Category Archives: Ministry of Defence

MoD under fire for spending almost £13m on hire cars for staff

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Unite union criticises ‘excessive’ figure while Labour says ‘Tory waste’ letting down taxpayers

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has come under fire after revelations that it has spent almost £13m on hire cars for staff this year.

A freedom of information (FoI) request by PA Media also showed that the Department for Transport spent more than £1.1m in the year to October, while other departments have spent tens of thousands of pounds. The total figure from responses to the FoI request was more than £14.2m.

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Team of 10 UK soldiers sent to Poland to assist on Belarus border

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MoD says small team of military personnel deployed after agreement with Polish government

Britain has sent a team of about 10 soldiers to Poland to help Warsaw strengthen its border with Belarus, where groups of migrants have been stranded attempting to cross into the EU.

The troops arrived on Thursday and are expected to spend a few days in the country, including visiting the border at the request of the Polish government to work out if they can repair or toughen the fencing.

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Family of Kenyan woman allegedly murdered by UK soldier to sue MoD

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Agnes Wanjiru’s family instruct law firm to demand answers over her death

The family of a young Kenyan woman allegedly murdered by a British soldier almost a decade ago plans to sue the Ministry of Defence to demand answers over her death.

The body of Agnes Wanjiru, 21, was found in 2012 after she reportedly went out partying with British soldiers at the Lions Court hotel in the central town of Nanyuki, where the UK army has a permanent garrison.

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MoD wasting billions with ‘broken’ procurement system, MPs warn

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Commons spending watchdog says out of 20 projects, 13 were running late by a cumulative total of 21 years

The Ministry of Defence’s system of procurement is “broken” and is repeatedly wasting billions in taxpayers’ money, according to a scathing assessment by a watchdog committee of MPs.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said that the oversight in the department was so poor that it was unable to spell out what additional capability the country will get from an extra £16.5bn which was allocated by Boris Johnson last year.

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UK defence minister faces call for inquiry into 2012 killing of Kenyan woman

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Inquest in Kenya in 2019 concluded that Agnes Wanjiru, 21, ‘was murdered by British soldiers’

The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, is facing calls to launch an investigation into a possible cover-up after no one was held responsible for the alleged killing of a 21-year old Kenyan woman by one or more off-duty British soldiers.

John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, described the 2012 killing of Agnes Wanjiru, a sex worker, as “dreadful” and called for Wallace to “take this more seriously”.

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‘They left us to die’: UK’s Afghan aid staff in hiding from Taliban

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Evacuation of employees, not contractors, ‘splitting hairs’, says HRW, warning of days left to save lives

Afghan employees who worked as contractors on UK aid projects fear for their lives after not being granted resettlement in Britain.

The Guardian has been in contact with four families who said they had been targeted by the Taliban because they worked for the UK government, and have now been forced into hiding.

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Classified Ministry of Defence papers found at bus stop in Kent

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Documents include details on HMS Defender in Ukrainian waters and possible Afghanistan plans

Classified defence documents containing details about HMS Defender and the military have been found at a bus stop, prompting an investigation from the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The loss of the sensitive information was described “as embarrassing as it is worrying for ministers” by Labour, who are seeking reassurances that national security has not been undermined.

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UK-Russian naval dispute: both sides will claim victory

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Analysis: Royal Navy ship sailing near Crimea may also be test of Beijing reaction to territorial reach

British ministers will have been under no illusions that the decision to sail HMS Defender into disputed waters off the coast of Russian-annexed Crimea would provoke a reaction from the Kremlin.

A dispute about whether warning shots were fired or not is beside the point – although if they were, they were miles out of range. Because even if the west considers Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, to be still part of Ukraine, the Russians do not and will act accordingly.

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UK trained military of 15 countries with poor human rights records

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Campaigners seek inquiry into whether skills gained in UK were used to commit abuses in countries such as Bahrain, China and Saudi Arabia

The UK government has trained the armies of two-thirds of the world’s countries, including 15 it has rebuked for human rights violations.

An anti-arms trade organisation has called for an investigation into the use of UK military training by other countries to determine whether it has been used to perpetrate human rights abuses.

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Hackers HQ and Space Command: how UK defence budget could be spent

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Creation of specialist cyber force and artificial intelligence unit in pipeline

A specialist cyber force of several hundred British hackers has been in the works for nearly three years, although its creation has been partly held back by turf wars between the spy agency GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence, to which the unit is expected to jointly report.

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What do we know about the SBS?

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The Special Boat Service that stormed a tanker off the Isle of Wight is closely aligned to the SAS

The secretive Special Boat Service, which stormed a tanker off the coast of the Isle of Wight on Sunday evening and detained seven stowaways suspected of seizing it, is Britain’s elite military unit tasked with tackling terrorist and other localised, violent incidents at sea. Its origins date back to the second world war, and the Ministry of Defence refuses to say how many fighters it comprises or give any detail of its operations.

