Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
16 JUNE 2004
MR LAWRENCE
WATERMAN AND
MR JEREMY
CORFIELD
Q160 Mr Blunt: Can you elucidate?
Mr Waterman: I have personal experience
of some health and safety work in connection with the RAF and
there seems to be a greater willingness for central arrangements
to be made which most people then make use of locally in a way
that makes sense. So you get slightly more benefiting from experience.
I find it hard to understand how quite so many reports could make
recommendations and there be no closing of the loop, which has
occurred over a number of years. If some of the recommendations
which have been made over the last decade had been implemented,
some of the problems we are discussing today would have been resolved.
One of the reasons why there was a degree of diffidence in answering
that earlier question about the current proposals is around whether
this is going to be completed and finished rather than be just
another set of recommendations. For example, having some standard
approaches to risk assessment with some standard formats for recording
it would seem, in any devolved organisation but with a degree
of central authority, to be efficient and useful and facilitate
people moving from place to place, yet it is not in place within
the Army. You get much more coherence in the RAF and I believe
in the Navy as well from some of the consultations we have had
with colleagues.
Mr Corfield: The Army has some
very strict standards about health and safety and those are outlined
in JSP375, which is very much an overarching document which will
apply standards across the whole of the service.
Q161 Mr Blunt: How are those interpreted
on the ground?
Mr Corfield: The Army is massive
and diverse in its operations, is disparate in its locations and
activities, so the way things are handled on the ground will be
very different from, say, a Territorial Army barracks in London
or a naval base in Scotland.
Q162 Mr Blunt: Is it your conclusion
that the Army appears to have got the paperwork right in terms
of JSP375, but it is the cultural aspects which, to different
degrees in different units, different establishments, need attention?
Mr Corfield: Absolutely. I would
reiterate what Lawrence said which was that the hardware is in
place and it is good hardware, the paperwork is in place and it
is good paperwork, but it is the things which fall between those
and the culture and the people.
Q163 Mr Blunt: Do you see any financial
consequences for the MoD to apply those standards across the piece
or the Army to apply those standards across the piece?
Mr Waterman: We identified that
there would be some areas of potential cost. We mentioned issues
to do with welfare facilities; I am thinking about the facilities
for the young recruits, that if there were some standards which
were applied and delivered against, then there might be some spend
there. We have already discussed the supervisory resources and
there will be some implications there. We also feel, in terms
of equipping supervisors, having a training regime which was more
focused on the cultural side, that there would be some costs associated
with that, rather than just having annual refreshers on health
and safety which focus on how to tick boxes on check lists and
inspection forms. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of
wastage in terms of the initial number of recruits initially and
the drop-out rate before transfer to units. It may well be that
a cost-benefit analysis, which we think would be warranted with
any significant increase in spending in any area, would be able
perhaps to defend the expenditure in terms of an investment, with
some targets for reducing drop-out rate, because some of that
is probably associated with issues such as supervision, facilities
in training, etcetera. We do not have the competence or access
to the data to be able to fully explicate what the benefits would
be of that kind of investment.
Q164 Mr Hancock: You made a point which
the police in Surrey have also covered and this is the inability,
particularly of the Army, but presumably other services, to close
the loop when they have had reports which have recommended courses
of action. Over the last 10 years there is evidence that there
were at least six significant reports, of which two were major
reports on the way in which they looked after recruits. It appeared
to the police that recommendations had not been implemented. Why
do you think that is? Maybe you could give us some examples of
where that failure to close the loop properly has led to a continuation
of problems which were first recognised a generation ago?
Mr Waterman: To answer the second
point first, you just have to look at the reiteration of some
of the solutions in the most recent report as an indication that
people are singing from the same hymn sheet and saying if they
actually do this it will resolve the problems which in recent
years they feel that they have been confronting. As to why? You
have to look at other regimes where those loops are closed. People
go down a number of routes. In private industry it is not uncommon
to find that the loop is closed because someone else demands it,
for example a customer says "You don't stay on our tender
list unless you demonstrate that you have resolved the problem
which we advised you we were experiencing with the way in which
you were dealing with this contract two years ago". It may
be customer led. I suppose the equivalent would be political leadership
or the MoD saying "We're in charge and we really want you
to do this". It is a question of leadership. The second way
in which the loop is closed, if you look at something like the
Prison Service, is when the regular independent evaluation carries
on pointing out that the recommendations which were made three
years ago in a particular establishment have not been implemented
and it becomes increasingly embarrassing and is regarded as untenable.
