Mark Francois is a former Armed Forces minister, chairman of the Defence Committee inquiry into defence procurement, and MP for Rayleigh and Wickford.
A fortnight ago, Ben Wallace resigned as the Conservative Party’s longest-serving (and arguably, best in some time) Defence Secretary. He will undoubtedly be a tough act to follow.
Grant Shapps, who has no prior military experience at all, faces what will certainly be a steep learning curve and a full in-tray.
This is not least because at the heart of the Ministry of Defence lie some serious and systemic problems, in particular regarding how we procure our miliary equipment; the procurement system has repeatedly been described as “broken” by both the Public Accounts Committee and now the Defence Committee.
As we know, the war in Ukraine has been a game-changer for the United Kingdom in defence and security terms. Faced with a revanchist Russia, which is prepared to use high-tech weapons, from drones to cruise missiles, combined with barbaric methods, we can no longer take our national security for granted.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, we have to face the prospect that we could become involved in a conflict with Russia, a martial peer, with little further strategic warning or opportunity to scale up our industrial and military capabilities.
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 has the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Against this backdrop, we established in January 2023 a sub-committee of the House of Commons Defence Committee (HCDC) to take a detailed look at Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), the principal entity for purchasing and then maintaining the UK’s military equipment, as well as some of the broader issues negatively affecting procurement. At the end of a six-month inquiry, in mid-July, we concluded the following:
“We have 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. We agree with the previous conclusions of the Public Accounts Committee from November 2021 that our procurement system is indeed “broken”. We believe the system is now in need of major, comprehensive reform.”
The Report’s full findings can be found here. It is intended not just to prove that the system is crying out for change – which it evidently is – but also to suggest how that reform might be achieved in order to provide a procurement system which is fit for purpose.
To that end, our Report included 22 specific recommendations to seriously overhaul the system. At the heart of these is improving accountability and aligning it more clearly with responsibility, to actually empower those who need to deliver change to do so.
As part of these multiple changes we recommend giving Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) much greater power over their programmes, with rights of direct escalation to the CEO of DE&S and then to ministers if programmes begin to go badly wrong. We also recommend putting the CEO of DE&S back onto the Defence Board and also making them, rather than the Permanent Under-Secretary at the MoD, the Accounting Officer for all purchasing and support of UK equipment.
These changes should also materially improve accountability to Parliament, which has to vote the funding for defence programmes in the first place.
We also need a system which places a much greater value on time, promotes a sense of urgency rather than institutional lethargy, and prevents endless so-called requirements creep from the military. This reformed system should also make much greater use of both spiral development and also Urgent Capability Requirements (UCRs), both as a procurement methodology in itself but also as a mindset which stresses the imperative of delivering battle-winning equipment, in a timely manner and at an affordable cost.
The Government will need to use this revised system to help our Armed Forces, in particular the Army, speedily address the serious equipment deficiencies in their current Order of Battle – deficiencies which mean we cannot currently meet out NATO commitment to field a warfighting division if called upon to do so.
This is also a political imperative. If the military is to acquire the increased resources which we strongly believe it really needs, including over the medium to long term then the Ministry of Defence now needs to demonstrably put its own house in order, to make a convincing case that it really can spend money wisely – not least to a Treasury grown weary from years of multiple, high-profile procurement failures.
As procurement and subsequent in-service support of equipment now accounts for approaching half of the entire MoD annual budget, if this area cannot be fixed convincingly those additional resources are unlikely ever to arrive at the scale really necessary to ensure our national security, or be well-spent even if they do.
With a war now raging on the eastern border of Europe, we can no longer afford – strategically, militarily, or financially – to continue the broken procurement system which we have been operating for decades. If we are to keep our nation safe, our adversaries deterred, and our allies reassured, we now urgently require full-scale reform of the way we be buy and support our fighting equipment.
As our report put it plainly: it is broke – and it’s time to fix it.
