Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2002
MAJOR GENERAL
A D LEAKEY, CBE AND
MR MARTYN
PIPER
Chairman
1. Welcome. Before we start, just a few words
about the areas we intend covering this morning. Our purpose obviously
is to look at the work of one of the MoD's executive agencies.
We will ask questions about how the Army Training and Recruiting
Agency has performed against its key targets and its mission,
which is to provide the required number of appropriately trained
and motivated soldiers to meet the operational needs of the Army.
I have no doubt that we will have some questions on the treatment
of recruits and on the agency's duty to care for those it is training,
but we will not be asking questions on the events at Deepcut Barracks,
which are currently the subject of police inquiries. I want to
repeat what the Committee said in July. Although we are concerned
by events at Deepcut Barracks, we have no wish to cut across or
interfere in police inquiries. In due course, we expect to undertake
an inquiry which will examine conditions at Deepcut, but that
will not be until the police inquiries are completed. Therefore,
we have that agenda. With that in mind, could we begin? We will
explore the details of your training later on but could you give
the Committee a quick sketch of ATRA's size, its fixed assets,
their distribution, value and a broad outline of your main activities
together with the number of staff and students in each, perhaps
telling us whether you do any training for the other services?
(Major General Leakey) The purpose of
the ATRA is to produce highly trained, highly motivated soldiers
for not just the Army but the other services and other government
departments and agencies as well. To do it, the core part of our
task is in three or four parts. The first part is to recruit soldiers.
The second is to turn those recruits from civilians into soldiers
in what we call phase one training. That is the recruit training.
When they graduate from recruit training, they go to their special
to arm or cap badge or trade training. That we describe as phase
two training. Once they have graduated from phase two training
they are then what we would describe as trained soldiers and we
have fulfilled our part of the ATRA's role which is to provide
soldiers who are trained, ready to undertake their first tour
in a front line unit. By "front line" I do not just
mean infantry battalions but logistic units, an operating unit,
a combat support unit or whatever. We do not attempt to train
these soldiers for every eventuality, for every theatre. There
is more training which they will come back to inside the ATRA
as part of their career development and further advancement, instructor
training and so on, which they come back into the ATRA to do.
That we describe as phase three training. Those are the four things
which the ATRA does: recruiting, phase one training. Phase two
training, the initial special to arm training and phase three
training is the career development training. How do we do it?
The ATRA is split up into 12 operating divisions. I know that
you were sent earlier this diagram. I thought I would give you
an idea of the size and scale of the spectrum or our organisation.
If I go very briefly through the organisation and how it operates,
the first operating division I want to mention is the recruiting
group. The recruiting group is just that. It is responsible for
the recruiting, the advertising and the marketing of soldiers
and officers into the British Army. To give you a very broad idea
of its size and scale, it operates on 122 sites, recruiting officers
throughout the country. About 30-odd of those are shared with
the Air Force and the Navy. The recruiting group is really the
nervous system of recruiting. It provides the intelligence; it
does the market research; it organises the advertising and it
sets the recruiting plan and organises the bureaucracy, of which
there is a considerable amount, in recruiting and enlisting soldiers.
You might want to talk a little more later about what the rest
of the Field Army does on recruiting because recruiting is a whole
Army activity in which field units out in the Army contribute
in various ways. That is one of the operating divisions. The second
one, which is again a stand alone one, is Sandhurst, where all
our officers are trained, both regular officers and professionally
qualified officers—that is, doctors, dentists, vets, chaplains
and so on—who go through shorter courses than regular, direct
entry officers. Also, we run Territorial Army officer courses
at Sandhurst. The third operating division which is important
to mention is ITG, initial training group. Initial training group
is the organisation which runs all of the phase one training—that
is, turning civilians into soldiers. There is not a standard way
of joining the Army. We do have the single entry, which is the
adult recruit who comes in and does a 12 week standard, common
military syllabus. In that 12 weeks, he is turned from a civilian
into a soldier and is ready for his phase two training. For junior
soldiers, we run a variety of options. For the technically minded
soldiers who are going into the technically demanding corps, they
can go to the Army technical foundation college where they do
a 28 week course which gives them not only the recruit training
but also some technical foundation to equip them to undertake
better their phase two technical training. There is then the Army
foundation college at Harrogate which takes the higher grade combat
armed junior soldiers. These are boys and girls aged 16. They
do a 42 week course there which is designed to develop their leadership
and initiative as well as turning them from civilians into soldiers.
