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Britain needs to show “a credible path” of annual increases in its defence budgets to meet a Nato target of spending nearly £30bn more on the military by the middle of the next decade, the head of the alliance said on Thursday.
Mark Rutte, Nato’s secretary general, said that Britain could not wait until just before 2035 to lift defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, in an unusually pointed intervention a day after he met prime minister Andy Burnham.
In an interview with the Press Association, he said: “And that is why you need a credible path towards that 3.5%, and yearly increments.”
The alliance’s secretary general, a former Dutch prime minister, made similar remarks to the BBC, where he said that the UK understood that the target could not be met “in one go in 2034” and that it would have to be achieved gradually.
Earlier on Thursday, Rutte met with Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, and Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary. He saw Burnham on Wednesday, at a business park in Didcot, and also met representatives from the defence industry.
Keir Starmer signed the UK up to a Nato-wide target of increasing defence spending to 3.5% of GDP in the summer of 2025, under pressure from the US president, Donald Trump. The figure has since been endorsed by Burnham and his chancellor, former defence secretary John Healey.
Current spending plans, covering until 2028/9, show defence spending levelling off at 2.7%, nearly £30bn below the ultimate target, raising the question of how it would be achieved after the next general election. It is unclear if taxes or borrowing would have to rise, or other government spending cuts.
Healey resigned as defence minister in June because Starmer would not commit to lifting defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030. At the time Healey said Labour needed to set “a clear path” to meet the Nato commitment, similar language to that used by Rutte in his interviews.
But since then Healey and Burnham have avoided committing to the 3% by the end of the decade. Decisions on future spending are likely to be left to the next government spending review due next year, prompting the Nato leader to engage in public lobbying on his trip to Britain.
Rutte said he was certain the Burnham government remained behind the ultimate goal and the need to increase defence spending gradually. “I am absolutely confident that when it comes to the yearly increments, they totally take it and accept it, that they have to be there,” he told the BBC.
“There has to be a credible path. What that credible path exactly will be, we will see with the spending review next year,” Rutte added.
A day earlier, Rutte gave a speech to at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, in which he warned that the 32 country military alliance faced “the most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation” with wars in Ukraine, the Middle East coming at time of rising state competition.
Nato needed “more UK and more Europe”, he added, to take up the slack as the US reduces its military commitment to the alliance. Trump has long argued that the UK and Europe should match US levels of defence spending and take the lead in defending the continent from Russia aggression.
