Examination of witnesses (Questions 280
- 296)
WEDNESDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2000
VICE-ADMIRAL
PETER SPENCER
ADC and AIR MARSHAL
MALCOLM PLEDGER
280. You do not see the pay limits being a difficulty
for you?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Pay, actually used properly,
is jolly helpful. For the large majority pay is not an issue unless
they feel that they are not getting enough. They want comparability.
There tends to be a difference between the Royal Marines and the
Royal Navy, but Royal Marines tend to compare themselves with
what they would get as a policeman, because many of them do pursue
the police force as a second career. There is a differential in
that and that is a judgment they have to make for themselves.
Elsewhere, particularly in the medical world and for pilots, there
are particular arrangements in place which you will be familiar
with, where, in order to retain people, we clearly have to achieve
a certain measure of comparability.
281. In your memorandum you made the comment
about unforeseen market forces and the pressure that puts on you,
and the changes in the review that was carried out by the MoD.
How has that helped you, or has it help you at all?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) In what context?
282. Keeping people. Using pay and whatever
to keep people?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) At the moment we are heading
towards a new pay system next year. This will introduce some huge
improvements, both in terms of simplicity and flexibility and
using job evaluation as a tool to really target areas where there
may be problems and where we make sure that we are paying the
right rate in order to retain the people that we need.
Mr Hancock: Thank you.
Mr Hood
283. Can I ask you a few questions on what is
known as dissatisfaction with naval life? When you last gave evidence
you agreed that a key problem with separated service can be the
lack of notice of posting and the feeling of personnel that they
have been unable to plan their lives. Would you agree that the
Navy should make more effort to listen to the views of individuals
when making decisions about their postings, and should those taking
the decision explain to personnel the reasons for the decision?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Yes, and I can give you examples
of where that is already beginning to happen to a much greater
extent. In each of the three base ports we now have a small team,
each headed by a Warrant Officer who is called a drafting and
career management liaison officer. Each of them is connected with
a main computer which drives all of the Navy personnel we have,
and so any sailor, however young and inexperienced, or however
old and experienced, can go and have an interview with this warrant
officer and be shown what the opportunities are for him or her
to do over the next three to five years, and be given help in
order to understand how they can best organise themselves to go
and do that. We already have some good figures now of the numbers
who have decided not to leave the Service early after all as a
result of being helped by this. This was trialed by my predecessor,
Admiral Brigstocke, as part of the Naval Strategic Plan where
we would progressively move more to an appointing system for ratings
and other ranks, and bring them more into line with officers.
The same initiative is already in place with the Royal Marines,
and they have a warrant officer who is there for Royal Marines
and does career management and development.
284. You mentioned an initiative to measure
"at sea harmony" for individuals, rather than just for
platforms. When do you hope to have this system in place?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) That system will begin 1st
April next year.
285. Is the Royal Navy losing a valuable resource
by forcing personnel to retire after 22 years, even though many
would wish to remain in the Service?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Yes, but there is a balance
to be struck here and I think that it is useful to put this into
context. When we had the redundancies in 1994 we simply could
not continue to run people on beyond the age of 40 without making
redundant even younger people who were coming through. As the
system has now settled down a bit, and particularly because we
are under-manned in total numbers, we do selectively target those
people who we, as a Navy, need to serve on. 700 of them were made
offers go into what we call a second open engagement for either
a further five or 10 years this year. That number has progressively
increased since 1994. I would also say that we do not, in all
cases, lose that talent. There is, in my Naval Home Command in
the training establishments, a strong presence of ex-naval personnel
and ex-Royal Marine personnel who now work for a company called
Flagship in partnership with my people, and who have found another
way of feeding their expertise and skills back into the good of
the Navy.
286. Is the problem with keeping such people
in the Service a lack of physical fitness, or is it that they
are in branches where there is not a manpower problem?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) There are several components
to this equation and each of the branch managers has to look at
this very carefully. We have to consider the other people in that
branch, because if everybody stayed until they are 55 we would
have very slow rates of promotion and that would give us the retention
problem earlier on in the career. Secondly, all members of the
Royal Navy, except for the 400 women with reserved rights, are
liable to sea service on an alternating basis, and the physical
standards for sea service are quite demanding. You only have to
think about climbing up ladders all day and the problems of looking
after yourself in rough seas to know that you can be perfectly
fit to do many jobs, but if you have a knee which has gone or
a hip which has gone, then, frankly, that is a problem. We just
have to, statistically, look at the likelihood that people are
going to be unfit for sea service, and there is a correlation
between fitness for sea service and age.
