The Ministry of Defence has admitted that £6.1bn of spending on the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) was erroneously classified as ‘assets’ in accounts dating back to 2007 and will be partially ‘written off’. The errors were only discovered several years after AWE was taken back into direct MOD control in 2021 MPs were told at a Public Accounts Committee meeting on MOD Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25.
To put the number in perspective, defence nuclear spending in 2024-25 was almost £11 billion, equivalent to 18% of the department’s budget. The committee was told that the error stemmed from historic expenditure, dating back to 2007 when AWE was owned and operated by a private US-involved consortium (Lockheed Martin UK, Jacobs Engineering and Serco) whose contract was ended early by the government. The spend was misclassified as capital expenditure but did not meet the capital recognition criteria Permanent Secretary and Principle Accounting Officer, Jeremy Pocklington informed the committee.
The error relates to several major programmes in AWE, including the Future Materials Campus and the Mensa facility, which operate the assembly and disassembly of nuclear warheads.
Aneen Blackmore, Director General of Finance in the MOD confirmed the plan to write off some of the balance related to the capitalisation treatment of some of the early feasibility work that did not meet MOD’s accounting policies. She blamed complex financial interfaces and some ineffective historic processes for the errors and stated that controls have now been strengthened.
Aneen Blackmore was appointed in June 2024 and Jeremy Pocklington in December 2025.
Transcription of Public Accounts Committee meeting 23 March 2026