Is there really anything to add
Oh, yes, of course there is
MoD Gifts £26million to the Northern Ireland Assembly (H/T UK Defence Forum)
And there’s more where that came from
“A crucial question for the Ministry of Defence is whether it can use strategic financial management to stop living beyond its means. The current Strategic Defence and Security Review will provide an opportunity for the MOD to balance its books in the short-term. The greater challenge will be to keep spending plans affordable in the longer term. The Department is not at present placing enough emphasis on financial management to be able to do this.”
Mr Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 21 July 2010
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2 Comments
I could swear she said “Financially Incontinent” which is rather more fitting and frankly hilarious when in the right mood than “Financially Incompetent”.
Euan,
Seconded. Free-flowing too, it seems. And since the rough figures from HMT show about a quarter of the total national debt was widdled on the financial sector by the last government (or was that the financial sector widdled on … never mind) entirely in the spirit of the times.
A general question that would light up my ignorance with some inside knowledge: why do “major procurement projects take up to twenty years” these days? In the previous generation of defence development (literally a generation since most of the gear leaving now was really developed and tested in the Seventies/Eighties) it seems like most projects, other than a few blue-sky design roots of aircraft, took about half that time to go from early development to IOC. I’m sure most of it has to do with both MoD and the biggest contractors (BAe, Lockheed Martin, etc.) being grotesquely inefficient in their structure, poor compartmentalisation of skills, and general attitude. But the particular hows and wherefores would be good to know, so that in some world that’s not ours someone might try to fix them.