287. You made an interesting comment about the
promotional problem. Is that a serious part of the policy, to
make sure that you are moving people out so you do not get a logjam?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) I would not want to exaggerate
it. It is a factor that is taken into account.
Chairman
288. We went to look at the RAF and their AWACS
Operation and there was a guy there that looked older than me.
He had retired, but been kept on because he had a skill that was
not available. Do you make exceptions?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Yes, we do. In addition to
the formality of offering somebody another Open Engagement, which
is an extended contract for another five or ten years, there are
people who are specifically targeted for extensions of service
by mutual agreement.
Chairman: How many would that be? Perhaps
you can drop us a note.
Mr Cohen
289. You have clearly listened in relation to
the Continuous Attitude Surveys and the Premature Voluntary Retirement
Surveys, and you have learned some things, for example there is
going to be a design for six people in accommodation rather than
the higher numbers that there have been a lot of complaints about.
What are the other major lessons you have learned from those surveys?
The key ones you are implementing and making changes on?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) The biggest is the ability
for people to plan their own lives and a need in the Navy to recognise
that we are going to have to redesign the personnel management
system for the Navy. This rejoices in a project named TOPMAST,
Tomorrow's Personnel Management System. We are taking a look at
how we can actually redesign the system. It used to work very
well for a much bigger Navy but is increasingly not really delivering
the right balance in people's lives. We have a number of pilot
schemes, for example in HMS Scott there is a manning system where
we have one and a half crews. This means the ship can go away
for a very long period but the individual members of that crew
will know with great certainty when they are going to come home
and take their leave—there is a very high happiness factor
in that ship—even if the ship gets redeployed at very short
notice. There is another pilot scheme in one of the frigate squadrons
in Plymouth, which is looking at continuity drafting, where we
look after—this is for the young operator mechanics—and
follow very closely the careers of those guys and women and get
them through their initial service in the ship, back into the
training system, and then back into the same squadron so they
have some element of geographical stability. One of the problems
we have is that we have a large number of different specialist
groupings. As the total numbers reduce, if we do not find some
way of getting more flexible in the way in which we use our people
we will constantly run out of a product line. Industry has done
much more with multi-skilling than we have achieved. All of our
sailors are multi-skilled, because they all have to do lots of
different things on a ship, not just their trade, but what we
are looking at is ways of rapidly re-skilling people so that you
do not find that somebody entered a branch as a naval rating and
you find it is another branch which is in shortage at Petty Officer
level, and these two are mutually exclusive.
290. Those are certainly very good points. If
you are going to have a degree of certainty for Navy personnel,
you are going to have to have some sort of slack in the system,
a degree of slack, so they can be covered, if need be. We also
need a review of all of the tasks overall, perhaps some of the
lower priority tasks need to go. Is that part of that Top Mast
approach?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Yes, it is. It is a question
of making it clear. We do have a margin at the moment. We do have
this contingency. We are not using the system rules as efficiently
as we should do and there are ways of doing it better. We need
to do that quickly.
291. Let me be a little bit unfair. The Clerk
has been looking at the full Continuous Attitude Survey and she
has come up with some of the more frequent comments of the Navy:
Officers do not listen to the grievances of junior personnel;
the Navy has become too much like a commercial business; there
is little slack; the fun of service life has gone; promotion takes
too long; qualified people spend their time doing menial jobs.
Any comments on those?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) What I would say is, there
is a difference between a notice-giving survey, when people tell
you why they are leaving, and a general Continuous Attitude Survey
where people are generally more upbeat. There is an element of
truth in all of those statements. We have to do a lot to win the
hearts and minds of our sailors about the degree to which they
have seen civilianisation of jobs and demonstrate that there is
a way of getting balance in their lives and the ability of planning
their lives, which does not necessarily need them to go into the
menial jobs, that is largely why we pulled out of them in most
cases. The question of whether there is more fun in the Navy is
perennial. It goes back to when I was joined the Navy, everybody
is convinced that the previous generation had more fun. What I
would say to you is it varies between ships. Well led ships with
confident captains create the time to go off and have a sports
event, they create the time to do adventurous training and they
still come top on the operational side. The less able and the
less confident try too hard, are a bit dull about it and that
is what sailors perceive. All I would say is it is made very clear
to all commanding officers, as they take up their new commands,
by the Commander-in-Chief (Fleet), that he is looking to see the
totality of what they deliver, that includes the ability of the
ship to be seen to enjoy itself and to be happy to feel good about
itself for all of the right reasons, which includes being good
operationally, but also having fun in life as well.
