Systemic failures found in MoD Ajax vehicle review

A review of a troubled £5.5bn armoured vehicle programme has highlighted "systemic, cultural and institutional problems" at the Ministry of Defence.

Defence minister James Cartlidge said these included a "reticence" to raise and "occasionally" by senior officials to listen to "genuine problems".

The independent report identified no evidence of misconduct or anything that would require disciplinary action.

But it found "a number of errors of judgment" in the Ajax project.

The programme, which has already been running for 12 years and is due to deliver 589 fully-operational armoured vehicles by 2029, has been beset by delays, with problems including excessive noise and vibration which injured soldiers.

The aim is to provide a family of hi-tech vehicles for battle, fit for reconnaissance, troop carrying, and recovery and repair.

The first Ajax vehicles were due to enter service in 2019. However, the army is still waiting for testing is to be completed.

The vehicles are being assembled mainly by General Dynamics in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales. The project is managed by Defence Equipment and Support, part of the MoD, based in Bristol.

Responding to the report in a Commons statement, Mr Cartlidge said the project had "turned the corner" with training taking place in a range of Ajax vehicles on Salisbury Plain this week.

Whether the MoD or its contractors were to blame for issues was not within the scope of the review carried out by senior lawyer Clive Sheldon KC.

He found that "optimism bias infected some of the thinking of senior individuals working on the programme. The failures that I identified were systemic and institutional."

The report said there was a "reticence" to escalate concerns about the noise and vibration issues, and "it took a considerable amount of time before anyone looked at the matter strategically and asked what was really going on".

This led to senior personnel and ministers "being surprised to discover in late 2020 and early 2021 that the programme was at much greater risk than they had appreciated".

Conservative former defence minister Mark Francois told MPs the programme had been an "absolute debacle", adding that the report had revealed "just how massively bureaucratic and broken the MoD's procurement really is".

He called for "root-and-branch reform of how we buy military equipment".

Conservative chairman of the Commons Defence Committee Tobias Ellwood said "something very, very serious has gone wrong" and "Ajax is now a case study... [of] how not to do procurement".

Labour spokesman Chris Evans described Ajax as the "biggest procurement failure for a decade", calling the findings "beyond damning" and "embarrassing" for the government.

Ajax had become "a byword for waste and incompetence", he said.

Mr Cartlidge said the review would improve the MoD's understanding of the governance, culture and leadership of major programmes.

But he conceded it "makes for difficult reading", identifying "fragmented relationships" and "conflicting priorities".

"Now, we accept these findings and most of Mr Sheldon's 24 formal recommendations, with 15 accepted and nine accepted in principle.

"Crucially, the review did not find that either ministers or Parliament were misled," he said.

Mr Cartlidge said many of the behaviours highlighted in the report had been addressed, both in the armoured cavalry programme and across the MoD, while transparency had improved including detailed updates on the Ajax project.