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Mr. Spellar: No, I will not give way.
I am able easily to move into the subject of recruitment. We are doing more to encourage young people to join the armed forces. We wish to make them a career of first choice, and we are doing well. We are also doing more to encourage personnel to stay, although we still have some way to go.
I have already mentioned the effects of high levels of operational commitment. There are pressures on families and family life as well as on individuals. We are determined to do what we can to ensure that family life does not suffer as a result of the demands that we place on the armed forces. When we were conducting surveys during the strategic defence review, service personnel told us that separation was a considerable problem.
Not only did we listen to what we were told, we took action. We have made improvements to the package of benefits that personnel receive while on operations. We have increased the telephone allowance twice, from three
to 20 minutes a week, so that personnel can better keep in touch with those at home. I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members will recall events in East Timor and Mozambique, where British forces were deployed rapidly and at short notice to lend assistance to the United Nations and to disaster relief efforts. In both instances, welfare lessons learned in the Balkans were put to good use. Specifically, we learned that getting the provision of welfare telephones right was crucial. We acknowledged that there were problems in the Balkans and we did something about them. We introduced Project Welcome, a new contact for the provision of welfare telephones.Project Welcome will ensure that personnel deployed on operations are able to keep in touch with their families back home. It is now working very well in the Balkans. It worked well in East Timor, and in Mozambique telephones were deployed with the lead elements of the force and were operational within 24 hours. However, in the Gulf region, where we have almost 1,500 personnel maintaining the northern and southern no-fly zones, we know that there have been some technical problems with the introduction of Project Welcome telephones. The speech quality of the original system was not good, and it was difficult for untrained personnel to use. These difficulties have been raised with us constructively by the Select Committee on Defence and by the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), and I thank those involved for so doing.
We have taken temporary measures to resolve the problems. For the longer term, we shall shortly be changing the communications system used in the Gulf region. We are determined to make Project Welcome work for our personnel. We are not in the business of making hollow promises. Instead, we are delivering.
We are alive to the potential of modern technology. As I have reported before to the House, we have trialled an electronic bluey, an electronic version of the traditional forces aerogramme, with forces deployed to the Balkans and the Falkland Islands. We provide internet terminals at units and family centres throughout the country so that as many people as possible can have access to it, and we have installed internet communications on Royal Navy ships. Carriers are taking up to 1,000 e-mail messages a week and destroyers and frigates are taking about 50 to 80, and that is on a rising trend. We have introduced guaranteed periods of post-operational tour leave so that personnel can be assured that they will be able to spend time with their families when they return from operations.
I am particularly proud of the achievements of the service families taskforce, which I lead. It is continuing to address and overcome problems faced by service families that fall outside the scope of the Ministry of Defence alone. Many of these problems have been drawn to our attention by the excellent work of the families federation, to which I pay tribute. The taskforce is truly an example of joined-up government in action. We have brought together Departments and Ministers across Whitehall to resolve difficulties that have previously been significant disincentives to service life.
I am grateful to ministerial colleagues for their help in resolving these issues. The taskforce began its work in the autumn of 1998, and in its 18 months of existence impressive results have been achieved.
For the first time, the code of practice on schools admissions now makes specific reference to service children. Service children's education is now represented
on new local authority admission forums in most areas where there are many service children, and local education authorities are now directed to be sensitive to the position of service children returning from abroad.I was pleased to announce during my recent visit to RAF Waddington that children of armed forces personnel are now exempt from the three-year residence requirement normally needed to qualify for student loans. That means that service children will no longer be disadvantaged by the fact that their parents are serving abroad.As a result of problems brought to light by the service families taskforce, the national health service has established 24 incentive schemes for dentists to take on more NHS patients in areas where there are many service personnel.
We identified the fact that service spouses were failing--through no fault of their own--to meet the criteria to allow them to claim jobseeker's allowance when they moved around the country. Working with the Department for Education and Employment and the Department of Social Security, we have therefore produced guidance to overcome that problem. We are also considering a number of other issues, such as how to help service children with special educational needs and, with the credit organisations, how to tackle the refusal of credit to service personnel. It is quite wrong that the men and women who serve their country should be denied--simply because we require them, as part of their duties, to move around more than the average, or to serve overseas--what so many of us take for granted.
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): Does the Minister not agree that one of the finest facilities for service children with special educational needs is provided at the school in the Cotswolds services centre in my constituency? Will he wish the centre his very best and assure it of its continued existence?
Mr. Spellar: The hon. Gentleman has been in correspondence with me about the centre. We face a difficulty, because that excellent facility, which provides a first-class service, is underused. We have to consider how we best provide the range of services offered by the centre, which is used by personnel for several different reasons. We have to decide whether the centre is the most effective way of providing those services. As he knows, we are in consultation on the future of the centre and we are considering how we can best proceed. We are considering whether it should be a service base and assessing whether the service should necessarily be provided from a particular centre. None of that in any way detracts from the excellent work that is undertaken by the staff there, but we have to consider whether the facility is the most effective way of providing a necessary range of services.
If anybody doubts the case for joined-up government, or its effectiveness in action, they need look no further than the service families taskforce to see the real benefits that it is bringing. However, I recognise that there is still work to be done. Enabling someone to be given credit for time already spent on an NHS waiting list on moving to a new area has to be balanced against the clinical needs of those already on the waiting list in the new area. Enabling the portability of child-minding registration--a matter that has been raised with us--has created understandable concerns about whether child safety might
be compromised. The taskforce is continuing to work on these and other problems, but their successful resolution will take a little time.Retaining our personnel remains an issue on which we need to do more. It is not easy, as we all recognise, to persuade people to stay in the armed forces once they have made the decision to go. We know that many of those who have left in recent times have done so not because they no longer wish to serve their country, but because they are no longer willing to put up with the pressure that their career places on their families. We must recognise that some of that pressure is inevitable; it goes with the job and it is not something we can change. However, we can do much and we can do more to mitigate the consequences. Of course, we do not want to lose people when we have made a considerable investment in time and money training and developing them and when they still have much to offer.
We have taken action to encourage people to serve longer. That action is not just for those deployed on operations; it also supports their families. We have already increased the allowances for separated service to acknowledge and reward those individuals who have experienced the greatest separation. Those who suffer more than 280 days paid separation in a two-year period will receive a £1,000 bonus, and those who are separated for more than 365 days will get £2,000. We have already reduced the qualifying periods for those allowances and, as part of this year's pay deal, increased the daily rates at which they are paid. For families, we have introduced improvements and greater flexibility in the concessionary travel scheme, so that families based overseas can have more choice of how they return to the UK; for instance, they can now use Eurostar.
For the longer term, we are looking at a number of ways to encourage people to serve longer. They range from addressing sources of irritation identified by services personnel themselves--such as accommodation--to considering the provision of incentives, financial and others, to continue a services career.
In the latter category, our learning forces initiative is providing recognised, highly sought-after skills and qualifications. We have also introduced targeted schemes. Currently, 3,500 personnel are in Kosovo and 3,300 are in Bosnia-Herzegovina--although the latter figure will drop to about 2,000 by the end of this year. As well as contributing to the maintenance of peace and stability and to the building of democracy in the region, we are enabling our personnel to train. In Croatia, the Army has established a theatre education centre in Split to provide education services to personnel deployed in the area. The RAF has installed IT-based learning facilities at stations and detachments in the Gulf, Italy and Bosnia. Last year, when I visited Cosford, many of the personnel who had used those facilities told me that they had found them extremely useful.
Our efforts do not stop there.
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