Then there is Bassingbourne, which is where we train the rest
of our junior soldiers, again mostly into combat arms and they
join at 16, sometimes 17. It is slightly longer than the CMSR
course at some 20 weeks. Then people graduate from phase one and
go into phase two training and that accounts for all of the other
operating divisions in the ATRA. These are all specialist training
groups, logistics, engineers, artillery, signals, aviation, infantry
and so on. There we undertake the phase two and also the phase
three training. The one organisation I have not mentioned is the
infantry, where we combine phase one and two training. I do not
want to go into the details of that now. Anyone who joins the
infantry as an adult soldier goes to Catterick and does a combined
phase one and two on a gradual progression. There are 12 operating
divisions. We take in and expect to enlist this year over 14,000
soldiers. There is some wastage, which you may want to ask about,
during training. We expect to turn out into the Field Army—i.e.,
trained, having gone through phases one and two—some 10,000
soldiers into the Army. In addition, we are running as part of
our phase two and phase three courses some 77,000-odd courses
a year inside the ATRA. We run about some 1,400 different courses
and there are 143 different trade groups or career employment
groups in the Army, so it is quite complicated. In terms of directly
employed staff, there are 11,700. The breakdown between those
is 57% military and 43% Civil Service. On top of that, we have
outsourced or insourced a lot of contractor instructors and staff.
I do not know how many they employ because we do not account for
them but I guess it is between 7,000 and 12,000. It is 43 schools.
We are spread on 39 different sites across the country. In terms
of the costs of it, our operating costs are over £1 billion
a year. That includes the management expenditure, interest on
capital and depreciation and so on but the cash cost of running
it every year is of the order of £830 million-odd a year.
Perhaps that gives you an idea of the spectrum of what we do and
the size and scale of what we consist of.
2. What sort of coordination do you have with
the other services? Are there any different principles involved?
What are the key differences and similarities between yourselves
and the Air Force and the Royal Navy?
(Major General Leakey) There was another question
you asked me earlier and that was how much training do we do of
the other services. We do a lot of training for the Navy and the
Air Force in particular. I guess it is in the region of 3,000
or 4,000 courses, particularly the logistic ones and particularly
drivers. We run the Defence School of Transport. We are training
Navy and Air Force in almost all of our schools in the signals,
CIS, electrical and mechanical engineering. Also we are training
a lot of people from the Home Office in the National Research
Centre and at the Royal School of Military Engineering at Chatham
and other government departments as well.
3. It is driving the ships they need the help
on, not driving the vehicles!
(Major General Leakey) You asked about what we do
in common with the other services. Each of the services has a
similar set-up. They are training agencies. It starts at the top.
I meet with my fellow chief executives regularly, at the moment
probably once a month and sometimes more often. We discuss matters
of common interest. We share ideas literally from the top to the
bottom, in particular on some of the management processes we are
using. We do joint seminars with them on wastage rates and output
costing management systems to try and get systems in for that.
We have tried to get ourselves all onto a common IT system for
managing the training and the scheduling, recruit tracking and
so on. In that sense, quite a lot, but the nature of our training
in many areas is quite different. Where it is not, it is being
rationalised. As you may be aware, there was the Defence Training
Group Review that reported about two years ago and recommended
that large areas of training should be rationalised on a triservice
basis. There is a team now which is putting together a package
which has gone out to industry for partnering ideas and that will
rationalise six large areas of defence training into six large,
combined, defence training establishments.
