The British Army Recruiting Partnering Project was meant to reduce the costs of recruiting, while at the same time recruiting more soldiers and officers. In 2012, the Army committed £1.36bn over ten years to the project, including a £495m contract with Capita to handle recruitment and marketing.

However, Capita has missed the Army’s targets for recruiting new soldiers and officers every year since 2013. The total shortfall each year has ranged from 21% to 45% of the Army’s requirement.

The NAO has concluded the project will not achieve its planned savings of £267m by 2022 for the Ministry of Defence. In October 2018, the Army estimated that it had achieved savings of £25m in the first six years of the contract and forecast that the programme would achieve savings of £258m by 2022.

However, the NAO found that the Army has not yet adjusted its forecast savings to take into account the additional personnel that continue to be involved in the recruitment process, at a cost of at least £37m, or established whether savings resulting from pension changes should be included.

The Army is forecasting that expenditure will remain within the approved budget, despite the cost of the Capita contract rising by 37% to £677m. The NAO points out the Army has used the £199m contingency that was included in its original budget and will need to apply for additional funding if there are any further cost increases. 

A core part of the project was online recruitment, but the Ministry of Defence failed in its contractual obligation to provide Capita with the necessary IT infrastructure to enable this. In January 2014, it passed responsibility for developing the online system to Capita, but due to the complexity of the Army’s requirements, system development was delayed even further.

The NAO says as a result, the online system launched 52 months later than originally planned, at a cost of £113m, triple its original budget.

Technical problems continued after the launch, with applicants experiencing difficulties when using the system and staff finding it hard to process applications. The Army estimates that these problems resulted in 13,000 fewer applications between November 2017 and March 2018, compared to the same period in the previous year, which in turn could lead to up to 1,300 fewer enlistments.

Capita, and not the Army, owns the online recruitment system. The Army has the right to modify and use the system, but it has not yet established whether it will be suitable in the future. After 2022, if the contract with Capita is not renewed, the Army will have to create a new system or negotiate a new support contract with Capita so it can continue to use the system.

The NAO says the Army’s failure to simplify a very complex recruitment process, which it was supposed to do prior to the project, is another factor affecting recruitment numbers. It took half of the regular soldiers recruited this year up to 321 days to go from starting the process to beginning basic training.

Neither the Army nor Capita tested the fundamental changes to the recruitment process prior to its introduction. The Army and Capita reduced the number of local recruitment centres, from 131 to 68, at the start of the project, preferring a more centralised and online approach. However, both parties realised that this approach did not provide applicants with sufficient support, and that face-to-face contact was crucial in encouraging applicants to join. This meant that in November 2016, the Army and Capita enhanced the support available for applicants in local offices.

The Army has penalised Capita for missing its recruitment targets, applying financial service credit deductions of £26m, 6% of Capita’s total contract payments.

In September 2016, the Army and Capita renegotiated the recruitment targets as the Army considered that there was little prospect of performance improving without agreeing to concessions. These were dropped by 20% in 2017-18, but Capita continues to miss these lower targets for new recruits. Capita recruited only 2,400 regulars, compared to the Army’s target of 5,300, in the first six months of 2018-19.

Investigation into the British Army’s Recruiting Partnering Project is here

Report by Pat Sweet