MoD in firing line as £1.1bn armoured vehicle procurement delivers nothing

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) was under fire yesterday for spending £1.1 billion on programmes to acquire armoured vehicles, without delivering a single vehicle in more than a decade.

In a scathing report, the Commons public accounts committee said the MoD had proved to be both “indecisive and over-ambitious” in its attempts to manage the programme.

It expressed dismay that no-one within the MoD had been held responsible for the repeated failures, which have meant that British troops will not have all the vehicles they need until at least 2025.

Since the 1998 strategic defence review under Labour, the committee said the MoD had spent £1.1bn on armoured vehicle procurement projects which had yet to deliver – including £321 million “wasted” on cancelled or suspended programmes.

During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the MoD had attempted to plug the gap by buying vehicles “off-shelf” with an additional £2.8bn from the Treasury reserves.

However, the committee said the system was expensive and that many of the vehicles bought in that way could not meet the wider needs of the army.

Committee chairwoman Margaret Hodge said it “was no surprise to the committee that the accounting officer of the department could not name who was responsible for this serious failure of procurement or whether anyone had paid the penalty”.