Royal Navy recruitment at its lowest since 2017

Royal Navy recruitment has dropped to its lowest number since 2017, a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed.

An FOI is a request to see specific information from any public authority, and the one in question looked at the numbers of other ranks being recruited into the Royal Navy, including Royal Marines, for the last six years.

This includes those who enter the non-commissioned basic training and the request revealed that from April 2022 to April 2023, 2,453 people were recruited to the Royal Navy.

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This represents a drop of more than 800 from the previous year - and the lowest it has been since 2017.

The Navy has been grappling with a shrinking workforce for a number of years and has identified recruitment and retention as an issue it needs to address.

In a statement, the Royal Navy said the figures "are for only for three months of the year, so cannot be directly compared with the previous year".

This means they "do not account for recruitment volume varying across the year", the Navy argued.

"The Navy is working in line with the MOD’s strategy refresh and Haythornthwaite people review in a range of areas to improve the career route for our people," a spokesperson said.

The Royal Navy also said they have already introduced strategies to improve their recruitment process and are working on ways to develop a candidate satisfaction survey.

The service also said the recommendations in the Haythornthwaite Review, an independent review of UK service personnel's terms and conditions, and the commitments made in the Defence Command Paper 23 would keep the military as an attractive employer.