Chairman: Bring back the rum and they
will have more fun. I am pretty glad we do not have Continuous
Attitude Surveys in this place because you would find the biggest
collection of whingers and chronic malcontents in the history
of the world.
Mr Viggers
292. The Association of Royal Naval and Royal
Marine families said in written evidence to us that the families
often feel undervalued and invisible. Is this fair and are you
taking steps to improve the situation?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) Maxine James is doing a really
super job to bring families up into my field of view than has,
perhaps, been the case in the past. Part of it is that most of
our families are home owners, most of them live in local communities
and they do not necessarily live on married quarters estates,
so there is a sense in which we respect their privacy as individuals.
70% of spouses work, they have lives of their own. We do need
to recognise that there are specific needs of families which need
to be responded to. We are working on a number of initiatives
which she has drawn attention to. Some of them are already in
place and clearly need to be better advertised, and some of them
are good ideas which we will respond to. One of the problems she
has raised is the difficulty of us communicating directly with
the family as opposed to through the spouse. The rules at the
moment are that we have to go through the spouse, for all sorts
of reasons, including the Data Protection Act. There are some
people who do not necessarily want us to pass information onm
to their wives—not very many. When I meet the number of
people who have not received a really good piece of information
which we sent to their families via them and they have not received
it, they either have not been bothered or they do not think it
is worth it. We are finding ways now of communicating with them
better, including using electronic communications, so they can
dial in and find out what is going on.
293. Where a spouse cannot work, are you pursuing
the concept of providing educational opportunities?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) There is a Government initiative
where we have managed to get some help to spouses, particularly
back-to-work schemes. I am looking specifically at a proposal
that Maxine James has raised as to whether or not some of the
Learning Force Initiative, the learning Centres we have set up,
18 of them, can be made available to spouses as well as to Royal
Marines and to the Navy.
Mr Hancock: I was very interested in
your booklet. In the Personnel Strategy—
Chairman: Is that the restricted one?
Mr Hancock
294.—there is no mention about the communication
with families and how that could be improved. There is a gap there,
that is not mentioned at all. How do you communicate with the
families of your Servicemen? On the one about the people pillar,
you mention in here one of your targets for the next two years
is to improve harmony and focus on the individual and career paths
with great joint emphasis. What on earth does that mean?
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) It means for officers and senior
ratings, because we now think of ourselves as producing joint
forces, we need to grow people who can actually work well with
the other two Services and aspire to the higher levels of command,
because that is increasingly going to be the route to success.
I hope you found that the benefit of that particular document
was a real top down strategic plan which attempts to link together
a lot of initiatives and to make clear a lot of things which are
interrelated to one another.
Chairman
295. Thank you very much.
(Air Marshal Pledger) Can I add one point on this
families issue? The priority we give to that is very clear from
the Overarching Personnel Strategy vision. We had to put families
very much more in focus in our concerns. Maxine James and her
colleagues have huge visibility today, not only in their respective
Services but at higher levels and indeed with ministers. The Service
Families Task Force and the Family Forum are examples of ways
in which that is being made available. We all enjoy appearing
in front of Family Forums annually, often more regular than annual
forums, where they all ask some particularly difficult questions
of us, and quite rightly so. So far as the other communication
elements are concerned, we are exploring, because of their particular
concerns, putting much more on the Internet, so that families
can have access, and then provide access for those families to
that Internet where they may not have it in person.
296. Thank you.
(Vice-Admiral Spencer) By extraordinary coincidence,
I am going to a Navy Board meeting, amongst which they are going
to review this for publishing at the end of this month. I can
take your suggestion directly to them.
Chairman: I could not quite see what
the requirement of restricted was. It did not seem to be endangered.
I am glad you are reviewing it, and perhaps most of it will appear.
Thank you very much for coming.
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