Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 12 JANUARY 2000 (Morning)
MR COLIN
BALMER, MAJOR
GENERAL JOHN
KISZELY AND
MR TREVOR
WOOLLEY
340. Sadly we know that recruitment and retention
has been an uphill struggle no matter what efforts have been made
and it is a situation that is worsening. We know that to recruit
3,000 people into the Armed Forces costs about £100 million.
We can safely assume that to try and catch up on the shortfall
of people that we would like to see in the Armed Forces it would
cost about the same. This is an area where there has been some
under-spend. Why can we not use some of that money to increase
recruitment and retention levels and to expand some of the schemes
that we now know have been announced that do affect a relatively
small number of people within the Armed Forces?
(Mr Balmer) The first point to make is that I think
the growth in the number of people employed in the Armed Forces
which we anticipated in the Strategic Defence Review made some
assumptions about the number of people who have been recruited
and the number of people who would leave and the balance. When
we started in 1998 we knew we could not solve that problem overnight,
we would have to close the gap over a period and the period for
each Service varies. In the case of the Army, it is not until
2004/05 that we can expect to achieve full manning and we plan
the growth from the current level of under-manning of 8,500 up
to full manning over that period. So we set our budget on the
assumption we would employ the number of people growing in that
way. So while we are on that growth path there is no under-spending.
It is not as much as full manning would have cost, but we did
not expect to have full manning, therefore we did not make provision
for that and the budget which emerged from the Defence Review
was enough to employ the people we actually expected to employ,
so there is not an under-spend to be had. You are quite right
to say that the 8,500 people missing today from the Army total
would indeed cost us a lot of money if they were employed, there
would indeed be a couple of hundred million pounds worth of extra
expenditure, but we are not incurring that, we did not expect
to incur it and we did not have it in our budget, therefore we
are not under-spending it[6].
341. Much of what we have been discussing today
centres around over-stretch and it is a major difficulty. Why
has this programme not been accelerated? Many of us would consider
2004/05 a long way away and we are wondering how our Armed Forces
can manage to keep going until then. Why has this area not been
targeted as one of these areas where we use some of that under-spend?
(Mr Balmer) It is being targeted. We share the concern
about that shortfall in manpower because it does indeed lead to
the over-stretch that is bothering this Committee and it bothers
us equally. There are two broad measures of attack to reduce the
over-stretch while we are short of people. The first is to draw
down on the commitments. It is worth noting that the troop levels
particularly in the Balkans now are a lot less than they were
at the peak of activity. Earlier last year we had over 10,000
people in Kosovo and we are now down to 3,800. The plan is to
reduce some more. The first effect is to get people away from
their deployments so that the burden of over-stretch falls less
heavily on the people and their families, but we also need to
do all we can to close the gap in numbers. Recruiting is actually
buoyant. We are recruiting many more people this year than last
year, nearly ten per cent more.[7]
So at the moment recruiting is going quite well. We are continuing
to have advertising campaigns and the Navy have been running a
campaign on television in recent weeks. The Army have a major
programme for attracting recruits to the extent that the initial
training establishments are getting quite close to capacity, but
nonetheless we are doing all we can to increase recruiting and
we are certainly not putting any budgetary constraint on the number
of recruits who can be attracted and put into the training machine.
The problem area that remains is we are not retaining enough people.
A year or so ago we were losing more than we were attracting.
That has turned round. We are now increasing in net terms, but
the rate of increase is not good enough and we need to accelerate
it. In addition to reducing the burden on people we have targeted
other measures. We have increased the telephone allowance twice
for people on deployed operations. The Secretary of State announced
before Christmas changes to the longer separated service allowances
and the related longer service at sea bonus for the Navy and there
are some other measures we are looking at to find ways in which
we can bolster retention, which is the key target we are looking
at.
342. I know that when this Committee has been
on its travels—and we have travelled extensively recently
to places where our Armed Forces are—it has noticed that
it is the older, more experienced people who are really feeling
the pinch. If there are under-spent monies that could support
people like that to remain in our forces then it is vital that
we do so. The next point I want to talk about is the feasibility
study on the call out for our TA people. I know that has been
going on. How is it going? What is happening with it?
