A new row over the state of Britain’s Armed Forces was set to break today as MPs slammed the ‘broken’ way their vtal military equipment was procured.
In a damning report, the Common’s defence committee said the ‘highly bureaucratic’ procurement system had left the UK ‘an extremely limited reserve of fighting equipment, including warships, modern armoured vehicles or combat aircraft’.
Tory MP Mark Francois, who chaired the committee’s inquiry, even claimed the Ministry of Defence’s ‘dysfunction has put Armed Forces personnel in harm’s way, with some troops suffering permanent injuries’.
Mr Francois singled out trials for the new £5.5bn Ajax armoured vehicle.
The new vehicle was reportedly so noisy that troops testing it could have suffered hearing loss although earlier this year, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the project was back on track.
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Tory MP Mark Francois (pictured), who chaired the committee’s inquiry, even claimed the Ministry of Defence’s ‘dysfunction has put Armed Forces personnel in harm’s way’
But Mr Francois said yesterday: ‘The Ajax trials are a black mark on the record of the Ministry of Defence.
‘Concerns around safety should not be swept under the rug…’
The committee concluded that overall, the UK equipment procurement system was ‘overly stratified, far too ponderous, with an inconsistent approach to safety, very poor accountability and a culture which appears institutionally averse to individual responsibility.’
However, one senior MoD source told the Mail on Sunday that the committee report had ‘ignored the evidence’ and was written ‘to justify the pre-conceived views of the authors’.
