Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee
10 November 2026
Contents updated on 10 Nov 2026
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Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee House of Commons
Follow its sittings00:02 - 00:26
Speaker 2
Order. Welcome to today's session of the Business and Trade Committee as we open our inquiry into export support. Thank you very much indeed to our witnesses for joining us. This first panel is going to look at the particular opportunities and challenges around defence exports. Nathan, you're from ADS, just give us a sense about what the opportunities for the UK look like in the defence export space.
00:26 - 01:25
Speaker 10
Thank you for having me. For our members looking ahead in the defence space, we've been on an upwards trajectory in terms of our growth from an export perspective, we've seen around a third increase in the last decade. A third? A third. Yeah.
Defence exports are a bit of a funny thing because they're quite lumpy in terms of how they translate on a year-on-year basis, so we count it on a five-year rolling average, but we assess that they were £10.8 billion worth of export sales on a five-year basis in 2025. We're seeing a shift in the market towards Europe as a whole, so traditionally the Middle East has been the main market focus for the defence sector as a whole, with a big lean towards air, as a sort of the main component of that, but we're seeing a shift, and the companies here, I think, will represent that. But overall that there's a growth trajectory that, I think there's a challenge of how the UK, we work and hunt in packs, as is sometimes said, to pursue those opportunities.
01:25 - 01:34
Speaker 4
We're going to drill into that in some detail. But basically, when you look at the next five years, what do you see by way of prospects for the UK defence?
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