Phenom

[The B Word]

Originally Posted by Arty Fufkin

Last time I checked, Airtanker seemed to be delivering on their contract though....

They may be, but from what I hear it is not delivering ‘value for money’...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ts-abroad.html

Comment by LORD DANNATT, former Army head

Buying something you couldn’t really afford was taken to a new level in the 1990s under the Private Finance Initiative.

The government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seized on the concept to produce shiny new schools and hospitals across the country, especially in marginal constituencies.

But the Voyager PFI deal has to rank as the worst of the lot. Even at face value, £10.5 billion to lease 14 aircraft does not seem like value for money.

The project was led not by an RAF officer, but by an Army brigadier, so that there was no undue service bias.

But this brigadier was so alarmed at the way it was going that he came to me in 2008, while I was Chief of the General Staff, to ask if I could try to get this deal stopped.

I asked for a briefing, having been told there were much cheaper ways to meet the RAF’s air-to-air refuelling and strategic lift requirement.

At the briefing, all other options were dismissed for one spurious reason or another, leading to the curious conclusion that the £10.5 billion procurement of 14 A330 airliners, assembled at Airbus Industrie’s factory near Madrid, was the answer.

In the end, the politics of European industrial collaboration was the winner, the MoD was the loser, and now bucket-and-spade holiday-makers are travelling to sunny places overseas at British taxpayers’ expense. Is that value for money?

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson’s Modernising Defence Programme must put a stop to scandals like this.

Or this analysis: https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2013/...g-out-of-fsta/