While you do not have transparency and independent audit, it is
possible for recommendations to sit in the library somewhere and
for good people just to make the assumption that, because the
recommendations seem to be good and at the time they were published
were welcomed, they would be acted upon. You probably need a dynamic
outside of the normal command structure within any one of the
services, which says "We will check to see whether or not
that loop has been closed. If you accept these recommendations,
then we will come back in 12 months' time and see whether you
have implemented them in the way in which your action plan stated
that you would". There is not that sense of an external overview
creating that sort of dynamic and in health and safety terms many
public companies now pay for independent verification that they
have health and safety managerial arrangements which stand up
to scrutiny and mean that they are doing what they said they would
do.
Q165 Mr Hancock: I think what you have
just said is the whole nub of the issue. Your experiences so far
have related mainly to the Army, but we are talking about the
three services here, so could you widen it out? Do you think it
is possible to achieve what you have just said and to get the
armed forces to respond to that sort of external scrutiny looking
at these specific issues?
Mr Waterman: I think the answer
is yes.
Q166 Mr Hancock: Is there any experience
of that anywhere?
Mr Waterman: I should like to
turn to my colleague Jeremy, who was telling me over lunch about
the smell of paint. A little anecdote might actually be relevant
here.
Mr Corfield: Within any military
formation—and I am presuming the Navy and the Air Force
are the same—there are many, many inspections every year;
annual inspections run the diary for any commanding officer. They
are used to a framework of people coming in from outside their
immediate command structure and assessing them in one way or another
as to standards. Whether whoever was assessing that standard was
internal to the organisation, as in the Army, the Navy, the Air
Force, or whether they were external, it is still somebody coming
in from outside, so I do not think it would be a burden which
would be too excessive to a commanding officer. However, you then
have to look at the reliability and efficiency of that process
because, when you go to establishments, when you look into standards
anywhere—those of you who have now been on visits to MoD
establishments will be familiar with this—there might be
a feeling that certain things are laid on, things are not natural
when you visit. I know myself from visits to establishments that
they take on the smell of paint when you visit.
Q167 Mr Hancock: I want to move on to
the questions I really want to ask which are about the assessment
before the training of a recruit starts, to make sure that when
you are taking somebody into the armed forces the people who actually
do that initial assessment . . . I spoke to a young lad in my
own constituency last Saturday who came to see me full of despondency
and despair that he had been turned down by the Army. He said
that when he went at the initial stage he was told that he would
have to do a test but that there was no failure on this test,
it was just to make sure he slotted into the right area. He took
the test and was then told he had failed the academic tests which
were set for him. He was very, very upset about what had happened.
I questioned him about the situation and the interesting thing
was that his father then joined him in the interview and his father
actually told me that he was rather surprised that they had not
asked him too much about what he had done previously before arriving
at the recruitment office. I was somewhat disturbed by that, that
somebody was making a judgment on this lad who had not really
delved too much into his background. It would not have taken too
much to have asked one or two questions, which I did, which would
have shown that there was probably another problem here which
had to be addressed before this lad would be suitable to go into
the armed forces. Are you satisfied that the people who are doing
the initial interviews of recruits are getting it right? Then
I should like to go on to what happens when they actually arrive
at that first training camp.
Mr Waterman: We have a problem,
because the Institution does not purport to have particular expertise
in psychological testing, aptitude testing, that sort of thing.
Q168 Mr Hancock: Should they have?
