Meeting with BRETT PARKER of IBM Consulting, Partner specializing in Aerospace & Defence
7 November 2025
One purpose of our Business Club is to give people the bigger picture. We certainly got that a few days before Remembrance Sunday, as Brett Parker gave us a sweeping view of the extraordinary £34bn industry in Defence and Aerospace we almost take for granted, much of which is on our doorstep.
Brett is a Sunderland lad, who remembers joining the 3rd South Shields Sea Scouts as a boy and kayaking along the River Tyne, where in those days remnants of the mighty pre-war shipbuilding industry could still be found. HMS Ark Royal (strains of Rod Stewart’s “We are Sailing” came to mind) was on a visit as the boys paddled nearby, a moment of wonder he never forgot. Education came in the form of a degree in Computation at Manchester then a Masters at Durham; after a range of IT jobs at Unisys, ICL Fujitsu and Coopers & Lybrand Consulting, he looked for broader-based work, joined PwC for four years and then IBM Consulting in 2002, where he has been ever since. Most recently, he was promoted to Partner in 2023 and he is now part of their Consulting Leadership team for the Aerospace and Defence sector.
“The attraction of consulting is obvious,” he said, showing a slide with the wide variety of household names whose projects he has worked on: clients have included Triumph Motorcycles, Jaguar Land Rover, BAE Systems, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, UBS, Shell, Sony, BP, AstraZeneca, Surrey County Council, PwC and Vodafone. Consulting gives a clear objective, a time limit, then on to the next project: hugely satisfying, plenty of challenge, never boring. (My brother who has spent most of his life as a consultant, reckons that he’s often called in to tell the management the bleedin’ obvious, which they can then implement without any obloquy attaching to themselves..). Being a consultant means acclimatising to culturally different businesses – such as when he went straight from BP to Shell, which were dramatically different, though he was discrete enough not to spell out exactly how.
Seven years were spent working with Jaguar Land Rover; perhaps had he still been there they might have avoided their recent catastrophic IT outage. But IBM handed over the management of their IT systems some years ago.
Life changed in 2019, the exact day the Toddbrook Dam was compromised, when Brett set off for BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness. Their job is building nuclear submarines, using nuclear power packs based on the long-standing work of Rolls-Royce & Associates in Derby. For many years all our subs have been nuclear-powered, for as the Australians have discovered, diesel-powered subs can’t stay under and silent for the 6 months or more on stealth trips all over the oceans as required by modern navies. A nuclear-powered sub can create its own drinking water and oxygen, so independence from base is guaranteed for long periods.
Brett showed us pictures of the existing Astute class of hunter-killer subs which are about 100 metres long. Towering over them are the new Dreadnought class at 150 metres, the submarine monsters of the future; each will take 10 years to build, should be in service many decades (longer than existing stock), and “represent a real impetus to get the new-builds done to replace the ageing fleet.” The plan is that the new subs will be “considerably quicker to build and less expensive,” Brett said, but development is constant: “The last will be quite different from the first.” The challenge of building is phenomenal – everything has to be taken inside the sub for assembly, everything has to fit, from missiles to separate women’s quarters. These machines will only return to base when they’ve used up all their food supplies; that’s it.
He touched briefly on our Trident nuclear deterrent – for many decades we’ve had four subs ready with nuclear weapons, with at least one on patrol somewhere round the globe, part of NATO, a policy continued by governments of every persuasion. In the 1950s it was expected that nuclear missiles would be carried on Vulcan bombers (there’s a Vulcan at the Avro Heritage Museum in Stockport) but it soon became clear that air defence could prevent their use, so in 1962 the Nassau Agreement was signed with the US to enable our subs to carry the deterrent. The concept of mutually assured destruction has meant that nuclear weapons have not been used in combat since 1945, and that’s how we’d all like to keep it.
Barrow-in-Furness in the Lake District might look like an odd location but they’ve been building subs there since the days of Vickers – my husband’s grandfather, William Currie, was a Master Shipwright there all his life, having come down from Glasgow with many other Scotsmen to help in the war effort. The collaboration is international; the next generation of submarines will include intellectual capital from the USA as well as money from Australia, as part of the AUKUS deal signed by Sunak, Albanese and Biden a couple of years ago. President Trump is said to be watching closely as the US also needs more subs and can’t build them fast enough. NATO member Norway is buying a fleet of Type 26 frigates to be built in Scotland (a £10 bn boost to the UK economy) and Turkey has just signed an £8bn deal for 20 Typhoon jets. All these involve Derby-based Rolls-Royce. No wonder RR shares have rocketed from under £2 to over £10 now.
Brett took us down another route, looking at how IBM itself has changed over the years. Once entirely hardware (International Business Machines, starting in 1911 with typewriters), it’s already 30 years since IBM computer Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at a series of chess matches. The company moved into the “software era” decisively from 2008 and is currently in the “AI era.” “And we are entering the Quantum era,” Brett said, of super-fast computers using a new form of computing beyond simple zeros and ones, the applications, successes and threats of which are as yet unknowable. Brett is one of more than 500 IBMers based in Manchester, where earlier in the year they moved what is their flagship northern England office from Sale to the centre of Manchester, demonstrating their commitment to investing in this part of the world.
Coming back to defence, Brett took us through the latest (2025) Defence Review. It’s a fascinating read (link below) written for the Starmer government and taking into account the challenge of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, known Russian Federation threats to our undersea cables, the dominance of China in global supply chains, the danger of significant cyberattacks which have become such a feature of business life. The review led to a Defence Industrial Strategy outline by John Healy the Defence Minister in the Commons on 8 September this year, with the firm commitment of an increasing share of GDP going to defence.
There’s also a clearer understanding of the benefits this can bring to industry, with a new Defence Industrial Strategy. The debate in Hansard is below:
Can we find the workforce for all this? Especially in remote places like Barrow? BAE Systems is already advertising hard for the new jobs. In Derby, the view has always been that a class act is a Rolls-Royce apprenticeship. Perhaps the question is, whether we can afford not to. And as an engine for growth, the high-tech worlds of defence and aerospace are a stronger bet for increased productivity and growth than “build, baby, build” with housing targets which might not be met. The government is particularly keen to involve SMEs and “non-traditional” suppliers in the UK. That means opportunities for a wide variety of new business.
One local example Brett referenced was AF Fasteners of Glossop whose customers include RR, Leonardo, MBDA and other defence manufacturers. The question was raised whether they actually manufacture here, but I checked – they’ve been producing cold forged steel fasteners in the Peak District for over 90 years, originally for mining and quarrying, shifting to aerospace in the 1970s. Sheffield Forgemasters are another local business with electron-beam welding serving all the industries we discussed today. As Toyota found, the suppliers are there; we’re not obliged to depend on China, especially when security is at stake.
We could all have talked far longer, and it was a privilege to have such a breadth of viewpoint. And to allow ourselves however briefly a sense of pride in these remarkable industries, and the safer future we achieve with their products.