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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 620-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
Wednesday 30 June 2004 LIEUTENANT COLONEL RICHARD HAES MS DENISE MURPHY and MS MORAG ANTROBUS Evidence heard in Public Questions 238 - 401
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Wednesday 30 June 2004 Members present Mr Bruce George, in the Chair Mr Crispin Blunt Mr James Cran Mr David Crausby Mr Mike Hancock Mr Dai Havard Mr Kevan Jones Mr Frank Roy Rachel Squire Mr Peter Viggers ________________ Examination of Witness
Witness: Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Richard Haes OBE, examined. Q238 Chairman: Welcome. Mr Haes: Thank you, sir. Q239 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 Uphaven. That is where I get my experience from but, obviously, that is also based on 37 years of experience in working at the training establishment of the Army as well. Q240 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 Uphaven 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 MS 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. Q241 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. Q242 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 report 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 staff 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 ten per cent - 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, if you like, 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. Q243 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. Q244 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. Q245 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, if you like, 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, if you like, 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. Q246 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. Q247 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. Q248 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. Q249 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. Q250 Mr Viggers: The numbers I have here indicate that your report suggested about 330 extra staff. Mr Haes: Yes. Q251 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, Lakenfield, 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. Q252 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. Q253 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". Q254 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 about to a very tight schedule and, therefore, if you like, 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, if you like, 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, if you like, 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. Q255 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. Q256 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." Q257 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, I think it is, 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. Q258 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 ---- Q259 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 per cent 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 per cent 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." Q260 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 ---- Q261 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. Q262 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, if you like, 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 teams - 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. Q263 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. Q264 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. Q265 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, if you like, the Holy Grail. Q266 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. Q267 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, if you like. 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 file 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. Q268 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. Q269 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. Q270 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. Q271 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 ---- Q272 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. Q273 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. Q274 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. Q275 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. Q276 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 MOs 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 per cent you get 10 per cent 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. Q277 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 ---- Q278 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 ten 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. Q279 Chairman: Would you know offhand how many of those 15 were disciplined? Mr Haes: I could not tell you because discipline - one of our problems which, maybe, we will come on to when we deal with the split Chain of Command - was dealt with by the Land Chain Command. Therefore, what happened to anyone being disciplined I was not allowed to see. Again, that was part of our problem; that we had responsibility for the behaviour of those people but we did not get oversight ---- Q280 Chairman: So when people are disciplined - forgive my ignorance - are they just transferred to other duties or are they simply sent home until the inquiry is completed? Mr Haes: No, it really depends on the recommendation of the police report or the evidence, if you like, that is presented. Probably in the majority of cases a charge would be raised under the Armed Forces Act, or military law, and these guys could be charged for disobeying a standing order; i.e. you will not have relationships with your trainees. Therefore, they would be charged and they could risk losing their rank; they could certainly risk being returned to their unit, which would have been quite disgraceful, to be honest. It was a severe discipline problem. It was formal discipline. It