03 Sep 25. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, is available for interview on the report – all bids and queries to Ed Sheridan on / 07719 005551
House of Commons
Public Accounts Committee
Govt plans to boost military reserve and cadet forces lack detail and funding, PAC finds
– Network of reserve training sites and cadet huts in managed decline, according to Mo
Government lacks a realistic and appropriately funded plan to achieve its ambition of expanding the reserve forces and the cadets. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), in its report on the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) oversight of the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Associations (RFCAs), warns that the MoD’s targets for expansion of reserves and cadets face significant barriers and suffer from a lack of clarity.
The reserves are a key part of the UK’s defence capability, making up a little under a fifth of its total armed forces strength at the start of 2025. Ambitious plans were laid out for expanding the role of the reserves in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), including increasing active reserve forces by at least 20% “when funding allows”. According to the SDR this would “most likely” be by the 2030s – however, the MoD recognised to the PAC’s inquiry that investment would need to come in support of the reserves during this Parliament, so within the next 4 years. The MoD is also seeking as a priority to improve reserves’ management via a digital solution by early 2027 – a tight timescale to meet.
The report also covers the cadet forces, which the SDR wants to increase (currently 140,000) by 30% by 2030, aspiring to reach 250,000 cadets in the longer term. Cadet forces can enhance social mobility and give confidence and structure to the most disadvantaged young people, and the PAC’s inquiry heard that there was no lack of interest from young people wanting to join the cadets. However, the MoD is still working out how to address the shortage of adult volunteers who run the cadets, and the PAC believes it will require considerable effort to persuade young people to volunteer as cadets in such significantly increased numbers.
The PAC’s report is calling for the full enhancement and expansion plans for the reserves and cadets to be set out by 2026.
The enhanced roles of the reserves and cadets will also need to be supported by a modernised and fit-for-purpose volunteer estate of training sites and cadet huts. However, the PAC’s report finds that the estate has been in a state of managed decline, with too many sites (around 2,500), some of which are not in the right places. The MoD has begun a programme to dispose of some sites and consolidate others into super reserve centres, but has not yet secured future funding for this work while facing teething problems with an estate maintenance contract. The PAC’s report calls for MoD to give due consideration to the volunteer estate in forthcoming investment decisions.
Overall, the PAC finds inadequate arrangements for monitoring the financial performance of the RFCAs, which received £146m of public money in 2023-24. October 2024 saw a batch of three annual accounts published together, meaning that some information about the RFCAs’ financial performance was not publicly available until more than four years after it had occurred. An overall financial framework that complies with Treasury requirements is still not in place, and the PAC is calling for one to be implemented as a matter of urgency.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The publication of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was greeted with great celebration from the top of government. It is of course welcome to see the high-level commitments to spending on our defence contained within it. What we still do not have, following an unacceptably long delay in proper scrutiny of defence spending through the lack of publication of an Equipment Plan, are granular details on specifically how these ambitions will be funded and delivered. This includes the lack of clarity our Committee has found around highly ambitious plans to expand our reserve and cadet forces. Our inquiry has found that the MoD will need to find funding in this Parliament to begin its massive 20% expansion of the reserves, rather than the SDR’s anticipation of some point in the 2030s. Similarly, the planned boost of the cadet forces by a third by 2030 will stumble if the lack of adult volunteers is not addressed. This is before one begins to grapple with the considerable challenge of persuading young people to join up in the numbers required. Our Committee welcomes the government’s aims. The reserves are the very grassroots of our armed forces and the cadets offer young people valuable life skills and opportunities. The managed decline of the infrastructure that supports them shows they are in sore need of attention. But as we have frequently found in scrutiny of this government, what is missing is a plan for how these aims will be achieved.”
The PAC’s June 2025 report on the future of the Equipment Plan found that the public still lacked a reliable assessment of whether government’s defence spending plans are affordable.
03 Sep 25. Inquiry launch: Afghan data breach and resettlement schemes. Defence Committee launches broad inquiry into MOD Afghan data breach and resettlement schemes.
Today the Defence Committee launches an inquiry into the Afghan data breach and the resettlement schemes.
In July 2025, the High Court lifted a ‘superinjunction’ that had been in place since September 2023, suppressing information about a data breach that had taken place in February 2022, involving the personal data of thousands of Afghan applicants for resettlement to the UK and their families, potentially putting these people at risk of reprisals.
In 2024-25, the Government secretly brought many of those affected by the data breach to the safety of the UK, including people whose initial applications for resettlement had been rejected.
The deadline for written evidence is Tuesday 14 October 2025. While lived experience can inform the Committee’s work, please be aware that the Committee does not consider or assist with individual cases.
Chair of the Defence Committee, Tan Dhesi MP, said: “We were all shocked by the Government’s revelation in July that hundreds of ms of pounds of taxpayers’ money had been secretly committed to bringing to safety thousands of Afghans whose lives were jeopardised by a colossal data breach from the Ministry of Defence. We on the Defence Committee want to understand how this breach could have been allowed to happen, and, once it had happened, whether successive Governments took well-informed and sensible decisions under cover of an unprecedented super-injunction. We will be taking as much evidence as possible in public and on camera, to shine a light on events kept secret for nearly two years.
Was the Government right to use the courts for so long to prevent public debate on matters of public interest and controversy? What is to stop another catastrophic data breach or secret injunction? These and other questions will be at the heart of our inquiry.
