A devastating report into the deaths of 14 British servicemen today found that the Ministry of Defence had sacrificed safety in order to meet budget cuts resulting in the “preventable” crash of an RAF Nimrod aircraft.

Charles Haddon-Cave, QC, said that the Government had failed to meet its obligations to service personnel in “a systemic breach of the military covenant”.

The Nimrod spy plane exploded in mid-air near Kandahar in 2006, causing the biggest single loss of life for UK forces since the Falklands War.

Mr Haddon-Cave today published the findings of his 22-month review into the accident concluding that failures in MoD leadership had allowed business priorities to eclipse air worthiness.

He said that financial cuts in the wake of the 1998 strategic defence review had resulted in a “cascade” of organisation changes which had led to “a dilution of the airworthiness regime and culture with the MoD”.

Mr Haddon-Cave said that BAE Systems and QinetiQ should share the blame for the accident after a “lamentable” safety review of the ageing Nimrod MR2 job, which failed to identify “key dangers”.

“Its production is a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism. The best opportunity to prevent the accident to XV230 was tragically lost,” he said.

The first two phases of the review were “poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly executed”, work was rushed and corners were cut, he said. The inquiry found that the safety report was “riddled with errors” and “fatally undermined” by a “general malaise”, that led to an assumption that the Nimrod was safe because it had flown successfully for 30 years.

Mr Haddon-Cave, a leading aviation lawyer, accused BAE Systems of failing “deliberately” to explain the extent of checks not made by the company. “Throughout my review BAE Systems has been a company in denial,” he said.

He said its behaviour raised question marks about the “prevailing ethical culture” at the company.

QinetiQ, the company employed as an independent auditor of the safety case, should also share responsibility for the accident, he said. “QinetiQ’s approach was fundamentally lax and compliant."

Ten individuals were criticised in the report, five from the MoD, three from BAE Systems and two from QinetiQ.

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