Responsibility for getting benefits
3.4 Flying training involves many stakeholders across several lines of funding and accountability. Getting benefits will require the to assign clear responsibility for identifying, quantifying, achieving and measuring them. The benefits expected from new core training are qualitative (improving aircrew skill) and quantitative (reducing time and cost). The August 2014 benefits strategy set out roles and responsibilities for getting benefits (Figure 16).
3.5 Organisations understood these roles. However, they needed more clarity about the process to get benefits. For example, it is unclear how:
• the Royal Air Force's Training Group will release any cost savings from front-line conversion units not under its control;
• the armed services will be incentivised to seek opportunities to get benefits and release cost and time savings for use elsewhere in defence;
• the Royal Air Force's Training Group will work with the Royal Navy and Army to get benefits across lines of funding and accountability; or
• Ascent will be held to account for achieving benefits without a robust baseline for existing performance (paragraphs 3.7 to 3.36) or effective performance incentives (paragraphs 2.39 to 2.45).
Figure 15 Expected benefits of new core training Aim | How this will be achieved | Assessment of ability to achieve and measure | Optimise time in training | Refine training content to reduce length of training. | No robust baseline data on actual time in training. | | Reduce 'holds' (non-productive periods between courses). | No readily available data tracking changes in time in training or their cause. | Close the skills gap | Introduce modern training aircraft more like front-line aircraft. | Advanced fast-jet trainer bought. Plans to update rest of training aircraft. | | Improve student ability through improved course content. | No consistent applied approach to measure improvement in pilot ability throughout training. | Reducing costs | Increase proportion of simulated training. | There are plans to increase use of simulators and decrease flying hours and instructors. No accurate baseline data on current costs, so difficult to measure impact. | | Move training from expensive front-line aircraft to cheaper training aircraft. | Some evidence of front-line training being moved to cheaper training aircraft for advanced fast-jet training. No data collected to measure whether training costs reduce at the front line. | | Reduce number of training aircraft. | Plans in place to significantly reduce the number of training aircraft. | | Reduce student failure rates. | Limited understanding of what affects student failure rates. | Source: National Audit Office | |
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Figure 16 Responsibility for getting benefits Organisation | Responsibility | Project team | Stakeholder engagement, introducing new core training that meets project milestones, performance, time and cost targets agreed with the Royal Air Force. | | Plan, assure and oversee plans for getting benefits. | Royal Air Force Training Group | User acceptance and assuring quality of new training. | | Manage and achieve benefits. | External provider | Achieve benefits through effective, fully integrated flying training. |
Source: Ministry of Defence |
3.6 To explore how well placed the is to identify and get the planned benefits, we examined the :
• data on flying training;
• understanding of flying training performance; and
• readiness to realise and measure benefits when the contractor, Ascent, is running the system at full capacity.