Defence spending in UK to be put ‘on war footing’, Rishi Sunak says – as it happened

Rishi Sunak addresses a press conference in Warsaw. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images

6.03pm BST

Afternoon summary

• Britain will boost its defence spending to 2.5% of national output by the end of the decade, Rishi Sunak has announced on a visit to Poland, as he warned the UK had to be equipped to meet the challenges of an increasingly dangerous world. But economic thintanks warned that Sunak could only achieve this through deep cuts to some areas of public spending. (See 4.40pm and 4.55pm.) And another thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said the nature of defence spending chosen by government was more important than the size of the defence budget. In a statement it said:

In a world where the US and China spend more on defence than the next 38 highest spending countries combined, defence, for most countries, cannot simply be a funding race.

Metrics are useful but more important is what that spending goes towards. We need more modern capabilities, not simply more money. What that money is spent on can mean the difference between fighting the last war or winning the next one.

• The Council of Europe’s human rights watchdog has condemned Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme, saying it raises “major issues about the human rights of asylum seekers and the rule of law”.

• Rishi Sunak has said he is confident Home Office staff will enact the Rwanda deportation scheme, despite fears that could put them in breach of international law.

• Jeremy Hunt’s scope for a substantial pre-election tax giveaway has been hit after the latest set of official figures showed the UK’s public finances in worse shape than thought at last month’s budget.

• One of Rishi Sunak’s dementia advisers has resigned over the government’s approach towards unpaid carers, describing the prosecutions of vulnerable people as “beyond the pale”.

5.42pm BST

Ben Wallace suggests Sunak has abandoned tax cut plan for Tory manifesto to make defence spending pledge instead

Ben Wallace, the former Conservative defence secretary, told Radio 4’s PM programme that he thinks Rishi Sunak will fund the MoD increase announced today by sacrificing a potential tax cut plan that might have been included in the Tory manifesto.

Wallace said he did not know the full details. But he told the programme that he spoke to Sunak this morning, and that Sunak told him he could fund this plan by abandoning “other commitments” that might have been in the manifesto. Wallace said:

Rishi doesn’t say anything on things like money without really going to the nth degree – more than I would.

I spoke to him this morning and he said, “Look, we decided we’re going to spend it on this. We had some other commitments we thought we may or may not do at the election, that we would introduce in the manifesto, and we’ve decided that this is going to be our priority.

So they have clearly, within No 10 and the Treasury, identified some extra spending. This is only speculation – some of that could be not doing a tax cut that might have happened, some of that could be not spending more in another sector of government.

But he’s clearly identified that. He was keen to talk to me.

If Sunak has abandoned plans for a tax cut in favour of plans to increase defence spending, he will be doing what Conservative party members want, according to a recent survey. (See 2.38pm.)

On the PM programme the presenter, Evan Davis, did point out that when Boris Johnson was prime minister, he also announced a long-term plan to raise defence spending to 2.5%. He aised the question as to whether, in the light of that, today’s announcement was very significant.

Davis was too polite to provide the obvious answer (which is that no promise from Johnson could ever be taken seriously), but Wallace did allude to it, saying Johnson and Sunak have very different approaches to making financial commitments.