Examination of Witness (Questions 239-259)
30 JUNE 2004
LIEUTENANT COLONEL
(RETIRED) RICHARD
HAES
Q239 Chairman: Welcome.
Mr Haes: Thank you, sir.
Q240 Chairman: This is our third evidence
session in the Duty of Care inquiry. The aim of this inquiry,
as you know, is to examine how the Armed Forces look after their
people at the very beginning of their service: the recruits in
Phase 1, training establishments and trainees in Phase 2. In today's
evidence session we will be hearing first from you, Mr Haes. In
2001 you wrote a report for the Army on duty of care and supervision
at their initial training establishments. We will be asking about
what was found, the recommendations for change and how they were
received. Then, at about 4.30, if we have concluded by then, we
will hear from the WRVS, an organisation that has been providing
welfare support at Army establishments for a long time. I would
like to thank our witnesses very much for coming and for their
written submissions. Mr Haes, would you like to introduce yourself,
and thank you, again, for coming.
Mr Haes: Yes. I am Richard Haes
and I am a retired Lieutenant Colonel. I spent the last three
years in the Army working at the headquarters of the Army Training
and Recruiting Agency in Upavon. That is where I get my experience
from but, obviously, that is also based on 37 years of experience
in working in the Army, including training establishments.
Q241 Chairman: Thank you very much. How
did you come to conduct your investigation into duty of care and
supervision? Was it your idea or that of your commanders? Can
you give us some account of the days leading up to your appointment
in this inquiry?
Mr Haes: My job at Upavon was
a newly created one. Until then there had been no G1 military
focus at all in the headquarters, apart from the retired officer
who dealt with the MRS officers' confidential reports and manning
matters. The staff on the personnel branch, as it was known, were
all civilians and their principal task was manning and management
of a number of civilian grades throughout the ATRA. So I believe
my post was created, principally, to look at emerging legislation
that was coming out of the EU, not least the Working Time Regulations,
the Young Workers' Directive and the Human Rights Act, which obviously
led on into equal opportunities, and such things as that. It rapidly
became clear to me that there were problems in all the operating
division common to most of them as a result of the way ATRA had
been set up and organised in the first instance. The ATRA establishment—ie
the number of people who were on the books there—was specifically
designed to be a very lean, mean organisation and it was set up
specifically to do the job of getting recruits in, taking them
through Phase 1 and Phase 2 training and putting them to Field
Army. It, I think, was transpiring that it was the other pressures
on the ATRA, the under-manning, the under-resourcing and the huge
amount of overstretch on the Army in general—which had to
knock on into the ATRA, unavoidably—that was causing the
system of duty of care and supervision, as I call it, to begin
to break down. So it was my idea, really, after starting to visit
some of the operating divisions to pull together a working group
of those units which had particular problems so that we could
air them, discuss them and begin to analyse where the problem
was in order to come up with some kind of solution to help them
out. I think I would add, at this point, that the purpose of my
report was purely to try and establish for DGATR's benefit and
for the staff to make the right decisions on what was going wrong
and how we could best tackle it. It was an internal report; it
was never designed to be for this kind of forum, but obviously
it was a record of the problems which the operating divisions
were having. So I was, basically, recording what they were telling
me and then staffing it in the best way we possibly could. I would
like to add also, at this point, that at no stage in any of this
was there any whinging about the long hours or the hard work or
anything from the military staff; their sole interest was in delivering
the best possible service to our trainees and, indeed, from my
point of view, giving the instructors, the staff and the Op Divs
the best possible service, so we could produce the best possible
recruits. I think that is quite important; this was not a whinge,
it was very much a staffing matter. That is how it came to start,
in fact.
Q242 Chairman: How did you pick your
team?
Mr Haes: Basically, it more or
less picked itself. There were people who should obviously be
there. These were the staff officers representing the operating
divisions, including places like the Royal Logistics Corps at
Deepcut, who we knew had probably the biggest problems—they
had the biggest turnover. So there would have been representatives
from the staff, we drew in the senior training padre, we drew
in the S01 occupational medicine, and we also had representatives
of the different rank levels of instructors, from the RSM of one
organisation, senior NCO and junior NCO instructors, officers
who ran the support administration unit that actually did the
looking after the soldiers in places like Deepcut and officer
instructors from Lieutenant through to Major. So it was very much
all those who were involved in the production of the goodies.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q243 Mr Viggers: Your report itself is
often blunt and to the point. How did you expect the report to
be received?
