Comprehensive review
 

The comprehensive Foreign and Defence review conclusions will be revealed to us all by Boris Johnson on 16 March 2021. So order the Beer, Popcorn and Pizza for then!

Best wishes,

FB

Got a source for that - I’ve heard anything from the 8 March to 19 March!!!

The day after the next Defence Questions. I wonder what the standard answer to those will be....

Coming on the back of the "No Pay Review" for the AF this year I dread to think!

It’ll be a Triple C... Chop Chop and Chop..

It will be interesting to hear how the government have decided (if they have!) how they intend to go on with the F-35? Will they hold out for all 138, cut the total at 70 and will there be a mix of Bs and As?

FB

The Daily Depress is saying that 32 (Royal) Sqn is loosing the jets, the 146 to be gone leaving just the AW-109. Future use will be the A330.



..

Indeed,

I read that Nutloose, all to help "modernise" the armed forces!:ok:

FB

That's how to make the RAF look bigger! Only equip each Squadron with one aircraft and suddenly, wow! Look how many squadrons we have!

Or perhaps we ought to call it the Northolt Station Flight.

Or the Northolt Wing.... it makes it sound bigger ;)

I don't think we'll be buying more than the 48 we've committed to......and certainly not any A's.

The increasing level of noise (finally) coming from USA (and elsewhere) about the costs of the things, I suspect will mean we'll never buy the 138 or the A.

The A model will not be purchased.

Not good for my blood pressure, and probably worse for yours, but when discussing the defence budget in coming days, let us not forget that the Govt has pissed £37bn (& counting) down the drain on Track & Trace. For what tangible benefit one wonders. Scarcely believeable.

That £37,000,000,000 can simply be counted as part of the debt mountain. No realistic benefit came from it and perhaps will be made redundant by the vaccine (fingers crossed). The government have an incredible knack for stepping, deliberately it would seem, on any Banana skins around. The 1% pay rise for the nurses is likely fairly arrived at, I hadn't been mindful of the 12% pay rise they'd had over the preceding three years, nor that the average pay of a nurse is now £34,000. I wouldn't begrudge them a single penny but the 1 % rise is a headline grabber for all the wrong reasons! Someone needs to better advise this government about how they present stuff.:rolleyes:

FB

The benefit of test, trace and isolate is in reduction of case numbers, hospital admissions and deaths, so assessment of it is bound to involve counter-factual study of what might have happened without it. I haven't seen any informed analysis so I'd be interested in your source for the above. Or is it just an assertion on your part?

Meanwhile I have posted something on the Integrated Review (not the Comprehensive Review as this thread mis-names it) on the long-running and equally mis-named "UK SDR 2020" thread.

£37Bn over 2 YEARS is what they have budgeted. Sounds like you have been reading fake news posts from the lefties on Face Ache?

There is £22Bn budgeted for FY20/21 and £15Bn for FY21/22. Sounds a lot, but that is a test and trace system for 68,000,000 people, which equates to £323 each. That is enough for just 3-4 COVID tests per person, so it is hardly the Government “pissing away” money. Don’t forget that out of that came 18,000 contact tracers that must have worked at least 100 days over the past year - at minimum wage of around £9 an hour then for an 8 hour day then each one is costing £72, so over 100 days that is £7,200 each. Multiply by 18,000 and that is roughly £130M alone.

If you think you can do such a Herculean effort any cheaper than £323 per head per year, then crack on! I digress...

LJ, quite. Almost 1 million tests are being performed daily at the moment, with a turn round time of about 12 hours for the 750k of those which require laboratory assessment. It's a staggering capability to have established, and yet is dismissed as being of "no benefit" by fools who don't make the slightest effort to understand what's beneath a headline.

Some idiots really do seem to think that £37bn was poured away on a failed smartphone app and bungs to Dido Harding's mates. I've seen the £37bn described as a 'zombie statistic', one which refuses to die despite being repeatedly explained in simple terms such as those you've set out. The lesson I take from that is that Harding should have followed Kate Bingham's example and spent a large amount on a top-notch PR consultancy at the very beginning. This would have been decried as 'waste' at the time but might have increased the public's understanding, respect for and compliance with the scheme.

That’s OK then,all the cronyism,incompetence and waste,less than 37 billion,no problem,got it!

Better to have than not, and that goes with all the other cock ups on the way in PPE etc, it’s a steep learning curve, but I’d rather the U.K. PLC has wasted some Monies to get us to where we are now, rapidly on our way to getting the population inoculated and leading the world with a few other countries in the coverage rate and quantity.... it’s not as if there was a tried and tested playbook to work from as such. I personally think they have done an excellent job and even those that deride it are actually benefitting from it.