THE Ministry of Defence (MoD) was “naive” to award outsourcing giant Capita a contract to handle recruitment for the British Army, a scathing new report by MPs says today.

Parliament’s public accounts committee (PAC) has branded Capita’s performance “abysmal” and “terrible,” warning that the firm “failed to meet the army’s recruitment targets every single year of the contract.”

The cross-party group of MPs said that this was “an unacceptable level of service delivery” and that the army and Capita “must share blame for soldier recruitment failures.”

The British Army “naively” entered into a 10-year partnership with Capita in 2012, the MPs said.

Capita has admitted that at the time it bid for the contract it was “chasing revenue” and was simply interested in booking additional contracts.

The MPs lamented: “Some of the problems establishing this contract are similar to those on the MoD’s other major contract with Capita on the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, which it will end five years early due to poor performance.”

They said: “We are disappointed to see the MoD replicate the contract management errors that our committee sees all too often across government.”

The botched recruitment contract has seen aspiring soldiers wait considerable periods to hear if their applications to join the army have been approved.

The committee’s chairwoman, Labour MP Meg Hillier, said: “It beggars belief that more than half of applications still take around 10 months or longer to process.

“Almost half of applicants are voluntarily dropping out of the process but action to address this has been inadequate.”

This has exacerbated a shortage of soldiers, with the MoD resorting to increasingly bizarre and desperate marketing campaigns.

Ms Hillier noted that: “The army and Capita have introduced a number of changes over the past year and Capita told us that the new marketing campaign launched in January has led to an increase in applications.

“While we welcome these developments, it remains to be seen whether they will deliver concrete results, address long-standing skill shortages and ensure the army has the capability to meet both pressing challenges and those in the future.”

Labour’s shadow defence secretary Nia Griffith said: “This is yet another reminder of Capita’s appalling failure to deliver recruitment to the British Army and the government’s complete refusal to manage the contract properly.
 
“The number of trained personnel in the army has fallen in every year since this disastrous contract with Capita was signed in 2012. Conservative ministers have repeatedly refused to take any action to rectify this because of their ideological obsession with privatisation.
 
“The next Labour government will scrap this failing contract and bring the service back in house to be delivered by army personnel themselves.”