In recent years, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) has been confronting notable and, at times, insurmountable recruitment challenges.
The strategy of boosting investment in recruitment efforts does not appear to be yielding the expected returns in terms of increasing personnel numbers.
It suggests that the solutions to the RFA’s recruitment woes might not lie simply in amplifying the budget but rather in re-evaluating and potentially re-strategising the entire recruitment approach. The data indicates that simply ‘throwing money at the problem’ is not rectifying the recruitment issues, as even when the spending on recruitment rises, intake still falls.
Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, John Healey MP, told me:
“The Conservatives have failed in defence for fourteen years – failing to hit their recruitment targets for our forces. This is the latest example of how the Conservative’s have ‘hollowed out’ our Armed Forces. In Government, Labour would renew the country’s commitment those who serve; by fully incorporating the Armed Forces Covenant into law, tackling the shameful state of military housing and legislating for an Armed Forces Commissioner as a strong independent voice to improve service life for our Forces and their Families.”
Recruitment Shortfalls
The staffing requirements for the RFA in the financial year 2023-24 were identified as 1,713 personnel. However, the actual headcount, as of 1 October 2023, was recorded as 1,675, evidencing a shortfall. This trend is not a new development but part of an ongoing issue, as revealed by the data from the past decade.
The following table details the recruitment targets versus actual intake from 2010 to 2023, highlighting the RFA’s consistent struggle to meet its recruitment objectives.
RFA Total Intake vs Recruiting Targets, 01 April 2010 to 31 March 2023
| Recruiting Year | Total Intake | Recruitment Target |
|---|---|---|
| 2010-11 | 150 | 177 |
| 2011-12 | 32 | 37 |
| 2012-13 | 34 | 34 |
| 2013-14 | 86 | 122 |
| 2014-15 | 167 | 267 |
| 2015-16 | 217 | 336 |
| 2016-17 | 164 | 204 |
| 2017-18 | 149 | 218 |
| 2018-19 | 145 | 192 |
| 2019-20 | 131 | 166 |
| 2020-21 | 171 | 227 |
| 2021-22 | 167 | 231 |
| 2022-23 | 169 | 201 |
The Ministry of Defence’s financial commitment to RFA recruitment over the years has been substantial. The written responses detailed the costs associated with marketing and staffing, specifically attributable to recruitment activities, spanning six financial years. The following table summarises the expenditure:
Financial Year Expenditure on RFA Recruitment
| Financial Year | Recruitment Campaign Cost (ex VAT) (£million) | Estimated Cost of Direct Headcount in Support of RFA Recruitment (£million) | Total (£million) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | 0.103 | 0.327 | 0.430 |
| 2019-20 | 0.115 | 0.328 | 0.443 |
| 2020-21 | 0 | 0.346 | 0.346 |
| 2021-22 | 0 | 0.351 | 0.351 |
| 2022-23 | 0.175 | 0.357 | 0.532 |
| 2023-24 | 0.175 | 0.438 | 0.613 |
| Six Year Total | 2.716 |
The data challenges the assumption that more spending leads to better recruitment outcomes. The figures are as follows:
When correlating the financial investment with recruitment outcomes:
- 2018-19 to 2019-20: Despite a modest increase in recruitment expenditure, the total intake of recruits decreased.
- 2019-20 to 2020-21: Interestingly, a decrease in spending was associated with an increase in total intake.
- 2020-21 to 2021-22: A slight increase in spending did not significantly impact the intake numbers, indicating a disconnect between financial input and recruitment success.
- 2021-22 to 2022-23: Even a substantial rise in recruitment spending resulted in only a marginal increase in total intake.
The trend observed in these figures indicates that increasing recruitment spending does not necessarily lead to an increase in recruitment numbers.
This suggests that factors beyond financial investment are significantly influencing the RFA’s ability to attract and enlist new personnel. Such factors might include the effectiveness of the recruitment strategies, the appeal of the roles offered, market competition, or broader economic conditions etc.
There’s the question, though, how does this get fixed? If I knew, I wouldn’t be writing a blog in my spare time.
Should the UK not start to recruit from overseas also.. I don’t know if that happens with the RFA.. Just a thought. Might help to fill some of the vacant job positions.