Mr Haes: I have to say, by the
time I wrote the report and handed it in (I actually wrote the
report in my terminal leave as I was leaving the Army and therefore
when I handed it in it was basically by post), I did not have
the chance, sadly, to brief it up to the General. But for the
three years I had been working on it there was clearly a stumbling
block, if I can put it that way. I do not think people believed
that the situation was as bad as it was. I briefed the main board
in July 2000 with the findings I had got to at that point, and
I think it was indicative that one of the two-star officers present,
as soon as I had finished, basically said "Thank you for
that but I don't believe the picture is as bad as the boy has
painted." After that I am afraid more junior officers, ie
the colonels and brigadiers who were commandants of the operating
divisions, basically, did not speak up, and so I do not think
the problem got really properly aired as it should have done at
that point. The other things that went on in that time were that
I routinely briefed, obviously, my head of personnel, who was
a civilian, and we had discussed the problems at length and what
might be done. I had also briefed the General on items as they
were happening, and the problem always seemed to come back that
we did not have the resources, actually, to tackle the problem.
Therefore, it was a question of "Well, what could we realistically
do?" We did try a number of options and indeed we did put
in place a number of actions which were probably the best we could
at the time with the resources available. However, we eventually
persuaded DGATR that he should write to firstly the Adjutant General
and through him to the ACGS in MoD that there was one aspect that
was particularly troubling us, that MO1 military operations put
out their request for augmentees to support all the number of
operations that were arising round the world and, essentially,
the augmentation requirements coming to AG had to come from ATRA—we
were the only ones who had the manpower—and the only people
that we could send were the instructors, basically. Since ATRA
had such a lean establishment to begin with, and that was under-manned
by at least 10%—we were then having to take more instructors
away to support the Field Army, which obviously detracted yet
further from the under-resourcing and under-manning that was stopping
us, really, from delivering the proper duty of care. This was
one of the nubs of my argument. I think it is indicative of the
attitude in MoD at the time that we got a very brief response
which was, basically, "Just get on with it". I can understand
that because operations take priority, but I think what was not
appreciated was, in fact, that I had found that ATRA was, a hidden
corner of the overstretch in the Army that no one had publicised;
there was no outlet for people to say "Look, this is what
is going wrong". So that is really why we began our working
group, to try and put right this particular difficulty.
Q244 Mr Viggers: Just to get the chronology
right, you said you wrote the report during your terminal leave,
and then you went on to describe how the work was done while you
were in your executive post, presumably.
Mr Haes: Yes.
Q245 Mr Viggers: So I assume that you
were both carrying out your duties within the training organisation
and writing the report simultaneously.
Mr Haes: Yes, I was.
Q246 Mr Viggers: When you described action
just now, that was action which, as it were, preceded the final
publication of the report?
Mr Haes: Yes. The work I was doing
during the three years really began to evolve into what became
the duty of care study and report, although I called it that from
fairly early on just to give the thing a title so people could
know what we were talking about. I suppose, all the work I was
doing for the three years I was there was part of my normal staffing
function as I saw it, to try and put things right, but it was
collating the information that the Op Divs were telling me and
beginning to catalogue the different areas where things were going
wrong, as well as trying to rationalise it. So pulling the report
together was quite a massive task, I have to say; there was a
huge amount of documentation that I had collected that really
needed to be sifted and pulled together as the final report that
was presented to DGATR. The way I wrote the report was designed
to give the operating divisions the leverage, to put in a change
proposal to what would have been then the STP (short term planning)
finances for zero one and zero two. So that was really the target
of the paper, to give the Op Divs the chance to bid for money
to get the resources they needed.
Q247 Mr Viggers: You said you had the
chance to brief the main board. Is that the Army Board?
Mr Haes: No, no, sorry, this was
the ATRA main board, which was DGATR and all his commandants;
all the heads of his 19 operating divisions, plus his principal
staff officers.
Q248 Mr Viggers: What information have
you about the fate of your report thereafter? Can you comment
on the manner in which it was carried forward or not?
Mr Haes: I have to say that I
did not have high expectations, having experienced the difficulties
and the reluctance, really, to address the difficulties and put
resources into it.
Q249 Chairman: We often have that same
feeling about the response to our major reports, so I can empathise
with you on that front!
Mr Haes: The report went in with
a cover brief from my boss, who was then head of personnel, and
I got a copy of that cover brief. I have to say it did not raise
my optimism inasmuch as one of the early comments was, "He
has strayed outside his terms of reference." I had to say
that at the beginning the terms of reference were written fairly
tightly. OK, I knew I was going outside because there were things
I felt needed to be recorded that I had not been asked to do,
and I felt they were vital and had to be mentioned.
Q250 Mr Viggers: The Surrey Police said
that your report was "dismissed by the Chain of Command".
Do you agree with that?
Mr Haes: It was not dismissed
out of hand; I am absolutely convinced that they gave it a fair
reading. In fact, a number of lesser items were taken up—a
number of my recommendations were put in place—although
I have to say they were not huge and they were of minor impact
on resources. One of those, just to give you an idea: the change
in the way that summary dealings for discipline were conducted
brought a huge and additional workload on the commanding officers
and the appropriate superior authorities in ATRA. Therefore, we
had recommended that in order to relieve some of the pressure
there should be an extra administrative officer to deal with that,
and that was accepted, so at that level things were put in place.
Inasmuch as it was not followed through anymore than that, I think,
I can only put down to an element of cognitive dissonance; that
the problem was so great (from my point of view) and the resources
required were so huge—ie, I was recommending a very large
number of additional military instructors to come back in to provide
the care that was required to look after our trainees—that
the cost of that at a time when the Army was already overstretched
and resources were being taken out of the Army in year-on-year
budget cuts, I think it was felt virtually impossible even to
make the case for a few. So they did what they could and I think
it was then put on the shelf, although my successors did carry
on doing some of the staff work to try and resolve other problems—they
did carry on following it through—but I think it was down
to total lack of resources and possibly a failure to accept that
the problem was as bad as it was; it was not recognised as being
so bad.
Q251 Mr Viggers: The numbers I have here
indicate that your report suggested about 330 extra staff.
Mr Haes: Yes.
Q252 Mr Viggers: In fact, subsequent
considerations by ATRA came to the conclusion there was a need
for between 212 and 389. When finally concluded, ATRA's further
studies then led to believe that the number you suggested was
approximately correct.
Mr Haes: Yes, I had heard that,
which was obviously gratifying for me because it meant I was not
wide of the mark. The way I came to those figures, and this was
part of the difficulty, was that people said we could not have
any more resources for the duty of care/welfare aspects until
we could prove with statistical, not anecdotal, evidence that
we actually required it. We had to, in a business manner, produce
an analysis with measurements and costs of what we wanted and
why we wanted it. Hence, that is why I say that was the purpose
of my report, to try and produce that. This had never been done
in the Army before because the duty of care, essentially, is part
of the officers' normal duty; it has never been measured, you
do it as and when it is needed; you know your men and you know
when there is a problem and you get round and solve it, and a
lot of that is out of working hours. Unfortunately, the way the
ATRA was set up, with a very large number of civilian instructors
and the minimum number of military staff, was that the civilian
instructors had no responsibility for duty of care; they went
home at the end of the working day and there was such a thin veneer
left in, particularly, the technical operating divisions, like
Deepcut, Leconfield, Blandford and places like that, that the
contact with the trainees was so limited that problems did not
get spotted and they did not get dealt with. I am straying from
my point a little bit on that one, but the whole nub of my persuasion
to DGATR was that we were trying to run the ATRA like a business
and we were applying the business rules at the top end, where
you have to have change proposals for STP based on statistical
analysis, whereas at the bottom end we were saying to instructors,
those working at the coal face, "You carry on doing the traditional
duty of care" when there were not enough people to do it.
