Andy Burnham’s political rise to Prime Minister has placed renewed focus on buying British across defence procurement, with British money spent on British firms.
During a visit to a BAE Systems shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness last month, Burnham set out his vision, stating that “security is not only about what we build, but who builds it and benefits from it.”
The underlying logic carries genuine weight, as increasing investment in defence and national economic growth are not mutually exclusive goals for government.
Defence should be treated as the innovation arm of government, acting as a force multiplier for economic growth by supporting skilled employment, research and development, and international trade.
But Paul Jenkinson, CEO of the British sovereign AI company Whitespace, argues that in the current reality of the UK defence sector, this turn to nationalism may prove unhelpful.
Sovereignty has become one of the most frequently invoked buzzwords across UK domestic and foreign policy, appearing in government speeches, political bylines, and research papers with increasing regularity.
In most discussions, sovereignty goes hand in hand with the Buy British ethos, keeping capabilities on home soil to ensure resilience against emerging threats from adversaries.
Jenkinson argues that hyperfixating on where a company happens to be registered as the metric for sovereign capability fundamentally asks the wrong question and leaves the nation on the back foot.
While procuring homegrown capabilities may be an effective strategy in sectors such as healthcare, coordination with NATO in defence is too crucial to focus solely on where a company is registered.
Jenkinson writes that Whitespace does not supply sovereign AI to the UK defence sector simply because it is a UK-based company, but because the UK can depend on what it delivers.
“The real question should be: can the government trust that the capabilities being procured are truly resilient?” Jenkinson argues, shifting the debate away from registration and toward genuine performance.
He identifies a deeper root problem in procurement that prioritises procedural requirements over capability and performance, invoking the well-known phrase that “no one ever got fired for awarding a contract to IBM.”
The government’s desire to buy recognisable logos, Jenkinson contends, frustrates him infinitely more than any form of nationalism ever could.
If procurement is refocused on technical performance that can be genuinely relied upon and will not be cut off at the whim of others, a boost in British defence procurement will happen naturally and on merit.
The UK defence sector is also notoriously slow with procurement, which Jenkinson describes as being penny-wise and pound-foolish, a situation that can prove devastating for scaling companies at the mercy of government timelines.
Levelling the playing field so that UK tech companies can be genuine competitors with reliable global brands is, in his view, the strategy that cannot wait any longer.
Given the right environment, British firms are more than capable of delivering the resilient capabilities the UK defence sector needs, not because they are British, but because they are genuinely better for the job.