‘Snowflake campaign’ fails to halt decline in Army recruitment
THE Army recruitment crisis has deepened in the wake of the “snowflake’” campaign.
The number of people enlisting dropped again in the past year, continuing a recent trend.
The recruitment campaign, called Your Army Needs You, caused controversy on its launch in January with Kitchener-style illustrations of soldiers with labels such as “snowflakes”, “phone zombies”, “binge gamers” and “selfie addicts”.
It resulted in applications almost doubling in the first month, but the numbers of people actually joining the Army has continued to decline. Answering a parliamentary question last week, the MOD said that only 6,315 soldiers enlisted in the Army in the year up to March, down from 6,545 the year before. These figures fall far short of the 10,000 new recruits the Army says it requires every year.
Capita, a business services company, took on a 10-year contract for Army re- cruiting in 2012, worth £1.3billion.
Mark Francois, the former Armed Forces minister, said: “It is imperative we remove Capita from this utterly failing contract and I will raise these issues forcibly in Parliament until we do.”
In February Mark Lancaster, minister for the Armed Forces, revealed that all bar one of the Army’s 30 infantry battalions were under strength.
The Welsh Guards had only 360 fully trained soldiers out of a requirement for 503, the 4th Bn The Royal Regiment of Scotland had 490 soldiers from a requirement of 635 and the Scots Guards were 34 per cent under strength. Only the 2nd Bn The Royal Anglian Regiment were up to strength with 500 soldiers available, the figures as at October 1 2018 showed.
The Army says it has 71,870 trained soldiers, down from 74,070 in 2018 and well under the 82,500 it says it needs.
The Capita recruitment contract with the Army is due to run to 2022.
The Daily Telegraph understands there is widespread unease in the Royal Navy and RAF about relinquishing control of their recruitment operations under the Mod’s proposed Future Recruitment Strategy in 2022. At that point recruitment for all three services will be outsourced. The RAF in particular is almost fully-manned, ascribed to a year of RAF 100 celebrations and ownership of its own recruitment campaign.
A Capita spokesman said: “The last quarterly figures show we’re on the right course. The Army and us have been clear that the recruiting partnership has been turned around since the re-set last summer. For example, the final quarter of the last financial year – January to March – was the most successful, at a record 2,662 regular soldier enlistments, since 2012.”