Examination of Witness (Questions 260-279)
30 JUNE 2004
LIEUTENANT COLONEL
(RETIRED) RICHARD
HAES
Q260 Mr Jones: I accept all that, but
from General Palmer's point of view he has not even recognised
the fact that they have agreed, for example, to the level of supervision
which may be right. OK, it might not be met straightaway but it
concerns me that in your report you raise some quite clear points
about what the supervisory levels should be and we are still having
a debate, three years on, on what those levels should be—not
the fact that we should meet them. I accept that because of budgetary
constraints there are reasons why we cannot.
Mr Haes: I am very sad. I hone
in on the bit you are saying, which is that if we are not going
to put enough staff in to do the job 100% then we have got to
be very specific in what task we expect the staff to carry out.
I am concerned because when I raised the degree of regulation
that is being imposed upon the ATRA—and on the rest of the
Army but ATRA particularly in our case—the response, basically,
I think, from General Palmer was, "Yes, we expect our commanding
officers to carry out the regulations that are put upon them".
However, my argument was that there are now so many regulations
that they cannot all be carried out at once, and therefore you
are going to take a gamble; you are going to say "We won't
follow that one now because I haven't got enough staff, I'll concentrate
on that one." Therefore, what you are saying is that really
we need a charter for the instructor to say "These are your
specific duties, and that is the limit. Therefore, that equals
100% of the time you spend doing that and, therefore, the duties
that are not included there we exclude; we count those as the
non-obligatory, if possible, if resources are available, parts
of the duty of care."
Q261 Mr Hancock: I am interested in some
of the things you have already said, and I want to ask you some
specific questions, but do you think part of the problem was that
some of the trainers were not up to the job? You suggested that
this was a bit of a feather in their cap but it was also a way
of resting people who had spent long periods on other duties.
Were they sufficiently trained themselves to both recognise the
problems that young people would have and the stress that some
of them would be under?
Mr Haes: I think, at that stage,
we were in significantly changing times where attitudes had to
be adjusted. We were hitting the difficulties of equal opportunities,
for example, at that stage, and we had a major task—and
I was the equal opportunities officer to DGATR—to try and
bring people's attitudes round. So we were still at the point
where—
Q262 Mr Hancock: What has that to do
with the quality of training?
Mr Haes: It is to do with the
way that the instructor handles the recruits. Therefore, it leads
on to the quality of instruction. It was the relationship between
instructor and trainee that this affected. Were they sufficiently
trained to do the job of instructor? I am afraid the answer to
that is both yes and no. The instructors came from the Field Army,
they would come because they had been recommended in their confidential
report by their Commanding Officer, they would arrive with us
in the ATRA and, I have to say, some of them, probably, were short
of experience because of the speed with which the NCOs were turning
over in the Field Army. They were not staying for full careers—people
were not particularly happy—and therefore there was, particularly
at the Lance Corporal, Corporal and Sergeant level, a very fast
turnover and you were continuously pulling up the good private
soldiers and they were never reaching senior corporal, or not
in sufficient quantities, for the battalion to say "I can
release that senior corporal, who is a good corporal and a good
instructor" because he is the next man for the Sergeant's
Mess and needed. So you were, perhaps, in some instances, getting
young instructors, bright, capable of doing the job, but perhaps
still not fully qualified. That was one of our problems, they
came still needing to qualify on range management courses, battle-handling
exercises (BHLs) and, to an extent, we had to then train them
up to the qualifications required for doing the instructors' job—NBC
training, first-aid training and so forth. So, yes, it was part
of the overstretch; the Field Army could not give us trained instructors
every time.
Q263 Mr Hancock: Who was training them
to recognise potential problems? Where did that training come
from?
Mr Haes: Can I just put one point
in between that, and I will come back to that one, if I may. The
trouble was these guys had come back from the battalion with the
attitude that "I was trained in such-and-such a style, in
that manner; therefore, that must be a good way to do it because
I've turned out well." Therefore, we had to try and break
this cycle where we had the shouting, chest-poking type of attitude
in the instructor's mind. We had to change from that to a modern
way of training people. We spotted that it was necessary to educate
the instructors in, the new way of doing things quite early on,
and I credit the initial training group who set up the ITGIS—the
Initial Training Group Instructor School—which was absolutely
brilliant. It had to come from resources within the ATRA but we,
for the first time, could get the instructor in and say "Look,
this is how you do it. This is the behaviour we expect, these
are the equal opportunities rules." We had a great number
of problems of instructors having relationships with trainees.
At one point, for example, adding to the overstretch, at one of
the initial training group bases we had 15 male instructors suspended
at the same time—that took out three complete training tears—while
they waited six to nine months for the RMP, who were so busy doing
other things, to write a report on the accusation against this
instructor. It was a nightmare scenario that we could not get
round; you could not have put him back into the training system,
for obvious reasons, therefore we had to break this cycle right
from the beginning. ITGIS was the solution, and it worked.