was not just a slap on the wrist and off you go. Q281 Chairman: We must find out in more detail about this because if this exacerbated the training problem, then this is a matter of considerable concern. Mr Haes: It was just one of the factors that added to the overstretch of instructors. I have to say that one of my main concerns, because I was concerned to see in a previous report record that they thought that equal opportunities was now a matter that was under control and had died down, was, if you like, the presence of females. I will not call it sexual harassment because that goes beyond what I am trying to describe, but females training in the military environment, in the slightly macho environment, were a concern for me. I think there was conflict between males and females. We were trying to run an organisation where everyone was treated equally and the females were expected to perform exactly the same duties as the males and yet on occasions we had some difficulties. I quote our SO1 Occupational Medicine, who was a female Lieutenant Colonel, who described to us at one of the main board meetings the problem that in fact women are not built to stride out with an 80 pound bergen their back; they physically have difficulty with that. In fact, we were finding that in Phase 1 training round about 27 per cent casualty rates for female recruits was the figure against 8 per cent for males. This was in a physical testing training stage, if you like. I remain concerned that there is an element of conflict between the sexes in the Armed Forces training centres. Q282 Mr Cran: Colonel, in answer to a few questions by Mr Hancock you said that you did not know of the various other reports but that you did know and indeed had read the Surrey Police report, the final one? Mr Haes: I was sent a copy. Q283 Mr Cran: You have read it? Mr Haes: I have. Q284 Mr Cran: I think it is important that the Committee does get on the record what you think of that particular report? I think it is worth stating when I ask the question that it was very complimentary of your report, the one that was published in 2001. Mr Haes: Yes. Q285 Mr Cran: Could you tell us what you feel about that report? Is it balanced? Is it fair? Does it set the problems surrounding the various deaths in the manner that you think right? Mr Haes: My answer to that is generally: yes, it was a balanced report within the limit of my experience. Clearly, I did not get to read the other reports that made input to their report. I can only say from the perspective which they were looking at, yes, they picked out of my report things which obviously helped them to come to their conclusions on the problems of the suicide end of the line. From that point of view, I think they scored a success. Q286 Mr Cran: So you had no reservations whatsoever about the standard of that report? Mr Haes: No. Later on in their conclusions I think they made comment that I made only one recommendation, which was a slight contradiction to what they had put earlier. In fact, they did note in other parts that I had made three recommendations principally: either we cut training, or we have the resources to do it, or we take a more minimalist approach, none of which were attractive, none of which were really acceptable to the establishment. Q287 Mr Cran: Laying that aside, the Committee, as it goes around assessing the responses that the armed services have made to various reports, has been in a difficulty because all the right language has been used, of course, but the question is: is it getting any further down? You did answer a few questions by my colleagues over there. Let us just bring it all together. I know you have been out of the Armed Forces for some time, three years or whatever. Do your contacts tell you that the lessons really have been learned and that action is really going to be taken and that it will be long-lasting, because of course that is the problem? Lessons can be learned. The question is whether they are going to be learned and apply for any length of time. What is your sense of all this? Mr Haes: The first answer to that is: yes, there has been a sea change in attitude to duty of care and supervision. It is now flavour of the month, if you like, to use that phrase. I do have some cynicism from long years of experience as to whether it will be sustained. I think that the DOC report and the reappraisal, which I have read, at the six-month reappraisal is fantastic. I think that has hit the nail right on the head. They have picked up the vast majority of the major concerns that I had. One of my feelings was that the DOC report is having an amazing effect because people accept that as a high level MoD document that cannot be ignored, and so we have got out of this phase of DOC quoted corporate blindness. I think "cognitive dissonance" was the phrase which I used. I think we have been able to set that aside now and people are recognising that there is a real problem; they have put resources into it; they are looking at putting more resources into it. I believe that further bids for money in STP 04 are being made, but again I would not like to look into the crystal ball and say that that will continue for ever more. We need to ring-fence these changes somehow and they have to be written in in red so that at some later defence review, or further cut-backs in demands on manpower, people then forget what we have done when it is too easy in the height of an operation to say, "This has operational priority and we will overrule it at this time" because you then begin to erode what you have achieved now. The DOC report has made a huge difference. Q288 Mr Cran: Does that lead you to believe that change must come from the top of the organisation, or at least it has to be recognised there? You feel that is recognised by the high command, as it were? Mr Haes: I do, yes. That is my gut instinct and the fact that 179 military instructors have already gone to ATRA is indication at very high level: you will sort it out. I think the message has gone down. Q289 Mr Cran: Is not a problem the fact that no matter the size