Examination of Witnesses (Questions 651
- 659)
WEDNESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2000
MAJOR GENERAL
ANTHONY PALMER
CBE, REAR ADMIRAL
JOHN CHADWICK
AND AIR
VICE-MARSHAL
IAN CORBITT
Chairman
651. Thank you for coming. We have an interesting
agenda. Would you like to introduce yourselves for our shorthand
writer please?
(Rear Admiral Chadwick) John Chadwick.
I am the Flag Officer, Training and Recruiting, which means I
am the Chief Executive of the Naval Recruiting and Training Agency,
and I also look after the Navy's individual training and recruiting
policy.
(Major General Palmer) Anthony Palmer. I am the Director
General, Army Training and Recruiting, and Chief Executive of
the Army Training and Recruiting Agency.
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) I am Ian Corbitt, Air Officer
Training for the Royal Air Force and also Chief Executive of the
Training Group (Defence Agency) which does incorporate recruiting
as well, although it is not in the title like the other two.
Mr Brazier
652. We have been told that you are seeking
to achieve efficiency schemes of 3% a year in line with many other
areas of the Armed Forces. Are these having an adverse impact
on your ability to fulfil your recruiting and training? It does
seem extraordinary, when we get statement after statement that
manning is a critical problem area and a critical priority, that
you should have your budgets reduced. It is a question for all
three of you.
(Major General Palmer) Obviously one could do without
efficiency targets, but they are there and they are a fact of
life. Mine are set by the Adjutant-General who is head of my Owners
Board. We are looking at 3% in the first two years and slightly
more in years three and four. I would say that we believe (and
I certainly believe) that there are some efficiencies to be made
in the training and recruiting organisation in three areas. The
first area is by reducing the number of failures in the recruiting
organisation. About two years ago we had about 4,000 people who
were failing training. That is the most inefficient and expensive
way of conducting business, not just because it costs a lot of
money to have people failing but also because those that fail
go back into the pool from whom one is trying to recruit more,
and in a way they pollute it. The major aim in the last 18 months
has been to reduce the number of failures. We have done that by
putting up the pass rate at the recruitment selection centre so
that only those whom we believe have a 90% chance of passing training
will be allowed to go straight into training. We are not rejecting
those that do not match up to the 90%. People with a lesser chance
we are giving courses to in order to try and increase their motivation
and sometimes their fitness so that when they do start training
they will also have a 90% chance of passing. I have to say that
so far, although it has only just been implemented, that has been
extremely successful, not only in increasing the first time pass
rate but also in making a significant amount of efficiencies.
Secondly, we are driving down the numbers who are awaiting their
training. As you are probably aware, they start with their initial
training which we call phase one and then they get Special to
Arm: gunners, engineers, etc, in phase two. The number of people
who are waiting to move from their basic training to their Special
to Arm training we have reduced by about 50%. At the same time
as part of the efficiency programme we are generating significant
amounts of income from selling irreducible spare capacity in line
with the Government's selling into wider markets policy.
653. To foreign countries, you mean?
(Major General Palmer) To foreign countries but also
from the private sector who want to do training with us increasingly,
and also from letting some of the facilities. We have even had
pop groups hiring hangars that have been available for a short
period of time.
Chairman
654. I hope they did not smash up the property.
(Major General Palmer) No, they were extremely well
behaved. It was very good for the morale of the troops as well.
The final thing is of course our public/private partnership programme
which seeks to ask the private sector to look and see whether
they can more effectively and more efficiently deliver training.
In all those ways we are driving down the costs of the training
operation and they are genuine efficiencies.
Mr Brazier
655. That brings us straight to the Air Force
because the public/private sector partnership of course has been
a very big factor in the Air Force. I do not mean to prejudice
your answer but yesterday at Cranwell I had an awful lot of complaints
about it. Would you like to give the Air Force perspective on
the efficiency savings?
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) The efficiency savings
have been with us for several years now. We embarked upon that
post-DCS through programmes of contractorisation, civilianisation
and estate rationalisation. We have totally rationalised the estate.
What we have found is that that has been able to give us big chunks
of savings which should have been able to meet our in-year savings.
Year on year we have been able to rationalise the estate further,
look at contractorisation further and deliver the savings required
up to date so far. Clearly there is a limit on how far you can
go with that. The key driver for us in being able to deliver those
efficiencies was the change from the Cold War to the Expeditionary
Air Force. Under the old scenario all of our training assets,
particularly on the aircraft side, had a war role as well. Therefore
we had to have them fully able to deliver the operational capability
that we would have to do in war. We had to have the pilots available,
the engineers available, to maintain those to deliver that capability.
