Defence Training Review Over Budget

The latest edition of Private Eye reports that Brigadier Geoff Nield has let it slip that the cost of the Defence Training Review programme had gone up and is now over budget.

"At a local “Stakeholders” meeting in the Vale of Glamorgan, home to a proposed new defence academy, the Ministry of Defence’s officer in charge, Brigadier Geoff Nield, let slip that the price had gone up from £11bn to £ 12bn. As the deal was slated to save the MoD just £400m at the old price, it seems the scheme will not only expose the armed forces to serious operational risks (see Eye 1213) but will actually cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions more than keeping training in-house."

Further on into the article I noticed that it mentioned that the Vale of Glamorgan's Labour MP, John Smith had told the South Wales Echo how good this would be for the Vale economy and that Private Eye had double checked this with the MoD who confirmed that the extra £1bn was not investment but a revised cost of the project.

"This is great news for the vale economy. The extra £1bn will be felt by people and businesses in the vale. It will mean that the Defence Technical Academy will inject more money into the local economy each year than previously thought."

I thought that can't possibly be right it must be a misquote. But on further investigation I found the original article on WalesOnLine. Surprisingly not a misquote, the headline is "£1bn investment boost for training academy". Somehow the bad news of the project going over budget has turned into good news.

In addition to that John Smith thinks that it would be a good idea to build a new dedicated rail stop to service the Academy in St Athan, saying it will benefit the Welsh economy and ease congestion. This will obviously add more cost to the project! And that's not all a proposed road link to St Athan could cost up to £135m of tax payers money.

Currently there are approximately 600 Civil Servants plus many military and private sector workers employed at RAF Cosford, the majority of these staff would be expected to move from Cosford to St Athan if the Metrix plans go ahead. Cosford is situated 800 meters from a motorway and already has it’s own railway station. Is it right that so much taxpayers money is needed to support the Metrix bid is surely a question that needs to be asked.

PCS members are now writing letters to the NAO to ask them to scrutinise this project which has already cost the tax payer millions in wasted consultant fees.