Over four years on from the UK withdrawal, we will also take a broad look at the successes, failures and opportunity costs of the Afghan resettlement programme. We intend to identify the key issues for affected Afghans, Defence, public services, local communities and public trust, and reach a view on what the Government should do next.
“We want to hear from you. If you have insight into how these events unfolded, their personal impact or the wider questions they raise, please respond to the call for evidence that we have issued today.”
The Committee welcomes written evidence on the following:
Use of a legal injunction
- Was the Government’s original application for an injunction appropriate in this case? Why were alternatives, such as use of the D-Notice process, not considered adequate?
- Was it right for the Government to argue for the injunction to remain in place for as long as it did, and was it right for it to agree that it should be lifted when it was?
- Is it reasonable for the Government to continue to argue that some information covered by the original injunction should not be released?
- What were the implications of the injunction for public and parliamentary scrutiny, and for data protection regulation?
- Did the Government take appropriate, well-informed, timely, effective action under cover of the injunction?
- How did the change of Government following the 2024 general election impact on decision-making relevant to the injunction?
- In what circumstances would it be appropriate for a Government to apply for such an injunction again?
Information security and risk management
- How was it possible for the data breach to take place, especially in the context of the additional controls announced following previous data breaches in 2021?
- What were the systemic, cultural and other factors that enabled the data breach?
- How confident can we be that another serious data breach could not take place again today?
- What has been the impact of the data breach and its handling on trust in Government, both within the UK and among overseas partners?
- How far did the quantum of risk to those affected by the data breach change substantially between the discovery of the breach and the conclusion of the Rimmer Review, and how far did the Government’s risk assessment methodology change?
- Following the lifting of the injunction, what is the risk to those individuals in the dataset who have not been resettled, and how has this risk been managed?
- What is the risk to UK citizens whose data were part of the breach, and how has this risk been managed?
Planning and delivery
- Were decisions on who to offer resettlement reasonably taken in light of the data breach?
- Were decisions on who to offer resettlement in light of the data breach taken in a timely way? If not, why not?
- How much will the data breach have cost the public purse? How reliable are the assumptions behind this cost estimate? What if anything is not being funded instead?
Resettlement
- Has the Ministry of Defence and Government more widely made adequate arrangements for the resettlement of eligible Afghans in the United Kingdom?
- What are the successes of the Afghan Resettlement Programme, and what are the key issues, for affected Afghans, Defence, public services, local communities and public trust? What are the opportunity costs?
Each submission should be no longer than 3,000 words and contain a brief introduction about the author. Submissions should be in malleable format such as MS Word (not PDFs) with no use of colour, logos or photos. Further guidance is available on our Written Evidence Guidance.
03 Sep 25. PAC to question MoD on Afghan data breach and F-35 fighter jet programme
Evidence Session .
Monday 8th September, 3.30pm, Grimond Room, Portcullis House
The UK’s F-35 stealth fighter capability / The Afghanistan Response Route
Watch live or catch-up on Parliamentlive.tv
The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a report on the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) to support the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) scrutiny of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will hold an evidence session with senior Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials on Monday 8 September.
The session will have two panels – the first will take place at 3.30pm. The PAC will take evidence on the ARR scheme, informed by the NAO’s factual account.
A second, separate panel will then be held at approx. 4.15pm on the UK’s F-35 fighter jet capability, also informed by the NAO’s equivalent report on the topic.
The ARR was set up by the MoD to mitigate the security risks arising from a data protection breach and the unauthorised disclosure of personal information about Afghan citizens which occurred in February 2022.
The NAO report found that the MoD does not know exact cost to date of the ARR scheme. HM Treasury (HMT) has also prepared a briefing note for the PAC on HMT’s understanding of rules and expectations for reporting the actual/estimated spending or contingency incurred following the data breach and in relation to spending on the ARR.
The second panel on the F-35 will take place at approx. 4.15pm. The NAO’s report found that the UK’s 37 F-35 jets significantly improve the armed forces’ warfighting capability. It also expressed the view that the capability achieved for the estimated £11bn spent to date is a disappointing return so far compared with MoD plans, even if other benefits have been significant.
The NAO found that, although the F-35 represents an upgrade on any previous UK aircraft, deliveries of it have been delayed by over a year; important capabilities such as the ability to attack ground targets from a safe distance have been delayed into the 2030s; and the aircraft are available to fly far less often than the MoD’s targets. The report further found that the MoD’s estimate of £18.8bn for whole life costs for the programme is likely a significant under-forecast, with NAO estimates putting it at £71bn at least. The PAC will explore how the MoD can better invest its resources in the F-35 programme, with other subject topics likely to include:
- Shortages of engineers, cyber workers, pilots and flying instructors;
- Slow maintenance and lack of spare parts driving the F-35’s availability issues;
- The delayed deliveries of the aircraft by over a year from the original plan.
Panel One on Afghan data breach (from 3.30pm)
- David Williams, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence (MoD)
- Dominic Wilson, Director General Transformation, MoD
Panel Two on F-35s (from approx. 4.15pm)
- David Williams, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence (MoD)
- Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton KCB ADC FREng, Chief of the Defence Staff
- Air Commodore Nick Lowe, Assistant Chief of Staff Combat Air and Senior Responsible Owner for F-35 capability