{"id":670598,"date":"2026-07-02T22:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/670598\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T22:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:32:15","slug":"uks-likely-next-pm-andy-burnham-faces-defence-funding-gap-politics-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/670598\/","title":{"rendered":"UK\u2019s likely next PM Andy Burnham faces defence funding gap | Politics News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis is facing questions over the funding gap and whether Burnham was blindsided,<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Published On 2 Jul 20262 Jul 2026<\/p>\n

Andy Burnham will have to find an additional 4.7 billion pounds ($6.2bn) to close a defence funding gap if, as is widely expected, he becomes the United Kingdom\u2019s prime minister later this month.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Tuesday announced a long-delayed defence plan aimed at making the UK\u2019s depleted armed forces war-ready amid \u2060rising security threats and warnings that Russia could attack a NATO member as soon as 2030.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

However, the plan\u2019s commitment to spend an additional 15 billion pounds ($19.9bn) came under scrutiny within hours of its release after accompanying documents showed that almost a third of the funding still needed to be found in a budget later this \u200cyear.<\/p>\n

Burnham<\/a> only found out about the funding hole on the day it was published, Minister of Defence Procurement Luke Pollard said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not unusual for governments to make announcements saying this is what we\u2019ll spend, and then to complete the details of that at the next budget,\u201d Pollard told Sky News.<\/p>\n

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis is facing questions over the funding gap and whether Burnham was blindsided by the need to plug it in his first budget.<\/p>\n

Jarvis sidestepped repeated questions about whether it had been made clear to Burnham that he was being left with a funding gap.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, we\u2019ve been talking to Andy Burnham and his team about this plan,\u201d Jarvis told BBC Newsnight, pointing to Starmer\u2019s focus on a \u201csmooth transition\u201d of power.<\/p>\n

Burnham is widely expected<\/a> to become the UK\u2019s prime minister later in July.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that if Andy Burnham becomes the prime minister \u2026 that he will take national security as seriously as Keir has taken it,\u201d Pollard said.<\/p>\n

He later declined to answer questions on when Burnham had been told of the financial details, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not involved with those conversations,\u201d in an interview with BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme.<\/p>\n

Opposition politicians and former military chiefs also criticised the defence investment plan for failing to set out when defence spending would reach 3 percent of GDP, on the way to meeting the UK\u2019s NATO commitment to spend 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035.<\/p>\n

Starmer defended the costings on Tuesday, saying much of the additional funding would come from reallocating spending from other government departments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis is facing questions over the funding gap and whether Burnham was blindsided, Published On…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2411,591,59,57,58,50,229,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-670598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-business-and-economy","tag-europe","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}