Mr Howarth
4. Can you be more specific about the six large
training areas where it looks as though there may be a triservice
element? Can you tell us whether you think this is driven by a
desire to genuinely rationalise training or is it driven by financial
necessity? I declare an interest in that the Army School of Catering
is in Aldershot, in my constituency, and there is a proposal to
move that to Leconfield, where there will be a triservice catering
training centre. Maybe for catering that makes sense but I wonder
how far you feel that triservice training can go.
(Major General Leakey) The Defence Training Review
spent some 18 months going round all the defence training establishments
just to see how much duplication and overlap there was and commonality
in the training that was being undertaken in separate establishments.
The report found that there was an enormous amount of commonality
and that therefore we were being wasteful of resources because
you can achieve economy of scale and efficiencies and indeed share
best practice if you combine some of the training. I think that
addresses part of your question. There genuinely are an awful
lot of training areas where we can harmonise and get better value
and better training. On the second part, let me speak from the
ATRA's perspective. We are 43 schools on 39 different sites and
this is a legacy from where the Army has come over the last 300
years, I suppose. It is not an efficient way of running an organisation.
Our overheads are vast, just regarding the number of messes, the
number of grass cutting areas, and common facilities like catering
and other utilities. It is an extremely inefficient way to have
established ourselves. My predecessor decided that we had to rationalise
and set in train the ATRA rationalisation strategy. The handbrake
was put on that when the Defence Training Review got under way
and it was overtaken by the Defence Training Review, which decided
that rather than the Army rationalising within its own sites it
would be better to rationalise on a defence basis. With regard
to that part of your question, is it just for savings and efficiency,
yes, it is, because there are efficiencies there to be made. We
were going to do it ourselves on a uniquely Army basis and it
makes much more sense to be doing it on a defence basis. Turning
to the individual parts of the rationalisation projects, the chefs
and the catering going to Leconfield, we have taken these six
streams of training and spent some time doing a project development
of each of these streams and tried to design a benchmark solution
so that if we were going to rationalise on our own we would have
an idea and indeed a cost of how we would do it. We have done
that as a best guess or a very detailed estimate of how we would
go about doing it ourselves. The problem about rationalisation
on this scale is that it is extremely expensive. Any change management
of this scale involves some very serious, up front, capital costs
and investment. That is why we are going out to industry to see
if we can do it with industry in partnership. The benchmark solutions
are out there as an indicator to industry of how it might be done
and an indicator to us of what it might cost if we were to do
it in-house. Whether the chefs go to Leconfield, we will not know
until industry comes back with its solutions. They may well have
better ones.
5. Can you tell me in a word whether you are
paying attention to potential damage that this triservice training
can do to the maintenance of the individual service ethos?
(Major General Leakey) Yes, we are paying a lot of
attention to it.
6. How would you characterise the benefits first
to the ATRA and second to the Army more widely of adopting this
agency status? You may regard it as not being a benefit but I
am sure in your position you would.
(Major General Leakey) When the ATRA was given its
agency status and was set up as an agency, the whole of defence
was beginning to be run on a much more businesslike manner. Some
of the management processes within defence were a little archaic
and not particularly modern. By making parts of defence and in
particular the ATRA an agency, the idea was to put a ring fence
round it, give it a bunch of money, give it a task to do and impose
on it some of the sorts of disciplines which industry and commerce
have imposed on them by their boards and shareholders, and to
adopt some of the commercial and businesses practices, particularly
in their accounting, in the setting of targets and the measurement
of performance. In that sense, the setting up of Army training
into an agency in that way brought exactly those disciplines on
it. They were put in the charter and it made a revolutionary change
inside the way we were doing our business. It made people much
more accountable for how money was spent on delivering training.
