Most would-be military recruits drop out because it takes so long to sign up

Three quarters of would-be recruits drop out of the military’s application process because it takes too long, government figures have revealed.

While just over one million people applied to join either the Royal Air Force (RAF), Navy or Army since 2014, three in four gave up on the process of joining, resulting in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) signing up just over 132,000 people and rejecting almost 170,000.

In the past year alone, the MoD signed up fewer than one in 10 of the 137,000 people who applied to serve in the Armed Forces, according to figures unveiled by Labour.

It comes as a recruitment crisis is threatening to engulf the military. Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed the Navy has so few sailors it has had to decommission ships to staff its new fleet of frigates, while employment for both the RAF and Army has also fallen.

In the past 10 years, 83 per cent of the 707,000 people who applied to join the Army voluntarily withdrew their application, and fewer than 80,000 were recruited, as first reported by The Times.

For the same period, 71 per cent of the 197,000 people who applied to join the Navy voluntarily withdrew their application, with less than 32,000 recruited, while 46 per cent of the 225,000 people who applied to join the RAF voluntarily withdrew their application.

‘Government’s total failure’

For the Army, 8,423 of the 54,128 people who withdrew their applications had waited at least six months before doing so.

John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said the figures “lay bare the Government’s total failure in Armed Forces recruitment”.

“Hundreds of thousands of people willing to serve and defend their country have simply given up on their ambitions, while ministers have failed to get to grips with the problems,” he said.

“The Conservatives have presided over 14 years of failure in defence – missing their recruitment targets every year, hollowing out our Armed Forces, and reducing the British Army to its smallest size since Napoleon.”

Recent suggestions put to Parliament by Capita, the outsourcing giant in charge of recruitment for the Army, on how to solve the recruitment crisis included allowing the employment of soldiers with a record of asthma, hayfever and visible tattoos.

The Army is also considering overturning a 100-year-old beard ban to attract more recruits.

Grant Shapps, the Defence Minister, has been critical of the military’s poor recruitment figures, saying candidates were often rejected for “ludicrous reasons”.

‘It is time to move on’

On a visit to see troops in Poland last week, Mr Shapps told reporters: “We have got to have a far, far more sensible approach to this. Who cares if somebody has got a beard? Does that really mean you cannot fight, come on? We are living in the 21st century. It is time to move on.

“The main thing we’ve got to do is ensure we don’t put barriers in people’s way. In this Amazon world, if you are a youngster applying for one of our Armed Forces and actually getting into it takes six, 12, 18 months… you may have moved on to the next big thing by then.”

The MoD insisted recruitment and retention were priorities, adding that new measures have been put in place to respond to the challenge.

An MoD spokesman said: “While it does take time to recruit the right people to the military, we have sped up Army recruitment by 9 per cent in the last year and the vast majority of time it takes for a regular soldier to join is less than 140 days. We are also seeing positive results in recruitment, with January having the highest number of Army regular soldier applications in over six years.”