So fair more than £15.5million has been spent on the system but it is so rubbish that defence secretary Philip Hammond is considering spending nearly £50m on a new solution. According to Gartner, the army's recruitment wing picked the wrong bidder to build the IT system after failing in 2011 to challenge an MoD policy that favoured the less suitable of two competing offers. The project management team was inexperienced and under-resourced and the army failed to take charge when delays started and put in a suitable contingency plan.
Now Hammond has been told to pay Capita, the MoD's partner in the project, £47.7m to build a new IT platform. Vernon Coaker, the shadow defence secretary, issued a statement saying that the leaked report points to the latest series of catastrophic failures at the Ministry of Defence on David Cameron's watch.
It said that the opposition warned that the government was taking risks with Britain's security by not fixing the reserve recruitment crisis before reducing numbers in the regular army. The opposition was not particularly happy that Capita was going to get the job as it had worries about its performance.