Since the change from the Cold War into the Expeditionary Air
Force we have seen a requirement for us to sustain training throughout
conflict. Those are the SDR assumptions. As a consequence of that
there is no further war role for our aircraft or for the people
who are delivering training. Therefore that has allowed us to
go into the contractorisation, rationalisation and subsequently
into the PPP areas. What we have had to try and do is make sure
we retain the right balance of people in the system, military
versus civilian to allow us to inculcate the Service ethos into
people and also to get people trained for a military environment
that they are going to be deployed in, not a civilian environment.
It is limited on how far we can go. Having said that, when we
did the initial contractorisation of the bases post-DCS it was
called "multi-activity contracts". In essence they were
really nothing more than manpower substitution. Instead of having
a serviceman doing the task we continue to own the resources,
we continue to maintain the resources and be responsible for maintaining
them, but we actually asked a contractor to provide the manpower
that did it. Instead of servicemen they were civilians. That really
was only one step into the whole contractorisation. Whilst we
accept that there is no requirement for military people in the
training system per se to deliver the task, we are going
forward in trying to balance out the delivery of the capability
and the resources for our training from the private sector whilst
maintaining a balance of instructors in uniform to deliver the
Service ethos and the military training that we believe is necessary.
Multi-activity contracts I think will become much more substantive
in the future and rather than just having a manpower substitution
in the future we will certainly be looking to say, "As well
as you providing the manpower you own the asset, you maintain
the asset and you make the asset or the resource available every
morning for me to conduct the training". My responsibilities
in the end are to deliver trained personnel to the front line
commands of the three Services. I do not want to spend my time
worrying about the resources that are necessary to deliver that
training if someone else can take on that risk. The private sector
is prepared to and that is the way we are certainly looking in
terms of ensuring the private sector does take on the risk that
goes with the delivery of the assets, which currently they do
not under the multi-activity contracts, whilst we concentrate
on providing sufficient military people within the system to provide
appropriate training to meet the needs of the front line.
656. I am going to ask you the hard questions
because you are leading the three Services in this area. I had
one of the Clerks with me on the visit yesterday at Cranwell and
I think I can honestly say that of all the complaints I received,
particularly among other ranks (to some extent among Officers
too), this was the continuing theme right across all the various
activities. A lot of trouble was taken around that, the feeling
of the collapse of the Service ethos because of civilianisation,
the feeling that with the Service being reduced every time there
is a need for deployment the ability to provide an expeditionary
deployment involves a much heavier stress on Service personnel
than it would have before because civilians cannot be deployed,
the feeling that even if there is a domestic crisis like responding
to flooding it is only the uniformed people that get out, that
if there is a security crisis it is only the uniformed people
who can carry a rifle. It was the one immediate item that came
up straightaway in every discussion we had. Just to put a specific
question to you, how do you respond to the point in other rank
recruiting that people now going to visit RAF bases, potential
RAF recruits thinking of joining the Air Force, arrive to see
an organisation which is largely civilian and think, "Why
not go and join an airline instead?" This was the point that
was put to me rather strongly and vigorously more than once.
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) Coming to the latter point,
the interface that the recruitment normally have with the Services
tends to be either in our recruiting areas which are still mainly
Service, and particularly the selection and recruiting in the
Cranwell area is very much a Service environment, or they go to
front line stations where there is still a predominance of Service
personnel. In the support area the fact that we have had civilians
there is nothing new. It is just the balance that has changed.
Where the balance in the past—I am just plucking figures
out of the air—might have been, let us say, 20% civilian,
80% Service, that has changed and I would suggest at the moment
overall within the training environment it is something like 50/50,
but with the potential that we may well go further to 60% civilians,
40% servicemen. That potential exists there. The fact that it
is being run by a civilian has not actually affected the overall
output that we have delivered in general to the front line. There
are specific areas I am aware of where it is perceived that we
have gone too far and we are looking at how we can redress those
particular issues.