of our Army, for instance, decision-making takes place at all sorts of levels. The question is: is the edict that comes from on high, as it were, going to be applied at each level? Do you perceive that to be a problem or do you think this is has just been such a wake-up call? Mr Haes: I think where the edict needed to work was at the top level. Really, it had to come from MoD, the overarching organisation which tells the posting branch to move soldiers from there to there. This is significant policy stuff that could only have come from MoD with adjutant general's full approval and so forth because he is Controller of Planning and so forth as far as the Army is concerned. There has to have been a major sea change. You ask: is it going to apply at every level? I think the key level is at the top. Once you have put those soldiers into the chain of command where they are needed at the bottom, those guys are more than willing and able to do the job they are required to do. The fact that they are there I think will sort out the problem. Q290 Mr Cran: With the background that you have, not only as a former senior officer in the Armed Forces but knowing how the adjutant works, are you sure this is all going to last and, if you are not sure that it is going to last, how should we ensure that it lasts because that is the question? Mr Haes: I cannot be sure that senior officers will not do what has happened in the past and unless I suppose this "wilco" attitude of the military officer, which is ingrained in every officer's psyche, which is a battle-winning philosophy --- You cannot remove that; it has got to be there if we are going to go into war, that you go for the objective and overcome all obstacles in your way. Q291 Mr Cran: I have one last question. My colleague, Mr Jones, referred to the fact that we were in Lichfield, and a very enlightening trip it was. I, however, was quite surprised to learn that the welfare officer, because that is the man who is pulling everything together, at Lichfield is in fact not a specialist; he is a welfare officer of one year and he could be a gunnery officer the next year. I thought that was a weakness. Do you think it is a weakness? Mr Haes: No, I do not. Principally, that is the way the Army has operated for ever basically because we are posted from jobs every two, two and a half or three years as part of, if you like, our career progression. We gain experience through doing that. You do not lose the experience, having left the fact that you have been a platoon commander or company commander where you have managed soldiers. You take that experience on with you and it is enriched by the other jobs you go to. You would not be an officer if you could not do that job. Mr Cran: I am interested in your reply because the reply we were given yesterday was that the high command, as it were, are indeed looking to see whether these people should be specialists or not. Q292 Mr Jones: You are aware that on 24 May Adam Ingram announced the appointment of the Adult Learning Inspectorate, the independent inspection oversight of training establishments. Could you tell us what your views are of that decision and of external oversight and inspection of training establishments? Mr Haes: The Adult Learning Inspection has come after my time and I am not in any way qualified to talk on that. Was the second part of your question whether we should have an inspector of actual duty of care? Q293 Mr Jones: Yes. It is really about external oversight of the duty of care regime in Army training establishments. Mr Haes: I have some reservations. I can understand why people say: yes, the Army has failed to put its house in order by itself and therefore we need an external inspector to look at it in order to give it validity. I do not see us as being like the Prison Service where you have your Inspector of Prisons. In fact, I would much prefer to see that you put in place a series of checks and balances within the system: you make DGATR totally responsible, but he must have the ability to have a red card that he can wave to a particularly senior officer in MoD, be it DOC or someone who has been involved in this particular aspect, without prejudice to his career. I think there is always a worry, in my belief anyhow and I may be speaking completely out of turn, that the senior officer is reluctant to tell bad news upwards because bad news equals bad reports and so you get on with it. I think that has been part of the problem as to why commandants would not tell DGATR what the news was. I knew the staff were briefing the commandants but it was getting filtered out before it got to DGATR. My feeling is that you should keep DGATR as totally responsible and wholly responsible, but he should have the authority without prejudice. He should have working to him a series of committees or, if you like, focus groups in each operating division that works to something like the working group that I set up that meets bi-annually, or however often is deemed necessary, and that input comes through that group to DGATR. If you are to have an external inspection, if it is possible, and I believe that the DOC appraisal system seems to have worked the magic this time and it has worked brilliantly well and it has really broken the log-jam, why can that not continue as your external validation of what ATRA is doing? Q294 Mr Jones: Would you also agree that there is an important element here in terms of ourselves as politicians and the public in general, especially those who have relatives who are sending youngsters into the Armed Forces, that they have confidence in the system? I hear what you are saying, that you are a retired officer, and I hear it when we have been on various visits that somehow this is an internal problem that can be looked at internally in the military. It is clear from the history, starting with your report, that serious issues have been raised. You raised the reasons why you think they were ignored, but unless there is any pressure from outside, nothing is done. In your case, your report was shelved, which raised a whole range of issues. How