The Thirty-first Report of the Standing Committee on Defence (SCoD)1 was submitted to Parliament on 9 March 2017. The report examined the capital outlay for the defence services for the year 2017–18, procurement policy of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and defence planning. A glance through the report showed that, apart from a rather sketchy analysis of these issues, the committee has only ended up making hackneyed observations and recommendations that have been made repeatedly in the past without much success.
Issues in Defence Costing
It is important to pay greater attention to the system of costing followed by the MoD given that costing errors could result in the sanctioning of an unaffordable procurement programme, contract being awarded at a higher price, cost and time overruns, and default on contractual commitments.