It was a great benefit. We have now moved on five years and those
disciplines are much more commonly shared across every headquarters
and organisation in the Army. Last year I was in Northern Ireland,
for example, as the chief of staff there and I can honestly say
that we had our business and management plan. We had accountants
delving into our accounts. We were always looking for output costing
methods and looking at efficiency, setting targets and measuring
things. That discipline is alive and well certainly across the
Army and I think defence as well. Part of the purpose of setting
up the ATRA to impose those businesslike and commercial disciplines
has disappeared to a certain extent. Nonetheless, it is there
and we are seen as an agency. One of the big benefits that came
out of it was to try and make us establish a customer/supplier
type arrangement, rather than informal, loose arrangements with
the delivery of our output. That was another purpose and a benefit
of setting up the agency. The detail of setting up some of that
customer/supplier agreement, even five years on, is nothing like
as good as perhaps it ought to be. We are doing a lot more work
on it now. Whether we were an agency or not, we would still be
doing a lot of work on that because that is the business practice
that is alive across the MoD. The ATRA is almost a brand name
now. People inside the Army know what the ATRA is. It is an identifiable
group of training organisations. Before, we did not really have
that in the Army. It was a disparate group of training organisations
owned by all sorts of people with no real structure and accountability
or identity behind it. If we lost our agency status, the thing
I would be most upset about would be the loss of that brand name
in the Army. It may sound trivial but outside every training establishment
on all the schools and sites we have, there is an blinking great
green sign with our logo on the top and "Army Training and
Recruiting Agency" at the bottom, with the name of the barracks
or the unit there. People have quite a loyalty towards the ATRA
and that matters. If we lost our agency status, I would ask to
keep the name.
7. You are imposing quite a big burden on the
politicians to resist the change. We have the Royal Air Force
Establishment at Farnborough and it has been through a succession
of name changes in ten years but it is still known as the RAE.
You have a review of armed forces personnel and processes under
way at the moment, the first phase of which you have completed.
Given what you have just said about this brand name, are you concerned
that this review might result in a change in the ATRA and what
do you see coming out of this review in terms of the status of
the organisation of the ATRA?
(Major General Leakey) I am not concerned. I am not
frightened of change. If the review comes up with a good reason
for change, we get on and do it. Do I know what the review is
going to produce? No. It is in the early stages.
8. What do you want to see coming out of it?
(Major General Leakey) The review is a very thorough,
end to end process audit of what we are doing. I want to see whether
the machine is broken and needs fixing or not. From the ATRA perspective,
we have a lot of improvement we can make and there is a lot of
change going on inside the ATRA as it is. I am not seeing the
process, from where I sit, end to end in the way that the review
team is. The major benefit of the review is that it is not looking
in the traditional way at each of the agencies in isolation. We
welcome that. We are being looked at quite intrusively by all
sorts of organisations to audit what we are doing, but the beauty
of this one is that it is looking at the end to end process.
9. I have heard this expression "end to
end process" and it seems to be something associated with
the atmosphere in the old War Office building. What does it mean?
(Major General Leakey) It is the service personnel
process review and it is looking at all the agencies that deal
with service personnel processes, from recruiting to individual
training to true life management, career management. It is looking
at the whole management of how we do our personnel, across each
of the three services. In our case, recruiting the ATRA personnel
and manning agency and the headquarters adjutant general deals
with manning and manning policy and career management. It is doing
that through the Army and through the other two services. It is
end to end in terms of recruiting right through life and in terms
of all three services.
Mr Jones
10. Unlike Mr Howarth, I am not sure there is
a difference between boiling an egg in the Army, Navy or Air Force.
You say you are looking at the private sector. Have you had any
discussions with, for example, the further education sector?
(Major General Leakey) Yes. To say that catering is
boiling an egg is dumbing it down somewhat.
11. I did not say that. I said there was no
difference between the different forms of catering.
