• The lack of an up-to-date and realistic set of defence planning assumptions has resulted in significant over-programming, with no realistic prospect of delivering the current EPP plan even under optimistic levels of future funding.
• Cutting back programmes could bring the EPP back into balance, but this is likely to be temporary as there are serious and deep-rooted behavioural and organisational issues that will drive again towards un-affordability unless they can be dealt with.
• The combined impact of over-programming and under-costing is an EPP where time to deliver output slips continuously as in-year expenditure is constrained. Time slippage correlates strongly to cost increases, and left unchecked, these unproductive costs of delay will rise at an exponential rate, with productive output moving in the opposite direction.
• There are also enduring affordability pressures within the ESP. There is some relief of cost pressure from ongoing transformation projects (e.g., Contracting for Availability), but the benefits of these are struggling to offset ongoing inflation and other forces at work.
• The process for building up the ESP needs to be done in a way that has clearer information and regular scrutiny across the capability areas to allow more intelligent tradeoffs, and to identify and potentially rationalise very high cost / low effect support expenditures.
• The EP is not currently as useful as it could be as a functional management tool for long-term financial planning because component funding lines do not correspond to individual projects and plans are not comprehensive over its full 30 year span.