The Department continually fails to learn from its mistakes. The Department has been delivering equipment programmes for decades and has overseen many expensive failures. There have been at least 13 formal reviews of defence procurement policy over the last 35 years which have provided the Department with opportunities to take stock and learn from experience. We were therefore shocked to learn that the Department had only established a central register of learning from experience (LFE) in December 2020. Experience shows that there is a need for reflection and openness earlier in the process to avoid further catastrophes like Ajax. This does not convince us that the Department aspires to achieve a radical step-change in performance. We are encouraged by the Department’s Strategic Partnering Programme (SPP) initiative launched in 2018 to transform its relationships with industry. We recognise its strategic intent, but are disappointed with its lack of ambition in forecasting only £160 million in savings over the next ten years—less than 0.1% of its forecast Equipment Plan spend. The Department told us that it Improving the performance of major defence equipment contracts 7 expects efficiencies to amount to hundreds of millions of pounds as the programme matures, but until it develops scalable plans and can clearly attribute improvements to its interventions, it is cautious about the scale of potential success. Recommendation: The Department should provide the committee with a clear plan on how it will draw on LFE and how its SPP and associated initiatives will generate the level of savings that would be expected from work that is intended to transform the procurement of hundreds of billions of pounds of equipment.