A former minister has urged the government to correct “decades” of “Treasury tricks” with its defence spending.

Ben Wallace, the Tory defence secretary from 2019 to 2023, told BBC Question Time last night that the US has been telling the UK to invest more in its own security for years.

He said the sector is currently underfunded because of spending cuts from multiple UK governments.

“For decades, both governments of both colours have taken the money out of the defence budget and spent it on lots of other policies,” Wallace claimed. “Everything from road, transport, foreign aid.”

The former MP pointed to the clear messaging coming out of Donald Trump’s administration – that Europe should be responsible for its own security and will no longer be propped up by the US.

He said: “That is a very clear and stark message and a fundamental change since the founding of Nato. [The US] is not going to be the cornerstone of security in Europe, including UK.”

Focus has shifted onto Britain’s defence spending over the last fortnight because Trump has been trying to end Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

In his bid to stop the violence quickly, the US president and his team have hinted Ukraine may have to cede occupied territory to Russia and give up its ambitions to join Nato.

That has sparked wider fears across Europe that Putin will resume his expansionist mission further into the continent at a later date.

Keir Starmer has also said he is “ready and willing” to deploy a peacekeeping force into Ukraine, but that has sparked wider questions about the current capabilities of the UK’s armed forces.

The UK currently spends 2.3% of its GDP on defence and Labour has promised to push that up to 2.5% but it has not set out a clear timeframe for doing so.  

Wallace also told BBC Question Time that, while the UK can take issue with Trump’s recent attacks on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his apparent support for Vladimir Putin, “we do have to listen to the very stark warning the US governments have been giving”.

“We all have to take a greater share in our responsibility in keeping ourselves safe and secure and defending our values,” he said.

“We do need to listen to the United States. We should have done in 2014 with [Barack] Obama, we spent years of tricks, pretending we are artificially inflating our defence budget.”

He claimed the current government has “rolled in the £3bn they’ve sent to Ukraine and claimed it’s the core defence budget.”

“That is called Treasury tricks,” the former minister said. “In 2014, my government, put VAT receipts into the MoD budget to make sure £1.6bn we pay back to the Treasury on VAT is in all our defence budgets. You can’t kill anyone with a VAT receipt.”

He said it’s up to leaders to choose where to get the money from, but it “has to come from other government priorities”.