SBS operatives are trained to seize control of ships, tankers or rigs, typically by fast-roping down from helicopters. A similar operation in December 2018 saw the SBS take control of an Italian tanker that was subject to an attempted hijack by four stowaways near Tilbury in Essex, on the orders of then prime minister Theresa May.

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Zaghari-Ratcliffe: UK acknowledges debt owed to Iran over Shah’s tank order

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Debt seen as stumbling block for release of British-Iranians including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has for the first time acknowledged that he is actively seeking to pay a debt to the Iranian government that could finally help to secure the release of British dual nationals including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Wallace assured lawyers acting for the families that the government was exploring every legal avenue to pay the debt, which for the first time he formally acknowledged the government owes.

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Commonwealth veterans launch legal action in immigration row

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Eight Fijian-born soldiers went public five months ago and have yet to receive positive response

Eight Fijian-born soldiers who served with the British army in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking a judicial review against the Ministry of Defence and Home Office, saying bureaucratic errors have made them illegal immigrants in the country for which they once served.

The group of Commonwealth veterans have been forced to go to court five months after first going public because neither Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, nor Priti Patel, the home secretary, have yet responded positively to their initial complaint or properly reviewed their cases.

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Alleged breaches of international law by Saudi forces in Yemen exceed 500

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UK government figures revealed days after it justified resuming arms sales because incidents were isolated

The Ministry of Defence has revealed it has logged more than 500 Saudi air raids in possible breach of international law in Yemen, even though last week it justified resuming arms sales to Riyadh on the basis that only isolated incidents without any pattern have occurred.

The trade minister, Greg Hands, answering an urgent question in the Commons on last week’s resumption of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, refused to say how many bombing incidents had been reviewed by the UK before it agreed to grant UK arms export licences again.

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BAE Systems sold £15bn worth of arms to Saudis during Yemen assault

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Campaigners also allege latest export values imply UK arms sales greater than government’s declared figures

Britain’s leading arms manufacturer BAE Systems sold £15bn worth of arms and services to the Saudi military during the last five years, the period covered by Riyadh’s involvement in the deadly bombing campaign in the war in Yemen.

Figures taken from the company’s most recent annual report and newly analysed by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) reveal the British arms maker generated £2.5bn in revenues from the Saudi military during the whole of 2019.

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Bill sets five-year limit to prosecute UK armed forces who served abroad

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Legislation to stop ‘vexatious’ claims excludes alleged crimes by military personnel in Northern Ireland

A five-year time limit on bringing prosecutions against soldiers and veterans who have served abroad – except in “exceptional circumstances” – is to be imposed under legislation introduced by the government.

Clauses in the overseas operations (service personnel and veterans) bill would protect serving and former military personnel from what the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, claimed was a “vexatious” cycle of claims and re-investigations.

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UK’s air war against Isis ends after five years

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RAF has launched no attacks in Syria or Iraq since September, but controversy continues over civilian casuality numbers

Britain’s five-year air war against Isis has quietly come to an end, with official figures revealing no bombs have been dropped since September – yet the MoD still acknowledges only one civilian casualty in the entire conflict.

The data shows that over a period longer than the first world war, 4,215 bombs and missiles were launched from Reaper drones or RAF jets in Syria and Iraq, and a wide discrepancy has emerged between UK and US estimates of the number of civilians killed.

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‘People like you’ still uttered: BAME armed forces personnel on racism in services

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Concerns persist despite MoD initiatives to tackle racism, Guardian call-out shows

Serving soldiers from BAME backgrounds who spoke to the Guardian about their experience of the armed forces say the days of daily abuse and overt name-calling are gone, but instead it has been replaced with “subtle racism”.

“Comments such as ‘people like you’, ‘you people from the colonies,’ or ‘passport seeking’ are still uttered in plain hearing,” said one veteran serviceman, who described his experience over more than a decade in the ranks as “nothing but traumatic”.

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Racist incidents on rise in British army, warns ombudsman

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Nicola Williams urges MoD to do more to tackle ‘depressingly frequent’ racism

Incidents of racism in the armed forces are happening with “increasing and depressing frequency”, its official ombudsman has warned.

Nicola Williams, the service complaints ombudsman for the armed forces, called on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to do more to tackle racism among service personnel.

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Court ruling over tanks debt deals new blow to UK-Iran relations

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Judge finds in UK’s favour in dispute that has been linked to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe case

The path to improved British-Iranian relations has hit a new barrier after the high court in London ruled that the UK does not have to pay at least £20m interest on the £387m it owes to Iran over the cancelled sale of Chieftain tanks in the 1970s.

The debt was seen by Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary as critical to the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual national imprisoned in Tehran.

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