Army ‘naive’ to think Capita could hit target for recruitment

THE Army must share the blame for the Capita recruitment fiasco because it was naive to trust the company, the public accounts committee has said.

A report by the committee’s MPS criticised the Army for its hands-off approach to the contract. MPS said it had “naively launched into a 10-year partnership with Capita” in 2012, the latter not “fully understanding the complexity of what it was taking on”.

The committee said the Army’s passive management style allowed Capita’s poor performance to go unchecked meaning a recruitment target of 10,000 a year was missed every year and not expected to be achieved until 2022.

Meg Hillier, committee chairman, said: “It has taken Capita and the Army too long to address underperformance. It beggars belief that more than half of applications still take 10 months or longer to process.”

Capita won the £495 million contract at a time when recruitment numbers were good, the report said, but the Army “naively assumed that it could just hand responsibility” to the outsourcing company. Recruitment shortfalls for each year thereafter have ranged from 21 per cent to 45 per cent.

Capita admitted it had been “chasing revenue” when it bid for the contract and accepted it should have demanded greater clarity over the Army’s “prescriptive and restrictive” target of 10,000 recruits a year.

The report concluded both organisations were to blame for the “terrible performance” in recruitment.

The MPS also criticised the Army for closing half its recruitment centres and said it needed to change its “mindset” to keep up with the changes in society.