£6.7m written off in army computer ‘shambles’

Some £6.7m already spent on the recruitment scheme will have to be written off, the Defence Secretary admitted.

Around 1,000 Army personnel have been put back into recruiting roles as a result of the botched system and Mr Hammond acknowledged that the problems had meant some would-be soldiers “falling through the cracks”.

Temporary “workaround” solutions to the problems in the recruitment partnership programme were costing £1m a month, he told MPs.

The recruitment partnership programme with outsourcing giant Capita is worth £1.3bn over 10 years.

But there were problems integrating the existing Atlas IT platform with Capita’s system, Mr Hammond said.

The Defence Secretary made the decision to ditch Atlas in favour of a £47.7m system produced by Capita after visiting the Army’s recruitment centre at Upavon, Wiltshire, last year to see the scale of the problems.

Forced to go to the Commons to answer questions on the IT problems, he said: “It was clear to me, despite the Army putting in place measures to mitigate these problems in the near term, further long-term action was needed to fix the situation.

“It was agreed in principle at that point the Atlas system was not capable of timely delivery of the Capita-run programme and we would need to take up the option to revert to Capita to build a new IT platform specifically to run their system that will be ready early next year.”

Mr Hammond said the alternative system would have cost £43m, so the additional cost of Capita’s programme was around £4.5m. Of the £15.5m already spent, Mr Hammond said around £6.7m would be written off.

Shadow Defence Secretary Vernon Coaker said there had been a series of “catastrophic failures costing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money” at the Ministry of Defence.

He said: “The blame for the mess we are now in lies squarely with the Government. We can’t take risks with our armed forces, we can’t gamble with out nation’s safety and security.”

He told Mr Hammond to “get a grip and sort this shambles out”.