British troops face "significant shortages" in armoured vehicles for at least 14 years despite hundreds of millions of pounds being wasted on equipment that has never been delivered, the Whitehall spending watchdog has warned.
The National Audit Office said that without significant additional investment by the Ministry of Defence, the Army will not have all the armoured vehicles which it has identified as "top priorities" until 2025 at the earliest.
In a scathing report, the NAO blamed "over-ambitious requirements and unstable financial planning" for a procurement process which had managed to deliver only a "fraction" of the vehicles it set out to buy.
In the 13 years since the Labour government's 1998 strategic defence review, the MoD has spent £718 million on armoured vehicle programmes which have since been scrapped or have yet to deliver, the NAO said. In the same period the MoD managed to procure fewer than 200 vehicles, at a cost of £407 million, through its standard acquisition programme.
Instead, it had to rely on emergency purchases through the system of "urgent operational requirements" (UORs) to get the vehicles needed to troops on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the NAO said that while the UOR system had worked well - delivering an additional £2.8 billion worth of vehicles since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - it was not a "sustainable substitute" for the standard acquisition process.
Much of the equipment bought through UORs was tailored for specific operations and was unsuitable for wider use. Often it was delivered without training or back-up support, causing further problems in the long-term.
The NAO said that the MoD needed to show "greater pragmatism" when it came to ordering equipment through the standard acquisition process.
"The department's reluctance to compromise in setting technologically demanding requirements under its standard acquisition process has put the timely and cost-effective delivery of the equipment at risk," the report said.
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Defence Equipment Minister Peter Luff said that the report highlighted the "serious flaws" in the wider procurement process under the previous Labour government. He said: "We are absolutely committed to a funded and realistic defence equipment programme to ensure our armed forces are properly equipped and taxpayers get value for money. Given the disastrous state of the department's finances we inherited, this change will take time."
