Defence chiefs 'wasted' £300m

Defence chiefs have spent more than £300million buying duplicate military hardware because of delays in repairing equipment, it is revealed today.

A Ministry of Defence internal audit found a large stockpile of tanks, field guns and off-road vehicles which will now be sold because they are surplus to requirements.

Investigators found top brass have been buying new equipment because of the six-month delays in repairing and then returning defective equipment.

The type of hardware purchased includes Land Rovers, mobile rocket launchers, Challenger 2 tanks and Rapier air-defence missile systems.

Senior officers are also accused of running a chaotic system where details of repairs are kept on paper, not computer, and where officers have no idea what progress has been made.

To ensure that front-line troops are never left without vital equipment, procurement officials are forced to buy the excess items. This surplus hardware represents more than five per cent of all the land equipment owned by the armed forces.

Today's report from the National Audit Office undermines efforts by Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to squeeze more cash out of Chancellor Gordon Brown in the summer spending review.

With the armed forces in action in Afghanistan and keeping the peace in the Balkans, and with the threat of military action in Iraq, Mr Hoon has publicly admitted that the services are stretched to the limit.

Sir John Bourn, NAO head, said: "The Department [of Defence] should address important unresolved issues for achieving its repair and overhaul requirements and the role and future of its inhouse provider, the Army Base Repair Organisation."

The NAO found that private-sector companies fix broken machinery far more quickly than the armed forces. It takes the RAF four times as long as a commercial airline to get a broken aeroplane engine fixed and back into service.

The typical six-month "repair loop" consists of two months getting a faulty item from the front line to the repair depot, followed by four months taking it to the repairer, mending it, and bringing it back to the depot. Every day saved would cost taxpayers £3 million less.

Around 60 per cent of repair work on land equipment is done inhouse by the Army Base Repair Organisation (Abro), the rest carried out by private firms. The MoD had planned to put more jobs out to tender, but was forced to scale back its plans because few companies were able to do the work.

In its report, the NAO said: "The MoD lags behind best industrial practice in such areas as supply chain performance, inventory management and asset tracking."

The watchdog concedes that the task is a complex one, with 15,000 different repairable items in use at any one time, but it concludes: "There is scope for it to be more cost- effective. The department has recently identified for disposal total land stock worth over £300 million, and further reductions are planned."

If too much of the repair work was put out to tender, the NAO warns, it could weaken Abro to the extent that it is no longer ready to scale up its operations in times of war or crisis.