Somehow we had to prove that that gap existed statistically. It
proved exceedingly difficult and, clearly, I did not manage to
provide an adequate analysis. I think that was the word which
was used: there was "inadequate analysis for this report"
and, therefore, the findings were not taken forward. At that I
was very disappointed, I have to say.
Q253 Mr Roy: Just on a point you made
earlier, did you expect the "not as bad as the boy makes
out" attitude? Did you expect that? Was that a surprise to
you, or was that indicative of the attitudes?
Mr Haes: I suppose I am not surprised
by anything, but I think it disappointed me because the nature
of the Army and respect for senior officers, and so forth, automatically,
because of who said it, made everybody else clam up, I suspect.
No one was going to, therefore, speak out of turn. So, no, I had
not expected it and I was sad. Perhaps I should have stood up
again and said something but I had my say at that point and, therefore,
I was purely an observer to the rest of the main board's proceedings.
I was not a member of the main board.
Q254 Mr Jones: I think an answer earlier
on to Mr Viggers' question was that you did not expect your report
to be the final document, but would you agree that it actually
gave a good benchmark of where extra work needed to be done, certainly
in terms of the supervisory role of instructors? What work do
you think has been done since? I will come back and quote General
Palmer in a minute, but even if there were resource implications
your report was basically the starting point of something that
should have led to some actual improvements in supervisory levels,
because you were not far off the mark.
Mr Haes: No, and I am absolutely
convinced that the facts in there were actually what happened.
All my report was based on what I was told was happening, and
the dedication of the staff who told me leaves me in no doubt
at all that none of this was in any way exaggerated and, indeed,
we played it down to avoid exaggeration of any of the facts so
that we could not be accused of hyperbole. So, yes, I believe
that my report was a benchmark, although as I have said the purpose
of the report was specifically to support change proposals to
get the finances, to get the resources we needed. Yes, it did
become a benchmark in the end because it laid down at that point
in time "These were the problems being experienced".
Q255 Mr Jones: Can I put it to you that
that attitude of "Well, we need to define what is needed
supervisorally" is still there? When General Palmer came
before us on 26 May this year, when he was asked about the supervisory
figures, he said: "Off the top of my head, Sandhurst was
one where he thought [referring to your report] an enormous extra
number of staff were required, when actually all the cadets there
come from university and were quite used to looking after themselves.
There is a lot more work to be done to make the incontrovertible
case that we needed to define what the supervisory care regime
was going to be in terms of number of hours we expected people
to work in the various areas, in the area of training recruits
and in the area of supervising recruits." The "enormous
extra number", I think you recommended in your report, was
18. Can I just say, I visited Lichfield yesterday and speaking
to instructors there one of the points they made in private was
the fact that they still consider themselves overworked. Have
we actually, since your report, and given the attitude clearly
coming from General Palmer, still not grasped the nettle in terms
of this idea of the number in terms of supervisory capacity?
Mr Haes: There are an awful lot
of points that I could come back and answer on that one. Could
I just say on Sandhurst, to begin with, since you raise that topic,
Sandhurst probably had the Rolls Royce of establishment; they
still had the proper military Chain of Command for carrying out
their training and whatever. This is why we identified in the
technical corps, who use more civilian instructors and had less
military people, that they had the greater problems. So I do not
believe Sandhurst had a huge problem, except in one department,
and this was the department we are talking about, and that was
their transport department, where the people who were working
very close to, I suspect, the legal limits were the drivers, because
they had to move these people[1]about
to a very tight schedule and, therefore, the logistics of getting
cadets from one place to another was a testing task. That was
the one area where they were short and that is where, in my report,
I referred to it. It did not refer to anything to do with duty
of care of cadets, or anything like that; I quite agree, cadets
were intelligent people and they did not need so much looking
after. So I hope that clears that one up. Lichfield, I think you
mentioned, was one of the initial training establishments. We
have always worked long hours in those places. I have never, ever
heard anyone complain; there is quite a kick or quite a buzz out
of training these people who come into the Army with absolutely
no military skills whatsoever and you turn out, at the end of
your time, this chap who can march and be polite. Parents who
I have talked to when their kids have finished their training
come up to us and say, "We don't know what you've done to
our son; he came home for the first time and talked to us."
