Recommendation 6

The Department does not have all the necessary arrangements or qualified staff in place to provide assurance that its Equipment Plan is reliable and has been subject to rigorous quality assurance. The Department has made some improvements to its production and presentation of the Plan in recent years. But shortcomings remain, particularly around the reliability and consistency of its adjustments to cost forecasts. The Department has also struggled to strengthen its financial capabilities, with no increase in the 41% of finance staff who have a professional finance qualification. The Department acknowledged the shortcomings of its delegated model. Head Office was not able to provide adequate quality assurance on the production of the Plan, with poor visibility of data used by the Top Level Budgets (TLBs), and struggled to challenge the inconsistency in their judgements. There have also been errors in the last three published Equipment Plan reports, raising further concerns over quality assurance. Recommendation: The Department should re-assess the role of its Head Office team in providing assurance on the affordability of the Equipment Plan and strengthen financial capabilities across the Department, ensuring that TLBs have adequate capacity and capability to make reliable and consistent assessments of future costs. 8 Defence Equipment Plan 2020–2030 1 Assessing the affordability of the equipment programme