Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2002
MAJOR GENERAL
A D LEAKEY, CBE AND
MR MARTYN
PIPER
40. I would like to see if there is a correlation
between the problems that you are experiencing. If we looked at
these regions, could we then say these are regions where we have
had cases of bullying or cases of unemployment or cases of anti-military
feelings or whatever? I would really like that note to see if
there is some sort of correlation with any other factor.
(Major General Leakey) Can I just make one or two
points? We could send you a note on the areas[8]where
there are difficulties in recruiting and why we think those difficulties
are there because we have got that research. Just picking up your
point on attitudes, we do conduct surveys across the country and
quite a lot of the information comes through the Central Office
of Information on attitudes to the Army. You mentioned bullying
and attitudes to that. There has been a slight drop in the public's
perception of the Army. It is slightly less favourable now than
it was by a few percentage points. It has not affected the number
of recruits coming forward and the number of applicants. The number
of enquiries and the number of people enlisting is actually rising.
Patrick Mercer
41. General, could you explain the relationship
between the Recruiting Group and the Regimental Recruiting Teams?
(Major General Leakey) Yes. It has tightened somewhat
over the last 18 months in all sorts of senses. The first is that
they are now formally and properly funded. The Regimental Recruiting
Teams are divided into three tiers, heavy, medium and light and
they get funded accordingly, and they are heavy, medium and light
depending on the size of the organisation they are recruiting
for, the priority that has been afforded to them and so on. They
get given formally, funded by my organisation, vehicles, trailers,
lap-top computers, telephones, a travel and subsistence allowance
and a fuel allowance so that they can do the job which we wish
them to do. So we have given them the resources to do it. The
Recruiting Teams are not manpower that are owned by the ATRA,
they are manpower that are owned by the Field Army because they
do not spend all their time doing recruiting. They are taken off
recruiting very often when they are required to go on exercises
or operations and so that is part of the flexing of manpower in
and out of the ATRA. They do not really come into the ATRA at
all anyway because recruiting in the regions is run by the Regional
Brigade Commanders. That is why I said before that Recruiting
Group provide the nervous infrastructure which provides the intelligence
of where to do it, how to do it, how to do the advertising and
makes the plan. In each of the regions there is a Commander of
Regional Recruiting who is on the staff of the Regional Brigade
Commander and the Regional Brigade Commander agrees the regional
recruiting plan for his region and the recruiting teams operate
to his plan as advised by the Commander of Regional Recruiting,
who is the Recruiting Group's special-to-arm adviser on this and
it is working extremely well because we have now got much more
tight control over where the recruiting teams are going to make
sure that they are more intelligently targeted at events and also
much more tightly involved in the nurturing of people, particularly
when they are having to wait to get into training. It is a much
tighter liaison, it is better funded and it is better commanded
and controlled and organised.
42. Just to make quite clear, the Regimental
Recruiting Teams are misemployed soldiers from their battalions
or regiments who are mortar men, anti-tankers, snipers or whatever
who are temporarily acting as recruiters?
(Major General Leakey) I would not agree with that
at all. They are not misemployed at all. Recruiting is a whole
Army task. It is in the Commander in Chief's management plan and
he has given direction and orders to his District Divisional Commanders
and to the Regional Brigade Commanders, it is in their orders
to go and do recruiting and so they employ the manpower in the
Field Army to go and do recruiting. The Recruiting Group provides
the nervous system which provides the intelligence for it in the
same way that the gunners provide the special-to-arm advice to
a Brigade Commander, but the gunners down there are firing guns
and that is what they are ordered to do and they go and do recruiting
as well because that is what they are ordered to do. Recruiting
is not just an ATRA activity, it is a whole Army activity, everybody
is involved. What the Recruiting Teams do is not just recruiting,
remember, they are keeping the Army in the public eye. The Army
is a much smaller organisation than it used to be. A big criticism
is that far fewer people have contact or knowledge of the Army
these days and the Recruiting Team go out not just to do a recruiting
job but to fulfil its role of keeping the Army in the public eye.
So I do not accept your proposition at all.
43. But these are not professional recruiters,
these are soldiers found by their temporary recruiting units,
paid for by their battalions, regiments and by Land—
(Major General Leakey) They are professional recruiters
because they now go on a course and that has started this year
and they are now formally trained in order to stop some of the
amateurism and cowboy ideas that were going on and some inappropriate
practices.
