The planned closure of five Defence bases has been reversed in the wake of the Salisbury Novichok attack, the Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood has announced.

The decision was made after a "clear-eyed assessment of the rapidly changing threats", Mr Ellwood said, taken to be a reference to the reckless action undertaken by Russian agents in Wiltshire in 2018.

In a partial reversal of the government’s 2016 plan to rationalise the Defence estate, the Royal Marine bases at Norton Manor, Arbroath and Chivenor will now be retained, as will Rock Barracks in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and RAF Molesworth, a Cambridgeshire-based intelligence site used by British and US Forces.

Mr Ellwood also announced that the closure of HMS Sultan, the home of Royal Naval Marine Engineering and the Air Engineering and Survival School, will be delayed and said retention of the sites “will give our service personnel the certainty to put down permanent roots and fully integrate with the local community”.

In 2016 the government launched the Defence Estate Optimisation Programme, a 25-year project worth £4 billion to build a “smaller, more modern and more focussed estate”.

The Defence Estate comprises two per cent of the UK’s land mass, which the government says is unwieldy, too expensive to retain and often in the wrong place for training.