Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2002
MAJOR GENERAL
A D LEAKEY, CBE AND
MR MARTYN
PIPER
20. You have some financial flexibility when
the ring fence is breached and you manage to pull some more money
in because of an exceptional surge, but if it is not exceptional
and there is a degree of surge do you have the financial flexibility,
given that you have 39 sites and 43 schools? How do you achieve
that flexibility?
(Major General Leakey) I cut down on some of the things
which we would rather not cut down on. It is what I would describe
as the quality aspect of life. It affects absolutely everything
right across defence. We under-fund on our property maintenance.
We do not do as much painting and repairing and servicing and
some of the things we ought to do. I hold my hands up here. If
you go round my estate, you will find parts of it in a Dickensian
state. It is well known. It is there for everybody to see. As
an officer put to me only yesterday, he visited two or three of
the barracks where our recruits live and he said he had seen better
accommodation in the Serb army barracks in Kosovo.
21. Physical flexibility in accommodation must
be difficult to have capacity for. The inspectors have to come
to Bovington to do their training. There is only a certain amount
of capacity at Bovington. There is only a certain amount of instructors
and if you get a surge how do you fill in that extra capacity?
(Major General Leakey) You have put your finger on
a real in year management nightmare that we live with. We are
not taking rocks out of a quarry where we can take them out at
a consistent rate and feed them into the factory. Recruits join
the Army on a seasonal basis and we get rich seasons and lean
seasons. When people say they want to join the Army, our aim is
to try and get them in as soon as they want to join. Sometimes
we make some variations on this, not out of choice. We just do
not have the capacity to get people in straight away. Nonetheless,
taking the year as a whole, for example, when people get their
GCSE results and they see what opportunities might be open to
them, we get this enormous influx of recruits and we have to try
and take them in. We can probably do that, and we do do it, in
phase one training where, instead of maybe having eight people
in the section you build it up to 11 or 12 to start with. When
they graduate from phase one training and go to phase two training,
for example, you mentioned Bovington, an instructor can only take
six people on a gunnery course because you cannot get more than
six people round the simulator or in the part task trainers. If
you have had to take a glut in, we cannot equip Bovington with
the capacity of instructors and facilities to cope with a rich
season because in a lean season these people would stand idle.
In the lean season, some of these people go away on career courses
or maybe do some adventure training, part of the quality of life
from being in the Army. In the rich season, when there are a lot
of people there, they are working absolutely flat out, probably
taking one extra person in their crew than they ought to, but
then we buy in a little help from the Field Army. They send us
extra instructors. Taking a particular case at Bovington and Lulworth
at the moment, we have exported some of our phase two training
to some of the facilities which are absolutely identical in the
Field Army. For example, when regiments are away in Canada or
on an operational tour and their part task trainers are not being
used or they have capacity, we get their trainers and do it there
rather than at Bovington. We are able to manage.
22. Do you think the review could give you more
flexibility by working on a defence basis? Obviously, with specific
skills like armoury, you are not going to—?
(Major General Leakey) No. Armoury does not have much
commonality with the Navy and Air Force. The jury is out on that.
There is a view that if you make the whole scale of the operation
that much bigger you ought to have more flexibility to manage
the risk and the surges in it. I am not a business management
guru and I would not want to say whether that was right or wrong.
23. You have the various targets in terms of
your outputs. Do you get a conflict between wanting to hit your
targets and turn out 95% of soldiers or whatever and maintaining
your quality threshold, which maybe ultimately is what we are
all after? We do not want shoddy soldiers.