44. I have to say that the Regimental Recruiting
Teams as I see it in my constituency would certainly claim to
be part of their battalions and regiments and would not claim
to be permanent recruiters or even professional recruiters.
(Major General Leakey) When they go adventure training
they are not part of their battalions then either.
45. They would claim that they are part of their
Commanding Officer's organisation.
(Major General Leakey) But they are also soldiers.
They belong to the Army and they belong to the Land Army and the
Commander in Chief wants them to go out recruiting and he gives
them orders to do that and the COs get their orders and they do
what the COs always do and they send their soldiers to do what
they are ordered to do.
46. If you ask a Parliamentary Question about
how many soldiers are recruited by the Regimental Recruiting Teams
and therefore by Land and how many soldiers are recruited by ATRA
personnel the answer which comes back is we do not know, we cannot
tell.
(Major General Leakey) Yes.
47. Comment?
(Major General Leakey) How would you define "recruited"?
48. Brought in off the street and delivered
to the office.
(Major General Leakey) I think we are developing a
much clearer idea of that because we now have a database which
is being developed and set up and it is beginning to show us some
statistics called the Contact Management Database. We are paying
a civilian company to run this and it is taking data feeds off
all of the recruiting contact points. We run an IT system in all
our recruiting offices, so as soon as somebody comes into the
recruiting office one of the icons or parts of the thing one has
to go through is how the contact was made. That data we have not
been able to capture before because we have not had a resource
with which to do it. We do have it now, it is the Contact Management
Database and we will be able to capture slowly and interrogate
that sort of source much more accurately than we have been able
to do before.
49. I have been talking to two battalions who
are over-recruited, well over-established and both would suggest
that they stand full in their own efforts rather than those of
ATRA, both would suggest that it is their own misemployed personnel
who reap the rewards of their efforts, their initiatives, their
drive. One would claim to have received an extra caravan from
ATRA, the other would have claimed to have received nothing from
ATRA or from Recruiting Group. There are other regiments who feel
so disappointed with the initiatives that are coming out of ATRA
that they have had to go to non-ATRA personnel to ask for ideas
and drive and initiatives on how they can set about recruiting
in order to help themselves because their numbers are so desperately
stretched. What do you think?
(Major General Leakey) Taking your very last point
about the Armoured Corps units, the Armoured Corps are exceeding
their targets on recruiting at the moment, so although an individual
regiment may have a problem—and I do not have the granularity
of detail to know which ones those might be—the Armoured
Corps as a whole is more than meeting its targets on recruiting.
I am slightly surprised to hear that today.
50. Yes, one ATR is recruiting in Liverpool.[9]
(Major General Leakey) Indeed, a regiment
of which I am Deputy Colonel. We will have a look at it. I think
I do know part of the answer to that question and I would not
wish to go down that bunny hole. It is a question of their perception
of what the liabilities might be, but that is a slightly esoteric
area. Let me address the first point you made and this was the
business of regiments only getting some support from the ATRA
and some getting no support from the ATRA and you mentioned a
caravan. I do not think the ATRA is providing caravans for anyone.
We are providing recruiting trailers, which they might be calling
caravans and every single Regimental Recruiting Team will be issued
with one and there is a plan for issuing caravans to every single
one of them.
51. A lot of Commanding Officers think you should
devolve the responsibility and the accountability to them and
let them do it, they will deliver the over-strength battalions,
the over-strength regiments because the current system does not
work. What do you think?
(Major General Leakey) If you asked those same Commanding
Officers the question do they go out and recruits for clerks and
vehicle mechanics and chefs which are also in short supply in
the Army those Commanding Officers will tell you that is not their
job, they recruit for their battalion. We recruit as a whole Army.
When I put it to those Commanding Officers that when you send
your recruiting team out presumably you are also sending out as
part of your team a chef and a vehicle mechanic and a clerk to
go and help bring in chefs, vehicle mechanics and clerks to the
Army because we need to recruit on a whole Army basis, they look
at me quizzically and say it is not my job, I am in the battalion
and I put it to them that they are in the Army. There are shortages
right across the Army and I think you have focused very much on
battalions that may be under strength. I focus on how it looks
across the whole of the Army and of course there are some battalions
under strength but there are also some other trade groups that
are under strength as well. We do target the priorities and make
the effort as and where we can. A lot of that is more easily done,
I have to say, with the larger corps because we can do it more
easily on a pan-Army basis. It is more difficult to recruit for
specifically regionally-based regiments because if that regiment
happens to be tied up in an operation and needs all its manpower
to undertake that operation, particularly if it is abroad, then
it cannot so easily release manpower into this pan-Army activity
of recruiting into which everybody has to contribute.