Start? We already recruit Gurkhas and Commonwealth nationals.
Yes, I know.. Just talking about the RFA. I did not know how that side of things worked out with the RFA.
I do apologise.
To join the RFA you have to have a British passport. Everyone in the RFA is a Sponsored Reservist!
Ta! For the Info..
Are you sure? I think commonwealth realms can also join and obviously the OSTs have a BP anyway.
Thats a very good idear .I have brother inlaws that are filipino citizens but would be very happy to serve our navy ships and work away for the money we get !. British People ” youngsters “are too fussy and expect miracles ,forgetting what the term “Military ” actually means .Ive been in the Army& navy since 19 until 47 now and still in ! We serve our country no matter what ! We need to serve and protect our monarch at all costs .People forget the pride and honour we receive being a part of this .People are wimps today .I wont leave and want to be remembered for the good works i did whilst being on the planet in times of crisis .
Hi matthew.. Thanks so much for the reply. Sorry about the late return of message. Appreciate your service in the armed forces. Yes, my family have had quite a lot of involvement serving in the armed forces. My Uncle served on Carriers and the Royal Yacht. Other members of my family have served over the years in different branches of the forces.
I was about this, I spend most of my time in the Caribbean now, the kids on the commonwealth island and OSTs would lobe this sort of opportunity and as far as I am aware, Commonwealth is eligable.
Thank you for the reply. yes, that’s a good point about the OSTs and passports from your reply to (Sleepy) Perhaps if it is possible to do.. Should advertise job vacancies a little bit more in some of the Commonwealth nations, when it comes to the RFA.
There is a difference between spending money on a recruitment campaign and spending money to improvement recruit and retention…not the same thing…one is just a small giveaway to the recruitment companies commissioned, the other needs a root and branch strategy, that includes pay, conditions, training staff development etc..I suspect what has happened is a small amount of money has just been handed out to recruitment companies…if you look £500,000 for recruitment of just over 200 hard to find skilled individuals….that is pittance. It’s around the £2500 per head mark….that’s not a lot…when you think the army will hand an ED nurse a £30,000 golden hello to come and work for the army that’s after all the costs from recruitment campaigns etc….to get highly specific people in jobs that few are qualified for and less want to do you have to put you hand in your pocket and keep slapping pound notes down….or you run without the people simple as I’m afraid..market forces are brutal…government is happy to use them to their advantage but refused to budge when it’s on the other foot.
You have to wonder what 60k civil servants employed by the MoD actually do if the give all the work to contractors. If we use a very conservative 45k total employement cost per employee (not salary) it would mean we could buy 1 addtional T26 and 1 addtianal T32 every year if we halved the civil service numbers in the MoD to 30k = £1.35b saving p.a. Thats conservative estimate as a I say. However we’ll likely see the opposite happening with the civil service actually increasing under the next government taking more cash from frontline services.
Law of diminishing returns or spending increasing sums of money on not being able to recruit anyone or with the right skills.
Usually means you are too tight fisted, moronic and wedded to Political Dogma to do the bloody obvious.
Or are on a fat contract to just keep on trying rather than telling the customer the truth.
Save your wasted Money and spend it on better Pay and T & C’s for your Staff.
The recruitment figures make good reading. But they are not the full story. As there are only a few vacancies the standards are extremely high. In fact I would say to high. My son tried to join the reserves last year. This is a lad who is studing for a degree, and is a 3rd degree blackbelt in Tae kwon doe. (Yes Im very proud). But was knocked back as he got an itchy chin when eating shrimp. I served in the regs in the eighties. I do not remember eating shrimp and the main condition was you were breathing. I dont think we need to lower the standards to much. But this would widen the selection pool. There are loads of working class young men looking to join up.
The armed forces have always been the traditional way lads of this caliber have sought to improve themselves and there lives.
Asking what are in effect merchant seamen to enter war zones without ample financial recompense? A no brainer. Up the pay, give a better career structure. It is just another aspect of a British disease, lack of investment in people, not valuing people, losing them, and whining about it. For a maritime nation we have become totally sea blind.
Is the issue with the non linearity COVID lockdowns?
