Jeffrey, who has a salary of £180,000, has been permanent under-secretary since 2005, during which time the MoD budget spiralled out of control, creating a £36 billion “black hole”.
In financial terms, this is the key paragraph. PUS (Jeffrey) is the Chief Accounting Officer. It is his job to oversee the implementation of the rules requiring the scrutiny Fox talks of. This scrutiny is nothing new. It has been mandated since time began. The trouble is, successive PUSs going back over 20 years have failed miserably to ensure their own regulations are enforced - not just since 2005. The key report on the subject, issued by MoD's own internal auditors, is dated June 1996. 19 recommendations, none of which were implemented. Untold Billions have been wasted as a result; which, had it not been spent, would not have affected Operational Capability. That is the essential difference between true efficiency, which the scrutiny rules are designed to ensure, and the forthcoming cuts which are designed to compensate for incompetence.
“Officers have been willing to let themselves be politicised as a means of climbing up the promotion ladder,” he said.
This very true statement applies equally to senior Servicemen and Civilians alike. Can we now look forward to a similar cull of those in DE&S who issued instructions to ignore PUS's scrutiny regulations, just to avoid rocking the political boat? Jeffrey is taking the blame for his lack of leadership, but history tells us the real perpetrators won't change.