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Select Committee · Public Accounts Committee

Improving defence inventory management

Status: Closed Opened: 12 Sep 2023 Closed: 3 Apr 2024 2 recommendations 19 conclusions 1 report

The wide range of supplies and spare equipment required by the UK armed forces for immediate and potential use are collectively described as ‘inventory’. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) holds more than 740 million individual items of inventory, valued at £10.8 billion. The Committee found in February 2013 that the MoD faced serious problems in …

Clear

Reports

1 report
Title HC No. Published Items Response
Eighth Report - Improving Defence Inventory Management HC 66 19 Jan 2024 21 Responded

Recommendations & Conclusions

3 items
7 Conclusion Eighth Report - Improving Defence Inven… Acknowledged

MoD inventory management suffers from long-standing issues with fragmented legacy IT systems

MoD’s inventory management has faced long-standing issues with its many legacy IT systems, which have limited functionality and reinforce the fragmentation of its inventory management. Each Command has its own core inventory management system, and there are other systems used across the Support function for managing other types of inventory, …

Government response. The government agrees with the committee's observations and will provide an update within six months by July 2024. It also provided corrected data on inventory stockpile holdings, claiming more success in managing them down than previously reported.
HM Treasury
9 Conclusion Eighth Report - Improving Defence Inven… Acknowledged

MoD's data gaps persist and major contract lacked competitive tendering process.

However, we do not see how this step alone will address the existing gaps in the MoD’s data. For instance, when new systems were introduced in DE&S’s central warehouses through the Team Leidos contract, DE&S stated that it had to engage a private company to do a lot of work …

Government response. The government agrees with the committee's observations and will provide an update within six months by July 2024. It primarily provides corrected inventory stockpile data to demonstrate better management than reported, rather than directly addressing concerns about data gaps or …
HM Treasury
13 Conclusion Eighth Report - Improving Defence Inven… Acknowledged

Team Leidos contract for warehousing delivered £403 million in financial efficiencies.

The MoD outsourced its central warehousing and the procurement of some of its commodities—food, clothing, general and medical supplies—to a consortium under the Team Leidos banner28 through the Logistics and Commodities Services Transformation (LCST) contract in 2015. Managed through DE&S, this has been a successful contract overall, and as of …

Government response. The government acknowledges the committee's observation regarding the successful LCST contract and states that lessons learned have been shared with the Future Defence Support Services programme and will be forwarded to the Committee with confirmation on plans to implement.
HM Treasury

Oral evidence sessions

1 session
Date Witnesses
13 Nov 2023 Andy Start · Ministry of Defence, David Williams CB · Ministry of Defence, John Farrow · Defence Equipment and Support, Vice Admiral Andy Kyte CB · Ministry of Defence View ↗

Correspondence

1 letter
DateDirectionTitle
18 Mar 2024 — Correspondence from David Williams CB, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence…