Britain’s Defence Ministry has begun to improve the way it handles major procurement areas, but must still do more to keep costs and delays under control, parliament’s spending watchdog said on Thursday.

Lawmakers and state agencies have frequently criticised the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in recent years for letting costs and timelines on multi-million dollar programmes run out of control.

That criticism has grown more acute as Britain struggles to rein in a big budget deficit through state spending cuts that have squeezed voter incomes.

“In respect of its largest defence projects, there are early signs that the Ministry of Defence has begun to make realistic trade-offs between cost, time, technical requirements and the amount of equipment to be purchased,” the National Audit Office said in a statement on its latest report into MoD projects.

The report covers the ministry’s 16 largest projects, including A400M transport aircraft built by Airbus, Astute submarines and aircraft carriers built by BAE Systems , and the Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft programme.

The audit office said in the 2011/2012 budget year under a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition there had been a total slippage of 139 months in forecast delivery times, and a cost increase of 468 million pounds ($750 million).

That meant that, since the projects were approved, costs had increased by about 6.6 billion pounds, or 12 percent. Delays across the 16 projects totalled 468 months, the office said.

The MoD said the cost increase for the last year represented 0.8 percent of the 16 projects’ total value of 63 billion pounds, less than the rate of inflation for the year.