A recent parliamentary disclosure has revealed that nearly 2,300 individuals—including Armed Forces personnel, civil servants, and private contractors—are currently working to support recruitment efforts across the British Army, Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and Royal Air Force.
The figures were provided by Defence Minister Luke Pollard in response to a pair of written questions submitted by James Cartlidge, Conservative MP for South Suffolk. The data, as of 1 April 2025, gives the clearest recent picture of the scale and structure of the UK’s military recruitment apparatus.
The British Army operates with the largest recruitment footprint, comprising 417 regular personnel, 84 reservists, 18 civil servants, and 708 external contractors—the latter primarily provided under Capita’s long-running recruitment contract.
The Royal Navy, including the Royal Marines, has a combined total of 228 regulars, 266 reservists, 35 civil servants, and 17 contractors, all working under the Royal Navy Recruit and Attract organisation.
The Royal Air Force employs 250 regulars, 105 reservists, 67 civil servants, and 14 contractors in its recruitment operations.
“For the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, we hold no details on the numbers of individuals who work for the provider on each contract,” noted Pollard in his response, highlighting the limitations in departmental oversight of outsourced recruitment services.
The role of contractors in Armed Forces recruitment—particularly within the British Army—continues to face scrutiny. Despite some improvements, the Army’s recruitment contract with Capita has drawn criticism in previous years over persistent shortfalls in intake targets and administrative bottlenecks.
Key challenges identified by defence planners include attracting specialist personnel and boosting Reserve Forces numbers, particularly within a tightening UK labour market.
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2300? …and I thought Aprils Fool’s day had gone. Such a success story as well.
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Our cousins are experiencing serious recruitment difficulties too, they do have a lot more ground to cover though, their numbers:
US Army managed 55,000 enlisted last year with a staff of 10,000 (5.5 per)
USAF managed 27,189 with 2,862 staff (9.5 per)
USN managed 40,978 with 6000 staff (6.8 per)
Or 6.5 enlisted per recruitment staff. I believe these are Active Duty/Full-time only numbers.
The British military managed 12,850 Regular joiners with 2,300 staff (5.5 per). Or 16,530 for 7.1 per if we include reserves.
To just maintain numbers, we needed 19,110 regulars and reserve joiners last year or 8.3 per staff obviously this requirement would be less if retention is improved.
As there were 223,280 (this includes duplicates) applicants in 2024 That’s a case load of about 97 applicants per staff per year, it’s hard to break those down given the application routes and roles of the staff involved.
Raw numbers aren’t terrible when you consider the US staff numbers are full-time dedicated and I suspect UK numbers are far from it. However, the system is obviously failing as 9 applicants joining per staff is not a crazy number if everything was running close to smoothly, you’d probably make that up when 10k+ applicants aren’t moving elsewhere due to 10+ month waits.
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As someone who worked in recruitment for the Army I will break it down without compromising security. .
There is a Recruitment Regiment for the Army that is based out of Upavon it is the Central HQ for Recruitment, across the road from SHQ is the NRC building that was staffed by Capita until now. The Country is divided into areas that x2 Recruitment Outreach Teams cover and operate in.
These Outreach Teams are usually multi skilled 8 pax teams operating under a command structure so you would have a in a perfect world a 15 pax team operating in one part of say area 4 and another 15 pax team operating in the other with the Recruitment Centre’s being left alone and manned by x2 Army x2 Navy x2 Raf x2 Civvies.
In the real world this doesn’t happen and people get pulled left right and centre and Teams lose manpower over DBS, Welfare and covering other teams and the Recruitment Centre’s or NRC.
I have written at length about this before on this site about when Capitas system went down and they spun up all the Outreach Teams to come to Upavon to answer phone calls and process applications while the Capita staff put there feet up but hey I don’t blame them when Capita was mugging them off for 23k a year at the time Serco will hire the majority of them for the same wage and rely on the same one way partnership because the Army can’t say no.
The Outreach Teams do school, college, work, job fairs , cadets visits you can pretty much spin them up for anything and you have to be a badge collector to guarantee your place in a team now you can’t just be LCpl Jones out of the Valleys talking about the Infantry those days are gone the people recruited to those teams are scalpels when they are used but it is a losing battle, I know I was there the Government is not serious and hasn’t been for the past 20 years.