Army 2020 programme: statement from Chair of Public Accounts Committee

The Army 2020 programme is crucial for the future of our country’s Armed Forces and is just too important to get wrong.  The transition to the new Army structure comes with some big risks which, if not mitigated, may significantly affect the Army's ability to achieve its objectives.

The Ministry of Defence focussed heavily on cutting costs rather than on recruiting, training and integrating a substantially increased number of reserves, something the Army is already failing to do.
  
Of the eight force structures considered by the MoD none was considered acceptable, and so a hybrid option was decided upon, without even testing whether it was feasible.

The MoD went ahead with plans to reduce the number of regular soldiers and increase the number of reservists from 19,000 to 30,000 by 2019 without even investigating whether it was possible to do this by that time, or even whether it had 19,000 trained reservists to start with.

Given this, it comes as no surprise to me that just one-third of the reservists have been recruited in 2013-14 and the size of the Army Reserve has not increased since 2012.
 
The MoD’s recruitment contract has been plagued by unreliable data and failure by the Department to provide the necessary IT infrastructure. The MoD cannot tell how much of the recruitment problems are down to its own failings or to Capita, and so it has not been able to determine the exact cause of poor performance.

It is scandalous that the MoD is paying out an additional £1 million per month to cover the cost of this incompetence.
 
Even after all this, I am astounded to find that reducing the size of the Army will not alone deliver the financial savings required for the MoD budget. Unbelievably, it may even mean increased costs to the Treasury if the reservists are deployed.

I look forward to getting to the bottom of all this when officials appear before us on 16 June.

Relevant information

• National Audit Office report: Army 2020