Written by Ed Arnold
As Parliament returns, the new Prime Minister should prioritise leading an honest national conversation on security, developing the legislative requirements for a ‘National Resilience Bill’, and reforming the machinery of government to get the whole of the UK ready for war.
The June 2026 dual resignations of the UK Defence Secretary and Minister of Armed Forces over the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan (DIP) were a significant contributor to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s own resignation just 11 days later. The DIP had consumed the Ministry of Defence since the publication of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) the previous year, and despite its significance for the armed forces and industry, it has minimal crossover to other government departments and very little impact on wider society.
The SDR concluded that ‘Everyone has a role to play and a national conversation on how we do it is required’ and so demanded a whole-of-society approach to national security. Yet, the House of Commons Defence Committee report on the UK Contribution to European security – published five months after the SDR – argued that the ‘national conversation’ on defence is ‘yet to start’ and that the Defence Readiness Bill (DRB) which is ‘vital to empower Government in the event of crisis or conflict…is yet to be written’. Planned for the beginning of 2026, the DRB was absent from the latest King’s Speech and is now not expected until 2027 at the earliest and could be as late as 2029.
With little sign of any immediate new money for defence, Andy Burnham should prioritise his efforts on the financially inexpensive but resource-intensive activities which have been delayed by getting the DIP over the line. First, he should use his active communication skills to lead a true national conversation on security to assess and prepare the public appetite for enhanced resilience measures and feed these requirements directly into the DRB. Second, for the next Parliamentary session, he should prioritise legislatively a renamed ‘National Resilience Bill’ and use it to proactively define the emergency powers required and build the political legitimacy to enact them through the associated national conversation. Finally, empowered by his political philosophy, Burnham should create a bottom-up regionalisation model of whole-of-society national resilience by enabling machinery-of-government changes that improve unity of effort between the four nations of the UK and the private sector to increase the UK's overall readiness.
Jump-starting a national conversation
The 2026 British Foreign Policy Group’s Annual Survey confirmed that Britons feel ‘increasingly insecure’ and identified a ‘rare consensus’ on national security being a foreign policy priority. Starmer accepted the SDR recommendation for a national conversation on defence but was uncomfortable in leading it, preferring to delegate the messaging to his Foreign Secretary, Chief of the Defence Staff and Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. As a result, the PM was accused by the SDR lead author, Lord Robertson, of ‘corrosive complacency’ for a lack of progress. The defenestration of the PM over defence spending has raised its political importance and the choice of the former Defence Secretary, John Healey, as Chancellor shows intent. These events have therefore provided the new PM with ideal conditions to jump-start the severely delayed national conversation.
The central challenge is that the UK has insufficient societal or institutional experience or memory of war and is equally blind to the destabilising impacts of mass cyber-attacks and systematic disinformation. Therefore, the most valuable frame of reference is the Covid-19 pandemic, but its shadow has been remarkably short. Most sectors have already returned to business as usual, and there have been few structured post-pandemic efforts to capitalise on the opportunity to significantly advance resilience measures. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has published four reports to date, identifying nine systematic flaws, creating a lack of urgency in all four governments of the UK which did ‘too little, too late’. Specifically, the Inquiry stated that ‘Confusion between advice and binding legal restrictions undermined trust and compliance and made enforcement by the police practically impossible or legally uncertain in some cases. This was particularly the case where legal rules diverged across the UK.’ Such criticism of the UK government has thus made the task of engaging the public and their acceptance of potential restrictions harder.
Against a backdrop of the enduring need to restore record-low public trust in government and institutions, several practical steps should be taken. First, use the Covid-19 Inquiry to identify lessons and create a blueprint for machinery of government changes. In addition, the many positives from the pandemic, such as a high proportion of the public adhering to government directives, the rapid building of additional medical capacities, as well as the adaption of supply chains and digital infrastructure, should be used as motivational examples of what society can achieve together. Second, be honest with the public about the threats to their safety and how and when they are expected to materialise. In lieu of direct experience, the UK should share and communicate the substantial and relevant experiences of Ukraine - Russia’s relentless targeting of civilian infrastructure, schools and hospitals – and how they have built effective societal resilience under existential pressure. Third, ensure that businesses as a whole – not just the defence industry – are engaged to understand their requirements, fears, and provide reassurance that measures will be in place to support them in a crisis.
Ultimately, the purpose of the national conversation would be to better prepare society for the looming dangers ahead and build the legitimacy for increased emergency powers under the DRB.
What is the Defence Readiness Bill?
