War Office: Army Estimates

These records concern the forecasts of army expenditure presented annually to Parliament by the War Office and upon which Parliament based its award of funding for the regular army in the coming year.

Eight of the twelve years covered by WO 112/1-20 are represented by two copies of the parliamentary paper. In these instances one copy is interleaved with the appropriate Treasury Blue Note and the other is interleaved with pages for manuscript notes and has the Blue Note gathered together at the end of the volume. The manuscript notes were intended for use in the preparation of the following year's estimates. The remaining four years are represented by single copies of the relevant parliamentary paper, two of which exhibit one form of interleaving and two the other.

In WO 112/21-25 and 27-43 the volumes into which the parliamentary papers are bound bear the title 'Army estimates - signed copies and submission letters to Treasury'. This refers to the signatures of members of the Army Council on each parliamentary paper and to the inclusion of correspondence between the War Office and the Treasury. No estimates were issued for the war years 1940-1945.

For parliamentary papers on army estimates for periods not covered by this series see ZHC 1

Topics

Army

Armed Forces (General Administration)

The estimates of army expenditure were prepared by a committee of the House of Commons until 1783, when an act of Parliament made them the responsibility of the Secretary-at-War. Once prepared, the estimates were laid before Parliament in the form of a parliamentary paper, within which the various votes (areas of expenditure) were treated separately.

These forecasts bore the title 'Army estimates of effective and non-effective services' until 1936, whereafter they became simply 'Army Estimates'. The 'Army Estimates' were superseded in 1964 by the tri-service 'Defence Estimates'.