(Major General Leakey) Yes, there is a conflict. We
have consistently been missing our targets. We are also failing
people and discharging people not up to the standard at every
point in the pipeline from recruit applications right through
to phase two training. There is a threshold below which we will
not go because you cannot take a complete passenger out into the
Field Army. We do take a lot of risks out into the Field Army
but we have to draw a boundary line somewhere. If it was only
about numbers, I could give an order inside the ATRA to say, "You
must hit those targets willy nilly" and they would in terms
of quantity, but it is a balance. If I look back through the history
of the ATRA, there has been quite a bit of experimentation on
this. One bit was to say, "It must be the case that if you
lower the threshold on the criteria for accepting people into
the Army, if you get more people in, you are bound to get more
people into training." The answer was yes, we did, but at
a huge cost of wastage inside that training pipeline, not only
in terms of quantities of people and the money it was costing
to recruit them, equip them with uniform, keep them in training
for a few weeks and then discharge them, but the human cost of
that, not only to those who failed. We do not want people coming
into the Army and being put into training which they manifestly
are not going to survive. It is at a cost to our own people as
well. It is very hard on these instructors to ask them to train
people who are basically untrainable.
Chairman: We recruit from the whips' office
and no training is required!
Patrick Mercer
24. What have been the principal reasons for
your failure to meet soldier recruiting targets?
(Major General Leakey) There is not a short answer
to that. One of the reasons is where we put the threshold bar
for the quality of acceptance into the Army. We could lower the
threshold and meet the recruiting targets. I will not let the
recruiting group do that. The recruiting group only recruits people.
The success of the recruiting group is not judged by them because
the selection of recruits is not done by the recruiting group;
it is done by the initial training group. The recruiters go out
and do the recruiting. They provide the course filter. They do
all the bureaucracy, fill in the forms, make sure people have
not got police records, fill in the medical application forms
and declare any bars to enlistment, any technical or obvious bars.
They do some interviewing and they, with experience, can weed
out the people who are clearly unsuitable for a variety of reasons
or untrainable. Any successful applicant who gets through that
stage goes to the recruit selection centre. These recruit selection
centres are not run by the recruiting group. They are run by the
initial training group and they put these people through a day
and a half of selection, physical tests, some elementary psychometric
trainability tests and medical examinations and so on. That is
where we set the high jump bar. That is the first part of the
answer to your question. The second is that it is a matter of
resources. I talk to my American and French counterparts and my
naval and Air Force counterparts and they are not meeting their
recruiting targets either. We have all agreed together that if
you throw more resources into this you will do better. We were
able to recruit more people, for example, nine years ago. I cannot
remember offhand the number of recruiting officers we had around
the country but we have reduced them dramatically as part of the
rationalisation under the previous efficiency regimes, so more
resources and more recruiting officers would help and advertising.
We know that if we put more advertisements and more air time on
television at peak time we get more responses.
25. I would say to you, "Recruit more people."
(Major General Leakey) I would be very happy to.
26. There are significant manpower shortfalls
in the Army and yet recruiting targets are going down. Why?
(Major General Leakey) You will have to ask the adjutant
general.
27. What is your view?
(Major General Leakey) I get set my targets. You missed
what I said before. Defence sets what the capability is. The Army
translates that capability into how many men you need to service
it. That is then translated by the director of army staff duties
and the general staff into a breakdown of cap badges, trades and
so on. That is all done by the adjutant general's staff and the
general staff and they then say to me, "We want 10,000 people
turned out of your organisation in this distribution of trade
and cap badges". That is the target I operate to and that
is to service the future manning requirements. The model for how
the Army is manned is a very complex model which we contribute
to because we provide some of the assumptions like what sort of
the wastage we have, how long people need in training and so on,
we provide some of the input to that, but the modelling is done
by a different agency.
28. With some units desperately undermanned
and with an increasing need for troops, actual boots or hands
and feet and whatever, do you ever question the targets you are
set?
(Major General Leakey) As a matter of general policy,
of course I do.
29. What are your views?
(Major General Leakey) I am not in the "directorate
of doctrine" to say what the future equipment requirements
are going to be. Our recruiting targets for this year feed through
into the Army in two years' time in terms of trade strength and
the numbers that feed through in two years' time are going to
be in the Army 5, 12 and 15 years beyond. So the strategy for
the manning of the Army is something based on a very complex matrix
of new equipments, new warfare styles, changing requirements under
defence policy, a new chapter, for example, which changes the
size and the shape of the Army. I am not involved in the detail
of that staff work and if I was then I might have a more informed
view.