do you ensure that in future, for example if somebody is asked to do a similar report to yours internally, that is not just shelved in the chain of command because it is unacceptable or it raises issues that cannot be addressed at that time? Do you not think if we are going to have confidence, and certainly this is of relevance to youngsters joining the Armed Forces, that they need that reassurance of an independent inspectorate? Mr Haes: Yes, I can fully understand why you are saying that. The answer to that is: even if you had your independent inspector, I am not sure that he would be able to find out actually what is going on and going wrong at the lower levels. I think, working within the organisation, I was able to work my feelers, if you like, into the system, because I developed a trust with these people. They knew I was working on their side, and I said to the people then within the closed door, the corporals, the sergeants or whoever I was talking to, under Chatham House rules, "Tell me what your problems are? Forget I am wearing these. I just want to hear your grumbles". We sat down with the whingers on the real stuff, but that is how we found out really what as going wrong. The difficulty then is when I produce a report, how are we going to stop that being shelved? I think that the chain of command must acknowledge now that it will be a very grave sin to shelve a report like that again. I believe that if you have something like the DOC appraisal system that is working so well now that would find out straight away if there was a report. In fact, you probably should not need a report like that if DOC was doing its job properly, and it is working well now. Q295 Mr Jones: I am told all the time and I was told again yesterday that the main thing is the chain of command with you reinforcing that. Clearly in your case, in the case of your report, the chain of command, even right up to the MoD, let you down, did it not? It also let down those youngsters who actually suffered because of some of the things that were not taken on board in your report. So this holy grail of the chain of command, which I am told about all the time and I accept it from the military in terms of the battle situation - and here we are not talking about that but about a training establishment - has failed in terms of those youngsters, has it not? Mr Haes: It clearly did not work, yes. I cannot argue with that. I know it failed. I saw the evidence and we did not manage to put the right resources in place. The answer is that I still believe that if you have got a military inspector, if you like, from outside ATRA even, you would still have someone coming in with an independent view who will stand probably a better chance of understanding where things are not working than if you have a non‑military, external inspector who comes round. There will be a formal visit or there will be all sorts of statistical returns produced. I am not convinced that he would be able to find out the nitty-gritty of what was going wrong by that means. He would not have the trust within the organisation. Q296 Mr Jones: I understand what you are saying but, likewise, they would not have been allowed to put your report on the top shelf in a dark corner because they would have to spotlight that. What amazes me about your report is that it was clearly instigated from concerns that were there. You would have expected, would you not, out of it an action plan but instead it was just put to one side, or hidden, and that was allowed to happen because of the chain of command, was it not? Mr Haes: My sincere hope, and an element of optimism is there now, is that since we have got to this level and the whole problem of duty of care within the training organisation has been examined at such a high level, it will always now be at the forefront of whatever budget processing is done each year, so that every time there must be a line in the budget process which looks at duty of care. Q297 Mr Hancock: As a quick supplementary, can you tell us how far up the chain of command you think your report went? Mr Haes: At the initial phase? Q298 Mr Hancock: No. Did it ultimately end up on the desk of the Minister, do you think? That is pretty fundamental. Mr Haes: I am sorry, I have no idea. I cannot answer that. All I know is that it went to Headquarter of ATRA and the Surrey Policy had a copy. Those are the only two locations I know that it went to. Q299 Mr Roy: Colonel, back on the theme of the chain of command, you describe a culture that appeared to lack confidence in the use of the chain of command as a mechanism for tackling important or difficult issues and specifically you suggest that operating divisional commanders failed to give HQ ATRA the information necessary for it to act in response to resource shortfalls. Why do you think they were unable to pass this information on? Mr Haes: I touched on it just now. This philosophy, the "wilco" attitude of the officers, is that they do not like telling their boss bad news because it looks like they are not doing their job or they cannot do the job. These are my words. I never reached that level of service, so I might be out of order. I think there is this element of: we will sort out our own problems and get the job done, however painful it is and however frustrating it is. Q300 Mr Roy: Can I stop you there and I understand why you are saying that, but that could also be seen to be, quite frankly: this is the way I will try to cover up, because that is what you are saying. You are saying that you are covering up. If you are not going to spread the news on to somebody else, then you are covering up. Mr Haes: I am almost certain that they believed that they were making the system work in the way that it needed to work. In one way there was no point in saying, "I have got these problems" because all the boss can say is, "Well, I have given you your resources. You have got your budget. You sort it out". Q301 Mr Roy: If you do not sort it out, then you are covering up by not allowing it to go up the chain of command? Mr Haes: I think that is a fair statement. I