Ministry of Defence annual report and accounts 2010-11 - eighth report of session 2010-12, report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence (Paperback)

This Defence Committee report into the MoD's Annual Report and Accounts 2010-11 focuses on the resource accounts, the MoD's performance, and personnel matters. The Armed Forces redundancy programme is expected to deliver up to 11,000 redundancies across the three Services. Civil servant redundancies have a target of 15,000. The Committee is disturbed that 40 per cent of planned military redundancies are to be compulsory while the MoD's current civilian redundancies will be entirely voluntary. The Permanent Under Secretary told the Committee that civilians are flexibly employable whereas the military are not. This runs contrary to the Committee's experience of the breadth of the military training and the skills shown by personnel as witnessed on operations. For the fifth successive year, the MoD's Annual Accounts have been qualified. In 2010-11, the MoD did not comply with international financial reporting as laid down by the Treasury and has no plans to do so for the foreseeable future. The MoD could also not provide adequate audit evidence for over GBP5.2 billion worth of certain inventory and capital spares. These problems are likely to persist until, at the very earliest, 2014-15. The Committee is concerned that the level of theft and fraud in the MoD appear generally to be increasing year on year. The MoD need to clarify the roles of the various police and security forces dealing with fraud and theft and provide further information on how the problems of prevention, detection and recovery are being managed.