A new round of job cuts across the armed forces is inevitable after the general election despite a Tory promise to the contrary, an authoritative analysis reveals today.
A report by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) calculated that Britain’s defence budget was set to fall well below the Nato threshold of 2 per cent of GDP from the next financial year without a significant increase in spending.
It would cost an extra £3 billion to £6 billion annually during the next parliament to keep spending above 2 per cent; a sum that was deemed by the think-tank as “not plausible” in the present climate of austerity.
In the worst case, the army would shrink to only 50,000 soldiers, its report said. Equipment programmes, from the number of new fast jets to the size of the Royal Navy’s proposed fleet of frigates, would also be under threat, it warned.
The number of military and civilian personnel at the Ministry of Defence would also be cut by almost a third to 184,000 during the same period, the study added.
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The findings came as Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary and former defence secretary, said that the government remained committed to the 2 per cent target and reiterated a commitment made by David Cameron not to cut the number of regular soldiers, sailors and airmen any further.
However, he made no such commitment to protect Britain’s reserve forces.
Mr Cameron “is passionate about our armed forces, he has always been absolutely clear that he is not prepared to preside over any further cuts in our regular armed forces”, Mr Hammond told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
“He knows where he wants to go. But we have got very difficult decisions to make in delivering our long-term economic plan to get Britain out of deficit and start paying down its debt. We will protect the integrity and the strength of our armed services.”
Malcolm Chalmers, director of research at Rusi, said. “The result will be a remarkably sharp reduction in the footprint of defence in UK society over a decade. Even in the optimistic scenario, defence’s share of gross domestic product will have fallen by a third: from 2.6 per cent of GDP in 2010 to around 1.75 per cent by 2019.”
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The prime minister is facing a backbench rebellion over defence as fears mount that George Osborne plans to freeze money for the armed forces during the next parliament, which would amount to a 10 per cent cut in real terms.
More than 30 MPs are to stage a Commons showdown on Thursday in an attempt to force the prime minister to meet the Nato commitment.
The Rusi briefing paper considered different scenarios on defence spending. The most optimistic is that defence is given the same kind of protection as health and overseas aid. This would mean that the defence equipment budget would increase by 1 per cent in real terms – a commitment that Mr Cameron has made. This would not be enough to meet the 2 per cent Nato goal.
The combined personnel in all three services could fall by 15,000, from 145,000 at the end of 2015 to 130,000 over five years, the Rusi report said.
The report considered a 10 per cent overall cut in the budget, but with the equipment-side still guaranteed a 1 per cent increase in real terms, meaning that manpower would take an especially big hit.
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“This could require a reduction in regular personnel numbers to around 103,000,” Professor Chalmers warned.