Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the Written Statement of 20 March 2023, HCWS652 on Ajax Payments Update, what the total cost was of the user validations trials for the AJAX programme.

The User Validation Trials were bespoke trials to establish the effectiveness of the proposed Ajax modifications, conducted jointly with General Dynamics. General Dynamics bore all of their costs associated with this activity and the Ministry of Defence bore approximately £650,000 in costs for the preparation, execution and analysis of the independent monitoring and instrumentation necessary for these joint trials.