Historically, responsibility for equipment support resided with the three single-Service logistics commands. A recognition that this dispersion of responsibility was leading to inefficiencies prompted the Department to reorganise the provision of the support functions and in 2000 led to the creation of the Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO), which was charged with the maintenance and upgrade of all military equipment and coordinated its storage and distribution.
The DLO set itself the target of achieving a 20% overall reduction in support costs by April 2006, to be achieved through both internal re-structuring of the 'enabling' layer and, from April 2005, through changes to the way in which the organisation delivered support to in-service equipment.
With the merger of the DLO and the DPA in April 2007, responsibility for support now resides with DE&S.
However, budgetary responsibility for equipment support planning remains fragmented with FLCs having budgetary responsibility for years 1 to 4 of the ESP, and the relevant Head of Capability within the MoD Capability Sponsor responsible for years 5 to 10 of the ESP. This situation is designed to give recognition to the fact that FLCs draw together all eight DLoDs to generate Force Elements at Readiness. Please refer to Chapter 6 and Appendix B for further detail. Further, the FLCs are responsible for delivering much of the routine maintenance when equipment is deployed on operations.
Despite the fact that annual spend on equipment support is roughly in line with that on equipment procurement, the support area has been the subject of considerably less scrutiny from NAO and others outside the MoD. To some extent, this is probably because performance analysis for support arrangements is intrinsically difficult due to innate differences between every situation and supplier contract. The paucity of data that are held centrally on both the nature and the performance of support operations render the task even more challenging.
As a result, it is difficult to establish the extent to which the numerous change programmes conducted under the auspices of the DLO or DE&S have been successful. Besides the organisational changes described above, many of the processes by which equipment support is actually delivered have also been significantly re-designed: the Department is currently in the process of implementing a "Transformation Staircase" whereby support arrangements are migrated from traditional "spares-and-maintenance" type arrangements to Contracting for Availability ("CfA") or Contracting for Capability ("CfC"). The amount of support activity that has been outsourced to industry for delivery has therefore increased significantly over the past ten years.