This is a difficult question to answer as remarkably little has been written publicly about such critical legislation. The SDR recommended the DRB to provide the government with ‘powers in reserve to mobilise Reserves and industry’ for a ‘sustainable and effective transition to war’, through:
1. improving the preparedness of key industries (not specified) to ensure resilient supply of people, services and resources for defence-related requirements;
2. increasing the availability and resilience of all 13 designated sectors of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI);
3. introducing plans to commandeer private and commercial assets and facilities, such as ports and airports; and
4. providing ‘external scrutiny of UK warfighting readiness’ through mandatory annual reporting.
In October 2025, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, updated Parliament by saying that ‘a Defence Readiness Bill is potentially a legislative vehicle for the wider Government, not just Defence. We are therefore working closely across Government through the Cabinet Office-led Home Defence programme to shape our key requirements, and understand and identify the measures needed.’
This legislation is imperative, as government - and business - will proactively need emergency powers before they are totally consumed by crisis. Existing legislative frameworks such as the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act lack the depth or breadth required to prepare the UK for the potential for an expanded large-scale war in Europe. Between 2020 and 2022, the UK passed one primary act of legislation – the Coronavirus Act 2020 – and over 400 statutory instruments (secondary legislation) to get through the pandemic, being caught by surprise despite ‘public health’ being a tier one national security threat from 2010. With US intelligence assessing that Russia could attack NATO between this Autumn and 2029, it is highly likely that emergency powers will be required and such measures need to be developed and tested ahead of a crisis.
First, if it is a whole-of-society instrument, it should be renamed as a ‘National Resilience Bill’ (NRB) to more accurately describe the scope and increase the buy-in from each devolved administration, sector and society. It is critical that the Bill is tailored to British society. While it can be influenced by attractive models from Nordic and Baltic allies, it cannot be simply copied, as those structures and measures are legitimised by very different societies shaped by their unique histories, geographies and experiences.
Second, the PM should be bold and calibrate emergency legislation for a public whose attitudes and perceptions will hopefully change during the national conversation and subsequently harden after any war with Russia begins. The government should design the upcoming 2027 ‘Operation Albiston Shadow’ – the largest UK resilience exercise in decades - not only to test the operational response but also identify the additional powers that devolved governments and departments might need. Additionally, given the gravity of the situation, the NRB must also clarify continuity of government procedures.
Third, any war will have direct and indirect impacts on almost all UK businesses, and it is not only government who might need additional powers. These could range from the relatively straightforward, such as pre-authorising exemptions to working time directives to ramp up defence industrial production, to the extraordinary, including the state requisition of private resources. For example, under the 1991 Finnish Emergency Powers Act, the Finnish Defence Forces hold legal authority to requisition private vehicles during crises or when readying for national defence. Much of the transport, port, telecommunications and logistics infrastructure in the UK is privately owned, and therefore the government should ensure that the physical infrastructure – and people if necessary – can be repurposed and re-tasked seamlessly. The NRB should therefore legally mandate the increased resilience requirements of businesses through corporate risk register alignment, business continuity and recovery plans, creating a professional discipline of Chief Resilience Officer at a board level and levels of stockpiles and reserves.
Fourth, ensure that Westminster legislation is replicated within the devolved administrations. Each of the UK developed administrations are currently led by nationalist parties in opposition to London. Unifying effort on national security should form a core pillar of the new government’s early engagement bill and strategy towards the devolved administrations, which must be given oxygen alongside other domestic priorities. Creating greater alignment between the centre and devolved administrations and regions can hopefully prevent some of the combativeness and inefficiencies of the pandemic, and Burnham’s experience as one of the most vocal critics of central government during that period could help find common ground.
Finally, establish clear parliamentary oversight from the outset as recommended by the Covid Inquiry - ‘Enabling greater parliamentary scrutiny of the use of emergency powers through safeguards such as time limits and regular reporting on how powers have been used’ which must be harmonised across all four nations.
Getting the machinery of government right
The machinery of government necessarily adapts to the Prime Minister. Over the past decade, seven UK premiers have governed amid recurring crises, including Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war with Iran. This has left the national security system struggling to anticipate threats and act proactively. While the NRB will set new legal parameters, the government must implement them effectively. To do so, it should build a layered governance system that streamlines existing fragmented structures and removes - or at least mitigates - political, systemic, and cultural frictions.
