MoD Blows Millions On Delayed Online Army Recruitment System

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has wasted millions of pounds on a delayed computer system designed to make it easier and cheaper to recruit soldiers and reservists, reports The Times.

The £1.3 billion Recruitment Partnering Project is two years behind schedule and will not be operational until April 2015 at the earliest. Around £15.5 million has already spent on the systems behind the project, and it is believed that the MoD will lose £1 million a month until it is fixed.

The scheme forms part of the MoD’s plans to boost the army’s reserves by 10,000, allowing it to make more redundancies and move one thousand troops handling applications in the offices onto the frontline.

MoD IT failures

These soldiers have had to return to recruitment posts to handle the backlog of applications and Defence Secretary Philip Hammond is likely to be under pressure to at least delay job cuts planned for next month.

Despite these delays, partner Capita will not have to pay any penalty because the recruitment programme is not yet at operating capability – the point at which such a clause would be activated. Hammond is apparently even being urged to pay Capita another £47.7 million to build its own platform for the programme, with the MoD concerned that further delays could lead to more negative coverage of army recruitment.

An assessment carried out by Gartner and commissioned by the MoD last July criticised the project, stating that the army underestimated the complexity of the task and accordingly, the skills and resources required.

The Gartner report said the less suitable of two competing offers was selected, that the project management team was inexperienced and under-resourced, and that the army failed to implement a viable contingency plan when the delays started, causing costs to spiral.

The Recruitment Partnering Project is hardly the first government IT project to encounter problems. The botched £12.7 billion NHS National Programme for IT (NpfIT) authorised by the Labour government was shut down in 2012 in one of the most expensive public IT failures of recent times.

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