(Mr Balmer) We are still examining what the arrangements
would need to be to ensure that we had used the TA in all the
ways we intend to use it. As the Committee knows, during the Defence
Review we took the view that we could rely on a smaller total
number for the TA and I know the Committee had a different view
of that, but our view was that the important thing was to be able
to rely on particular specialities in the TA, a lot of whom have
been already deployed in the Balkans and particularly Bosnia and
Kosovo over the last year. The idea that we might want to call
out larger numbers of the TA and conceivably do these things compulsorily
are issues we are still addressing.
(Major General Kiszely) The TA was restructured on
1st July last year. It is on course to achieve its operational
readiness by 1st April this year. That is no mean achievement.
As Mr Balmer says, it is being restructured to make it more useable
and more relevant with a worthwhile operational role.
343. Have you a rough idea of what the cost
of this compulsory call out would be? Have you done an assessment
of that?
(Mr Balmer) The cost of calling out any member of
the TA depends entirely on who you call because once they have
been called out they attract normal rates of pay. So it depends
absolutely on their rank, their length of service and their specialism.
It is quite difficult to produce a set of costs without addressing
a particular group of people.
344. We tend to know who they are because we
do know that 40 per cent of reserve forces in the Balkans were
actually infantry and they are the particular group of people
that took a big hit in the SDR, which is something we were complaining
bitterly about. It is quite possible, is it not, to know the sorts
of people you are going to need in the cost assessment?
(Mr Balmer) The majority of those members of the TA
who have been used in the Balkans are in specialist areas, which
is what we expected. The total numbers are still comparatively
small and it is still our judgment that a TA of the size that
emerged from the Strategic Defence Review will be adequate for
the sorts of purposes we think we might need, forces at that level
of notice. It is no longer our perception that large numbers of
formed units of infantry is the most likely way in which we would
use the TA and that is why the SDR decision was taken to rein
back in those areas particularly the infantry.
345. Remaining with the issue of making assessments
about the future, this is really a political question for the
Secretary of State and no doubt it will be asked at that point.
I need to ask you about any work that has been done on the peace
dividend from Northern Ireland with the setting up of the Assembly.
What stage are you at in assessing how much money can be saved
from the hopefully peaceful progress made in Northern Ireland?
(Mr Balmer) At this stage no decisions have been taken
that would significantly change the force levels in Northern Ireland.
If such a decision were taken and the numbers were reduced, we
would then have to decide what we did with those troops, whether
it would lead to a reduction in the size of the Army or would
we re-deploy those units elsewhere. That is the sort of judgement
that is rather critical to deciding whether and how much money
one might save from that and at this stage we have not conducted
any detailed analysis.
Chairman
346. Has the Treasury done any detailed analysis
of it?
(Mr Balmer) If we have not conducted it the Treasury
would not have any figures because they have to rely on our assessments
and as yet we have not attempted to produce any detailed figure
work. It is always possible to produce some broad assessments
of what a particular change in the force might mean and during
the Defence Review we had to look quite hard at an assumption
about force levels in Northern Ireland because of the effect it
has on the number of infantry battalions we need in the whole
of the Army.
Mr Gapes
347. We are talking here about several thousand
people, are we not? At one time we had 20,000 British military
personnel in Northern Ireland and it has been at levels of about
12,000. There has been press speculation that the figure could
go down to as low as 3,000. You mentioned the 3,000 figure for
Kosovo. The population of Kosovo and the population of Northern
Ireland are pretty comparable. It would be about 6,000, 7,000
or 10,000 people who would be available to fill the gaps and do
the other jobs that are increasingly needed for our Armed Forces.
(Mr Balmer) I do not think it works quite that way
in that what we have in Northern Ireland are formed units and
if we were to reduce force levels it would be formed units that
would be withdrawn and who would not necessarily be easily deployable
elsewhere. It might indeed help around the margins to be able
to post people to top up other units on deployment, but generally
speaking the bulk of the troops in Northern Ireland are in the
formed units.
348. Those forces would still be available,
though. If they were withdrawn from Northern Ireland and the same
people have done tours of duty in Germany or they have been in
Cyprus or wherever, then from time to time they will have then
been available to relieve the pressure elsewhere.