Q264 Mr Hancock: Can I ask another question
relating to the training? You had spent 34 years in the Army before
you went to this training place. Do you feel, because of people
haemorrhaging out of the Armed Forces and the need for the Army
to get its numbers up, that the standard at which the Army took
recruits had dropped considerably and there was not enough recognition
that they might be taking some people into the Armed Forces to
train them who really were not suitable for that task and that,
consequently, the mismatch of a recruit not suitable and a trainer
not trained properly was obviously going to be a major problem?
Mr Haes: I hope I can nail this
point about the trainer not training properly. The trainers, I
think, were doing a brilliant job although, perhaps, on occasions
they were going about it in perhaps not a way that we now class
as totally acceptable—in some cases. That was a vast minority.
So I think the instructors were doing a brilliant job under huge
pressure. The difficulty of training the youth of our society
today is getting more and more difficult. I have produced a chart,
which I think was Annex C to my initial report, that showed all
the difficulties that these trainees come into the Army with:
everything from debt problems, problems of morals to sexually
transmitted diseases. The number of problems we had to sort out
where soldiers had kids by several different women, so they had
partners who were not their wives with one of their kids. It was
a huge welfare problem that these young people were bringing in,
and somehow we had to absorb that. I coined the term that ATRA
was the shock absorber for the Army, and it was just that.
Q265 Mr Hancock: What I am trying to
get at here is that I read your memorandum and you do not highlight
those points in that memorandum (Document 18) about the problems
of trainers or the problems that recruits brought with them. You
mentioned earlier that brigadiers and colonels who were in charge
of the establishments did not speak up. Why did they not? These
people had a responsibility. You were in the training headquarters
of the British Army and yet you recognised that there was insufficient
training available for the instructors. They were coming on the
recommendations of the CO, they were put in touch with raw recruits
who were coming from the outside—some of them coming with
considerable associated problems from their previous existence
as young people in society which were, for some of them, difficult
to handle—and yet it would appear that some of the trainers
were not qualified for the job. Did your organisation not have
a responsibility to ensure that those people were properly trained
for the job that they were going to do before they were put in
charge of young recruits?
Mr Haes: I think the answer to
that has got to be yes.
Q266 Mr Hancock: Why was it not, then?
Mr Haes: It was a case—and
we come back to the word—of overstretch. We were under-manned
and we did not have the resources we required. Therefore, we had
to carry on training. The need was to fill the Army. That was,
the Holy Grail.
Q267 Mr Hancock: And the consequences
of that did not seem to matter?
Mr Haes: We had to get numbers
of troops trained and into the Army to fill the Army. This was
the difficulty of running ATRA as a business. The target became
the numbers required to fill the Army. We did try to increase—we
took risk. There is obviously a selection process of people coming
into the Army and they are graded, and below a certain level they
are not accepted because we felt they were too great a risk and
would not be able to complete the training.
Q268 Mr Hancock: So we took risks?
Mr Haes: There is always a risk
in this; every person you take in has an element of risk as to
whether or not they are going to pass, in that term. It is a business
risk. Every time you take on an insurance you are taking a business
risk that is calculated. The risk of these guys was increased.
In 1999 we were not recruiting enough people and DGATR took the
decision that we would widen the funnel and we would take in people
who would formerly not have been taken because they were considered
sufficiently risky not to complete the training. We found for
that year, although we got the numbers in through the front, we
actually lost more out of the system because they brought in far
more welfare and care problems that we completely swamped the
limited ATRA welfare resources and after one year we found that
that was unacceptable and that policy was stopped. It was clear
that the levels of acceptability for quality of recruits was right
at, I think it was, C-minus.
Q269 Mr Hancock: I am going to get moaned
at if I do not move on to ask these questions. I was following
the lead of my colleague on my right here. You and the others
in the Chain of Command must have been aware of the other reports
that had been produced over the previous decade about failures
in training and, surely, your General, when he gave you the task,
said "I have read these other reports. We appear not to have
learnt any lessons." Were you aware of those other reports?
Mr Haes: No, is the answer to
that. Until I read the Surrey Police report that was the first
time I became aware that other people had written that same kind
of reports that I had done.
Q270 Mr Hancock: You had not read the
Evans, Hawley or Walton reports?
Mr Haes: I was not aware of any
of those. It seems they were lost from the collective memory.
One of my remaining concerns is that when a report like that has
been produced a certain amount is done and it quietens down and
the problem that has caused it to be written has faded from the
memory and we carry on. It is a very fast-moving business.
Q271 Mr Hancock: That is an appalling
admission for the Army, is it not? A young soldier dies, a report
is written and then it fades from the memory.
Mr Haes: I can only assume that
the people who dealt with the report believed they had done enough
to meet the recommendations of that report. I have not read those
other reports and I do not know the gist of them so I cannot help
you very far on that one, other than the point in answer is no,
I did not know about them before I read the Surrey Police report.
Q272 Mr Hancock: What did you think of
the Director of Operational Capability's report, the 2002 report,
on the recognition in the Chain of Command of the need to address
the duty of care and supervision in training establishments? Yet
some of its conclusions were echoing what you had already said.
Are you surprised that they still had not listened?