Mr Waterman: We are aware that
organisations across the UK and around the world are increasingly
making use of testing of that sort, partly because of the cost
of initially welcoming into—the opposite of the situation
you have just described—an organisation people who prove,
after an expensive interlude, that they are not really fitted
to the life that faces them. We understand that the attrition
rate from initial recruitment to the end of training and transfer
to units is of the order of 50%. I would have thought that, at
least on a trial basis if not more generally, it would be worth
properly exploring ways in which the initial assessment and evaluation
of potential recruits could perhaps be enhanced by improved testing
in order to reduce that attrition rate. One of the benefits of
doing that is that at a stroke you would address one of the questions
we were asked earlier about the ratio of supervisors, because
half of the supervisory time is spent supervising people who are
not going to end up being transferred into active units. We think
that sort of testing would be a good thing, but our knowledge
is even more limited than Irwin and Sellars' knowledge when they
were talking about historical things being a good thing. It is
really a bit ultra vires for us in the Institution to be
banging on about industrial psychology, but we believe that you
have access to a lot of advice and assistance in that area as
part of your investigation.
Q169 Mr Hancock: Could we then move to
the risk associated with the actual initial training? No-one,
I hope, is suggesting that the armed forces set out to break people's
spirits to such an extent that they change their personalities
completely, but they are subjected to an enormous amount of stress
and we will probably get evidence from some people who failed
that situation and will tell us what went wrong. Do you think
enough care is put in to assessing what they are expecting a recruit
to do? All of us on this Committee have accepted that we are not
looking for somebody who is going to be doing a run-of-the-mill
job with no real physical risk or the potential of a life-threatening
situation arising. We accept that, but do you think enough care
and consideration goes into the way in which the training is put
together so that the superior officer in that situation, whether
it is the corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, the unit commander,
whoever, will have enough knowledge to be able to judge whether
the risks are worth taking with this individual?
Mr Waterman: May I make a preliminary
response to that question? If you are using the word "care"
in the more general and colloquial way, we have no reason to believe
that the people to whom young recruits are handed over and in
whose charge they are placed do not try very hard to look after
those recruits and I think they do care about those issues. If
you are asking from a technical point of view, we would say that
the motivation of those people is not enough and it may be that
there are things which need to be done to enhance their expertise
in the way in which they carry out the risk assessments. We would
not presume to state that the training of these recruits results
in them being exposed to risks which are wholly avoidable; that
would be ridiculous. We do think that there are opportunities
for improving the evaluation of those risks, looking at the ways
in which they can be managed and in particular looking in a more
holistic way at the environment, the psychological environment
which can be created around those recruits so that they are more
robust in handling those risks and tackling them. There should
also be an outlet—and I suspect we may come back to this—which
is independent of the command management structure for alerting
people to the fact that they are not coping very well with whatever
it is that they are being exposed to, whether it is deliberately
part of their training or whether it is to do with the social
context in which it is taking place. We think that there is room
for improvement and we do think that some of that room can be
explored by improving the quality of training for people who are
in supervisory and managerial positions. We did a bit of checking
on this and we have a couple of training courses from the Institution
which are UK standards: the titles of the two courses are Working
Safely and Managing Safely. [1]They
are used in the Navy and the Air Force and not used at all in
the Army where the courses which are used are internally generated.
Q170 Mr Hancock: Why do you think the
Army would not use that?
Mr Waterman: I think there is
a culture of a mixture of "Not invented here" and "We
are so special and different that perhaps we need to sort things
out for ourselves". We would not argue that we ought to be
doing things for the Army and they ought to do things the same
as everyone else, but there are some real benefits from cross-fertilisation,
about independence and the questioning and challenging "Why
are you doing it like this?". If there is a coherent answer
then you carry on doing it that way.
Q171 Mr Hancock: Would you say that the
failure to look at that is part of the problem? They are looking
for flaws in recruits, but I am more interested to see whether
the trainers are flawed.
Mr Waterman: The answer to your
question is yes, and that is part of why we welcome being able
to discuss this. We think that there have been some real improvements
in health and safety management generally in the UK. We are one
of the world leaders in reducing accidents and ill health in the
work place and we think that the Army could benefit from a little
inoculation of some of that expertise from other walks of life.
But we would say that, because we are an institution which believes
people benefit from looking at what other people are doing and
importing some of the better aspects of that.
