Former Labour defence secretary Geoff Hoon has said he hopes Labour MPs will think again about their opposition to welfare reform in order to boost defence spending.

Speaking to GB News, he said: “I’ve been through, when I was Defence Secretary, several spending rounds. It’s always a tough business, not only dealing with the Chancellor and the Treasury, but also recognising that whatever money you get for your department has to come at the expense of money for some other department, so it’s always a bruising process…

“The money has to come from somewhere. I don’t think this is the right time for significant tax increases; I don’t think the public would support that. Therefore, we have to look at some other aspect of government spending.

“One of the other jobs that I had in government was chief whip. I suspect if I was still in that position, I would be having quiet consultations with Labour MPs who were reluctant to see welfare reform, to see whether they might have changed their minds in the interim, recognising all of the financial pressures on the government at the present time.

“It does seem to me that another look at welfare reform might not be such a bad thing.

“I would hope that this large intake of Labour MPs looking at the financial position that the government inherited and the financial position that we’re now in might well be saying to themselves, actually we’ve got to look much harder at, for example, the welfare budget. We’ve got to look at ways in which we can give the Chancellor and the Prime Minister a degree of headroom that allows them to spend extra money on those other areas that are also vitally needed.

“Otherwise, I recognise that all governments then face this crunch that they spend so much money on welfare, on health, on education, that there is simply no money left for other departments, and that includes defence.

“I always found Labour MPs very able to discuss these more complicated issues, and it may well be that the proposals for welfare reform came too early in the parliament.

“A lot of new members of parliament, idealistic, rightly, because they’ve been elected to champion certain values that they very strongly believed in, but at the same time perhaps not entirely, at that stage, acquainted with the realities of government spending.

“You can only spend this money once, and if that money is all going into welfare, then necessarily that’s not money that can be spent on other aspects of government policy.

“I would hope after two years now that some of those Labour MPs might well have thought again about their opposition to welfare reform. Some of them will never change their minds, but some, I think, might have a different view given the pressures that they’re facing in their constituencies across the board.

“Therefore I think that there might be an opportunity in the next months and years for the government to look again at welfare reform, because there are significant savings to be made there.

“The government made that clear when it brought forward its proposals previously. I think perhaps having another look at this would not be such a bad thing.”