Planning for equipment procurement and support is part of a Department-wide Planning Round ("PR") process that covers all expenditure categories, over periods ranging from 30 years for equipment, 10 years for support and non-equipment investment and 4 years for manpower and other costs.
The Planning Round is managed by the Defence Resources area in MoD centre with appropriate inputs regarding equipment procurement and support provided by the Head of the Equipment Plan, the Capability Equipment Plan ("CapEP") department, Centre Resources & Planning and single Service representatives. Appendix B provides further detail on the how the plans are put together from the components of expenditure across the Department.
Plans are produced annually35. For each planning round a staged approach is used to produce cost projections necessary to enable the Capability Sponsor and Top Level Budget ("TLB") holders to align planning activities and manage projections to affordable36 levels where necessary.
There are typically 3 key stages37:
• Stage 1: TLB holders evaluate and re-validate plans from the final plans in the prior year and engage in a re-costing of these plans to account for any variances that may have occurred.
• Stage 2: TLB holders seek to align cost projections with their control totals, through internal re-prioritisation and provide proposals for extra funding that cannot be resolved internally to the TLB.
• Stage 3: The Centre leads a process to "balance the books" through obtaining costed proposals from each TLB (understanding the need for any inter-TLB transfers, in the form of costed savings and enhancement options).
The proposals and projected costings derived from Stage 3 provide the basis for final costing decisions made by the Joint Capabilities Board ("JCB"), the Defence Strategy and Plans Group ("DSPG"), the Defence Board ("DB") and Ministers.
Once Ministerial endorsement of the programme has been received, final Control Totals are issued to the TLBs and they are then required to submit a final iteration of cost projections for the given planning round.
The entire process typically takes one year to complete. The current planning round PR09 commenced in April 2008 and Control Totals for each TLB were issued in June 2009.
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35 Re-planning of the equipment plans is intended to be biennial process, but has fallen into an annual planning cycle with the rest of the Department. See Appendix A for further details
36 Affordable: i.e., within the constraints of the Control Totals set for the year.
37 In PR09 a short stage 0 was introduced to enable the Capability Sponsor and Capability Planning Group stakeholders to update the Master Data Assumption Lists (MDAL) which provide a common basis for stage 1 re-costing