Defence claims in the 2024 general election: fact checked
As polling day approaches, we’re rounding up the work we’ve done over the 2024 general election campaign in a series of easy-to-read guides to help you get the facts you need.
Claims about defence have cropped up several times during the election campaign, and this article lists our verdicts on some of the key claims we’ve seen from the major parties.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of the claims we’ve written about or fact checked, and there have been many accurate claims made about defence too, which we’ve not necessarily covered. So we wouldn’t suggest using these round-ups to judge how honest any party is overall. At the same time, just because we haven’t written about a particular claim doesn’t mean we’ve verified it as true.
Please follow the links to read our full fact checks on each of the claims below. These include links to all the sources we’ve used (so you can check our work for yourself).
Labour have not matched our commitment to defence
During the ITV head-to-head debate between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer on 4 June, Rishi Sunak said Labour hadn’t matched a Conservative pledge to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.
The Conservatives have pledged to reach the 2.5% target by 2030, while the Labour party hasn’t matched that timeframe, but has previously said it would do this “as soon as resources allow”.
We assessed this claim and several others in our round-up of that debate.
Defence to receive an additional £75 billion over six years
Science, innovation and technology secretary Michelle Donelan has repeated this claim, that has previously been made by senior Conservatives, during the campaign.
But it’s misleading, because it assumes spending would otherwise have been frozen in cash terms, and fallen as a percentage of GDP, over the next six years. If you assume spending would otherwise have been maintained as a percentage of GDP, the increase by 2030 is expected to be around £20 billion.
The government announced in April that the UK would increase its defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. The government plans to spend £64.1 billion, which amounts to 2.32% of GDP, on defence in 2024/25. A series of planned increases will see this rise to 2.5% of GDP, or £87 billion, in 2030/31.
In cash terms, therefore, the government’s additional annual spending on defence in 2030/31 will be around £23 billion higher compared to this year. The £75 billion figure is the sum of all the additional amounts above £64.1 billion spent between now and 2030.
We wrote about this in April and again when defence secretary Grant Shapps repeated the claim in May.
The Conservatives have hollowed out our armed forces
The Labour manifesto claimed that the Conservatives have “hollowed out” the UK’s armed forces.
A decline in the number of military personnel is supported by government statistics, which show that in April 2024 there were 129,760 fully trained personnel in the armed forces, down 27% since 2010.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer made a similar claim during his first major campaign speech, suggesting the UK army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars (which took place between 1792 and 1815). This appears to be broadly correct, though there are caveats around the data.
The present number of personnel in the British Army is comparable to the period shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. That said, the data that far back is not entirely reliable and there are many different ways of counting serving personnel. You can read more in our explainer on the size of the armed forces here.
The army has shrunk from 100,000 to 75,000 in 14 years
Discussing the Conservatives’ national service plans on Sky News on 26 May, Nigel Farage, then honorary Reform UK president, now the party’s leader, claimed “the army has shrunk from 100,000 to 75,000 in 14 years”.
This actually slightly understates the fall in the size of the UK Army Regular Forces since 2010. The number of UK Army Regular Forces personnel (trained and untrained) fell from about 109,000 in 2010 to about 75,000 in 2023, though there are many different ways of counting serving personnel.
[National service] would only apply to one in 36 young people
In an episode of Question Time on 30 May, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage said the Conservatives’ proposed national service policy would only see one in 36 youngsters do military training.
Based on current population estimates though, it’s more like one in 26.
[Renewing Trident] is estimated to cost more than £200bn
This is a claim from Plaid Cymru’s manifesto. The party told Full Fact that this figure is based on an estimate produced by the anti-nuclear weapons group Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 2016.
But this is just one estimate. A 2015 estimate produced by Reuters was lower, at £167 billion, and a 2015 government estimate of replacing the Dreadnought programme, the replacement programme for the Vanguard Class submarines that carry the Trident missiles, was even less, at £41 billion.
But there’s considerable uncertainty over some of the costs associated with renewing Trident so we don’t reliably know how much it will cost in its entirety. For more detail, read our fact check of the manifesto in full.