Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
UK defence secretary John Healey has told universities to ensure the safety of defence companies attending careers fairs amid rising industry fears over harassment from protesters.
Healey said companies were facing “harassment and intimidation”, with many forced to cancel events on campus.
“This is wrong. This attitude takes for granted the privileged position we enjoy in Britain — to live in freedom and security . . . security our defence industry guarantees,” he told an industry audience on Tuesday evening.
Healey said that, together with business secretary Jonathan Reynolds and education secretary Bridget Phillipson, he had written to Universities UK, the main sector lobby group, to demand assurances for companies’ safety.
The move comes after it emerged that several defence groups had been forced to withdraw from careers fairs in recent months after being advised to cancel over security concerns.
The scale of the protests had affected companies’ recruitment plans by putting potential recruits off a career in defence, said one industry executive. The situation risked exacerbating an industry-wide skills shortage, they added.
Britain’s aerospace and defence sector directly employs 164,000 people with an average salary of £39,900 — 14 per cent higher than the UK average.
While the war in Ukraine and suspected Russian and Chinese sabotage of deep sea cables in Europe have underlined the importance of defence resilience, industry executives believe the sector continues to lack wider support.
Anti-war protesters have stepped up their activities against the sector in recent months, notably in the wake of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Sites owned by BAE Systems and the UK arm of Italy’s Leonardo came under attack several times last year.
Defence companies were being ranked alongside tobacco and gambling in environmental, social and governance audits, said Healey, adding that pension funds were also divesting from the sector. While he had no doubt the intentions were “well meaning . . . they are fundamentally flawed,” he said.
“We don’t stop wars by boycotting our defence industry. We stop wars by backing it,” said Healey, adding that national security was a precondition for “economic security, investor confidence and social stability”.
Universities UK said it had recently convened vice-chancellors as well as university security staff to discuss “how best to ensure those students who wish [to] consider careers in the defence sector have the chance to do so, safely”.
Universities, it added, had a “vital role to play enabling all the key industries in the industrial strategy, including defence, to succeed, whether through the skilled graduates they teach or the research and innovation they pioneer”.
