Examination of Witness (Questions 620
- 639)
WEDNESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2000
MR JOHN
WILSON
620. Is your target diminishing?
(Mr Wilson) No. My target is still to complete the
upgrade programme. That is, to get the bulk of the long term stock
up to standard one for condition by November 2005.
Chairman
621. When the clerk and I come to Tidworth,
obviously we would love to see the best but it would be unfair
if we did not see the worst. Maybe somebody from your organisation
who I hope will meet us can tell us what the plans are for housing
in the Tidworth area and perhaps a microcosm of your overall policy
can be seen there.
(Mr Wilson) I would be delighted to arrange it.
Mr Hood
622. How many SFA properties are vacant at present?
(Mr Wilson) There are currently, at 30 September,
5,477 empty properties in the course of disposal. Those will form
part of the 6,500 properties which are being disposed of over
a 15 month period, January this year through to the end of March.
Within our managed voids, it is 8,846.
623. Has this fallen as a percentage of the
total homes managed by the DHE since the sale to Annington Homes?
(Mr Wilson) No, it is about the same and the reasons
for that lie partly in the uncertainties which followed the Strategic
Defence Review and a series of studies which followed that which
have made it difficult to dispose of properties because incoming
units may move to one of two or three different locations and
therefore it has been necessary to set aside houses against that
eventuality. The other phenomenon that has happened is that there
is a fall in demand for families' quarters across the United Kingdom
and that demand rate has been falling about 4% a year for the
last three years and is forecast to continue. Those people have
left estates in a pepper potted way and there is an interval,
a time delay, which is necessary to batch houses for disposal,
either to Annington Homes or through sale. That is the reason
why we have not got down as far as we aimed to. The reality is
we will be disposing of over 6,000 properties by next spring.
624. Can you tell us how decisions are taken
on which properties are to be released to Annington Homes?
(Mr Wilson) The process is basically one of identifying
the core stock. Each of my areas in association with the local
station commanders, unit commanders and local commands identifies
what their core requirement is for the coming year, one year,
two years, three years downstream in so far as we can determine
the medium and long term requirements. That process involves a
team of service officers that I have working for me which is headed
by a serving brigadier who maintains very close liaison with the
commands on this. We identify the core stock. To that we add a
management margin which comprises basically the number of properties
which we are required to hold against some 20,000 to 22,000 moves
a year which we operate. We also require a further pool of houses
either awaiting modernisation or actually undergoing modernisation.
There were some 1,800 properties in that category, for example,
at the end of September. We identify the requirements and the
balance we put into disposal. Hence the very high figure of 6,500
disposals which we aim to achieve over this 15 month period.
625. How many will be released this year and
how many will that make in total since the sale?
(Mr Wilson) The DHE's total stock figure before the
sale was about 70,000 and the current total stock level is 60,647
at 30 September this year. The stock has already come down by
some 10,000 since the DHE came into being. There are further substantial
releases forecast in the future.
Mr Hancock
626. Does that figure include the 5,000 that
are earmarked to go before March next year?
(Mr Wilson) The 60,647 includes properties in the
course of disposal.
627. That figure is going to reduce by another
5,500 by March next year?
(Mr Wilson) Offset by any new houses which we are
bringing in, either through our own new build programmes or through
the PFI.
628. Before your agency was formed, the housing
vacancy level was nowhere near as high as this, was it?
(Mr Wilson) It was about the same.
629. 9,000 or 15,000? If you count the 5,000-plus
houses you are disposing of, presumably they are empty and have
been for some time and you have another 9,000 on top, I do not
think your figures ever got anywhere near 20% or 25% of the housing
stock being empty.
(Mr Wilson) There were very large numbers of empty
houses when the DHE took over the estate.
Mr Cann
630. Are you aware that anybody else in the
country who owns 60,000 houses would regard that as a huge asset
not to be disposed of but to be used?
(Mr Wilson) I agree it should be used. Hence the DHE's
aim to reduce its management margin down to 13% shortly and to
10% in the long term. 10% is a reasonable manageable margin to
allow for 20,000 to 22,000 moves a year because the DHE, unlike
a housing association, cue houses for occupants, whereas a housing
association does it the other way round. Yes, we should reduce
our management margin to a reasonable figure, but not to such
an extent that it seriously damages or damages at all our ability
to meet the operational requirements of the Ministry of Defence
or the reasonable aspirations of service families who want a choice
of housing and a reasonable notice of their addresses when they
move.
Mr Brazier
631. To what extent is the 4% a year decline
linked to the poor retention in the forces and married personnel
leaving and to what extent is it other factors?
(Mr Wilson) We believe—and we do not have very
accurate information on this because it is a subjective judgment—also
that there are socio-economic factors at work here. For example,
the higher proportion of working wives, the desire to give stability
to children's education and so on.
632. At the time of the Committee's inquiry
into the sale of the estate in 1996, it was announced that you
would be conducting a study into the social problems of mixed
estates. Can you tell us: has the study been completed and what
are you doing to minimise adverse effects, some of which were
mentioned last week, for example, the problems of asylum seekers
being put onto one army estate. Have you completed that study
on mixed estates?
(Mr Wilson) Yes.
633. What were its main conclusions?
(Mr Wilson) Its main conclusions were that there was
not an overwhelming or widespread problem but it rejected a "do
nothing" approach because there were concerns in particular
locations. There was the need to transfer good practice across
the piece. The study was conducted by Professor Ian Cole from
Sheffield Hallam University and his team, so it was an independent
study; it was not an MoD study. It was considered that we need
to have a whole estate approach to the management of the neighbourhood
so things like joint neighbourhood watches, patch watch schemes.