(Major General Leakey) Catering on a ship in a minute
galley or in a submarine is a different concept. The hygiene,
some of the principles and rules, the storage, the food management
and all that side of things is very different to doing it out
in hot, desert climates or cold climates. This is what the Defence
Training Review is doing. You are absolutely right. Boiling an
egg is boiling an egg in all three services. This is what characterises
the Defence Training Review. There is lots of the training they
are doing which has a lot of commonality. That is why we are looking
at putting it together. Everybody needs a basic foundation in
some of the scientific and theoretical principles before they
go on to the practice. You can do that in a lecture hall or a
theatre and with catering some of the basic skills are exactly
the same. The idea of these schools is to put them together and
do the basic bits that we can do in common modules and develop
that on and do the specialist bits elsewhere. We are looking to
do any of our training in conjunction with further education.
We are looking to map all of our training against civilian vocational
qualifications. It is a constant process of accrediting all of
our courses and qualifications into civilian qualifications. It
is now the other way round. There are some civilian organisations
which are coming to us saying, "Your course design and the
qualifications are so good, they must now be the benchmark."
That is happening particularly in some of the engineering aspects,
particularly as there are fewer and fewer of these formal apprenticeship
schemes running in industry. We do set a benchmark for some of
those. We are in very close touch with the education establishment
across the country.
12. Could you see the FE sector providing some
of this basic training?
(Major General Leakey) We are looking to anybody outside
the services to come into partnership with us to do some of this
training. We have further education authorities already doing
training with the Army and the other services as well.
Jim Knight
13. Your budget is set annually by the MoD.
Your owners' board chaired by the adjutant general sets your output
targets. I am interested in the linkage between the two, whether
for example you have a budgeted figure for the cost of recruiting
and training a soldier and whether there is a linkage between
output targets and your overall budget.
(Major General Leakey) The process starts with what
Army capability is required. That is refined into how many men
would we need to do that. That is done by the headquarters adjutant
general and the general staff. They say, "We need an Army
of 100,000." In view of the turnover, that means you have
to turn out about 10,000 trained soldiers. That gets broken down
into what cap badges, which corps, what trade groups they are
in. That is translated into a statement of training requirement.
That forms the basis of designing the ATRA. What training capacity
do we need to have in order to fulfil that statement of training
requirement which the Army wants? If you like, that is the customer/supplier
arrangement. That is costed, but not annually in every part of
the detail. It changes from year to year. Having put a costing
on it, we then know from the SDP process—
14. Remind me: SDP?
(Major General Leakey) It is the four year rolling
budgetary process that we use in the MoD. I mentioned earlier
that our operating costs in a year are about £830 million.
It is unlikely that there is going to be a major uplift other
than price increases and so on into our budget. During the year
when we look at the statement of training requirement we look
to see whether we have the capacity to fulfil that or not. The
answer is we never do have exactly the right capacity because
the requirement changes every year. New bits of equipment come
in and the structure of the Army changes so that there are more
people here and fewer people there. We have to adapt therefore
the capacity of the agency to deal with that. We cost that out
on a capacity basis, because we know that we have to turn out,
let us say, 10,000 people. If we reverse engineer that, we have
wastage during the process. In order to turn out 10,000, we probably
have to try and enlist about 14,000. If you are going to do that,
you have to have a recruiting organisation and we know that we
are going to have to advertise on about this scale to get that
amount of people through the pipeline. We then get into a process
of bargaining with Land Command and the other customers to say,
"Look, it is not affordable within 830 million, which is
what we are likely to get. It is going to cost 870 million."
There are some compromises that have to be made. Either we distribute
that training out to you or you have to change your requirement
or we have to go to the centre and ask for more money. That is
the basis of the planning cycle. Going back to your question and
do we say 10,000 times whatever it costs to train a recruit, we
are moving towards that but there are some difficulties with it
because we are not just a factory turning out Ford motor cars.
We are not producing a unique thing on a planned conveyor belt.
