Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the annual budget was for the cadet expansion programme in each year since 2010.

Phase One of the Cadet Expansion Programme (CEP) was launched in June 2012 with a budget of £10.85M allocated jointly by the Department for Education (DfE) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD), each providing £8.35million and £2.5million respectively. Phase Two (CEP 500) commenced in July 2015, with the Government committing an extra £50million from LIBOR fines.

Phase Three began in 2020. The Secretary of State for Defence set an ambition to grow to 60,000 cadets in schools by 2024. This equated to an increase of approximately 4,000 more cadets over and above the levels of growth in numbers that had been forecast in CEP 500 applications from schools. DfE has contributed up to £1.1 million annually to CEP in England only. Ministry of Defence annual funding contributions are shown in the below table, and cover CEP across the UK.

Data is only available from the start of the CEP in 2012.