Examination of witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 1999
MR KEVIN
TEBBIT, MR
COLIN BALMER,
AIR MARSHAL
SIR JOHN
DAY and MR
JOHN HOWE
Mr Brazier
100. Gosh.
(Mr Tebbit) I am trying to be frank: I am sorry
it caused a great intake of breath there.
Chairman
101. We were taken by surprise.
(Mr Tebbit) This blinding insight of candid behaviour.
I can assure you, Chairman, I have not sought to evade at all,
I have tried to provide the Committee with as much information
as I possibly can.
Mr Blunt
102. Can you just tell us why that was the
case?
(Mr Tebbit) It was partly because the contractor
under-estimated how much engineering support he really needed
to put in and it was partly because we were not able to make available
as many aircraft as we should. That has now been remedied and
we expect to hit the 53 number by May 2001. The figures are going
up all the time. That has been successfully resolved and there
is enough engineering staff now to keep the aircraft flying. That
was one of the main problems. I give you those examples to show
there is a problem, we recognise it and we are taking remedial
action. The question of how much more pay——
Chairman
103. I am sorry to interrupt, I hope it
is not breaching the Official Secrets Act but who is the contractor?
(Mr Balmer) BRAMA, it is a consortium.
104. Who are they? Are they British, American,
European?
(Mr Balmer) The BR stands for Brown & Root.
I have forgotten who the other components are.
(Mr Tebbit) It has been resolved with the contractor
amicably.
Mr Blunt
105. Has the contractor paid damages to
the MoD?
(Mr Tebbit) We both needed to work together in
generating the right number of aircraft with the right amount
of support, it was not one-sided.
(Mr Balmer) The consortium is Brown & Root
and Marshall of Cambridge Aerospace Limited.
Chairman
106. Mr Tebbit, there is no reason why you
should be expected to answer every question we throw at you.
(Mr Tebbit) I do try, Chairman. I was stunned
and wounded by the implication that we do not try our best to
give you all the help that we can.
Mr Hancock: And you
were at the Foreign Office previously.
Mr Brazier: Hang on,
that was wounding.
Chairman
107. Only ten at a time, please.
(Mr Tebbit) I was about to say that we have been
looking at whether we need to offer retention bonuses and that
sort of issue. Where it becomes necessary we are ready to do so.
Clearly we seek to avoid that until it is necessary, these are
public funds. We are not leaping into that area but it is something
we have to keep under review.
Mr Hancock: When a
pilot signs up for fast jet training what commitment do you expect
from that pilot in service terms, time in the Air Force after
they have started that training? From the answers that I have
been given it would appear that some of these personnel leave
the Air Force very soon after.
Chairman: Mr Tebbit,
just before you answer that there are four or five questions on
pilot training, perhaps you could encompass all of these in your
document to us: the reasons for the pilot shortage, improvement
in the capacity of the Joint Elementary Flying Training School
and shortfalls in performance at RAF Valley.
Mr Colvin
108. And also, Chairman, the question of
the plans for the fast jet volunteer reservist pilots?
(Mr Tebbit) Chairman, I have explained as much
I could put in writing on those first three things. I have given
you full details because I asked for everything that I could give
you. If I may just finish on the Air Force side. I have mentioned
that we are trying to get people off desks and into the air if
they have flying qualifications. We are developing ways of recruiting
more people from the non-graduate pool to maximise return of service
as junior officer pilots. We are seeking to improve retention
by offering extensions of service wherever possible, by working
very hard with the individuals concerned, by looking at the remuneration
package overall, as I say it is something we keep under review,
and by looking at improving training throughput, as I have described,
with these various measures at these three places.
Mr Brazier
109. And volunteer reservists?
(Mr Tebbit) We are also looking for a fast-track
commissioning scheme for warrant officers, and the first competition
for that was in October 1998 so that they become, as it were,
master aircrew. There is a lot of interest in that and we are
hoping that also improves retention.
Mr Colvin
110. And volunteer reservists?
(Mr Tebbit) I will send you a note.
Chairman: I was hoping
to say that history had been changed in that our colleague, Mr
Brazier, had gone for a whole session without asking a question
on reserves and I am afraid that history has not been changed.
Mr Brazier: We have
to find a wider method of tackling the problem.
Laura Moffatt
111. I wonder, gentlemen, if I could ask
you to look at page 17 and table 4.4 there please because I want
to explore the targets that are set for recruitment of people
from different backgrounds into the Services. Firstly, there was
one thing I could not quite understand which is that you have
spoken today very much about looking at all that the Services
do together and most of the things that you have mentioned today
are that we are moving towards tri-Service agreements, but there
are different targets for the different Services there and I wonder
if you could first explain that to me.
(Mr Tebbit) Well, I think that when it comes to
recruiting, the most effective recruiting method is still by the
individual Services. People join the Services; they do not join
a purple organisation or a tri-Service organisation, but they
join the Army, the Air Force or the Navy and the recruiting effort
is geared on that basis and to come back, as it were, to Mr Brazier
who is no longer with us, I think he would understand why that
is probably the best method. There are different targets reflecting
really different requirements and expectations of what can be
achieved. They are challenges, but set as realistic challenges.
112. What do you mean by requirements and
expectations?