(Mr Balmer) Even today we rotate units through Northern
Ireland, of course, so the experience and the practice of individuals
will vary. I do not want to get into idle speculation about what
we would do with given troop levels. It would be quite interesting
to discuss whether any troops that were withdrawn were earmarked
to be available to go back if things went wrong again or whether
they would be mixed in to a more general training pattern for
other deployments or whether we could afford to reduce the size
of the Army in those circumstances. All those factors would have
to be weighed.
Chairman
349. That is a policy question we will certainly
ask Mr Spellar. We will certainly ask him if the Treasury has
asked for cuts in the size of the Army, which is already an absurdly
long list and ask you to pass the letter on to us and we will
reply rather succinctly, Mr Balmer.
(Mr Balmer) The Treasury has not asked me for any
cuts in the Army.
Chairman: I am sure they will ask somebody.
Mr Brazier
350. I share my colleagues' concerns on that
point. Could I just go back to Laura Moffatt's questions on the
retention issue and focus on two specific areas. During the last
government when we had the disastrous sale of the married quarter
estate which this Committee did a lot of work on at the time the
one positive thing that came out of it was a substantial extra
injection of funds for married quarter repairs. There is very
strong feeling in the Armed Forces about the state of the married
quarters and it is something which the Armed Forces Pay Review
Body pick up again and again in their annual reports. I was staggered
to see in the White Paper under the section on people in the forces,
including the material on families, that there are a lot of worthy
and important small details on things being done for families
but there is literally nothing at all about the married quarter
estate and the repair programme. Is it true, as the papers have
reported, that substantial sums have been taken out of it?
(Mr Balmer) No, it is not true. At the time of the
sale of the married quarter estates we had in our forward programme
over £300 million provided for improving the state of various
quarters which we have readily acknowledged is not adequate. At
the time of the sale the previous government agreed that £100
million of the proceeds of the sale would be added to that programme
to ensure that it was completed in a reasonable period. Even so,
it was expected to take up to seven years to complete the whole
programme. What has happened since then is that in the current
year and as part of the general squeeze that area was looked at
to see whether the full programme could be afforded in the current
year and at that stage I think those in charge of the Defence
Housing Executive felt that they would be obliged to slip some
of the money into next year, so there was a timing effect rather
than an effect on the total. Later in the autumn we were able
to redeploy about £4 million back into that programme and
therefore speed it up slightly, but the total programme did not
change.
351. You said deploy £4 million of it back.
How much was taken out?
(Mr Balmer) I cannot remember the exact figure. It
was something like £15 million may have moved out of this
year into later years, but the total programme did not change.
What has happened with the total programme is that the more they
have been able to survey the estate in detail the more they have
discovered that additional work may well be necessary and we are
having to look quite hard at how we will be able to accommodate
those costs and whether the total programme might now take rather
longer than the seven years we envisaged at the time of the sale.
This comes back to the points we were making about retention because
we are well aware that the state of quarters is something which
has an immediate impact on families and that feeds into people's
willingness to stay and into retention levels. It is a factor
we look hard at to try and ensure we put the right provision in,
but at the moment the programme has not had money taken away from
it in total and we will almost certainly have to be adding money
into that programme maybe over a longer period.
352. But £11 million came out this year.
We will see if it comes in in the next year. Where was it being
added back?
(Mr Balmer) It is for the Chief Executive to rework
his programme. I would expect most of it to happen in the next
year or two.
353. One of the most frequent complaints that
I have had from contacts in the Armed Forces is about the rudeness
and unhelpfulness of the Defence Housing Executive in some cases
failing to answer letters on matters over which families are concerned.
Because people have careers at stake it is difficult getting people
to give concrete cases that we can use in open evidence. In one
case an eviction order was sent to a wife in reply to a husband's
perfectly reasonable request to have a 12-week extra extension
because he was doing a course for a short time before taking up
his next posting. I believe that particular example was eventually
sorted out, but it is very disappointing to find there is nothing
at all in this document about improving the management of the
Defence Housing Executive when it is something that I know organisations
like the Army Families Federation have raised many times.
