending more on working age welfare than defence.

About

just under 4% of GDP, and that's projected to go up to 4.3%.

So you're comparing that with 2.3%, 2.5% of GDP.

So that gives you a sense of the amount of resources which are going to these two areas.

And obviously, many people say that the welfare one should come down and the defence should go up, albeit there's lots of pressure on the government to keep spending on both.

Well, at the risk of pre-empting Helen's homework, we were asked to look into the 28 billion pound figure.

It's not an official figure that the government's put out.