Today’s leaked report on massive failures in defence procurement deserves an answer, though the proposal by the report’s author, businessman Bernard Gray, that the relevant MoD division should be privatised is plain silly. Putting public procurement into private sector hands would be like appointing a ferret to choose the hens for the chicken run. But that doesn’t mean that the devastating charges in the report shouldn’t be taken very seriously. To suggest that today’s defence procurement range is £35bn over-budget and 5 years late on delivery, that it can take 20 years to produce major kit like a plane or a ship, that it ends up costing twice the original tender, and that anyway it doesn’t function as specified, is a stunning set of indictments. Of course we need to see the detailed evidence in support of each of these claims, and the 269-page report should be published as soon as possible, not suppressed as the Government seems determined to do (with all those aspirations to a new era of openness once again dashed). But there was already enough evidence in the public domain about huge cost overruns, long-delayed delivery, and inadequate performance to give Gray’s denunciations an aura of credibility. So what needs to be done?

Several recent examples illustrate the litany of mistakes at enormous cost to the taxpayer and failure for the country. A year ago it was revealed that the MoD had spent hundreds of millions of pounds on 8 Chinook helicopters which were still not airworthy 13 years after being ordered. The NAO revealed that for 7 years the helicopters had been stored in air-conditioned hangars in Britain while troops in Afghanistan were forced to rely on helicopters flying with safety faults. It was then proposed that some of their more advanced equipment should be stripped out so that they could fly by 2010, at a total cost of £500 millions. In another case 10 former civil servants at MoD made more than £100m in one day from the privatisation of its research agency, by selling the idea to the M0D without explaining that they stood to benefit personally from the sale.
If then Gray’s allegations are substantially true and if privatisation is ruled out because it would make a bad situation infinitely worse, what action needs to be taken? What is really needed is a fundamental and drastic overhaul of civil service management. It is still too amateurish in a highly professionalised world, too dependent on their business clients for decision-making, and too cocooned in a protective environment without accountability. The checks and balances have steadily evaporated. The Minister for Defence Procurement is a figurehead who takes the rap if things go badly wrong, but is in no way a mover and shaker with the technical, managerial or military capability to determine the big decisions in any methodical sense. And whenever huge scandals of massive cost overruns, intolerable delays and below-specification performance occur, as they regularly do, nobody is held to account, nobody is sacked, and nobody even down-graded. It is a mediocrity’s charter.
The civil service has been allowed to shield for far too long behind the skirts of Ministers who are the showpiece, the spokesperson and the fall guy, but very rarely the driving force dominating the central processes and the key decisions. That needs fundamental reform of the whole constitutional interface between Ministers and civil service, on at least 3 levels. First, there should be far less reshuffling of Ministers, designed to strengthen the security of the PM at the expense of everybody else’s insecurity, but with disastrous consequences for Ministerial government (some Departments experience 5 Secretaries of State within 4 years).
Second, Ministers should be appointed, less to ensure loyalty to the PM in the Cabinet, more on the basis of experience and track record in that field of operation, and systematically trained further on arrival inclding by a range of external leaders in the field. And thirdly, top civil servants should be held to account as well as Ministers in Select Committee hearings and not be allowed to hide behind the pretence of a purely advisory role to Ministers. And where civil servants have messed up badly, they should be sacked, as they would be in the private sector.

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