52. The last Regimental Recruiting Team I saw
had a non-commissioned officer attached to it working on precisely
the basis that you say and they were extremely pleased with the
result.
(Major General Leakey) This was as a result of an
initiative which I have been driving this year.
Mr Jones
53. Can I just follow on the point you have
just made about recruitment to the whole Army rather than regiments
which is obviously important. Coming back to your analogy earlier
about Ford motor cars, one of the constraints that you have is
to make sure you have got enough raw materials coming into ATRA.
Is there not a case, therefore, for abolishing what appears to
me to be quite an old fashioned system of regimental recruitment
and having a dedicated agency, whether part of ATRA or separate
whose specific function and job would be to recruit people to
the Army?
(Major General Leakey) Thank you. That is a good question.
We have looked at this backwards and forwards over a number of
years. One of the experiments we have done recently is to see
if this is something we can out-source into the civilian market.
There are lots of recruiting agencies out there who recruit for
civilian companies. We ran an experiment with it last year and
I have to say—
Chairman
54. In Scotland.
(Major General Leakey) Yes. The company came to us
very soon and said, "We just do not know enough about the
Services, nor do we think we would ever know enough about the
Services to be able to go out and do recruiting," so we have
tried that avenue. Ought we not, therefore, to have a bigger recruiting
group specifically tasked to do nothing but recruiting? I think
that is behind your question. The answer is we used to have a
much bigger recruiting group. We had far more than 132 offices
round the country.
Mr Jones
55. It is not about the size, it is about whether
you actually have a dedicated organisation. I accept the problems
with the private sector doing it, whether it is the Army or partly
the MoD that is just dedicated to recruitment. The problem from
what I can see is that at the moment we actually do not know truthfully,
until you get the statistics from this new system, how effective
different parts of the recruitment is now and I would also hasten
to add that you do not know what the different costs are between,
for example, somebody being recruited from an advert or walking
into a recruitment centre or being recruited from a regimental
team. Is there not a strong case—and I am not going down
the line of giving it to the private sector—for having an
arm of ATRA or a separate organisation which is not regiment based
feeding in people on secondment, for example? I accept that you
do need soldiers to recruit people, it is not a civilian task.
Should there not be a separate organisation recruiting people
to the whole Army?
(Major General Leakey) That is exactly what Recruiting
Group does. Somebody will pass me a note to tell me how many uniformed
and civilian people are in Recruiting Group. We think we have
got that to the critical mass that is required to provide exactly
the expertise to do that across the country. That is all Recruiting
Group does. It is an expert at that. It does marketing, advertising,
research—it does not do it all itself, it out-sources a
lot of it, but it is the expert on it. I think the development
of Recruiting Group over the last two or three years has really
brought us a long way to some of the things you were talking about,
which is really analysing what is working and costing what works
and what does not work. We have got some very good models being
run by civilian companies on our behalf to test this and we do
have a coarse idea of what is working and what does not work and
we can test it by statistics. When we get this new contact management
database in conjunction with another model we are running called
the recruitment competency model—and both of these are quite
scientific—we will have a much better base. So we have got
a dedicated organ whose sole focus is doing this. Again, talk
to any recruiting organisation, recruiting is a bit like holidays,
it can be a seasonal activity and if you have people who are dedicated
to it full-time they are not necessarily most cost-efficiently
used in that way and that is why we have these Regimental Recruiting
Teams who are the people who understand what it is to be a soldier
in an infantry battalion or a female clerk or a vehicle mechanic
or a chef and who go out there and press the flesh and do the
contacting.
56. For example, if I had a company and I was
recruiting people to that company I would know my balance sheet,
I would be able to tell you how much it costs per recruit. At
the moment it does not appear that we have this type of system.
