They were given estimations but wanted more details. A simple totalcost/num-of-planes was not good enough.
88. We asked the Minister for Defence Procurement and her MoD colleagues several times about the cost to the UK taxpayer of the F-35 programme. Pressed on the total cost per aircraft, once support and spares are included, Mrs Baldwin and her colleagues did not answer directly, pointing instead to a recent NAO report which put the total cost of the programme through to 2026, at £9.1 billion, a sum that includes the first 48 aircraft, spares, support, training and the investment in infrastructure at RAF Marham and elsewhere.
89. When asked how the £9.1 billion figure equated to a cost per-aircraft, particularly in light of the MoD’s criticism of The Times’s estimate of £130–155 million per aircraft, MoD Permanent Secretary Stephen Lovegrove attacked that estimate as an “extraordinarily crude and misleading calculation” which, he suggested, was arrived at by taking £7.3 billion from the £9.1 billion (this £7.3 billion figure covers the production, sustainment and follow-on phase of the programme to 2026) and dividing it by 48.88 It should be noted that this is not the calculation process outlined by Alexi Mostrous during his appearance before the Committee (see paras 76–77 of this report).
90. According to Mr Lovegrove, it is not possible accurately to divide the £9.1 billion cost on a unit-by-unit basis due to the inclusion, within that figure, of training and infrastructure costs and additional costs “associated with the design and total concept of the aircraft”.89 Instead, he suggested that one would have to “do a very complicated sum at the end of the life of the programme [the mid-2030s] and divide it by 138. Then you might be able to do it”.
91. The Department was also unable to provide details of the total cost of the F-35 procurement programme, again pointing to the published costs for the programme up to 2026.91 The Minister told us that the MoD “have not gone” beyond those costings. Mr Lovegrove, however, suggested that the MoD had “rough orders of magnitude” for the possible costs beyond 2026/7, but which are not published for two principal reasons:
One is that they are rough orders of magnitude, and who knows exactly what the world will look like in 10 years’ time? In fact, there are no private enterprises that estimate their costs 10 years out with the accuracy that we do, or to the level of fidelity that we do. Secondly, even the last 17 or 19 F-35s within the first 48 are still under negotiation. To reveal publicly how much we think we might be prepared to pay for those would obviously be compromising our negotiating position and compromising taxpayers’ money, so we will not be doing that.
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