An armed forces commissioner? Wow. Another bureaucrat and staff and offices and oncosts and….. Might be worth spending the money on the RFA directly?
Rather than a ‘commissioner’ I’d plump for a Forces Federation. The divisional system isn’t fit for purpose and people with a gripe vote with their feet and leave. The Forces need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st.
Like the Police Federation? To look after “social” needs. Doesn’t seem a bad idea to me. Mind you, the old guard will probably have a fit.😉
Aye, like the Police Federation. Its been talked about for years but it seems the more gold you have the less you want it for some reason. 🤔I genuinely think it would cut both ways and help the Forces too. Especially with things like retention, if you have different people having the same drip then it can be collated and presented as an issue rather than individuals being fobbed off then adding to them eventually leaving.
I know several ex police. They all say if you want to know what the police think about any issue go to the Police Federation, not the police top brass, they are all political appointees.
Any of the LSTs I had the ‘pleasure’ of going on between Liverpool and Belfast had mainly Hong Kong Chinese as crew and British officers!(70s)
LSL,Galahad and Percival 🙄
Was that before 1970 ? They were transferred from the Army to RFA then, before that they had Hong Kong Chinese crews and British officers. Maybe they had the right idea 🥴
73&75 I had the pleasure of cruises across the Irish Sea😳definitely a Chinese crew.
It was the Falklands war that made the MOD change the crewing from Chinese to British. Before then RFA’S were crewed by Maltese, Chinese and Seychelle as well as British. Obviously not possible nowadays
Incentives are the answer. The RN is completely dependent on these support services and they should receive commensurate compensation. The current UK posture on World events can not be achieved with inadequate support personnel and that is the elephant in the room. One answer may be greater interoperability with friendly navies equivalents, which might be the long-term solution for all parties concerned. This current issue of manning the armed forces will only continue to fall as future youth will opt for other less demanding occupations. We are now after all living in the, ‘Working From Home.’ generation. A.I. should eventually replace some non-combation rolls but that’s still some distance in the future.
So pay more – just like any other industry would.
Pathetic.
Got to agree. The whole RFA earning a starting salary of £35-40k would be a good start and not cost the country all that much. After all our medical consultants are the 4th highest paid in the whole world and are still striking, having rejected an eye watering pay rise to just get them back to work. The junior doctors were offered around 15% pay rise, which they’ve rejected for pay restoration.
Seems if the government can afford those large pay rises to a huge medical workforce they definitely could afford a good uplift too the RFA to aide recruitment but crucially retention.
35-40k with 2 kids and working just 2 days a week you can get the equivalent from the UK government with the benefit of much more time on your hands and with family.
You’d need to.put salaries up more than 40k, but once you hit 45k you start paying nearly half back to the government in Tax and NI then above 50k you start to loose things like child allowance so effectively its diminishing returns working to give 1/2 back the taking a further kicking by have child allowance removed. The whole systems a joke.
Bring back the pressure gang! 😂😆😂😅 There are loads of youths wandering around Knowle ….as just one example, doing nothing but tearing up the estate. Knock them out, drag them onto a ship and set them to work.
Bit too extreme???? I’ll get my coat.
Sounds ok to me 👍
The main problem is most likely visibility. Most people simply haven’t heard of the RFA (frankly most people seem to barely have heard of the armed forces at all but that’s another rant….), let alone thought about working for them.
Maybe they do this already but perhaps offer things like on-the-job training + 7-years of service. No student debt built up and you leave with a marine engineering qualification or something. Or offer posts to retired / former navy personnel / rig workers etc. Must be plenty around.
I think hanging around the gates of some state schools offering a job with minimal previous qualifications needed, better pay than stacking shelves and a sense of community would be the quickest way to sort out recruitment. A pay rise would obviously help too.
There is clearly something about annual targets being strictly enforced in isolation. Almost no single annual target was met. But the recruitment system was clearly capable of hitting many of the targets because it did so in other years. For example the 19/20 target was missed but the number was achieved the following year even though the 20/21 target was missed. Same in 13/14 and 14/15.
Feels to me like someone is making the annual target an absolute hard limit. Which will ALWAYS mean the recruitment machine will undershoot in every year. Better to allow people to overshoot a bit in any given year, and focus on the total recruitment over 2 or 3 years at a time.