Although you are saying the system is there as a dedicated unit,
does it not need beefing up in terms of saying we want to know
what is working and what is not working and perhaps possibly taking
it out of the hands of regimental control and saying this is a
central body which has obviously got regional bases but this is
the way we have got to recruit a certain number of people each
year with different skill levels, chefs and various other people
and this is what it costs? At the moment it does not seem as though
you have got that.
(Major General Leakey) You are right. We have got
it to some extent. I can tell you exactly what Recruiting Group
costs, I know exactly what our advertising campaign costs, I know
exactly what my manpower costs are on Recruiting Group. Moreover,
I know exactly how many contact telephone calls we get as a result
of the television advertising campaign. So I can tell you what
the value of each contact is and we are doing it in conjunction
with commercial companies who want exactly the same information
for their shareholders and balance sheets. So we do have that
information. Where it is greyer is the area you touch on and this
is this business which the previous question touched on of getting
people in from the Field Army who come and reinforce that effort,
pressing the flesh out there. The people who go to county shows
and set up displays and exhibitions are not there just recruiting,
they are taking the Army out into society. We are part of society
and it is incumbent on us to get our people out there and to keep
the Army in the public eye. The public like it. They welcome us
at those shows.
57. Should that not be a separate arm, which
is public relations, which is not about recruitment?
(Major General Leakey) It would be a very inefficient
way if you were not combining the two things together. I would
submit it would be even more inefficient.
58. At the moment you actually do not know what
it is costing and all I am saying is in terms of having a dedicated
organisation, if you had that you would have a system whereby
you would know that you have a certain type of recruits and you
would not get the regional variations which have been highlighted
because you would be able to home in on certain areas if you had
an organisation which was just dedicated to recruitment.
(Major General Leakey) I think I do have an organisation
that is dedicated to recruitment. When we put extra resources
in we measure the extra output that we are getting. For example,
we have been running regional concentrations where we have been
putting more concentration of recruiting teams and other Land/Field
Army assets into contacts with schools in town centres and so
on in a recruiting drive to put more people out on the streets
to make contacts. We then measure very accurately in that region
what dividend that is paying off. We know exactly how many men
we put out there because the Regional Brigade Commander writes
an Op Order which says how many men will go where and what they
are doing and where and over what period of time. We can put a
cost on it. We can also show on the graphs from that region how
many more enlistments or recruit contacts are made, we can measure
that so we can put a cost on that. What you cannot do is put a
value on what concurrent efficient value that is having in keeping
the Army in the public eye. If a recruiting team goes to a school,
for example, and give presentations and show people what they
do that is having a benefit which the schools want, the kids enjoy
and it gives them an outlook on life and in some cases an experience
which they may not have had before. Very often we target these
recruiting teams not into the recruiting of eligible people, the
16-24 year olds, but very often we are putting our efforts into
what we describe as the pre-eligibles, the 14-16 year olds to
put the idea in their mind at that stage. How do you measure that?
The answer is we are measuring it because we have a club which
is called Camouflage and anybody aged between 12 and 16 can join
that and if they have contact with a Regimental Recruiting Team
or any other contact with the Army they have an opportunity to
join this club called Camouflage. They then get sent a magazine
which comes out three or four times a year. They go onto a computer
database and we can then track those people who are contacted.
This has only been running for a year or so so we will not get
the dividends of this for a year or two. We can now track all
of those people who have been in the Camouflage club, who have
been contacted by people at pre-eligible age and we will know
in three or four years' time whether that has worked and we can
put a cost on it.
Chairman
59. You can see how interested we are in recruiting.
The information you gave us on this experiment in Scotland was
that, reading between the lines, it was not so great a success.
Could you drop us a note on what was attempted and whether the
lack of success[10]was
the result of (a) the company, or (b) being in Scotland or other
factors because maybe there are ways of resuscitating what may
not have been successful? I would not like to see an experiment
jettisoned because one experiment failed. The other thing is,
I was looking at some of the stats you have sent us on recruiting
ethnic minorities. Perhaps you could comment on how successful
you look as though you are going to be this year and why the Royal
Air Force seems to be far more successful in meeting its targets
than the Army does?
(Major General Leakey) I am completely
unsighted on the Royal Air Force's success or otherwise, I can
only comment on the Army's statistics.
Chairman: 1.7% is the figure, the Naval Service
2% of all recruits, the Army 1.7, the Royal Air Force 3.5.
Mr Roy: That is down on last year.
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