30. I understand that, General. If we are looking
at the 4/7 Brigade, for instance, at the moment who may or may
not be involved in a war in Iraq, it has two of the worst recruited
regiments in the British Army in it and it looks as if they may
well be off fairly shortly to fight somewhere, so that is an immediate
problem. Blackwatch and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards are in
a powerless state. Can you not question why those regiments are
allowed to get like that?
(Major General Leakey) Yes, I can question it.
31. Do you?
(Major General Leakey) Yes.
32. What is the answer?
(Major General Leakey) It is simply not an answer
in my competence. You would not expect me to answer that question.
33. I would hope that you would be applying
pressure to increase the recruiting targets and to increase recruiting
abilities.
(Major General Leakey) What we do is we look across
the arms and service directories to see where there are critical
shortfalls in either individual regiments or trade groups and
they become priorities and we make them priorities. The manners
tell us what the manning priorities are and we then put extra
resources into those. You were not here earlier when I was describing
Recruiting Group's activities. What the action does in terms of
recruiting is provide the nervous system for recruiting.
34. Do not repeat it for my benefit.
(Major General Leakey) When it comes to priorities,
particularly if it is for particular regional regiments, then
that is a particular regional problem and the responsibility for
regional recruiting is with Land Command and we work very closely
in conjunction with Land Command because recruitment is not just
done by Recruiting Group, it is done as a whole Army activity
that is very very carefully stitched with co-ordinated effort
between the Adjutant Generals of the TLB and the Land top level
budget and it is a co-ordinated activity and it is a matter of
prioritisation and that prioritisation is not something which
is in my gift.
Mr Roy
35. You said the geographic regions have a problem.
Which regions have a problem?
(Major General Leakey) Let us take Scotland. I would
not say that we have a problem in Scotland. In fact, funnily enough,
I have only just looked at the statistics in Scotland. I think
Scotland has been producing 12% of the recruits into the Army
up until the last two years when it has dropped by a percentage
point down to 11%.
36. I am not suggesting that Scotland is a problem.
You said there is a geographic problem and I am asking you to
identify where the geographic problem is in the UK?
(Major General Leakey) I think there is a slight misunderstanding
of what I am saying. I said it can be a regional problem with
regiments that recruit from geographical areas, but that does
not necessarily mean that there is a regional problem of recruiting,
it is recruiting into a particular cap badge. For example, in
Scotland we have been recruiting very well into the Royal Logistic
Corps, so we have been doing well recruiting from Scotland, but
people have not wanted to join the Blackwatch.
37. Do you have a problem geographically in
trying to recruit people? It does not really matter where they
go. Is the East Midlands a harder area to recruit from than the
West Midlands or Yorkshire or Lancashire or the south? Do you
have a problem in a certain geographic area?
(Major General Leakey) Yes, there are problems in
geographical areas.
38. Where?
(Major General Leakey) It is very patchy across the
country. We are not looking just at this year, we do a lot of
very detailed research on the demographics and it is research
which we commission from the civil sector and from the Central
Office of Information and we pool all the research in. There are
great regional variations in areas where unemployment is low or
high, where there has been a great deal of local investment in
the economy. Sometimes there are even quite small variations between
regions within the same region with the 16-24 year old age group
from whom we recruit. In some areas where we have problems now
the problem is a problem because of the demography in that area,
there is a very small population of 16-24 year olds.
39. I understand that, but, with respect, you
have not answered my question. Can you name me a geographic area
that you have a problem in?
(Major General Leakey) I will name one, London. We
have got a problem with London because it has got a lot of people
in the demographic trough and we ought to be recruiting from them
and we are not taking our share. The reason for that is we need
more recruiting officers and we have got a plan to put more into
London and that is why we have got a problem in London. I could
send you a note on where we have got particular problems because
I just do not have the research to hand.
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