(Mr Tebbit) Of what can be achieved by the Service
concerned.
113. So you would not expect one Service
to be able to recruit as many people from differing backgrounds
as another, but why would that be?
(Mr Tebbit) No, I would not necessarily think
that, but the Army has been quite successful in achieving what
is, I agree, a very modest figure. We would indeed have hoped
to have improved on that. I am sorry, but I see the targets are
actually the same, but the actual performance is slightly different
between the three Services. We are aiming to get up to 5 per cent.
114. Not here. The target here for the Navy
is 1.9, the Army is 1.2 and the Air Force is 1.5.
(Mr Tebbit) That is the performance.
(Mr Balmer) That was the target for 1997/98 and
we changed it for 1998/99.
(Mr Tebbit) It is 2 per cent for this year.
115. That is not what this says.
(Mr Tebbit) I am sorry, but——
(Mr Balmer) This only covers 1996/97 and 1997/98.
116. Yes, this is all I am dealing with,
1996/97 and 1997/98.
(Mr Tebbit) When I said this year, I meant this
current year, but those are the targets for those years which
are differentiated. They no longer are and it is now 2 per cent,
3 per cent, 4 per cent, 5 per cent year on year, so we are trying
to lift it up as we go, so we are getting closer to the overall
proportion of 6 per cent in society as a whole.
117. There is something else that slightly
worried me. If we look at the performance of the Royal Air Force,
from 1996/97 to 1997/98, although the target was 1.8 and they
reached that target in 1996/97, sadly the achievement was just
1.3. What do you think happened there? Even though there were
modest improvements in the other two Services, I am quite sad
to see still in those sorts of figures just 0.9 for the Naval
Service, but a reasonable increase for the Army, so what happened
there in the Royal Air Force?
(Mr Tebbit) I cannot say precisely what happened.
I can say that this year currently up to the end of November,
they are up to 1.6 per cent, so they are coming up again now and
it is a small increase, but these are very small numbers. Last
year the RAF spent quite a lot of money on advertising and were
involved in 160 specific ethnic minority events in order to try
to increase the interest in this. This is an area which is terribly
important to us, not because it is politically correct, but because
it is a fundamental part of our recruiting drive. In terms of
age group, from 16 to 24, particularly males, in inner London
it forms something like 25 per cent of the actual group we are
trying to target, and nationally I think it is about 12 per cent,
so this becomes a very important area and also we are trying to
build armed forces which are more representative of the society
which they serve rather than a race apart, so these are very important
areas for us. It is quite difficult to get people in general interested
in joining the armed forces and it requires a big effort, but
even more so in the case of ethnic minorities. We are doing a
lot of work on equal opportunities to, as it were, rule out and
combat any hint of racism or intolerance within the forces themselves,
a zero tolerance policy, but we are also pushing forward with
major events. We have just held our first conference last November
on this very issue with Colin Powell from the United States, as
you know, giving us the lead speech and we have opened, for example,
a tri-Service centre at Shrivenham on equal opportunities training
for everybody of one star and above, so we are doing a lot in
this area and it is very important to us and we are going to persevere
and work hard.
118. I know it is very difficult in what
is a reasonably small document to try and put all the information
that we need, but maybe there is a wee lesson here about the reporting
of equal opportunities and how we go forward and action taken.
Perhaps I would be looking for something a little more in-depth
next time to give an explanation of that because if it is that
important to you, it needs to be recorded and if you need to be
pleased with yourselves, you need to say it, do you not?
(Mr Tebbit) Yes. If I may take this opportunity,
both the CDS and I are trying to lead this from the top and we
have both accepted the Commission for Racial Equality's leadership
challenge which requires us to take practical steps in our organisations
to push it forward and to make the Services seem a less unwelcoming
place for people from the minorities. As I say, at the moment
we have only got around 1 per cent essentially of the armed forces
being from ethnic minorities and in the Ministry of Defence itself
it is only about 1.5 and that is not good enough, so we, as I
say, have a major programme involving sending forces out into
particular target areas, Brixton and parts of the Midlands, meetings,
workshops, seminars with the gatekeepers, as it were, those people
in the communities who are trusted by young people and who are
prepared to listen to what we are trying to achieve. As I say,
that is a major effort across the board. At the moment I have
to say it is very expensive and it costs about seven times as
much at the moment in recruiting effort. That does not mean to
say we should not be doing it, but it means we have got to do
a lot better to bring those costs down.
Chairman: I really
welcome that. If you want to find a classic example of the dangers
of the Ministry of Defence not disclosing information, just look
at some of the reports our Committee produced in the 1980s and
early 1990s where the Ministry of Defence was not as open and
as concerned and as proactive as they are at the present time
and I think there has been very substantial progress on the issue
of attracting ethnic minorities partly because of what we have
been saying, the Select Committee on the Armed Forces Bill and
the realisation in the Ministry of Defence that they had got the
policy appallingly wrong in the past.
Mr Cohen
119. Can I draw your attention to page 30,
and actually I have got two sets of questions, the first one being
on the slippage of just under two months. Can you say firstly
what is the average time for such contracts to compare that against
that slippage so that we can get some sort of indication in that
respect?
(Mr Tebbit) The total time it takes on average
to bring equipment into service?
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