UK MoD Paid £600M of Arms Funds to Consultants

The Ministry of Defence has spent almost £600m from the military's equipment budget in the last two years to hire hundreds of outside specialists and consultants, routinely breaching government guidelines controlling this type of expenditure. An internal audit of signed defence contracts has highlighted numerous flaws and warned that control of the MoD purse appeared to be "poorly developed or non-existent". The report also stated that defence officials made little or no effort to ensure that contracts provided value for money. Despite the numerous concerns raised in the report, a defence minister said nothing was wrong. The scale of the spending, and the apparent lack of control, comes at a time when the department has been making thousands of civilian and military personnel redundant to cut spiralling costs. The MoD confirmed the figures and said stricter rules had been introduced. The disclosures have angered union leaders, who argue that the MoD is paying the price for losing too many in-house specialists, forcing it to rely on hiring expensive help from the private sector. Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the MoD spent £564m in the last two years buying in "technical support" for teams running the department's biggest engineering and procurement projects. In 2006, the MoD spent £6m. The sums have been rising dramatically year on year in part because of a new regime introduced by Labour in April 2009, which allowed senior defence officials to hire specialist, short-term help for "niche" tasks without needing authorisation from a minister. In the first year of the new regime, spending jumped by £130m to £297m. Spending this year will reach £267m.