do not like the words "cover up" because that smacks of something devious and underhand, and it certainly was nothing to do with that. The fact that you had me coming in to this staff position for the first time in ATRA, if you like, I was able to find those things out, and I acted as DGATR's telescope by reporting them direct back to him. Q302 Mr Roy: You could use the word "devious" because it is a cover up to me. You want to be devious; you do not want to pass on the truth to someone else and therefore you want to hide it. With all due respect, then that to me is devious. Mr Haes: I think "devious" smacks of preconceived ideas of trying to pretend that you are doing something better than you are, and I do not accept that at all. These guys were working their hides off and doing a really good job with the resources they had available. I am afraid the system did not provide enough resources for duty of care. Q303 Mr Roy: Can you just expand on why there is this "wilco" attitude. Are you a failure then if you cannot fulfil that type of attitude? Are you labelled a failure and therefore that is the reason why you do not pass it on up the chain? Mr Haes: I think it is in the psyche that you believe that you can do it. You have to have a very strong sense of self-belief. I think the damage that was done that would have to be undone and which may go the other way to the way you were looking is that the troops under command, the instructors and so forth, developed this widespread cynicism because they knew things were not going particularly well; they knew they did not have the resources and no one was representing their case upwards. If you like, I think that I find the most difficult point to accept that commanders would not fight the corner for their men, and this is where I believe the business attitude in ATRA began to take over. They were running it as a business at the top end to do the budgets, resources, the budget accounting system. Budgetiers almost took over and said, "You cannot do that. You have not got the money". Our commanders were essentially taking decisions that were more politically based in order to suit the cutbacks in budget they had been ordered to make to satisfy, if you like, Treasury or political needs, and there were some political decisions coming down like working time regulations that imposed huge extra problems on the ATRA. That was one of my principal first jobs. Q304 Mr Roy: Or huge protection for the men at the bottom? Mr Haes: Trying to implement it actually created, if you like, given the protection that you are talking about, even greater over-stretch because of total anomalies. It had not been thought out before it was given to ATRA to implement. A key example I will give you is that when we read this through, we had to ask the question: "Does this apply to trainees, for example, when you are under training and under duress to prove that you can operate under pressure? Does it also apply to the instructors?" The answer came back that the trainees were exempt working time regulations on exercise under duress when it was designed to put pressure on them, but the instructors were not. Therefore, technically, the instructor had to knock off, if you like at the end of a normal working day on exercise when he clearly could not do that because ethos and leadership mean the instructor has got to provide the leadership; he has got to be there in front of the men. Not only is he running the exercise but he is providing the leadership and saying, "This is how it should be done" - copy me type of idea. Therefore, we had to look at how we gave compensatory rest to the instructors later on in the period - I think 49 days was the period of the working time regulation cycle - and within that period we then had to say, "Look, this instructor has worked X number of hours on an exercise. That puts him so many hours over the working time regulations and we therefore have to give him a week's compensatory rest period at the end of the 49 days", or whatever the period was. That meant we took him out of the training cycle. This was one of our great dilemmas, how to apply this in a training organisation. I actually wrote the orders which implemented this. Certain categories of training and certain parts of the establishment, certainly the operatives, we categorised as operational training establishments. There was no way round it. If we were to produce operationally effective trainees, they had to work at this pitch, and you could not avoid it. But the sheer fact that working time regulation was imposed on us did put on extra pressure because you had to reduce the hours worked by the instructors, basically. Q305 Mr Crausby: You have already touched to some extent on how military instructors were selected. Could you tell us a bit more how the trainers were selected and trained during time at ATRA? Mr Haes: I can only go back to my previous experience. I was not party to the precise selection process, other than that I know, from my life's experience, that you do not get posted in as an instructor to the ATRA unless you are recommended by your commanding officer on your confidential report. When instructors' jobs become vacant, and we know after two years one guy will go back to the unit and another guy will come in, we know that there will be a cyclical process that goes out to the various administrative organisations, like Queen's Division, assist was then, who would be tasked to provide X number of infantry instructors, corporals, sergeants, officers and so forth. They would then say, "Right, the following battalions will produce so many corporal instructors and so many lieutenant commanders for the training establishment". If you like, the pain was spread thinly in those terms. I have to accept that not everyone going was a volunteer. Word had got back to the Field Army that a job in the ATRA was about as welcome as Blind Pugh giving you a black patch because the view was that there was so much to be done, and there were so many pitfalls that you could fall into as an instructor, that the chances of you getting