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27/12/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Buying Defence

Is Britain wasting billions through bad defence procurement? Francis Tusa investigates.

Why have overruns and overspends become the norm at the MOD? Francis Tusa investigates the murky world of defence procurement and asks if there is a better way of buying defence.

The Prime Minister has described the country's defence budget as "a complete car crash", with delays and overspends on military equipment costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds each year.

But why have successive governments found it so hard to get defence procurement right? How did the Ministry of Defence end up with a £38b black hole in its budget? And can they realistically balance the books while keeping the armed forces in tanks, submarines and fighter jets?

Defence expert and former soldier Francis Tusa takes us inside the secretive world of defence procurement and tries to work out what has gone wrong and how things can be fixed. He investigates some of the MOD's most costly procurement decisions and asks where the blame lies -with the civil servants, the politicians, the defence industry or the military top brass? Finally, he examines some of the radical solutions being proposed to cut Britain's defence bill.

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