UK's £1.2bn bill for drone that's seen 146 hours of active duty

Revealed: Watchkeeper surveillance drones commissioned in 2005 have only completed six days of active duty in total after a decade in development

A British army drone developed as an affordable solution is four years late and expected to cost 1.2bn to become fully operational, an investigation has found.

The order to design and build 54 Watchkeeper surveillance drones was announced by the then defence secretary John Reid in 2005, who said they would be "key to battlefield surveillance of the future". He signed off on costs of about 800m, with the contract going to a consortium led by the French defence firm Thales.