Mr Haes: Not surprised, basically,
because I am afraid that (and I see that the DOC report coined
the phrase "a widespread cynicism") this is what I was
picking up from instructors, that people did not expect very much
to happen. We knew the situation was not good, we were overstretched
and unresourced, and therefore people did not expect masses to
happen. So there was this cynicism that was quite widespread.
So "surprised" is not a word I would apply. In fact,
when my report, I think, politely, was shelved—
Q273 Mr Hancock: It was spectacular cynicism,
was it not? It was complacency—
Mr Haes: I was out of the system
and could no longer make any comment. I heard that the Deputy
Adjutant General had done a later report (in 2001 because it was
after I left) where he came to, basically, the same conclusions
that I had done by a different route.
Q274 Mr Hancock: I do not mean to be
in any way disrespectful to you, but you made the point that this
was your last job in the Army. Do you think you were given this
job because you were leaving the Army and they did not want somebody
in the Army who might be around to be in a position to see whether
or not your recommendations were going to be acted upon? If your
recommendations had been acted upon the potential is that, maybe,
at least one of these young persons at Deepcut—possibly
two—might not have died.
Mr Haes: I think that is a very
cynical point of view and, I would suggest, a level of co-ordination
in the postings department that would do them great credit. I
do not believe that that was in any way, shape or form the case.
I think they needed someone who had a huge amount of experience
and knowledge in these matters, and I think, to be honest, I was
a perfect candidate for that job.
Q275 Mr Hancock: Was it normal for someone
to write a report of this significance during the time he was
on leave, leaving the Army?
Mr Haes: I suspect that is unusual
because I think most people would not have done it.
Q276 Mr Hancock: More than unusual, I
think that sounds fairly cynical.
Mr Haes: I felt, having done all
this work with the operating divisions I had a duty to those people
to record what they had told me. I could quite easily have walked
away and said "No, I have now retired, I am on terminal leave,
they are too late, they have missed me." I felt that this
needed to be written down. The people I had worked with for those
three years trying to put it right deserved to have the best I
could do for them at that point.
Q277 Mr Hancock: I am only sorry the
Army did not listen, or read and take action on what you recommended.
Mr Haes: I think attitudes at
the time—as I have tried to describe—were those of
an overstretched organisation which simply did not have the resources
to make the effective changes that were needed. With troops being
sent to Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and so forth being given
priority—and rightly so, too—the ATRA, as I say, became
the hidden corner for overstretch. We had MO1s still trying to
pull more and more augmentees out of the ATRA, and I suppose if
I have to be critical, and I have great respect for General Palmer,
I just wish, if we were running the thing like a business, we
could have said to MoD "I am sorry, but if you take away
our resources we cannot produce the goods; so if you take away
10% you get 10% less output". We had to run the thing as
a business properly, at top and bottom, or we had to have the
resources as a matter of the normal ethos of military activity.
Q278 Chairman: Thank you. Perhaps we
can move on. It occurs to me, thinking aloud, if we are going
to have troop cuts in the future then maybe the lessons of your
report ought to be borne very, very strongly in mind, otherwise
we may have, if not a problem in your area, problems in other
areas which would produce an inquiry by us, or our successors
in five years. What I wanted to ask, Colonel—and thank you
for your very frank responses and for your report—is you
talked about youngsters coming in with problems, but you hinted
that the old lags were having problems as well, if 15 of them
were suspended. You hinted when you said "relationships".
Would you be in a position to write to us or say to us what the
problem was? Were they taken out of the system and it meant there
were 15 less trainers for six or nine months? Did anybody have
to come in to replace them or was the already under-staffing of
instructors exacerbated by some of these instructors apparently
getting their—I am not going to say it—indulging in
activities contrary to military discipline?
Mr Haes: It is a very difficult
one. It was not just one way, I have to say. The instructors had
to be suspended if an accusation was made against them, or if
they were discovered in a compromising position. There were very
strict rules about relationships between trainee and instructor
and they were enforced. It was part of the Chain of Command. So
they were not replaced and we did not know how long it was going
to take for RMP reports to get done. However, yes, it put stress
back on the system and added to the lack of resources. One has
got to see that these trainees came into the Army and they saw
these instructors—corporals, sergeants and whatever—almost
in a God-like way; they looked up to these guys with a huge amount
of admiration and respect because they were tough guys, basically.
I will not say there was not pressure the other way as well, to
a certain extent, but in that training organisation you are mixing
young people, male and female now, with more money than they have
had before in their pockets, with more testosterone running around
the veins than has been around in their lives before that, probably,
and there is this danger. There is this flammable mixture going
on. As I say, it was not just the instructors' fault. We have
known cases that I believe have hit some of the tabloid newspapers
at times where predatory females joined and, dare I say—although
I think it was recorded in public—there was a group at one
initial training establishment that kept a chart on the wall and
they—
Q279 Chairman: A chart that size?
Mr Haes: I am not sure how big
it was. I did not get to see it, in fact. They recorded on here
the points scored, because if they pulled the corporal that gave
them five points and if they got the sergeant it was 10 points.
I am conjuring up the figures, but this is my imagination, trying
to put in place a picture that you have asked a question on.
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