657. Which particular areas?
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) There is one particular
one which is not at Cranwell, it is close to Cranwell. It is called
the Joint Elementary Flight Training School where we deliver elementary
flying training on behalf of all three Services. That has been
given to a contractor to deliver where predominantly the instructors
that deliver the training are all civilian, but we have military
people embedded within the structure who are there to ensure that
the instructors are providing the appropriate training, so they
are really checking on the instructors. Both the Army and the
Navy perceive that that environment has gone too far and when
that contract is being renewed, which is in the near future, we
will look at how we can redress that particular issue. It is a
difficult area because the key requirement to redress it is more
uniformed instructors in the training system, and that is a problem,
as you are aware of, because the overall availability of front
line pilots to be called away from the front line to do training
is something we have to balance out very carefully.
658. Just before we go on to the Navy, that
was one of the specific areas that was mentioned as a specific
complaint. I have to say that that is an officer area of complaint.
There were also an awful lot of other rank areas of complaint,
people basically saying that the pool of people who do everything
from cooking to some of the more exotic areas of the technical
site has been so reduced by civilianisation that every time a
slot comes up in Pristina or wherever it happens to be it is coming
out of the same tiny group of people to provide it.
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) If I may just address that,
the Air Force is approaching that—it is not my area; it
is the manning area—through a crisis manpower requirement
exercise which is designed to identify the total number of people
the Air Force requires in uniform to deliver the operational capability
that comes out of the SDR assumptions. They have carried out their
initial exercise on that and it has demonstrated that two particular
areas show that we have insufficient uniformed people. We have
gone too far on contractualisation. One of those is in the catering
side and the other one is in the MT driver, the driving side.
Those are both being addressed in STP 01 by the Air Force. We
have already been given increased recruiting targets as from next
year for both of those particular trades and we are trying to
identify how we now feed those people back into the Air Force
for employment in peace time when they are not required for operations
because where we have got these civilian contracts going it is
a difficult area as to how you feed Service people back in. Do
you take away some of the contractorisation from the contractors
or do you embed Service personnel within the contract? That is
being debated at the moment. The crisis manpower requirement,
which is still in its infancy on the post-SDR assumptions, will
address that issue in due course.
Chairman
659. There seems to be a logic of further privatisation
and we are always given eulogistic assessments about what privatisation
is going to involve, air work for instance, and things do not
always come out that way. Are you saying that when this training
contract ends there will be a serious analysis, an objective analysis,
not a political analysis, of what the advantages have been in
privatising, taking all factors into account: the quality of the
training, the costs, everything? Will this be a serious look?
(Air Vice-Marshal Corbitt) Indeed, Chairman. We are
doing that all the time. These contracts do not all expire at
the same time. It is a rolling programme of replacement. The key
issue we have found is that where we have gone totally into the
PPP environment the most recent example is replacement of the
Bulldog aircraft which does elementary flying training and university
air squadron training. We are replacing that currently with the
Grobb aircraft with VT Aerospace. Prior to that was the Defence
Helicopter Flying School at Shawbury, which has gone into the
contractualisation area where the contractor owns the assets.
They have both proved to be an incredible success in terms of
the availability of assets to deliver training. I can quote an
example. Where we do basic flying training ourselves we have 70
aircraft on the station so that we can put 40 on the line every
day. Where we have gone contractualised, and Shawbury is an example,
we require 24 helicopters on the line every morning. The contractor
has delivered that every day for three and a half years and he
only has 26 aircraft on site. That has to be more cost effective,
to own fewer assets. He has the flexibility to balance the spares
holding, the manpower requirement, against the numbers of aircraft
he holds. Where we go into the public sector and we buy these
assets we are stuck with them and there is nothing we can do with
them. There are advantages there. The biggest problem we have
had in the past is that where we have gone and said, "We
want you now to maintain public owned assets"—and I
can cite Cranwell as an example there where we own the aircraft
but we ask a contractor to maintain them—the spares supply
comes through the Defence Logistics Organisation which is a third
party. We get into a three-way fight. If there are not any aircraft
on the line in the morning I say to the contractor, "I am
sorry. I am not going to give you money." He then says, "But,
hang on a minute. It is because the Defence Logistics Organisation
has not provided the spares that I cannot put them on the line",
so I have to pay him all the money because it is not his fault.
I get on to Defence Logistics and they say, "We are short
of money. We have no more spares there. Sorry: nothing we can
do." It is inefficient. We want to go further and say, "Whoever
has the contract is responsible entirely for all aspects of putting
that resource on the line. If he does not, he does not get paid."
That is the only we can get hold of them and make sure they deliver.
It has worked on the PPPs. We can see it working in other areas.
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