UK DIP 2026: Government changes Royal Navy, funds sovereign munitions and strike capacity

A British soldier holding a one-way effector UAV named “Bolt” during Exercise Northern Star in Finland on 25 May 2026. (MoD/Crown Copyright)

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) published its long-delayed Defence Investment Plan (DIP) on 30 June 2026.

It outlines a profile of spending across the four financial years from 2026/27 to 2029/30.

The Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (CDEL), which includes equipment spending is:

Combined with a Resource Departmental Expenditure Limit (RDEL) of GBP172.7 billion, used for day-to-day spending on things including training and readiness, the total is an overall Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) of GBP297.7 billion, rounded up and announced by new UK Secretary of State for Defence Dan Jarvis as GBP298 billion.

Spending

Unmanned systems feature heavily in the DIP, which has seen fraught negotiations inside government for months, and Defence Secretary John Healey's resignation over the document.

In his resignation letter on 12 June, then Defence Secretary John Healey said that government work had sought to “set a clear path to meet the new NATO commitment you [Prime Minister Keir Starmer] agreed, to spend 3.5% of GDP in 2035.” While Healey said that “a headmark date for 3% of GDP on defence in 2030 is what Britain must set,” he noted that instead “your DIP financial settlement... falls well short of what is required... The extra support is backloaded [pushed back to later years] when the pressure of operations and imperative to speed up readiness to fight is in the first two years [after 2026] and it rises to just 2.68% of GDP in 2030, when we will reach 2.6% next year [2027] with the investment we are already making.”

An MoD official told Janes