away without making a mistake, and therefore having a black mark on your career, were pretty low. Therefore, people were not keen to come. It was no longer the accolade; it was not the feather in your cap it should have been. I understand that we are now looking to reduce the posting to the training organisation to 18 months because the pressure is so great. That is a complete turnaround from what it was, say, 10 to 15 years ago. If you like, the selection process was part selection on reports and part to be nominated by the commanding officer who had recommended the guy. Q306 Mr Crausby: I went to Lichfield as well recently and the impression I got was that they were a pretty enthusiastic bunch of people who felt they were doing something really valuable and they got some self-satisfaction out of taking new people from civvies and turning people into soldiers. You say they were not generally volunteers. Is that still the case? Mr Haes: May I correct that then? There were some people who did not see this as a popular job. I think that probably was a great minority and that if you are picked as an instructor to go to the ATRA, it should be and in my book is an accolade; it is a credit to you that you are selected to do it. You are not just an ordinary guy any more. It must be, I believe, a step up on the promotion ladder. Q307 Mr Crausby: Would you make it known to your commanding officer that you were interested in that field or would it purely come from your commanding officer? Mr Haes: I think it comes from lower than that. If you are talking about corporals and lieutenants, it will have started at the company level and the company commander who has worked with these guys, who probably in his own time has been an instructor at the training establishment, will say, "That guy is good. I think he is a suitable candidate for the depot". Therefore, he will write on the man's report and this will then feed into the system. I think it would unusual for a corporal or an NCO or an officer to say, "I volunteer to go as an instructor". Basically, you have got to be picked. It is not something you stand up without being recommended for and say, "I will go". Q308 Mr Crausby: What mechanism was there to prevent those individuals that were temperamentally unsuited to be instructors? Was it just in the hands of those that sent them to you? Mr Haes: I think to a large extent in the initial case, yes. I do not believe that the commanding officer would send a guy to the depot or to the training agency as an instructor if that person was not the right temperament. I am differentiating between temperament and attitude here. Q309 Mr Crausby: I suppose it would depend on the commanding officer. Some commanding officers would be better at judging that than others? Mr Haes: No, I would disagree with you on that. I think the commanding officers have all been lieutenants at the depot at some point. We have all done it. That is the strength of our officer system. They have a vast amount of experience, wide experience, and they know exactly what is required at the depots, the training establishments. Q310 Mr Crausby: Were you overall satisfied with that method of selection? Mr Haes: I cannot think of a better one, to be honest. It has come on personal recommendation. Q311 Chairman: Please tell me what the difference is as you see it between temperament and attitude in the military context? Mr Haes: I think that temperament is something that is innate in the man and that attitude is something that we can change. For example, we can persuade people to change their attitude about equal opportunities, racism and sexual harassment. You can only mask a temperament. Q312 Mr Hancock: You cannot have it both ways, can you? If the commanding officers are such good pickers of people and they send people there, you described one training unit which had at one time 15 of the instructors suspended because of breaking the rules. You cannot really have it both ways, can yon? These guys were not all hand-picked, perfect soldiers, were they, by any means? Mr Haes: I am afraid I have worked with soldiers sufficiently long to be aware that there are some characteristics of the male nature and in which case, do not send anybody to the training establishment because they are all men, if you like. Q313 Mr Hancock: But 15 of them at one time in one establishment seems to be a bit high? Mr Haes: It could have been that this was symptomatic of a particular situation, perhaps a certain group either of instructors or females at that place at that time where perhaps, as I have mentioned, there were certain predatory females who sought out their instructors and placed it in his way, if you like. Q314 Chairman: We will move on. We have been around this. Someone will pursue that with the Ministry of Defence for more information. Mr Haes: I hope I am not letting that person in for a real problem. Q315 Rachel Squire: Like others before you, the MoD has acknowledged that lack of continuity and supervision between Phase 1 and Phase 2 training has been a problem. Can you say what your reaction is to the suggestion to merge Phase 1 and Phase 2 across the board or create a "family friendly" superbase? Mr Haes: My view on joining Phase 1 and Phase 2 training is that you are just reinventing the wheel. We only split Phase 1 and Phase 2 training when ATRA was set up or the ATO was set up as a cost-effective measure. It was cheaper to have only five initial training regiments, if you like, they were called ATRs, Army training regiments at that point, as opposed to individual depots for every regiment or every division. So we concentrated our initial training because all soldiers entering the Army have to go through that, so there is a complete phase that everybody in the Army has to do. You put them all into geographically sighted places that people would feed into and then logically they would go from there to their technical Phase 2 training. I was not happy when I heard they were going to split it. To prove the point, I think the Infantry have already reunited them and do one single course right the