Defence procurement minister Peter Luff

Balancing the country’s defence budget is a constant struggle. Whenever the British armed forces are mobilised, so too are opposition politicians and the media, wielding damning reports against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for providing the wrong equipment to troops at the wrong time.

Some of the more high-profile cases are hard to ignore. The Nimrod crash that killed 14 service personnel in 2006 was blamed on cost cutting. In 2009, a report by former MoD aide Bernard Gray criticised the government for squandering £2.5bn a year on the wrong equipment. More recently, the Public Accounts Committee warned that front-line troops in Afghanistan could be hit by shortages of equipment within 30 days because their supply chain was at ’critical risk of failure’.

Peter Luff, minister for defence equipment, support and technology at the MoD, admits that serious errors have been made in the past but insists that lessons have been learned. ’Sometimes things have gone spectacularly wrong,’ he said. ’Generally they’ve gone wrong because the budget hasn’t balanced and we’ve delayed decisions and programmes as a result. For instance, the Nimrod upgrade, in my view, is a project that should never even have begun. It was always going to end in tears.’