We are occupying an enormous number of sites where we do not just
do training and recruiting. We are also the landlord for other
lodgers. If you, for example, go to the School of Electrical and
Mechanical Engineering, on the site there part of the REME training
group has in the garrison, sharing the overheads, the utilities
and everything else, a Territorial Army battalion, a regular Field
Army REME equipment support battalion and an RAF unit and a couple
of other, smaller lodger units. To work out what the costs are
and divide them by how many students go through and say what the
cost is for a student would be a bit simplistic. We are moving
towards an output cost and management system whereby we can do
that much more accurately, but it means setting up some quite
complicated activity models and costing those activities in detail
so that we can attribute the costs which are attributable to training
recruits. There is another problem with this. Let us take phase
three training when soldiers come back from the Field Army into
the ATRA for career development and upgrading courses. The Army
has a training requirement, for example, of people coming back
into one of the engineering schools for upgrading skills. If we
get deployed on an operation suddenly, those soldiers are not
releasable from their units so there is unused capacity inside
the schools. That can happen at very short notice and it is difficult
to plan against that sort of contingency. We run just like any
other business. We get set the statement of training requirement.
We cost that and then we take a risk on it. We look back historically
and say, "They have always asked for 100 placed on that.
They have only ever taken up 80 because at the last minute there
have always been people dragged off, so we will only design and
fund the capacity for those 80." Sometimes we get caught
out. When that happens, it perhaps goes back to the business about
ring fencing the ATRA. We are part of the Army, whether we like
it or not. Whilst it would be very nice to be a discrete, distinct
agency with a fence built round us so that we could be given a
bag of money and resources and clear targets like a car factory
and told to produce, that would be very much easier to manage,
but when we go, for example, on operations and the Army needs
specialist skills or runs out of people from maybe undermanned
units we have to take our share of reducing some of the augmentation
to make some of these operations run. At the moment, the figure
is quite low. I think we are providing 40 augmentees, mostly officers
and senior NCOs out of the ATRA at large to deploy in operations.
Equally, when we get a surge coming in and we do not have the
capacity, we ask the Land Army and say, "We took a risk on
this and we did not have enough capacity. Can you lend us some
soldiers for six months to help us out through a blip?"
15. If you were to move to a more per capita
basis of working out your budget, would you be basing that on
your target number of soldiers processed or on the lower figure
of those who make it through the system?
(Major General Leakey) The target that we are given
is funded, but we aspire to train more. Let us take this year
as a very good example. We have been set a target to turn out
9,100-odd soldiers out of phase two training. I think we are just
going to exceed that target. This year, we are recruiting a huge
number more than we were able to recruit last year and more than
we expected to recruit this year. That will I hope inflate the
number of soldiers who we turn out of phase two training next
year. You cannot do this on an annual basis because what we get
in this year does not turn out this year; it turns out next year.
16. Does that mean you have had to put a hold
on new recruits coming in?
(Major General Leakey) No. We were not budgeted for
it. We budgeted to pay something like 12,900 recruits under training
so we have a budget to pay those salaries. At the moment, we are
running at 13,500 recruits so we are having to pay far more salaries
than we budgeted for. We are not just a discrete agency given
a bag of money. It is a defence priority to try and get the manning
up and money has been flexed into the ATRA from juggling priorities.
17. You are still taking on new recruits?
(Major General Leakey) Yes.
18. As and when people want to join up, you
are happy to take them on and you will get the money in to resource
that?
(Major General Leakey) We have so far this year been
given an uplift of some £30 million to continue recruiting.
19. That is on top of your 830 million?
(Major General Leakey) In the early part of the year,
there were also some savings exercises put on us because we are
not ring fenced and immune from this. If it is perceived that
there is a defence priority elsewhere then we will have to take
our share of the cuts. In the swing and balance, we had to make
some cuts in other parts of our activity, not only to help our
own under-funding situation, but also to contribute to other parts
of the budget.
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