The MoD has blown more than £1.2 billion in a single year on scrapped spy plane upgrades, a failed radio system, decommissioned warships and crashed drones. The Mail has the story:
Officials admitted to £1.23 billion of losses across 17,622 separate cases in 2025/26.
It follows write-offs of £1.9 billion the previous year, meaning the department has lost more than £3 billion in two years, as ministers plead for extra money to rearm.
Topping the list last year was £408 million knocked off the value of building work at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the Berkshire factory that makes warheads for Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
Another £254 million was lost when the MoD pulled the plug in 2025 on an upgrade of the RAF‘s secretive Shadow spy planes. …
Project Morpheus, the Army’s long-delayed replacement for its Bowman battlefield radios, cost £236 million to cancel after more than £690 million had already been spent on it by 2023. …
Eighty-six million pounds of half-built projects were written off. …
A scheme to build solar farms on the defence estate was cancelled at a cost of £5.8 million, and a project to replace thermal imaging cameras and laser rangefinders was terminated for £8.3 million. …
On top of the losses, the MoD made 7,080 special payments totalling £169 million, including £48.5 million compensation in historical cases of veterans sacked for being gay.
The Mail’s full list of MoD waste is worth reading in full.
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This is good project management, not waste. There is no point throwing good money after bad. If only this discipline had been shown over HS2!
Where is Monro when you need him? I want to hear how we are beating Russia, definitely totally completely.
Well to be fair welfare now costs us 1 Billion a day…..
And they want to cancel live fire exercises to save 30 million?
They are completely FUBAR.
A billion here, a billion there – soon you’ll be talking real money.
Dwarfed by the 106 billion the UK has lost aiding Ukraine.
If you add in the indirect costs of the energy crisis caused by Europe and UK “choosing” to ban cheap Russian fuel the total cost of the Ukraine war to the UK comes to £106 billion.
In the first two years of the war, according to the most recent government figures, Britain gave £12.8 billion to support Ukraine directly plus £0.7 billion supporting Ukrainian refugees.
The UK have now pledged another £3+ billion per year to Ukraine to continue a proxy war the US started. £25 billion in total.
Russia are no threat to anyone who doesn’t threaten them or the millions of ethnic Russians living in the east and south of Ukraine for centuries.
The UK and Europe backed the wrong side as Russia were totally “justified” in the actions they have taken against Ukraine.
Diverting more money from infrastructure to defence from a non-existent threat from Russia is madness.
I!m sorry but I agree.
Russia ia a great and christian country, and should be a natural ally of Europe.
I am really annoyed by this continual drumbeat of war drums, by people who shouldn’t be allowed out unaccompanied.
Hear hear
I don’t ever think the threat from Russia was ‘non-existent’. However, it was minimal compared to UK issues of Islamification, wokery and suicidal empathy. Unfortunately as the war continues Russia may well start to lash out to demonstrate to its population that it is still strong.