(Mr Balmer) Without detailed cases it is difficult
to comment. I am disconcerted to hear the anecdotal evidence you
have got and I will certainly pass on to the Chief Executive of
the Defence Housing Executive the concerns you are expressing.
Mr Hood
354. Can I emphasise that this is not an isolated
case. I have had particular problems in my constituency of Forces
families being worried about the housing conditions and there
is one particular case in Cyprus. I do not want to go into the
details of it. The grandmother asked me not to use her name because
her son-in-law was worried that he would be disciplined for complaining
about conditions which are just wholly unacceptable. This is a
problem nowadays and I hope you are going to mention it to the
Chief Executive.
(Major General Kiszely) Not only is it wholly unacceptable,
it is wholly untrue that that would happen. I know that there
is a feeling around that if any complaint is made that might result
in some adverse circumstances for the person who made the complaint.
That is simply not true.
355. I am sure you mean that would not happen
when you say that would not be true.
(Major General Kiszely) It simply would not happen.
Mr Hood: The fact that the soldier has
the perception that he cannot complain for fear of disciplinary
action against him or other types of action against him tells
us there is a problem there. The fact that Mr Brazier is at one
side of the country and I am at the other and we are getting similar
complaints tells us there is a problem and I hope it is taken
up.
Chairman: We have 42 defence agencies
yet to investigate so perhaps this will go higher up the list.
This is nothing to do with Mr Balmer.
Mr Brazier
356. Could I raise one other issue where we
have been quite overwhelmed by the level of concern and this is
the question of pilot retention. I am not clear what status this
memorandum you have given us has in terms of confidentiality,
but by any standards the figures for pilot retention are appalling
as they are stated. The particular proportion of pilots choosing
to leave at the option point are really appalling. This is against
a background of extremely low recruiting by the civil airlines.
We have had a period of several years of depression in the aviation
industry and there is now cut throat competition with people desperately
trying to get people on to aircrafts at almost any cost, with
the cheapest real costs for air tickets ever in history and if
recruiting for the airlines were to pick up then what is already
a very serious problem in terms of retention could become a crisis
in a matter of months. What is the Government doing to address
this?
(Mr Balmer) The point to make is that it is a well
recognised problem and the air force shares the concerns you are
expressing because this is a critical factor in the readiness
of the Royal Air Force. The Air Force Board Standing Committee
has met several times to debate the sorts of measures that might
be taken and they have looked at a range of different measures.
These include increasing what is called the into productive service
rate for pilots by changing the way in which pilots are trained,
looking at the way the contract at RAF Valley is run to make sure
the number of Hawks available to train pilots can be improved.
They have looked hard at the use of pilots in non-flying appointments
to make sure that those are only approved when there is a real
and genuine need for a pilot to be at a desk. There are many cases
where that is the case, but the Air Force have been reining back
quite hard to ensure that the number of pilots available to sit
in cockpits is maximised. They have been looking at using different
training facilities to ensure greater throughput. All of these
things are designed both to ensure that we maximise the number
of pilots flying in aeroplanes flying and maximise the number
we are using to best effect. I will not pretend that we have solved
all the problems and we will continue to look at ways and means
of improving those levels of retention and absolute levels of
employment.
Mr Hancock
357. I want to return to Laura Moffatt's point
about the effects of Northern Ireland on manpower and what have
you. I would like to draw your attention to page 9 of the paper
and paragraph 11 where you say, "In the SDR White Paper we
explained how the policy framework was translated into a detailed
basis for determining Britain's future defence needs ... planning
assumptions." Then you say "contribute to different
missions" and then you come to the lessons since SDR and
you say, "We have formalised this analytical process ..."
Tell us what you have done to improve your response to the Government's
requirement for you to do more and how is that now working, because
obviously it still is not anywhere near the right shape, is it?
(Mr Balmer) The decisions we took in the Strategic
Defence Review were arrived at by the sort of process that is
described here. We analysed the way in which the forces might
have to be deployed and used and turned those into a series of
planning assumptions and that led us into a force structure that
we judged as the right force structure to sustain those requirements.
