Defence Online

TechUK Welcomes MoD SME Action Plan but Warns on Accountability and Pace of Delivery

Homeland August 4, 2026

The UK’s leading technology trade association has given a cautious welcome to the MoD’s long-awaited SME Action Plan – but is calling for clearer ownership, quantifiable targets and greater capacity in the Office for Small Business Growth if the plan’s ambitions are to translate into measurable change within the timeframe available.

TechUK has published its assessment of the Ministry of Defence’s SME Action Plan, welcoming the direction of travel and the commitments it contains while raising substantive concerns about accountability, timelines and the capacity of the structures being asked to deliver them. The response, authored by Associate Director for Defence and National Security Fred Sugden and Jeremy Wimble, Senior Programme Manager, reflects a wider industry view that the plan represents genuine and necessary progress – but that progress alone is not sufficient given the scale of the challenge and the 22 months remaining to deliver a £2.5 billion increase in annual SME spend by May 2028.

The plan, published last week following the formal establishment of the Office for Small Business Growth in January, sets out the MoD’s commitment to reaching a total SME spend target of £7.5 billion – an increase of £2.5 billion a year – alongside a series of actions and milestones structured across the coming 12 months. TechUK acknowledges that much of the plan reflects recommendations it made in its own submissions to both the Strategic Defence Review and Defence Industrial Strategy, and that the establishment of the Office for Small Business Growth, its contact centre, anonymous helpline and publicly available SME Commercial Pathway represent tangible and useful steps forward.

The actions and milestones section – the part of the plan that techUK describes as the section that matters – sets out a sequenced programme of activity. In the first quarter, the MoD commits to reducing bureaucracy for SMEs including disproportionate terms and conditions and repeated inputs across platforms, setting internal spending targets across all portfolios, and beginning work with the financial sector to make it easier to back defence SMEs while clarifying that ESG regulations do not present a barrier to defence finance. In the second quarter, the plan commits to producing a publicly available guide mapping entry points, portals and marketplaces, improving reporting tools for tracking SME spend, establishing a Strategic Partners and Suppliers pledge and encouraging joint R&D and skills initiatives between primes and SMEs. By the third quarter, the MoD intends to review its approach to social value, offsets, consortium bids and open frameworks, and to reinvigorate the SME Champions network across strategic partners.

TechUK welcomes all of these commitments. Its concern is not with what is being committed to but with how delivery will be assured. Only one of the plan’s commitments carries a specific target due date. None of the activities is assigned a named owner, despite the multiple teams and National Armaments Director leadership functions that will inevitably need to play an active role in ensuring delivery – including the setting of spending targets across individual portfolios. The plan speaks throughout in terms of “we” with no accountability attached, a pattern techUK notes has been repeated across previous iterations of similar commitments including the Defence Industrial Strategy and the 2022 SME plan.

The digital tools commitment – a series of self-help resources and updated guidance to be delivered by the end of Q4 – is highlighted as a specific timing concern. Given the scale of the challenge and the £2.5 billion target to be delivered by May 2028, a Q4 delivery date for basic guidance tools leaves industry only 14 months to make use of them before the deadline arrives. That timetable, techUK suggests, underestimates the urgency required.

The association’s central recommendation is that the MoD urgently reviews the plan’s activities and, where appropriate, assigns clear responsibility across the NAD leadership group with firm deadlines for delivery – demonstrating that this is a whole-of-Defence-Enterprise priority rather than a commitment owned by a single office. The Office for Small Business Growth itself, techUK emphasises, will require far greater capacity than it currently has, driven by political buy-in from the very top of the MoD, if it is to force through the cultural and structural change it is being asked to deliver.

For the UK defence supply chain

TechUK’s assessment articulates what many businesses across the supply chain already feel: the direction is right, the intent is genuine, but the history of similar commitments creates reasonable scepticism about whether delivery will match ambition this time. The absence of named owners, specific KPIs and a tight accountability framework are not bureaucratic concerns – they are the practical conditions under which real change either happens or does not. For SMEs and mid-tier businesses looking to plan around the opportunities the action plan promises, clarity on timelines and accountability is not optional. It is the difference between being able to invest in defence market entry with confidence and waiting to see whether the landscape actually changes before committing resource. The specific actions to watch across the coming quarters include:

• Q1: Internal spending targets set across MoD portfolios with senior accountability
• Q1: Bureaucracy reduction for SME bidders including contract terms and portal duplication
• Q1: Financial sector engagement and ESG clarity for defence SME investment
• Q2: Public guide to MoD entry points, portals and marketplaces published
• Q2: Strategic Partners and Suppliers pledge established with primes
• Q3: SME Champions network reinvigorated across strategic partners
• Q4: Digital self-help tools and updated procurement guidance live

Image credit: William Barton/Shutterstock

Post written by: Vicky Maggiani

Vicky has worked in media for over 25 years and has a wealth of experience in editing and creating copy for a variety of sectors.