Upgrade of Trident 6yrs late, £1.4bn over budget
DEFENCE officials were yesterday blasted for the ‘unacceptable’ repetition of past mistakes which has led to almost £1.4billion being wasted in a Trident upgrade.
Projects to improve the support infrastructure for the UK nuclear deterrent, based at Faslane on the Clyde, are also running up to six years late, said MPs.
The extra cost to the public purse was blamed by the Commons public accounts committee on avoidable errors and poor management.
Costs for the three programmes to upgrade ageing facilities were originally put at £2.5billion.
But, said the MPs, this sum has now soared by £1.35billion on top of the projects lagging behind schedule by between 1.7 and 6.3 years.
Committee chairman Meg Hillier said: ‘To utterly fail to learn from mistakes over decades, to spectacularly repeat the same mistakes at huge cost to the taxpayer – and at huge cost to confidence in our defence capabilities – is completely unacceptable.
‘The [defence] department knows it can’t go on like this, it knows it must change and operate differently. The test now is to see how it will do that, and soon.’
One of projects involves building a new nuclear warhead assembly and disassembly facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment site at Burghfield, Berkshire.
The second is the building of a new facility at the Rolls-Royce site at Raynesway, Derby, to produce the latest nuclear reactor core designs.
The third is a construction at the BAE Systems shipyard at Barrowin-Furness, Cumbria, where the new Dreadnought class submarines will be built to carry Trident missiles.
The Ministry of Defence told the MPs that it ‘immensely regrets’ the amount of taxpayers’ money which was wasted but warned that the bill could escalate even more.
The original estimate of the cost was made by the National Audit Office (NAO) earlier this year. It warned the MoD was continuing to repeat mistakes made in the last cycle of investment in the nuclear deterrent in the 1980s and 1990s.
Branding this ‘unacceptable’, the Commons committee’s report said: ‘The department cannot explain why its leadership has not ensured that it learned from these experiences.’
In February, a separate NAO report warned defence chiefs faced a funding black hole of up to £13billion in their ten-year equipment plan.
It added the MoD’s unwillingness to take ‘difficult decisions’ was putting the country’s military capabilities at risk.