I have never seen a single advert for jobs for the RFA and plenty of people would join them if they did
I applied for a job on their website one night while drunk for a bit of fun! Never had a reply or acknowledgement! I won’t lie being ignored by the RFA burns 😭
The question is why are our young people not particularly interested? Is it the wage, the time away from home, the lack of focus in schools on stem and the everyone must go to uni culture? Or is it that’s its not fashionable on TikTok, or that many young have been either raised to loath the uk because we have only done bad or because they are new generational arrivals with no perceived link to the culture and values of the UK- only wanting to take from society?
Could be lots of other reasons as well.
But it’s sad to watch some.of the YouTube videos asking young people what they would do if called up; Not go, I’m Welsh; not go I’m resident but a Pakistani national; I would leave uk where I am resident and go back to Egypt; etc etc
Lots of people have tried every trick in the book to get out of being called up. That is nothing new. Kids are not rasied to loath the UK. Many who use this site loath the UK, judging by many of the comments. And as somebody else said. Many simple don’t know the RFA exists. It should be an appealing career. The excitement of the military with the benefits of being a civilian. It needs to raise its profile.
As an ex RFA man of nearly 20 years the lack of seaman reflects the decline of the Merchant Navy in general
Also the fact that it has become very very RN oriantated
People dont want to be militorised in the way the RFA has become (wearing unifoms etc)
As an ex AB even that terminoligy has gone being replace with term such naval terms such as Leading Hands
Exactly,the r.n. was so jealous of the r f a.during the Falklands war.overtime money,beer & spirits for rfa crew 2 cans a day for r.n crew.single cabins for rfa lads, mess decks for r n ie,10 men rooms etc r.n. just couldn’t wait to take over! The r.f.a. Will never be the same now the r.n.run it
My Stepson tried to join the RFA last year. The process took nearly 7 months. When he finally had his ENG1 medical assessment it was discovered that he was colour blind. The ENG1 was issued with 1 limitation “No night time watchkeeping duties” as he had applied to join as a deckhand we rightly or wrongly assumed that his application would be accepted…..The RFA recruitment process refused his application. He was so deflated by this decision he has since moved to Canada where he was accepted for employment.
If you look on the RFA website and see the salaries they are offering for the starters it’s more than insulting its embarrassing. My daughter gets paid more working in a call centre. If you uplifted the pay you’d get more recruits simple.
The RFA are in this position because of Pink and Fluffy Civil Servants making poor decisions, Minsters not understanding what the RFA brings to the party, lack of funding and real term pay cut. Doctors are complaining that their pay has reduced by 35 percent over the past 15 years well the RFA is the same position. The only real difference is the RFA employs less that 2000 people and has no clout and doesn’t hold the country to ransom! The RN needs the RFA but doesn’t help the recruiting situation and only looks at how it can rag the service. Note, no people, spares or future capability. Before anyone mentioned FSS these ship needed to be with the RFA back in 2016 and not 2031 as now expected. Politicians wake up before it is too late!!!
Offer private contractors more money to fix recruitment & they gladly take it, pay themselves & shareholders more, but skimp on doing what the money’s supposed to be for. They just minimise product & maximise profits. That’s the lie of the whole privatisation/market forces ideology. Then they’ll probably come back & ask for a bit more money that they hope will fix the problem, but never does. We’ve been promoting the worst sort of people across society for too long-in it for themselves, screwing the public, running civilisation & society into the ground.
When i joined the RFA a tanker was a tanker. The RFA had their own identity and was not used as a force multiplier. Now day tankers are used to chase drug runners, chase pirates, and shadow russian military ships. The RFA lost its way and its identity. I left in 2017, along with a lot of the guys i know. Recruitment is down to a number of factors and not just cash in your pocket. Ok so up the pay to bring in line with employers like calmac, serco ect. But a good way to keep the workforce is by giving them something to work towards ie pensions. If you talk to the guys that left. The reasons they give mostly is the RFA changed too much. And at the time i left we were only getting something like 2% increase each year. Put these factors together with the changes that happened and you have your reasons for guys leaving. Ps the RFA guys are alive and well, and working for serco.