The Ministry of Defence has halted all trials of the Army’s Ajax armoured vehicles after a soldier suffered vibration-related injuries earlier this month.
Use of the vehicles was suspended for training and exercising purposes last month after 30 service personnel reported noise and vibration symptoms during a training exercise.
At the time, defence minister Luke Pollard ordered an investigation into 23 Ajax vehicles involved in the exercise, but did not ban trials for the much-delayed £6.3bn programme, which aims to deliver 589 of the fighting vehicles in six variants.
The programme, which is being led by aerospace and defence firm General Dynamics, launched in 2014, with the vehicles originally scheduled for delivery in 2017. However, noise and vibration problems have dogged the project.
A revised schedule for the programme was announced in March 2023. That involved the first vehicles coming into operation this year, with full operating capability to be achieved by September 2029.
In a statement to parliament yesterday, Pollard said the latest Ajax incident had occurred at the Bovington training area in Dorset on 12 December as part of a reliability growth trial.
“The individual did not require hospitalisation and is being provided the appropriate medical support," Pollard said.
He added: “This additional report of an injury is a serious concern to me so, out of an abundance of caution, and to ensure the safety of our personnel, I have directed a pause on all Ajax trials. This is in addition to the ongoing pause for training and exercising.
“The pause to the trials will allow time for the individual’s symptoms to be investigated and for the vehicle to be thoroughly inspected. In the New Year, I will assess if trials can be restarted.”
The minister said that the vehicle involved on 12 December was not one of the 23 vehicles in use for the training exercise last month. He said it had been “immediately removed” from trials and would undergo a thorough investigation.
All of the vehicles involved in the November exercise have been given a 45-point inspection. Tests for noise and vibration issues are ongoing.
Pollard said: “Findings from the investigations into Ajax will be closely aligned to decisions in the Defence Investment Plan”.
The Defence Investment Plan had been expected this autumn, but will now not be published until next year.
It is supposed to set out detail on funding for equipment over the next decade, information that was not in this year’s Strategic Defence Review.
Some reports have suggested that scrapping Ajax could be an option in the plan.
In June 2023, an independent lessons-learned review into the Ajax programme said “fractious” relationships beteen different MoD agencies had contributed to the project’s problems.
Barrister Clive Sheldon, who led the review, said “friction” was most clearly seen in relations between Defence Equipment and Support, the delivery agent for the equipment side of the project, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
“Although Dstl’s subject-matter experts were well regarded, the technical and safety concerns they raised were often not resolved to their satisfaction,” he said.
Other issues identified in the review included an unhelpful focus on keeping to initial delivery targets. Sheldon said compromise on safety issues, with vehicle trials continuing despite noise and vibration concerns, had been one result.
The review was commissioned in May 2022, following a damning health and safety report and a scathing report by the National Audit Office.