Defence Secretary Wes Streeting warns regulatory barriers are holding back military innovation, exposing the tension between Britain’s ambition to strengthen its armed forces and the bureaucracy confronting those developing new capabilities.
Britain’s drive to modernise its armed forces has been confronted with an extraordinary example of bureaucratic obstruction: a Royal Marine developing underwater drone technology resorted to testing it in his own garden pond because regulatory hurdles made trials elsewhere too difficult.
The account, revealed by Defence Secretary Wes Streeting to a House of Lords committee, has raised questions about whether Britain’s defence establishment can move quickly enough to develop the technologies needed for an increasingly demanding security environment.
Streeting described the case as evidence of the “regulatory frictions” holding back military innovation, despite a government-wide push to remove unnecessary rules.
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“I met one Royal Marine who was developing underwater drone technology but testing it in a pond in his back garden because the regulatory hurdles to test in other environments were too high, so he just took the risk himself and did it at home,” he told the Industry and Regulators Committee.
“I mean, I applaud his ingenuity and drive for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, but there should be the same can-do approach in his workplace.”
The episode illustrates a dilemma facing Britain’s defence sector as how to accelerate the development and testing of new military capabilities without compromising safety or the safeguards governing potentially lethal technology.
For a government seeking closer collaboration between the armed forces and industry, the prospect of an innovator resorting to a domestic pond because authorised testing environments are difficult to access is an uncomfortable illustration of the barriers it says it wants to remove.
Defence ambition collides with regulatory reality
Streeting acknowledged that defence testing cannot simply be exempted from oversight. The consequences of failures involving military equipment can be severe, particularly when technology is designed for operational use.
“You can understand why, in a defence context, you don’t just take off all of the regulatory oversight and constraints because we are talking about lethal capability,” he said.
But he warned that the balance between managing risk and enabling innovation was not always right.
Across the armed forces and the defence industry, he said, people were eager to push technological boundaries, yet regulatory obstacles continued to frustrate their efforts.
The problem, in his account, is not necessarily the existence of regulation itself, but whether individual restrictions serve a meaningful purpose and whether the risks are being assessed proportionately.
“Where industry tells us that there is pointless regulation getting in the way, where our armed forces frankly tell us there’s regulatory handcuffs getting in their way – and we agree with them that they are pointless and not serving their purpose, or the risk calculus is in the wrong place and we’re not getting the balance right – we are really keen to act,” he said.
His remarks place the focus on implementation: ministers may endorse innovation and deregulation, but those ambitions must translate into practical changes for personnel and companies attempting to test equipment.
Industry partnership under pressure
Streeting insisted the government had the “right intention and ambition and spirit”, while conceding there was “more to do and more to go at” to remove barriers.
The challenge carries financial as well as operational implications. Defence technology developers need access to suitable testing environments, clear approval processes and opportunities to work with the military if promising equipment is to progress beyond the development stage.
Unnecessary delays can complicate that process, although the example cited by Streeting does not establish how widespread the problem is or quantify its overall cost.
The government is seeking to demonstrate that Britain can combine higher defence investment with a more accessible environment for industry.
Streeting announced that a defence investment summit, promised earlier this year as part of the government’s defence investment plan, will take place on December 1.
“I think that is a great opportunity for this country to demonstrate the extent to which we are both investing more, but also open for business, and more than that, open for a real partnership with industry,” he said.
The summit will provide an opportunity to set out how that partnership is supposed to work in practice. The test, however, will be whether regulatory reform gives developers a clearer and faster route to safe, authorised trials.
Streeting’s account has exposed the gap ministers must now address as Britain wants its armed forces and defence companies to innovate at pace, but the rules governing that work can still make the path to testing unnecessarily difficult.
The Royal Marine’s garden-pond experiment may be an isolated case. Yet it poses a pointed question for policymakers: if defence innovation is a national priority, why should those developing military technology have to improvise at home rather than test it through the system designed to support them?
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