\n<\/p>\n
Sprawling video meetings involving dozens of ministers and officials that each have a veto over the outcome are frustrating decision-making and delaying reform at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), according\u200b to the recently departed head of the armed forces.<\/p>\n
Sir Tony Radakin, giving a speech that had been blocked by Downing Street, complained of \u201cextraordinary Teams calls with 20 or 30 people\u201d \u2013 and that the number of senior MoD civil servants had increased by 85% since 2018.<\/p>\n
People who were \u201cnot going to face the accountability if something goes wrong or it doesn\u2019t happen\u201d nevertheless \u201chave the ability to say no\u201d, the retired admiral said, in online meetings that were normal practice both within the MoD and across government.<\/p>\n
Defence reform was \u201cnot happening as strongly and as quickly as it needs to,\u201d said Radakin at the Institute for Government, despite the efforts of the current and previous governments, and he acknowledged this \u201cspeaks to a personal failure\u201d to defeat bureaucracy.<\/p>\n
Whitehall needed to reduce \u201cthe levels of hierarchy\u201d, he said, adding: \u201cWe have increased senior civil service numbers in defence by about 85% since 2018 even as defence has got smaller and the military star count has remained largely static.\u201d<\/p>\n
The former admiral contrasted the normal civil service decision making processes with that adopted in the case of Ukraine, where ministers and officials were willing to take more operational risk. \u201cWhat I think is frustrating is the outcome [in the case of Ukraine] is so much better,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Radakin was careful to praise the Labour government and defence secretary, \u201cJohn Healey, especially\u201d, for wanting to reform the civil service bureaucracy. They were battling a system in which accountability \u201cbecomes cloudy\u201d, he said, when large numbers of people were involved.<\/p>\n
The problem, Radakin said, was that it was too \u200beasy for politicians and officials to delay anything non-urgent, and he highlighted repeated delays to green-lighting a replacement for the now-ageing Trident nuclear submarines in 1998, 2010 and 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is something wrong,\u201d he said, when governments say maintaining the UK\u2019s nuclear arsenal is the highest priority \u201cbut our sailors are having to put to sea for extraordinarily long patrols in some of the most complex machines on the planet that are beyond their original design life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trident patrols, which used to be considered long if they lasted more than three months, now routinely extend beyond five, as the time taken to repair and refit the submarines has increased.<\/p>\n
Originally due to be phased out between 2017 and 2024, they will not be replaced by new Dreadnought class boats until the early 2030s.<\/p>\n
Another approach, Radakin said, would be to drastically slim down the number of people involved in taking procurement decisions: \u201cIf the person leading a project and one other are willing to say \u2018yes\u2019 and are comfortable they can justify their decisions to the Public Accounts Committee and the secretary of state for defence, then let the programme move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Radakin was chief of defence staff for nearly four years, coming into post as Russia was gearing up to invade Ukraine. He departed earlier this month as his term of office concluded, to be replaced by the air force chief, Sir Rich Knighton.<\/p>\n
But he had to wait until he left his post before being able to give a valedictory speech in the UK. Downing Street allowed Radakin to make a speech in Washington and give an interview to a Ukrainian outlet and the BBC but otherwise said no to his speaking in public.<\/p>\n
The former admiral said it was the policy of Labour, inherited from Conservatives under Rishi Sunak, to restrict military chiefs\u2019 ability to speak in public, and accepted it was \u201cthe prerogative of government to make those decisions\u201d.<\/p>\n
But he said that service chiefs could \u201csometimes be helpful for the government\u201d in explaining UK policy, arguing that \u201cofficials, especially military, in all surveys of public trust tend to have quite high levels of confidence\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sprawling video meetings involving dozens of ministers and officials that each have a veto over the outcome are frustrating decision-making and delaying reform at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), according\u200b to the recently departed head of the armed forces. Sir Tony Radakin, giving a speech that had been blocked by Downing Street, complained of \u201cextraordinary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[13246,689,327,6129,13245,744,4142,11503,1186,838],"class_list":{"0":"post-21590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bureaucracy","9":"tag-chief","10":"tag-defence","11":"tag-delaying","12":"tag-meetings","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-ministry","15":"tag-mod","16":"tag-online","17":"tag-reform"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}