Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 1999
MR KEVIN
TEBBIT, MR
COLIN BALMER,
AIR MARSHAL
SIR JOHN
DAY and MR
JOHN HOWE
80. So the main problem areas then are the
Army officers and men and certain key categories of airmen, particularly
aircrew?
(Mr Tebbit) Yes, that is the main problem.
81. You were going very helpfully to outline
some of the plans you have for tackling this.
(Mr Tebbit) Well, one of them is the Forces Learning
Initiative which is something that we are attaching a great deal
of importance to whereby people in all areas of the forces can
make a commitment when they join to contribute a certain amount
of money to further education, acquiring skills of a nationally
recognised standard, not just, as it were, in-service, and that
will be more than matched by money from the MoD, put into a scheme
to actually counter the problem that one faces that a soldier
stays in for two years and his mates say, "This is dead end.
You need to get out because you need to get a skill, a job, a
qualification", so if you can get that in-service, we believe
that should be a major inducement to retention. It is something
the Americans have pioneered really and done very well at and
it has been borrowed in a way from their success.
82. I am strongly in favour of this and
put a long submission on it to the Bett Report in fact which he
was kind enough to pick up in his report. Could I just ask you
on this, will the new Tri-Service Staff College have full academic
recognition in the way that the old Naval Staff College and indeed
Dartmouth had academic recognition in the past in the way, for
example, the Army equivalents did not?
(Mr Tebbit) We are certainly aiming to achieve
that, you are quite right. That is the objective. I do not know
whether I can give you more detail than that at the moment other
than to say that is the objective, but I will certainly try to.
Chairman
83. Paper number six, Mr Tebbit.
(Mr Tebbit) You are enjoying this, are you not?
Chairman: Absolutely!
Mr Brazier
84. If we could actually have a note on
that, I would be very grateful, on the academic recognition for
the College. We have a rather distinguished academic as a Chairman,
as you probably know. So that is obviously top of the list and
quite rightly top of the list, but what other areas?
(Mr Tebbit) Length of engagement and career structures.
We are looking at, encouraging soldiers to sign on for four years
rather than three, encouraging 22-year serving men, warrant officers
and that sort of thing to be able to remain if they wish, to stay
on longer. We are looking at the financial retention incentives
in areas of critical shortage, and we are still looking at that,
so I have not got any details to give you at this stage, but,
as I say, the warrant officer and NCO retention issue going beyond
the 22-year point is something we are putting quite a lot of effort
into. There will be another major retention study this year because
we really need to find out as much as we possibly can about why
people leave. We think we know, but we want to look harder at
that. That is for the soldiers. For the officers, we are reviewing
and we have implemented new commissioning structures for regular
officers and late entry from the ranks. We are seeking to improve
career management generally and increasing educational opportunities.
Sometimes I wonder whether we do too much training in the armed
forces, particularly of our officers, but I do not think this
is that sort of area. This is about the educational opportunities
which will encourage people to feel that they have got portable
skills and do not have to rush off rather than——
85. A lot of that is about accreditation
rather than extra hours, is it not? We have always been rather
behind the Americans in terms of giving civilian accreditation
for military courses.
(Mr Tebbit) That is right and one of the sort
of bits of joined-up government which is relevant to the Ministry
of Defence. This popular phrase at present is linking up much
more firmly with the Department for Education in trying to develop
and raise skills, as it were, across the board because it is good
for the Services and service retention and it is good for the
national stock of training and education.
86. And I hope the Department of Health
on the medical side as well.
(Mr Tebbit) Indeed.
87. Because that is a total failure of the
finance, which is the favourite subject of this Committee.
(Mr Tebbit) That is not just rhetoric, but we
actually sit down with the Department for Education and Employment
and really get down to the details of what schemes we can bring
forward.
88. Just one more on that before I go on
to my other question. Families, will you be looking at retention
in the context of Service families and will you be doing it in
a single-Service context or a tri-Service context?
(Mr Tebbit) Well, we are doing certainly a lot
more for families. The people policy, so-called, in the SDR attaches
a lot of importance to that. There is an objective which is quite
hard to achieve in the Army, easier in the other two Services,
of trying ideally to leave families for five years in the same
place, not easy for moving with the regiment, as it were, but,
nevertheless a goal we aspire to because one of our concerns is
that there is too much disruption for dependants and where we
can square that with operational requirements, we are seeking
to do so. Then there is more help with resettlement and we have
even got a Veterans' Advice Unit which we have set up as a one-stop-shop
for people leaving to be able to find out about what is around
and indeed to keep in touch.
89. Just to go back to the families for
a second, you have mentioned this objective within the Army and
you have been very frank, but you did not quite answer my point
as to whether you are looking at the families in a single-Service
or tri-Service context.
(Mr Tebbit) Well, we are actually trying to look
at everything more in a tri-Service context, not in order to try
to amalgamate things for the sake of it or to undermine single-Service
ethos and morale, but to try to see whether there are generally
applicable principles which by pulling them together we can actually
target better and operate them systematically.
90. That is exactly where the MoD has gone
wrong for the last 15 years, that there is no general principle
between a service, for example, which is based almost entirely
in the two bases in one corner of England and one that is dispersed
over a very, very large number of sites within the UK and outside
and your five-year goal is unworkable. If you look at the dispersion
of REME, for example, they have a little group in almost every
base that the Army is in and it is impossible to achieve at least
for officers the five-year rule, so it actually is better to say,
"Let's give up on the overarching principles and let's see
if we can find ways of making mobility tolerable for the Army".
