My right honourable friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces (Bob Ainsworth) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

The Ministry of Defence has today announced the development of the defence technology plan (DTP), a cost-balanced list of research and development (R&D) priorities for the MoD. The DTP will build upon the defence technology strategy (DTS), published in October 2006, and will provide clear direction to the R&D community, allowing industry and academia to better direct its investment in defence technology. Population of the DTP will continue throughout 2008.

The DTP will be a plan starting with capability-driven research goals, showing how the goals will be met by R&D activity supporting later phases of acquisition.

The DTP will set out the R&D programme by presenting a number of high level R&D objectives in the form of technology road maps. Each R&D objective will be described in similar terms to allow the R&D board to provide strategic direction and oversight of the entire programme.

The DTP is being developed by R&D staff in consultation with the wider stakeholder community and will be owned by the Defence R&D Board. The DTP will have a dynamic online format, allowing regular updates when necessary and will be available in three versions; a government version available on internal networks, a defence industry version available to appropriately security-cleared companies and a public version available on the internet.