We needed to eliminate the `us and them' attitude as between different
parts of an estate. A series of pilot schemes was put in place
to pursue these issues and to discuss them with service families,
with non-service families, local authorities, the police and so
on. Four pilot schemes have been put in place, one at Tamerton
Foliot near Plymouth which is for the Royal Navy, one at Hemswell
for the Army, one at Brize Norton for the RAF and one at Poole
for the Royal Marines. There are a whole series of workshops going
on with the units, with occupants, with the welfare authorities,
with the service families' organisations, to work out and produce
model agreements. These model agreements will be used in all future
cases where properties are disposed of. As far as the disposal
of Annington Homes properties is concerned, the sale agreement
requires us to release to Annington Homes a minimum of either
20 houses or 10% of the site, in no more than three contiguous
patches. What tends to happen is not that we release to Annington
Homes houses pepper potted across an estate but discrete blocks
of houses on the edges of estates. It is not a completely mixed
estate that is delivered. Annington Homes have sold the overwhelming
majority of the houses released to them to owner occupiers and,
over the last two or three years, something like 25% of the houses
Annington Homes have sold they have sold either to serving service
families or to service families who have recently retired. It
is a process in which we are very conscious of the sensitivities
and it is one which we are managing very closely indeed. I believe
we have made a lot of progress on this.
Chairman: Could we have a copy of that
report?
Mr Brazier
634. I have two additional points, one just
going back to your earlier answer to Mr Hood. There was a study
done in 1991 looking at home ownership versus married quarter
occupancy as a PVR-ing factor. To your knowledge, has there been
a study carried out since then to look at whether people are more
or less likely to PVR if they move off the married quarters estates?
That was an Army document rather than a triservice one. Do you
know if the APRE or somebody has carried out a survey since or
not?
(Mr Wilson) I do not know that but I believe that
is one of the issues which is being examined in the follow up
to the MoD Treasury review.
635. Could I ask John Barton[4]
again if we could have any study which looks at the differences
in PVR rates within the services according to accommodation type,
because the 1991 study showed a much higher level of PVR-ing among
those who moved into owner occupied accommodation. The last point
I want to raise is remote from this but it is an important one.
I have had a couple of very bad cases raised with me, I have to
say both some time ago, possibly before your tenure, of people
writing to your organisation asking if they could extend their
occupancy of a quarter, in both cases because there was a three
month course before going on to the next posting. Instead of getting
a courteous answer back saying yea or nay or whatever, they got
an eviction notice. In one case, the husband was away and came
back to find his wife had received an eviction notice. Are you
getting your correspondence unit to the point where it actually
replies to letters with letters rather than standard forms?
(Mr Wilson) Yes, absolutely. We have also sent all
our front line staff on customer relations courses because we
are conscious that it is the front line staff who deal with families
on a day to day basis that to some degree determine the satisfaction
or otherwise with quarters. It is a very important issue and we
aim to be as flexible as we can in these matters.
Mr Hepburn
636. Do you have any statistics on how frequently
families are asked to move in order to surrender properties to
Annington Homes when they would have preferred to stay where they
are?
(Mr Wilson) Yes. Last year—release four, 1999—about
150 people were asked to move in order to release properties to
Annington Homes. This year, the figure will be significantly more
than that. The DHE's target is that we should not aim to move
more than 25% of families involved in that context. For release
five, when we started the process, there were something like 575
families living in houses that would be affected by the release.
What happens over time is that those 575 families reduce in number
as people are either posted, or leave or move for some other purpose.
What the DHE aims to do to mitigate the consequences of asking
families to move is firstly to pay them a disturbance allowance,
which we do, and secondly the aim is to move families to quarters
which are at least as good as the ones they are in and preferably
better. In the majority of cases, we achieve that. In some cases,
the moves are positively welcomed by families. May I give an example
of that? In Woolwich where we increased the number of properties
to be released to Annington Homes at Brook Hill, which were small,
cramped, unmodernised properties, we were able to move those families
into former officers' quarters further up the hill at Woolwich
to bigger, better, more modern houses. Furthermore, the battalion
was deploying abroad later in the year and we brought forward
the move so that the families could move before the deployment.
That was a satisfactory outcome. It does not always follow that
mid-term moving of families is adverse to morale. Clearly, we
try to minimise it by better planning. One could reach a point
where it was the number of mid-tour moves which actually became
the limiting factor on the number of houses one disposed of because
clearly one has to balance those issues very carefully.
637. How much are Annington selling the properties
for?
(Mr Wilson) That is a matter for Annington to answer
but in some cases I know that they have been as low as in the
£30,000 bracket in some locations; in others, very much higher.
It depends very much on geographical location and the size and
quality of the properties. In some cases, for three bedroomed
houses recently, the selling prices have ranged between £50,000
and, at the top end of the range, £120,000.
Chairman
638. If the MoD had flogged off the houses at
£120,000, perhaps we would not be in the strange circumstances
we are in. Are these houses at market value? Valuers must say,
"Annington are really doing a great service to the British
public by selling them at a knock down price", or would they
behave as any seller would and extract the maximum from the location
or the quality of the housing?
(Mr Wilson) Annington have recently had a policy of
moving the houses on fairly quickly. I mentioned earlier that
they have sold some 25% to service families. For service families,
they have typically a preview day. The fact that the houses are
coming on the market is advertised internally within the Ministry
of Defence to service families. Service families then have a preview
day and have, if you like, first choice of the houses. Annington
Homes arrange a variety of discounts to the service families.
For example, a package of £99 gets you in. In some cases
they provide £500 towards survey and legal costs and so on.
That part of the sale is actually working very well and I think
in the interests of the service families.
639. That is good. They are being quite sensitive
in the circumstances?
(Mr Wilson) Yes, they are.
4 The MoD parliamentary clerk. Back
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