The chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, has written to every member of the British cabinet telling them to tackle waste and cut their budgets by 5 per cent.
He does not need to look far. The chief culprits – and what should be his prime target – inhabit a large office block just across the road in Whitehall.
There stands the Ministry of Defence (MoD), bastion of unaccountable, corrupting power, and a lobby well-oiled by the incestuous relationship between senior military figures and leading arms companies.
For decades the MoD has wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money while always asking for more.
What should have been treated as a huge scandal has been indulged by the most effective lobby that has seduced ministers, mandarins, and arms companies alike.
Now is the opportunity to grasp the nettle. It would be an even greater scandal if the government does not seize it as part of what Keir Starmer has called a “complete rewiring” of the state.
The MoD has repeatedly ignored persistent and damning criticism, notably from parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), confidently assuming it will be allowed to continue pouring large quantities of money into military projects that are wholly inappropriate, or unusable, even as Britain’s civil infrastructure is collapsing.
Here are a few of those projects:
• Blair’s Labour government spent more than £6 billion on two of the largest ships built for the Royal Navy – the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described to me by Lord Richards, a former chief of defence staff as “behemoths…unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”. They have been plagued by serious mechanical problems and the navy has not sufficient personnel to crew them.
• It is still unclear how many F-35 fighter jets the MoD will buy for the aircraft carriers or the RAF as part of an aircraft project originally estimated to cost more than £13bn over 30 years. Declassified has reportedhow Britain’s role making components for the Lockheed Martin aircraft has further tied the country to the US and implicated the country in the bombing of Gaza.
• A fleet of new Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft was scrapped in the 2010 Defence and Security Review because of delays and cost overruns, wasting £4bn of public money and leaving a significant capability gap threatening Britain’s ability to track potentially hostile ships and submarines around the coast, including the Trident base at Faslane in Scotland.
• A new radio system for the army, called Bowman, cost £2.5bn. It was 25 years late and is to be abandoned.
• The navy described its new fleet of Type 45 Daring class destroyers as ‘state of the art’ vessels. Their Rolls-Royce engines could not cope with the energy consumed by the ships, which broke down with catastrophic propulsion and electrical failures. The destroyer programme was two years’ late and £1.5bn over budget. In early 2024, five of the navy’s six Type 45 destroyers, all less than 15 years old, were being maintained in dock. “We have £1bn destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) costing $50”, said Richards, who added that “there’s a growing mismatch between the reality and the aspirational”.
• £5.5bn has been spent developing Ajax, an armoured vehicle with problems including noise and vibration that injured soldiers testing the vehicles. It is reported that they will not be ready until the end of the decade, more than a decade late.
• The MoD was more than £4bn worse off selling married quarters, which it had to rent later from a private company, a disgrace the Commons defence committee recently referred to in an excoriating report.
The NAO in 2023 reported a £16.9bn black hole in Britain’s defence equipment programme. For the second successive year the MoD will not publish an annual report on the state of its equipment programme, its top officials told the Commons defence committee at a meeting on 17 December.
Consequently, the NAO has not been able to produce its own assessment of the government’s defence procurement plans. MPs on the defence committee said the MoD’s increasing secrecy raised a serious “problem of accountability”.
We have previously noted that Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons are neither independent nor a credible deterrent. Yet Trident is predicted to cost a total of more than £200bn over a 30 year lifespan. The MoD has not challenged the figure and has never given any of its own estimates in public.
Britain increased spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 by 17 per cent to £6.5bn, a greater rise than any other nuclear power except the US.
Many years ago, I asked a very senior MoD official, at a private function, what was a major problem which the government should be concentrating on and was not. “Cyber”, he said, without a moment’s hesitation. Only recently, the government was warned that the risk to Britain of cyber-attacks was “widely underestimated”.
While billions of pounds are wasted on aircraft carriers and bombers, Nato has now warned the government that Britain is increasingly vulnerable to attacks from ballistic missiles.
Jones should adopt a ruthless approach to the spoilt Ministry of Defence. And his colleagues and parliament should at last be brave enough to question continued spending on nuclear weapons.
Source: Declassified UK
