The wider national contribution of UK Defence — an opportunity going begging?
I recently attended a reunion of the UK military unit I served with at the start of my career. Many of my colleagues have now gone on to very senior roles both inside and alongside the UK Ministry of Defence, including contributing to the ongoing UK Defence and Security Review.
This Review has passed me by and is almost complete, but I’m writing this as a late contribution to the debate. I’d like to focus on the wider contribution that Defence makes to the UK, because I suspect this is an area that isn’t being well examined by the current Review (please prove me wrong:)
I’m basing this observation on my previous attempts to engage with Defence about the Net Zero opportunity. As far as I can tell, The UK MoD sees Net Zero as something marginal to ‘core business’ and in terms of the challenge (not opportunity — more below) of reducing the energy — and CO2 — required to conduct its business.
There are a number of issues here. First, ‘core business’. Across the various sectors that I have worked in over the past decade or so, and especially in the case of UK Government departments, there has been a tendency — largely driven by cost pressures but also indicative of a prevailing organisational mindset — of focusing on the core business, the essential activity, of those organisations. I think this is a fundamental mistake — I’d go as far as saying that organisations now — and especially in the public sector — need to start their discussion of purpose and prioritisation of activity — with the stuff that they do with others. Any ‘core business’ that also equals ‘stuff that we do ourselves’ is increasingly something that is a potential indulgence and whose impact is being limited because opportunities are being missed to work with others and create additional benefits.
Net Zero is a wonderful example in the case of Defence. Defence has huge resources that can contribute in a wider way to the national objective of developing a green economy. For example, UK Defence is a major landowner — why isn’t it also an energy producer or actively managing its land to sequester carbon? It also has a crucial asset from a national perspective — an estate full of poor quality buildings that need retrofitting. This estate work is crucial to addressing the challenge of reducing the energy footprint of UK Defence (and the cost of operating it), but it’s also an opportunity — and one that is going begging just now.
One of the practical limits on the UK’s aspirations to develop a green economy is the skills base. In construction, for example, there are just not enough people with the right skills to do all the new build or retrofit work needed. See the failed Green Homes Grant scheme abandoned in March 2021 as a great example of this — the scheme was great in principle but there simply weren’t enough qualified people to do the work.
For people and firms to start investing in the skills needed to decarbonise the UKs buildings, the market for these skills needs to be made. And it doesn’t get made just by policy (see the foot dragging over the adoption of the Future Homes Standard for example) but by the physical opportunities to do the work — i.e. buildings.
Defence has lots of these. Just imagine the market for skills created if Defence committed to retrofitting its estate to ‘zero energy in operation’ standards by 2028. And this is doable — just ask the US Department of Defence who since the late 2000s have been a leader in terms of decarbonisation and improving energy efficiency in the built environment (I wrote about this in 2011 (!) here).
So as well as developing the capability needed to enact whatever Defence policy emerges from the Review, UK Defence has a massive opportunity to make a foundational contribution to the development of a green economy in the UK. Is this in the Review? If not, it should be, because as well as being an essential part of its own plans for energy reduction, Defence has a great pitch to the Treasury and the rest of government about the contribution it can make to greening the economy — which after all is one of the Governments 5 National Missions.
The other area where I’d like to hear more from Defence is the role the military can play as a social institution. The UK military is, I’d argue, one of the most diverse institutions we have in terms of people’s backgrounds, life experiences and education. The military builds cohesive teams from people who would most likely never have crossed paths had they not joined up — is there another public body for whom this is true in the same way?
This mixing of backgrounds, and the lifelong relationships that develop in teams that get truly tested, is something very unusual and precious. Shouldn’t the military be talking more about this?
There is a wider point here about getting all government departments and public policy to develop approaches focussed on collaboration and the creation of linked benefits that they might not regard as ‘their job’. I will write more about this, but for the moment I wanted to share the case of Defence as an example.
As part of the Defence Review, there should be some focus on the wider contribution that UK Defence makes to our country and society. There is — or shouldn’t be — no longer any such thing as ‘not our job’. If public bodies can have positive wider effects, then they should have a duty to do so. It’s also, by the way, the best way to spend public money. At present, UK Defence and other bodies like the NHS are walking past opportunities all the time to deliver these wider benefits.
If we want to do the most with increasingly constrained national resources (which is surely our joint challenge as a society?), then this needs to change.
As always, Id love to discuss this with anyone who is interested.
