Douglas Carswell's Blog

Endless MoD waste - what can be done?

Another week, another story of defence spending waste.

Regardless of which ministers are sitting inside MoD, or which technocrats oversee defence spending, things will remain inefficient as long as defence procurement remains a protectionist fix.

If there was only one chain of restaurants allowed to operate in the whole of London, you’d expect a poor menu, long wait for bad service, and a higher bill at the end of it. That pretty much sums up how we run the defence budget.

On the pretext of preserving jobs and “sovereignty of supply”, the Defence Industrial Strategy restricts the range of suppliers able to tender successfully. The sellers end up dictating the terms of trade. That, ultimately, is why “the top 15 major procurement projects are now running at £8.8 billion over budget and, between them, are delayed by a total of 32 years” – according to the Telegraph.

Until we are prepared to spend MoD’s budget buying the best value kit from the most competitive supplier – regardless of bogus arguments about jobs and sovereignty of supply – we’ll keep reading about MoD waste.

Declining economic powers eventually become declining military powers.  That downward trajectory only gets steeper when various vested interests are able to prevent what financial muscle remains being converted into military punch.  There's nothing patriotic about protectionist defence spending.

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