The Ministry of Defence should admit its capacity to arm the army is damaged and urgently wants fixing at a time of rising safety threats, a bunch of MPs has warned.
The damning verdict emerged as Ben Wallace, who has overseen the division for the previous 4 years because the longest-serving Conservative defence secretary, revealed in an interview with the Sunday Times that he would leave government in the autumn.
"In short, it is broke - and it's time to fix it," a sub-committee of parliament's defence choose committee stated in a report revealed on Sunday following a six-month inquiry into defence procurement.
The MPs stated they'd "discovered a UK procurement system which is highly bureaucratic, overly stratified, far too ponderous, with an inconsistent approach to safety, very poor accountability and a culture which appears institutionally averse to individual responsibility".
Mark Francois, a Conservative MP and former defence minister who led the work, stated: "This is a dysfunctional system that has left multiple programmes floundering in its wake. This urgently needs to change."
The criticisms usually are not new - a number of experiences over many years have raised alarm bells concerning the newest iteration of what's known as Defence, Equipment and Support (DE&S), the department of MoD tasked with shopping for every part from warships to boots.
The MPs, who heard proof from a number of professional witnesses, listed varied of the newest procurement debacles - each sharing the identical outdated traits of both operating late, affected by elevated prices or seeing the contract meddled with earlier than it has even been delivered - or a mix of those options.
However, this newest doc was drawn up in opposition to the backdrop of Russia's conflict in Ukraine, with the very actual potential for escalation right into a full-blown battle involving the UK and its NATO allies.
"For the first time since the end of the Cold War, we have to face the prospect that we could become involved in a peer conflict with Russia, with little further strategic warning or opportunity to scale up our industrial, as well as military capabilities," the MPs stated.
"In this new, more challenging environment we need a defence procurement system which can not only equip our Armed Forces to fight and to win, but also sustain them over time, should any such conflict become protracted (as in Ukraine)."
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The programmes comprised the Royal Navy's Type 23 frigate, the Royal Air power's E-7 Wedgetail surveillance plane and the Army's Ajax armoured combating automobile.
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"The Ministry of Defence must finally admit, once and for all, that there is a real problem across UK defence procurement: the current system is indeed broken and multiple, successive reviews have not yet fixed it. With a major war now under way in Ukraine, now is the time to act," the MPs stated.
Their report made 22 suggestions to repair the issue, together with the necessity for the MoD to undertake a way of urgency that has up to now enabled speedy, profitable procurements in a disaster to turn out to be the norm.
It stated the MoD wanted a system that "places a much greater value on time, promotes a sense of urgency rather than institutional lethargy, and prevents endless 'requirements creep' by our own military".
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