Mr Corfield: Going back to your
original point, there were two elements within that: firstly,
the tasks and the activities and how they are assessed and how
they should be assessed to be suitable. The Institution would
agree that there needs to be a baseline for an activity which
people undertake and that is already the case within the military.
We know that people have to do certain activities to get by in
a military career. What we would not want to happen is for that
standard to be lowered or reduced so that when people were sent
on operations they were not physically or mentally robust enough
to deal with the challenges of that military operation. However,
there is a lot of local interpretation of those standards and
what the Institution would like to see would be a common standard
of challenges which would be faced by potential recruits and that
that thinking had been fed by a process of risk assessment which
was considered and consistent across the military or at least
the Army, the Navy or the Air Force. The second element was about
the activities themselves and the recruits who undertake those
activities and how that should be risk assessed. Many of the uniformed
services in the UK now operate a process of dynamic risk assessment,
thinking on their feet about the hazards you are going to face
as a supervisor and for the people you are with. Again, the Institution
would welcome better standards and greater consistency of training
and competency with regard to risk assessment, not purely in terms
of health and safety risk assessment but in the overall management
of risk when it comes to care.
Q172 Mr Hancock: Are many members of
the armed forces members of your Institution that you know of?
Mr Corfield: Yes.
Q173 Mr Hancock: In all three services?
Mr Corfield: Yes.
Q174 Mr Hancock: That is good. Maybe
you could let us know how many have done that, because it would
be quite interesting.[2]
My final question is really about the responsibilities the military
have when they take a young person on. This was once again drawn
out by some of the evidence which was given to the Surrey police
over the Deepcut incidents, that these young people who were given
rifles and live ammunition and sent out were subsequently found
to have had records, or at least in one of the cases the suggestion
was made by the Army that there were problems associated with
the state of that person—I am choosing my words carefully
because I do not want to be unfair to the individual concerned—the
suitability of that person to be given a loaded weapon was seriously
to be questioned. How do the armed forces make that sort of judgment
with somebody who has been in the armed forces for such a short
period of time? Do you think that the trainers and the superior
officers have the experience, the knowledge to know that these
people are equipped to take that sort of risk?
Mr Waterman: There is a problem.
When you look at the text of people giving evidence and writing
reports in the past, within the Army itself the word "competence"
arises, but you get the impression that it is almost back to hardware
again. It is the equivalent of the driving licence and the person
knows how to use the piece of kit, but that does not mean the
person knows when to use it and why they should be using it and
why they should not use it at certain times. It looks as though
there is a gap in terms of psychological assessment again, but
it goes back to the answer I gave earlier about initial recruitment.
Once the Army makes use of psychological assessment in recruitment,
it would not be difficult to develop that to a second stage assessment,
perhaps for the local training staff and officers to employ, in
order to update that assessment prior to equipping those recruits
with live ammunition and weapons, but it is not an area where
the Institution has particular expertise. It is really back to
the level of saying that we think it would be a good thing that
those sorts of assessments were made, but we have no particular
expertise as to what sorts of assessments they would be.
Q175 Mr Hancock: Would your assessment
be, from what you said and what knowledge you have gained over
the years, that the issue is not that the competence of the individual
to be trained to be a good soldier is of paramount importance?
It is the individual's willingness to agree to the discipline
of the command rather than their ability to understand fully what
is required of them and the military were more inclined to agree
that if you had somebody who adhered rigidly to the command structures
then all would be well.
Mr Waterman: I do not think the
military works well simply on the basis of people acting like
robots because it also wants people to think on their feet and
make the right choices when choices face them. That is probably
not quite the way in which I would term it. The problem is much
more that there is not sufficient emphasis on the cultural aspects,
the psychological aspects. To take an example which sits slightly
to one side of this, but is directly relevant to the Deepcut inquiry,
if you take something like bullying, it is possible to have an
internal culture where to rat on a fellow recruit for misbehaving
is regarded as unacceptable. It is equally possible to develop
a culture in which the tolerance of misbehaviour is regarded as
completely outwith what being a good recruit and a good soldier
and a good member of a team means. So that idea of the team and
the team becoming its own management, peer group pressure and
all of that, for good behaviour would be an example where whatever
you did with maximising numbers of supervisors would not be as
effective as getting people to adopt culturally that sense of
team and pride in the quality of the way in which the whole team
operated. I would probably rather think of it in terms of this
kind of psychological environment as well as the physical environment
that these recruits are operating in.