(Mr Tebbit) I think we have to do both things
because there is a degree of coming together and there is less
dispersal than there was. I absolutely take your point that where
there are service-specific issues, we have to address them in
a specific way. Equally, there are codes of conduct, general standards
which are universal and certainly apply to all three Services
which often are dealt with separately and which can be brought
together. I think we need harmonisation at the policy level, but
recognition of differences at the operational level.
91. At the family level we are talking about,
a recognition of differences at the family level between a mobile
lifestyle and a static one.
(Mr Tebbit) Yes, but, as I say, even the Army
is aspiring to try to give people more stability than they have
at present in their family life.
Mr Brazier: Can I
bring us on briefly to a separate issue, the question of civilian
recruitment. Why has DERA been excluded apparently from your civilian
recruitment numbers?
Chairman
92. Table 4.6.
(Mr Tebbit) I think it is probably because it
is a trading fund and is not vote-funded. I suspect that would
be the reason why it is not in there because, as I say, it funds
itself in a different way. We have three agencies of that kind.
The Met. Office is another and the Hydrographic Office is the
other.
Mr Brazier
93. Worthy and important as those other
two organisations are, DERA is obviously absolutely pivotal to
procurement for our future weapons programmes and I hope some
other way will be found of letting us have the figures on that.
(Mr Tebbit) DERA has a very good report of its
own, in fact. As you say, it is a £1.2 billion organisation
and I was not trying to, as it were, hide it under a bushel, but
I think that is why the figures are not aggregated with our own,
that they have their own recruitment policies, their own reward
structures, their own pay structures and, therefore, do operate
separately.
Chairman
94. You can anticipate my next statement.
Number seven, please. We have heard a little whisper that perhaps
the figure was excluded because the turnover in DERA has been
rather higher. In your paper number seven you really have to totally
disprove that malicious allegation I am passing on to you. We
now move on to Mr Colvin.
(Mr Tebbit) I see no malice in even your little
finger, Chairman.
Mr Colvin
95. To pick up specifically on one personnel
issue, which is RAF pilots, I think this illustrates the fact
that the Performance Report in some respects raises more questions
than it actually answers. Sections 404 and 405 refer to the difficulty
the RAF is experiencing in recruiting some technical trades. Without
specifying the numbers in each of the categories it refers to
the problems of maintaining air crew sustainability, the RAF is
alive to competing demands for pilots and all that. We have been
talking about the deliveries of Eurofighter but we do not even
know whether we are going to have the pilots to fly them. Can
you be more specific about pilot shortages in particular. What
are the reasons for the pilot shortages, how great are they, and
what is being done to overcome the problem?
(Mr Tebbit) Certainly you are right that the RAF
does face a shortfall in pilots, partly because of the airlines
which are recruiting vigorously, and that is being addressed by
the RAF as one of their highest priorities.
96. Can you give us some numbers?
(Mr Tebbit) In terms of numbers I am not sure
whether I have precise figures for you. Certainly the output has
been lower than we hoped at Valley, one of the things mentioned
in the Report on fast jet pilot training, but we have taken action
to improve that. At the moment we are below our output target
of trained pilots there. That was one of the areas referred to
in the Report. At the moment the deficit is one which I would
not like to give you a formal figure for although it is very small
on fast jet pilots. The important thing is to stop it deteriorating,
that is the real issue. Many European air forces have already
hit the problem of unsustainability with loss there. We are putting
in place means of trying to increase the throughput of trained
pilots and to keep them in their careers. One of the things we
are looking at is to increase the proportion of time that trained
pilots spend in flying appointments rather than at desk jobs.
We found that far too many of them are sitting at desks rather
than up in the air. We have a project called Link Up, I do not
know if you want to mention anything about that, Air Marshal?
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) I know nothing about
it.
(Mr Tebbit) Which is designed to increase retention
of pilots. We are thinking of looking at joining the NATO Flying
Training in Canada Scheme which will enable us to speed up the
throughput of trained pilots. As I say we have run into problems
at Valley in that we are only achieving about 60 per cent of our
throughput for pilot training. That is now getting better but
we are also looking at doing it in Canada.
Mr Hancock
97. In answer to a recent parliamentary
question to me you said that you are losing pilots quicker than
you can train them.
(Mr Tebbit) Yes.
Mr Hancock: The Minister
said in a defence debate that the RAF had schemes for retaining
these pilots. I would be interested to know, because he could
not tell us, what the plans are to retain them.
Mr Colvin
98. When you answer that can you also bring
us up to date on the plans that we heard for the fast jet volunteer
reservist pilots. Is that still a proposal that is going to be
followed through?
(Mr Tebbit) Let me be more specific. The paper
referred to some problems with the Helicopter Flying School and
those have been resolved. That was to do with difficulties in
getting the Sea King training through. That was resolved by the
contractor in May 1998 and the Helicopter Flying School is now
working properly, so the throughput is good there. The second
problem was that the Elementary Flying Training School had limitations
of airfield capacity. We have solved that by transferring some
of the squadron to RAF Church Fenton so we now have two airfields
working, Barkston Heath and Church Fenton, which is again improving
throughput.
99. It is still tri-service? Making it tri-service
was a good idea, was it?
(Mr Tebbit) Yes, I do not think that is a problem
at all. Thirdly, the fast jet pilot training was going not as
well as it should have at Valley. Last year the output was 32
when it should have been 53.
|
