Select committee: Defence Committee
Conclusion 73
First Report - Ready for War?
Published 4 Feb 2024
Addressed to Ministry of Defence
Defence Committee Armed Forces Readiness All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The Haythornthwaite Review (examined in the section below) found that in 2022 there was a net outflow (the difference between the number of people leaving and those joining) of 4,660 from the UK Armed Forces with the “overall voluntary outflow rate increasing to 6.0%, up 1.7% from the previous year”. In the past decade the forces’ proportion of untrained personnel has “significantly increased”, which means that the “rising demand for skills is already not being met in some key areas, including cyber, engineering, nuclear, digital, logistics, aviation and medical” and that there are now “significant risks to overall capability arising from skills shortages in cyber and digital, intelligence, engineering 150 Foreign Affairs Committee, First Report of Session 2023–24, A rock and a hard place: building critical mineral resilience, HC 371, paras 5; 9 151 Oral evidence taken on 15 November 2023, HC (2023–24) 52, Q77 152 Defence Committee, Sixth Report of Session 2022–23, Special Relationships? US, UK and NATO, HC 184, Paras 86–95 153 Defence Committee, Sixth Special Report of Session 2022–23, Special Relationships? US, UK and NATO: Government Response to the Committee’s Sixth Report, HC 1533, Para 16 Ready for War? 31 (including nuclear), logistics and health/medical professions”.154 Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman underlined that without sufficient numbers of trained personnel, the Services simply would not be able to operate the equipment that was available to them.155
From: Defence Committee, First Report - Ready for War? (HC 26), 4 February 2024
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 25 April 2024 (deadline 4 April 2024).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees there is no regular mechanism to scrutinise readiness and offers an annual open session, releases some Defence Planning Assumptions headlines, and sets out its position on stockpiles, recruitment and procurement.
- On transparency, the government "recognises that the Committee should have public access to more information on planning assumptions and readiness" and releases headlines from the 2023 assumptions, committing to release "as much as possible" of the next iteration "when national and NATO planning processes have matured".
- It agrees the response time for the inquiry was slow and "will make every effort to ensure this is not repeated".
- On the £1.95bn from the Spring Budget 2023, it states the money "will be spent in full on measures to address gaps in our capabilities". It says exact stockpile holdings are "not releasable on the grounds of national security".
- On recruitment and retention, it says a formal response to each Haythornthwaite Review recommendation "will be published during 2024", with next steps for delivery and implementation for each.