First, a ‘whole-of-society’ approach still requires a ‘whole-of-government’ approach as a nucleus. The latter has been an ambition for a succession of governments which have ultimately fallen short. Burnham’s government has immediately established a new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet (OPMC) to strengthen a longstanding criticism of an underpowered centre. However, this is not only a capacity problem. The current system expends too much effort on coordinating – rather than directing – Ministers and departments. The introduction of the OPMC is an opportunity to give the National Security Adviser and National Security Secretariat a stronger, more formal role in delivery as a direct extension of the PM.
Second, be brave enough to prioritise and simplify what is most important to defend. At a policy level, the 2022 UK Government Resilience Framework and 2025 National Resilience Action Plan are supported by a dense patchwork of sector specific policy which sits under the 2025 National Security Strategy, including: an Energy Resilience Strategy, a transport resilience to climate strategy, a National Cyber Action Plan, a new households preparedness campaign, a Civil Contingencies Act 2004 Post-Implementation Review (2027), and a developing Home Defence Programme linked to the SDR.
To deliver these policies, thirteen ‘lead government departments’ are then responsible for the thirteen designated CNI sectors (alongside an additional 15 sub-sectors), out of a total of 24 ministerial departments (currently), with 20 non-ministerial departments and 414 agencies and other public bodies (not all of which have an explicit national security focus) which operate across four nations. However, the importance of CNI and the threats to each sector are not equal, and resources must be prioritised on where best to harden defences, even if that means accepting risks elsewhere. For example, the energy grid - alongside communications - is foundational as it underpins the successful operation of all other CNI. In support, a fragmented landscape of non-governmental fora, including the UK Resilience Academy (training and education), National Preparedness Commission (advocacy), and Resilience First (business standards and best practice), help government and business enhance resilience. These supporting structures would subsequently shift from sharing best practice to getting organisations compliant with the NRB and helping the private sector and wider society understand how best to plug into this myriad of departments and policies effectively.
Third, ensure the devolved administrations are included from the start. ‘Resilience’ is a mix of reserved and devolved powers and responsibilities. During the pandemic, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were too reliant on Westminster to lead the response, with the Covid Inquiry recommending that decision-making structures and communication within each nation and between the four nations should be clarified and reformed. In Holyrood, the creation of the Scottish Government Resilience Room (SGORR) - analogous to the Whitehall Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (COBR) – is a welcome reform, as are public-focused initiatives such as ‘Ready Scot’. However, these are designed for emergencies such as the recent Cairngorms wildfires – where the response was criticised for being slow – rather than war. Scotland hosts the UK nuclear deterrent, a large proportion of NATO’s maritime patrol capabilities at RAF Lossiemouth - which were recently used to track Russian Main Directorate for Deep-Sea Research (GUGI) operations in the North Sea and supported the US interdiction of an oil tanker - and significant defence industrial facilities on the Clyde and Rosyth. Therefore, there is an imperative to ensure that Westminster and Holyrood work better together and the respective Parliaments pass the same emergency legislation.
Fourth, balance the requirements with the most effective means of implementing national and regional resilience. Burnham’s political philosophy of enhanced regionalisation could unlock a new model for whole-of-society resilience through building a bottom-up approach to national security. Again, during the early stages of the pandemic, local health protection teams were more effective than the national test and trace programme. Studies have also suggested that national government centralised control undermined the ability of Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to respond. Such an approach could yield quicker results, increase the resilience of systems and structures, and better reflect the composition of UK CNI. At a personal level, Burnham was Mayor of Manchester during the pandemic and the 2018 Manchester Arena bombing. He has also already built relationships with Kyiv’s Mayor and therefore – unusually for a PM - understands the requirements of crisis management at a regional level.
Doing things differently
The new Prime Minister and Parliamentary term is a vital opportunity to accelerate UK national security. While Sir Keir Starmer’s government conducted the analysis and developed the strategy, it was unable to fund or deliver what it had concluded. Therefore, Burnham and his team should resist the temptation to revisit the analysis and instead ruthlessly prioritise delivery. Reports that the deadline for completion of the new government ‘war book’ has been brought forward from 2035 to 2030 due to increasing Russian threats demonstrate the desire to prioritise readiness.
There are strong parallels with Germany’s recent defence and security renaissance. Immediately after Russia’s 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine, then Chancellor Scholz called for a ‘Zeitenwende’ (historic turning point), created a €100 billion special fund for defence and amended Germany’s sacrosanct post-war Basic Law and Constitution. He and his government actually did the hardest part, but in doing so were unable to maintain valuable momentum, allowing his successor, Chancellor Merz, to capitalise on the foundations set and then go harder and faster and securing by far the largest defence budget in Europe. If the new PM is to get the UK ready for war – during this Parliament – he needs to hit the ground running.
