What’s happened to UK defence spending?

Military analysts cite the rising threat from Russia since 2022, the current war in the Middle East and questions over the future of the US in Nato as powerful reasons for the UK to spend more on national defence.

General Sir Richard Barrons – one of the authors of the SDR in 2025 – told the BBC: “We’ve now entered a very new era in global affairs, with much greater risk but we’re entering it with the armed forces we were left with for a much more comfortable, peaceful time.”

A government spokesperson said: “We are delivering on the Strategic Defence Review to meet the threats we face.”

“It is backed by the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, with a total of over £270bn being invested across this Parliament.”

Additional reporting by Gerry Georgieva

Correction: 23 June 2026: We have changed the chart in the piece as the previous version did not reflect the full picture of government spending on non-pensioner welfare. The previous chart used DWP’s “working age benefit expenditure” series to represent this. It did not include tax credits paid by HMRC, but as these recipients were changed over to Universal Credit (paid by DWP) this appeared to show a marked increase in this spending since 2010 – in reality the expenditure was just moving from one government department to another. The overall rise in non-pensioner welfare expenditure since 1980 was therefore lower than suggested in the DWP figures. Payments directed at children which are paid to working-age parents were also not captured. The text has also been updated to reflect these changes.

Correction: 15 April 2026: The original article used MoD annual figures from October 2025 to show there were 11 frigates. A subsequent Parliamentary answer reduced that figure to seven. We also sourced a figure of 137 Eurofighter Typhoons to a House of Commons Library briefing from November 2025. After consulting the MoD we have changed that number to 107.