Q176 Mr Blunt: You have alighted on this
problem between Phase 1 and Phase 2 training, as indeed the military
have. General Palmer told the Committee that he could present
us with an entire book on the subject. Having studied or not studied
the book, are you able to identify things the armed forces can
do to minimise the risks which are giving you cause for concern
and which you think are not being addressed?
Mr Waterman: That is one of the
main areas which we have discussed amongst ourselves and with
colleagues.
Mr Corfield: We would think that
the initiatives which are being explored at ITC Catterick and
at Lympstone are the way forward; to close the gaps between Phase
1 and Phase 2 training is going to take a great deal of instability,
boredom and a time of negative change out of a soldier's early
career. How it would be achieved, we would not know. There could
be a book written on this. All we know is that it is potentially
demotivating for people to be between training or to be on SATT,
to be stuck in training establishments or other holding areas
which have a very poor physical environment. To be given menial
jobs and menial chores while they are there is negative and then
to give those people, when they are tired, dangerous equipment,
such as a weapon, again, purely from a safety and a welfare point
of view does not seem a good thing to us.
Q177 Mr Blunt: Do you think the Phase
1 basic training of 10 to 12 weeks is not long enough when you
describe this release into suddenly becoming an individual again
and being exposed to poor lifestyle options such as alcohol, drugs,
etcetera,?
Mr Waterman: We think it is more
about the transition. Even if it were longer, we would still be
dealing with relatively immature people; they are young, away
from home in most cases probably for an extended period for the
first time in their lives. At the point where you move from Phase
1, where there is quite a lot of pastoral care, where you are
with a group of people and there is a high level of supervision,
at the same time that the supervision and that care are reduced,
you are also put in a position where the training is simply on
hold for many simply because the next timetable for the next phase
of training does not quite work and there is a gap. So they are
dithering about and lose that sense of purpose, whereas at the
end of the 12 weeks, perhaps they are raring to go and up for
anything and that is allowed to diminish. We think that at whatever
point you did that, even if the basic training were for longer
and you had an even more cohesive unit at the end of it, if you
then had this disjunction, with people cooling their heels for
a period of weeks, involved in a whole range of desultory tasks
which do not seem to relate directly to their personal development
and you have diminished the degree of supervision and pastoral
care, you would be faced with a problem. It is more the seamless
transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2, whenever it takes place that
we think would be one of the key targets of any significant change
in the training regime which would produce a benefit. We also
think it would increase efficiency in the training, but that is
outside our remit, so we did not bang on about that. You do not
really want people cooling their heels for a month waiting to
go on a particular course which does not happen to start yet.
Q178 Mr Blunt: You mentioned Catterick
and Lympstone as two examples of where the Army and Royal Marines
seem to be attempting to address this. Are you able to go into
any more detail as to how the schemes running there do address
it and whether there are associated risks or downsides with those
initiatives?
Mr Corfield: Some of these issues
fall slightly outside IOSH's remit, but from a personal point
of view I cannot see any negative points whatsoever to combining
Phase 1 and Phase 2 training. I personally think it is a really
good idea not to have people held in limbo. When you finish your
12 weeks' basic training—or 10 weeks as it was in my day—you
are on top of the world, you are at the peak of physical fitness,
you are motivated, you would do anything the Army or the Service
would ask of you and you feel wanted, committed, you could go
on to any course. Then to be let down from that is a big disappointment
and I am sure you will be told this when you talk to people on
the ground. From an occupational health and safety point of view,
if supervision is continued at a consistent level that is a good
thing.
Q179 Mr Blunt: How big a disadvantage
is it if the cost of combining Phase 1 and Phase 2 training is
that you get much larger training establishments with reduced
continuity and level of quality of supervision as you have to
upsize the establishment to deal with handling two phases of training
in one place?
Mr Corfield: I would not feel
comfortable answering that particular question, but I presume
there would be resource implications.
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