Want to know why the military budget is so screwed up?

[NutLoose]

Just take a look at the hundreds of thousand pounds worth of equipment they left behind when they pulled out of St Athans........ It's criminal.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DJicKozYHj18%26feature%3Dyou tu.be&feature=youtu.be&v=JicKozYHj18&gl=GB)

[Al R]

He has certainly landed on his feet, but he is entering a tough market (I could be wrong?) so he'll probably need all the breaks he can get. If the resources were funded by the tax payer in the first place, and if they are going to be used for the benefit for creating and keeping much needed tax payer's (ex crab?) highly skilled jobs instead of simply being sold off for 3/6 to some scrappie to be sent out to build another coal fired power station in China and just to keep some web site listing civil servant in the Disposals Agency in a job.. then why not?

I take your point in one way though; I could do with a lathe like that for my Rover V8 rebuild.

[Milo Minderbinder]

The problem isn't with the disposal of the stuff.
The problem is with whoever planned and authorised the expenditrure in the first place when it clearly was not needed

[dervish]

If the rumour mill is right, this is the least of it. MoD are in a hole over ownership of similar plant and machinery at these ex-3rd Line bases. MoD assumed they owned P&M from the days when these bases were originally "privatised", but have lost track of what they owned and what the new buyers bought themselves. I'm told Lynx in particular is suffering as Westland now have the contracts but no access to P&M. MoD are liable because they let contracts saying the P&M was MoD owned and available free of charge. They've made a complete arse of the entire 3rd/4th Line concept.

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Milo Minderbinder. Bearing in mind that the plant and machinery currently sitting unused was very probably bought for DARA when it was a fully functioning MoD Agency, how was the original buy a mistake? Who would have known, then, its eventual fate?

[cerij101]

Indeed they were owned by DARA (though some items go back further than that..) the fact is it costs more to move some of this stuff than it's actually worth..the machine shop assets and VSUs are particularly expensive to dismantle and transport, reassemble etc.. Bruce has a good deal and I hope he makes the most of it! :=

[tucumseh]

They've made a complete arse of the entire 3rd/4th Line concept.

Agreed.


Pre-DARA, work scheduled to be carried out there was “free of charge” to MoD(PE) project managers, in that it was centrally funded so they did not have to make financial provision. For example, the Rotary Wing Support Line would fund Fleetlands.



The year it was announced projects would have to pay hard cash, PE was told it would have to fund this from existing project funding. Hitherto, while the need for a funding source had been recognised, we’d been told we’d get an uplift. The RW Support Line was more or less closed down, which was presented as a huge saving by beancounters, and capability had to be chopped to fund the Fleetlands work. (The same happened when DERA became QinetiQ and DSTL). But then matters got worse.



At the time, I had two major upgrade programmes running, with 47 aircraft for conversion, all duly scheduled in the Fleetlands Blue Book. Also, in excess of 3000 LRUs for modification, at both Fleetlands and Sealand. At a stroke, I was informed Fleetlands “No longer regard MoD(PE) as a customer” and I should take my business elsewhere. (At the time, their new Chief Exec was a retired Air Cdre). Have you any idea how much that work costs on the “open” market and how much delay Fleetland’s decision would have caused had I competed the work, as I was meant to? As it was, I single tendered the job as quick as I could, before the bosses could insist I waste more of the budget, and the ISD was met. Others didn’t. Fleetlands staff, disgusted at this because they could see the harm it was doing (and inevitable job losses), told me this was repeated across many projects.

The above amounted to one of the largest cuts by stealth the aviation component of the Defence Budget has ever seen. Not a word of protest was heard outside the confines of one or two aircraft project offices in MoD(PE). We were told to shut up, wind it in and knowingly waste money. We were instructed NOT to meet Time, Cost or Performance targets, at the very time MoD and Government were trumpeting “Smart Procurement”. Not one Service HQ would back up PE and all proclaimed themselves happy that ISDs would slip, capability erode and future budgets decrease. Please bear this in mind next time you want to chastise “procurers”. The cost of the Plant & Machinery at St Athan pales into insignificance. Those of you who remember the management structure at the time will immediately see the links between Fleetlands and St Athan.

[teeteringhead]

There were so many money-wasting c%ck-ups in the last days of DARA. How's this for a sequence of events:

1. Build a State-of-the-Art Super hangar, Red Dragon (aka White Elephant) with all the bells and whistles that an engineer could want. Plumbed in gases, hydraulics, electrics of any voltage and phase and orientation (AC/DC ;))

2. Decide to "roll forward" deep servicing to MOBs, thereby taking away the trade from 1.

3. Discover that you haven't enough suitably trained blue-suiters at MOBs to do 2 ..... so employ (expensive) contractors!!

.... you couldn't make it up .......:{

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Pre-DARA, work scheduled to be carried out there was “free of charge” to MoD(PE) project managers, in that it was centrally funded so they did not have to make financial provision. For example, the Rotary Wing Support Line would fund Fleetlands.

The year it was announced projects would have to pay hard cash, PE was told it would have to fund this from existing project funding.

A similar stunt was tried by DSDA. Every time the Customer Supplier Agreement was due for renewal, they tried to write in hard charging for storage and handling. Unfortunately for them, the Navy had a single entity with responsibility for that and the Bicester wide boys were told; hard charge and your CSA won't be signed and we'll Base store only. Shortly afterwards, DSDA was given Naval Base/Depot storage. If it's hard charged now, I don't know because I'm well out of it.

I digress.

[SlopJockey]

It was doomed a long time ago unfortunately some of the work was probably for the defence training school that fell apart and since we have sold out to the devil for "depth" maintenance it makes sense to let as a well found facility.

Best wishes to Bruce he clearly has the business plan and probably is not short of a few shekels to back it up.

But we could have used the prime real estate so much better for other things.

I mean if the airfield was not being used there is a vast area that we own and could exploit.

Is it still too late to sell off that white elephant of north west Bristol and move back to a proper unit where things like quarters, messes, access and parking will be available.

[Roland Pulfrew]

you couldn't make it up .

Actually TTH, I think most of us on the frontline could have made this up; most of us saw this coming.

I remember being told that scrapping all of the VC10K2s was a good deal as the money saved would be used to keep the rest of the fleet more serviceable.

And that the spares recovered would be fed into the system to produce spares more quickly for the remaining fleet to keep them more serviceable.

And that the engineers on the Sqn would only have to keep 9 ac serviceable rather than 14 so they would have more capacity to keep the the remaining aircraft more serviceable.

Of course no one could see the instant financial "saving" levied against the IPT. Or RAB meaning that spares recovered from scrapped aircraft had to be depreciated and received a cost of capital charge leading to the selling off of spares. Or the reduction in engineering manpower reducing flexibility. And of course 9 aircraft can't be in 14 places at the same time. You couldn't make this up? I think we did!!

[no-aitch]

At Farnborough today had a chat with engineer of 'pretty' Hunter, Miss Demeanour, owned by Jonathan Whaley: based at St Athan, they did all right out of closure - and good on 'em.