We also decided that in some areas we would increase the force
structure and in some areas we reduced it and we have reduced
the number of frigates and destroyers and fast jets. Conversely,
we increased the size of the planned size of the Army particularly
in the logistics and medical areas. We have not yet achieved all
of those changes. The force structure changes in the Navy and
the RAF have been implemented and some of those in the Army have
been implemented. As we have just been describing, until we have
full manning in the Army we cannot achieve all the structures
that we determined were needed and that is why we have the measures
in hand to try and improve the retention as well as continue buoyant
recruitment, so that we have the people in place to populate all
those structures. What has been happening while this has been
going on is that the Armed Forces have been given a lot of commitments,
Kosovo is the obvious and prime example of that, but it is on
top of Northern Ireland, it is on top of Bosnia, it is on top
of East Timor and everything else and we have been putting a lot
of demands on the Armed Forces to achieve commitments without
having been able to put into place the whole structure that we
judge necessary to sustain all of the planning assumptions and
that is the imbalance that we have been juggling with during the
course of last year. We know it is having an effect on retention
because of the over-stretch it leads to and that is why we are
taking the sort of measures we have been taking.
358. I would be interested to know whether this
is in some sort of code. I fail to understand it at all. There
must be in this analytical process a point where the Ministry
of Defence actually says they cannot do this. When does that come
in? Does it come in when the Treasury tells you you cannot have
any more money or does it tell you when people continue to leave?
We must be close to the process where the MoD must have a responsibility
for the people in it to say we cannot do any more with the resources
we have. This White Paper actually talks about lots of things
but it does not address that point.
(Mr Balmer) I think what the White Paper says and
what the position is is that we made planning assumptions in the
Defence Review which led to a particular force structure. The
key assumptions that were made were that we would be able to sustain
a medium sized force, a brigade sized force with appropriate supporting
elements in a sense permanently. We would be able to have a roulement
so that we could move units through and sustain such a force on
a semi-permanent basis in a peace keeping role such as in Bosnia
and in parallel we would be able to deploy to a war fighting scenario
a similar brigade sized force with appropriate lines of communications
and logistics supply to back them both up. That was the key force
driving assumption we made. It is certainly the case that we got
close to those levels of effort in Bosnia and Kosovo during the
course of last year certainly in the case of the Army and less
so in the case of the other two Services. The planning assumptions
we made were never an absolute template that says this is exactly
what we will do and not an inch more. It was an assumption that
said this is what we ought to be able to do within reasonable
tour intervals for individuals. It is always open to us and open
to Ministers to ask for more in particular circumstances and it
may be that one or two elements of the supporting specialists
in the Army in particular who have been asked for more than we
hoped we would have to ask of them in our planning assumptions.
Once we have been able to recruit more people, retain more people
and build up the strength of those specialists then we would not
be asking for more of them than the planning assumptions assumed,
but that is a very difficult balance. It is certainly the case
that we know that the level of commitment has been tight last
year in some areas and we know that it is causing problems of
retention and over-stretch and I have tried to describe the measures
we are taking to address that. We have not got to the stage of
putting our hand up and saying we cannot cope. That point has
not been reached.
Mr Cohen
359. You have mentioned about the faulty structuring
and I would like to ask some questions in order to ascertain whether
it is on target with what was proposed under the SDR. Perhaps
the best way to do that is to look at the defence White Paper
itself and page 24 which summarises the main forces structures
that were planned under the SDR. I wonder if you could take us
through each one and tell us whether those are on target, what
have been the cost change implications of each one and how they
are progressing from the future aircraft carriers down to front
line numbers.
(Mr Balmer) I am happy to try and do that. As to the
future aircraft carriers, the project has been launched and we
have recruited a leader for the integrated project team who came
from industry. The indications are that SMART procurement will
certainly enable us to achieve the dates set for that programme,
but at this stage the work that is being conducted is very much
exploratory studies to inform the sort of design that might emerge.
On Tomahawk Land Attack missiles, we achieved the operational
capability as described for HMS Splendid and indeed, as the White
Paper makes clear, HMS Splendid fired some of those missiles during
the Kosovo campaign.
6 See p. 203. Back
7
Note by witness: the figures for 1998/99, the year covered
by the Performance Report, were 11 per cent higher than for 1997/98. Back
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