Mark Francois is a former Armed Forces minister, chairman of the Defence Committee inquiry into defence procurement, and MP for Rayleigh and Wickford.
A fortnight ago, Ben Wallace resigned as the Conservative Party’s longest-serving (and arguably, best in some time) Defence Secretary. He will undoubtedly be a tough act to follow.
Grant Shapps, who has no prior military experience at all, faces what will certainly be a steep learning curve and a full in-tray.
This is not least because at the heart of the Ministry of Defence lie some serious and systemic problems, in particular regarding how we procure our miliary equipment; the procurement system has repeatedly been described as “broken” by both the Public Accounts Committee and now the Defence Committee.
As we know, the war in Ukraine has been a game-changer for the United Kingdom in defence and security terms. Faced with a revanchist Russia, which is prepared to use high-tech weapons, from drones to cruise missiles, combined with barbaric methods, we can no longer take our national security for granted.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, we have to face the prospect that we could become involved in a conflict with Russia, a martial peer, with little further strategic warning or opportunity to scale up our industrial and military capabilities.
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 has the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Against this backdrop, we established in January 2023 a sub-committee of the House of Commons Defence Committee (HCDC) to take a detailed look at Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), the principal entity for purchasing and then maintaining the UK’s military equipment, as well as some of the broader issues negatively affecting procurement. At the end of a six-month inquiry, in mid-July, we concluded the following:
“We have 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. We agree with the previous conclusions of the Public Accounts Committee from November 2021 that our procurement system is indeed “broken”. We believe the system is now in need of major, comprehensive reform.”
The Report’s full findings can be found here. It is intended not just to prove that the system is crying out for change – which it evidently is – but also to suggest how that reform might be achieved in order to provide a procurement system which is fit for purpose.
To that end, our Report included 22 specific recommendations to seriously overhaul the system. At the heart of these is improving accountability and aligning it more clearly with responsibility, to actually empower those who need to deliver change to do so.
As part of these multiple changes we recommend giving Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) much greater power over their programmes, with rights of direct escalation to the CEO of DE&S and then to ministers if programmes begin to go badly wrong. We also recommend putting the CEO of DE&S back onto the Defence Board and also making them, rather than the Permanent Under-Secretary at the MoD, the Accounting Officer for all purchasing and support of UK equipment.
These changes should also materially improve accountability to Parliament, which has to vote the funding for defence programmes in the first place.
We also need a system which places a much greater value on time, promotes a sense of urgency rather than institutional lethargy, and prevents endless so-called requirements creep from the military. This reformed system should also make much greater use of both spiral development and also Urgent Capability Requirements (UCRs), both as a procurement methodology in itself but also as a mindset which stresses the imperative of delivering battle-winning equipment, in a timely manner and at an affordable cost.
The Government will need to use this revised system to help our Armed Forces, in particular the Army, speedily address the serious equipment deficiencies in their current Order of Battle – deficiencies which mean we cannot currently meet out NATO commitment to field a warfighting division if called upon to do so.
This is also a political imperative. If the military is to acquire the increased resources which we strongly believe it really needs, including over the medium to long term then the Ministry of Defence now needs to demonstrably put its own house in order, to make a convincing case that it really can spend money wisely – not least to a Treasury grown weary from years of multiple, high-profile procurement failures.
As procurement and subsequent in-service support of equipment now accounts for approaching half of the entire MoD annual budget, if this area cannot be fixed convincingly those additional resources are unlikely ever to arrive at the scale really necessary to ensure our national security, or be well-spent even if they do.
With a war now raging on the eastern border of Europe, we can no longer afford – strategically, militarily, or financially – to continue the broken procurement system which we have been operating for decades. If we are to keep our nation safe, our adversaries deterred, and our allies reassured, we now urgently require full-scale reform of the way we be buy and support our fighting equipment.
As our report put it plainly: it is broke – and it’s time to fix it.