Ministers have confirmed that recruitment challenges and shortages of skilled personnel are affecting a significant proportion of the British Army’s programme portfolio.
Responding to a question from Ben Obese-Jecty MP, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said “these resource challenges are impacting a significant portion of the Army Portfolio.”
The affected projects are outlined in the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) Annual Report 2024–25, which provides confidence assessments for major defence programmes.
Pollard said the Army’s Programme and Portfolio Office “actively manages the prioritisation of programmes to ensure its workforce is allocated where it is most needed.” He added that the office offers “comprehensive Portfolio, Programme and Project Management training packages to develop current personnel and to attract talent into the team.”
The NISTA report, published on 11 August 2025, warned that the Army Programme Management Office faces difficulties recruiting staff with the required “skills and experience levels.” These shortages are affecting delivery confidence across parts of the Army’s modernisation portfolio, which includes major capability and digital transformation programmes.
Recruitment and workforce pressures are also evident in the wider force. In a separate question, Andrew Mitchell MP asked about the average time taken for a new recruit to progress from application to training entry.
Defence Minister Louise Sandher-Jones said that for the 12 months ending 1 July 2025, “the average time taken between application and untrained entry for UK/Irish Regular Other Ranks was 249 days.” Equivalent data for the Army Reserve, she said, “is not held centrally and will take some time to collate.”
The Ministry also released several caveats alongside the figures, noting that they exclude Gurkhas, Full-Time Reserve Service personnel, and non-UK applicants, and that the 249-day figure represents a median value rather than an average across all applicants.
Officials describe this “time of flight” between application and entry as a key performance indicator for recruitment efficiency. Data are derived from the Defence Recruitment System and matched with the Joint Personnel Administration database.
The long recruitment timeline and workforce gaps coincide with the Army’s efforts to deliver major transformation commitments under the Strategic Defence Review 2025, including new force structures, modernised command systems, and enhanced project delivery capacity.
The NISTA Annual Report 2024–25 is available here.
Decades of cuts, cuts and more cuts is the problem across the entire armed forces, mix that with a focus on targeted recruitment diversity rather than potential ability and this is what you end up with.
There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only the inevitable storm. 🌈⛈️
I remember talking to a doctor once, who said if I did an MRI of your whole body I could find loads of things wrong with you. So many organisations do the same thing these days, including the armed forces. We keep young adults at school until they are 18. Then they end up at university being over educated and in a lifetime of debt. Everything is so bureaucratic, you need 3 exams to get one GCSE. It’s absurd, especially when they still can’t find a job and end up with mental health issues. Less is more. That’s my take on it.
I remember at school when the class “Hardnuts” all went into the Army regardless of education, now you have to have degrees.
Education does not replace Intelect or natural ability, it just looks good on paper.
We are all “Sheeple” on our way to slaughter at the alter of mans ego.
It’s a good analogy- MRI is impressive technology, but interpreting what it’s telling you requires some subjectivity. The trick is to combine the imagery with observed symptoms to determine if there really is a problem, rather than going looking for ‘problems’ that have no practical impact.
“Defence Minister Louise Sandher-Jones said that for the 12 months ending 1 July 2025, “the average time taken between application and untrained entry for UK/Irish Regular Other Ranks was 249 days.” Equivalent data for the Army Reserve, she said, “is not held centrally and will take some time to collate.””
249 days is a disgrace – I can well understand anyone loosing interest after that period of time.
The more telling part is the lack of collated data on reserves progression. Given all records are digital, I find this hard to believe. What are they trying to say that there is no central database – because it is on a database. Or are they saying the database was so badly created that the query cannot be run? Unlikely. Or that nobody wants to invest the few days of programmers time to create a UI that can extract that data because the data is embarrassing?
I’d favour the last option.
It really is a disgrace, but it would be useful to know what “untrained entry” meant, is that day 1 phase 1 or just the day selection is passed? Probably in the document I guess, might read it later who knows.
I have a small amount of experience with the reserves compared to regulars. My reserve application seemed much faster but very much organised on a wing and a prayer. Granted this was a fair while ago now.
This whole mad rush to Digital is biting us badly, just look at yesterdays outages, I even read aa article where It was suggested that all data be written down on paper as a safety backup.
We have come full circle in just a few decades and nothing is safe in a world riddled with cyber criminals.
Right then, I’ve used up all my Serious quota for this week, normal service will resume shortly.
Offline backups are a critical thing.
Encrypted SSD in a secure location is quite a good idea.
In our business I mirror the NAS arrays periodically and take the SSDs offsite and store them in a fireproof safe.
If you’ve made proper use of cloud availability zones then nothing short of a nuclear war should be able to threaten your online backups. Of course accessing them may be a different matter.
Hmme…..that didn’t work so well after the last lot of DNS upgrades that got fouled up…..
There is always sanity in having more backup using different technologies that don’t just involve cloud.
Yes, I use cloudiness for real time backups, NAS for onsite backups [was an issue when WFH was big, then physical media backups.
A hacker can’t hack and encrypt a disk in a safe!
“Heads in the Clouds”
we used Fax a lot and Photo Copied mostly, we had rooms full of paperwork (6 years legal records) which actually worked really well as the emails and digital systems often gave issues.
The first company I worked at had just started employing Computer Geeks to transform the whole business, I left after 5 years, It went bust 5 years later after the workforce shrank from 1000 to just a few dozen Computer based office Geeks.
Every glorious advert for jobs always shows smily people sat at screens in plush offices, never workers getting cold, wet and dirty.
UK economy is hell bent on being Services based, It has no room for Grunts but it’s the Grunts that do all the dirty work.
Digital is great if it is done thoroughly and properly.
The issue you describe is a poor digital transition. Probably because leadership didn’t understand what they were doing and were lead by the digital ‘experts’.
The “Leadership” embraced the Geeks, Ignored tradition and perfectly good working practices, mistakes happened more and more, so more Geeks and systems were employed and it all went Tit’s up big style.
Those who warned got ignored and dismissed as “Ludites” or just left.
A perfectly good business that had existed and thrived for nearly 200 years vanished in Ten.
I started my own at that time, never made the same glaring errors of judgement, retired recently, now I see history repeating itself in the trenches.
Technology is good when used appropriately.
My main concern is the AI bubble – not many companies actually a productivity increase from AI.
“GROG”
I have a theory,
Back in the 1700’s the Royal Navy discovered that by watering down the Rum Ration, they could save money and get better work efficiency from the manpower.
This “GROG” process has been in use ever since but is now just Water, no actual Rum anymore.
I think we need to reverse this process imediately,
Drink Rum, save the Royal Navy.
Drink Beer, save the Army,
Drink Pimms, save the RAF.
“GROG” is bad.
It would be interesting to know what ‘skills shortages’ the APMO is suffering with. Presumably either appropriate technical specialists or capable project managers (or both). There is generally no shortage of such people- it’s merely a question of accepting that remuneration needs to reflect market rates.
Probably short of Grunts that just Fight.