Three in four would-be troops quit because of slow recruitment process

THREE quarters of would-be recruits drop out of the military’s application process because it takes too long, government figures have revealed.

While a little over one million people applied to join either the Royal Air Force, Navy or Army since 2014, three in four gave up on the process of joining, resulting in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) signing up just over 132,000 people and rejecting almost 170,000.

In the past year alone, the MoD signed up fewer than one in 10 of the 137,000 people who applied to serve in the Armed Forces, according to figures unveiled by Labour.

It comes as a recruitment crisis is threatening to engulf the military. Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed the Navy has so few sailors it has had to decommission ships to staff its new fleet of frigates, while employment for both the RAF and Army has also fallen.

In the past 10 years, 83 per cent of the 707,000 people who applied to join the Army voluntarily withdrew their application, and less than 80,000 were recruited, as first reported by The

Times.

For the same period, 71 per cent of the 197,000 people who applied to join the

Navy voluntarily withdrew their application, with less than 32,000 recruited, while 46 per cent of the 225,000 people who applied to join the RAF voluntarily withdrew their application.

For the Army, 8,423 of the 54,128 people who withdrew their applications had waited at least six months before doing so.

John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said: “Hundreds of thousands of people willing to serve and defend their country have simply given up on their ambitions, while ministers have failed to get to grips with the problems.”

An MoD spokesman said: “We have sped up Army recruitment by 9 per cent in the last year and the vast majority of time it takes for a regular soldier to join is less than 140 days.

“We are also seeing positive results in recruitment.”