So the training does do a lot of character building stuff there.
I suspect they probably are overworked in a civilian sense, and
I do not believe we will ever get the figures down to a point
where you can go to work at eight in the morning and knock-off
at five in the afternoon. It does not work like that in the Army;
we are a 24-hours-a-day organisation; we expect to fight a battle
whenever a battle is there to be fought. What I would add to that
is that in the old days, and this might reinforce a point you
are trying to make, the training organisation, the depot (what
would have been ATRA) was seen, first of all, as a career step-up
for the instructors—you were selected to go there and it
was a feather in your cap—but, also, it was a respite from,
the hardships and the pressures on the people in the regiments,
in the infantry battalions, etc, who were away from home six months
of the year; you had to get to know the family every time you
came home again—huge pressures on the family—and for
two years at the depot you had a chance to know when you were
going to go and see the wife and family every night, and there
was a bit of a respite. Yes, it was still hard work and it was
long hours but you could organise your life.
Q256 Mr Jones: I accept all that, but
if we are still in the situation where you are asking people to
instruct and supervise, I would think, some of the most vulnerable
people in terms of Phase 1 training we saw yesterday—and
I am not suggesting we are asking for an easy life for people—if
those people say they are overworked and actually cannot give
the attention and level of supervision that is expected of them,
which is what your report is getting at—
Mr Haes: That sounded very much
like what I was saying.
Q257 Mr Jones: Surely, then, that is
part of the root cause of this. I am not trying to blame those
individuals who do a good job and a hard job, but they are human
beings like the rest of us and if they are tired and overworked
there is a possibility they can miss some of the things that are
coming out. You are dealing, as we saw yesterday, with people
who are the most vulnerable in terms of duty of care in the Army
because they have come straight from civvy street, some very young,
into a very strange environment.
Mr Haes: A totally different environment.
I fully acknowledge that. First of all, I am delighted that someone
is prepared to say that things are not yet right. This was one
of the problems we had before, actually getting people to say
what was wrong. It was a very loyal system, and you cannot fault
that, but there comes a point where people should be saying "Look,
it is not working as it should be". So we were not being
totally honest with ourselves. So I am pleased to hear, if that
is the case, that at least someone is saying "Hang on, we
have not got it right yet."
Q258 Mr Jones: Is that not an indictment
of what we are talking about, that four years from your report
we are still in a position whereby the main thing that you actually
argued in your report, that we had to look at the supervisory
level (and, clearly, from personal experience trainers and instructors
think they are overworked) General Palmer's attitude is still
"We have not quite worked out what the supervisory level
is"? The MoD moves slowly, and sometimes at a snail's pace,
but is it not quite alarming that four years on we have not really
tackled the main issues you raise in your report?
Mr Haes: Yes, I am sad if people
are saying that things have not got better. I know for a fact,
although I left the Army three years ago and I do not know exactly
what has been happening since then—I still have contact
with colleagues who are still working there—that so far
not many of those 179 military posts have been re-established
in the ATRA. If I read the rumours right, a lot of those went
into the Phase 2 establishments to replace the Chain of Command
that had been taken out. So if we are talking about a Phase 1
establishment, ie initial training, where there was still a pretty
solid military structure, there was total military training and
therefore the Chain of Command still existed, then I can possibly
believe not many of those would have gone into the initial training
group.
Q259 Mr Jones: Just one last point on
that, just from the quote from General Palmer, he is still really
squawking and questioning the levels of supervision. Would you
not have thought, three years on, at least they would have got
to a point where they know what level of supervision is actually
correct?
Mr Haes: I think we are looking
at the bigger picture, in that case, in that the Army is still
under-manned, although not as badly as it was in 2001. During
the time I was in the ATRA, 1998 to 2001, we had a major task
of trying to fill the Army. We have still not got to that point.
There has been no diminution in the number of operational tasks
that have been put upon the Army—and that is their job so
no one is complaining about that—but the only place you
are going to get more instructors from is from the Field Army
and if you are working the Field Army still flat out and beyond,
there is no one—
1 Note from witness: Officer Cadets. Back
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