way through at Catterick and it has proved its worth. Having the gap in Phase 1 to Phase 2 is a significant problem in wastage rates; people have just begun after 11 weeks to build up friendships and suddenly they are split again. A lot of them, at the end of Phase 1, are still wavering as to whether or not they want to go on. Perhaps they have got used to their instructors there or they have made friends and the fact that you are now moving them to a totally new place with totally new instructors, new conditions and whatever, may be enough to unsettle them. The other factor that comes in is the discharge as of right, DAOR window, which all recruits are entitled to. Am I talking about a common phrase here? That DAOR window came just at the wrong time for too many people in that by the time they had just got into Phase 2, they may only have been there two or three weeks when the DAOR window opened and they said, "No, this is my chance. I am going". If you like, from that point of view, it caused quite serious retainment problems keeping the recruits going. I am surprised more did not leave. The other factor was, and mentioned these difficulties, the welfare problems that the kids brought in with them, that we had probably begun to analyse and sort them out in Phase 1 and reports were written, but by the time the instructors at Phase 1 had managed to write those reports and get them to Phase 2, it was probably almost too late; the guy had been there and said, "Look, I have a problem", and they said, "We do not know about it" and he had to begin explaining all over again. This cannot be good for morale. It looks like no one cares. This is where, if you like, the chain of command system when in place would handle this man's problem from start to finish. You would have continuity of leadership. That would overcome a huge number of problems. Q316 Rachel Squire: So you are very much in favour of merging and finding that continuity in Phase 1? Mr Haes: Yes, I am completely in favour, if I am absolutely honest. I know it will present some difficulties in the resourcing. If you go back to training all the Logistics Corp people through Deepcut, for example, Phase 1 and Phase 2, you are going to have to provide more Infantry instructors to do the infantry training part, but at Deepcut, at Logistics, so there will be manpower implications for that. Q317 Rachel Squire: Although someone coming in has identified by the time he gets into Phase 1 which area he is particularly interested in specialising, would merging not put the pressure on somebody who decides when he is six weeks through his initial training that maybe he does not want to be front-line infantry but would rather go into something else? Will it not create additional barriers to someone after six weeks in initial training who decides he would actually rather go somewhere else and it would mean being at Deepcut or being at another place just was no longer relevant to them? Mr Haes: I think the answer is not to as great an extent as you may imagine. First of all, the selection of cap badge is done at a very early stage. A person's qualifications, if you like their aptitude tests, will dictate which particular branches of the Army are open to him for a start. Q318 Rachel Squire: Some of us were at Glencorse on Monday; that is the pre‑initial phase? Mr Haes: Right, but that is not to stop somebody, even if he started at Deepcut, saying, "Look, actually I think I would rather be a signalman", and then arrangement being made either to say, "Complete your Phase 1 training here" and if you pass that, then we will pass you to the Signals if that person has the aptitude to do it. I believe that the system is flexible enough to cope with that and I do not think there would be a huge cross-referencing, if you like. I think the system at the moment where you get people changing their minds in Phase 1 is that they form friendships in Phase 1 training with someone who is going off to the Tank Corp and they put down Logis, and they say, "I want to stay with that guy. Can I change to there?" The chances are, as it is now, we will get more people chopping and changing for that reason because they have formed allegiances. Q319 Rachel Squire: The key part is that those friendships and allegiances will be maintained? Mr Haes: Yes, and I think that is thoroughly worthy, but if he went to Deepcut in the first place, he would form those friendships there and they would be reinforced. He would not know differently, if I put it that way. He would still be perfectly as good a soldier there as he would over there. Q320 Chairman: When you began your inquiry, and you must be feel very vindicated by events in terms of related response to much that you have done, did anybody come to you and say, "Colonel, read these before you begin" and this reading list should have included, I would have thought, some of the documentation you read about in the Surrey Policy Report, or was the obligation on you to find out? Mr Haes: I suppose, with hindsight, the answer could have been "yes" but at no point, whoever I spoke to, either in higher Headquarters or in the operating divisions where you might expect it, did someone say , "Ah, but a guy did a report on this two years go", or one year ago or whatever. There was absolutely no indication of that, and I think when I arrived in the job, because it was a newly-established post, I have to say I got very quickly stuck into sorting out the problems that were existing. There was very little in the way of any organised, back-dated reference material and, because no one had been doing the job, I had to go through all sorts of files. The civilian staff, with the best will in the world, had filed letters in places because they did not really understand what it was about. They just put it in any file. It was a case of going through every single file to find out where the information was. Most of the time, we could not find it if it was back-referenced. We had say, "Sorry, please send us another copy of that". Q321 Mr Hancock: Who was the general in charge when you given this job? Mr Haes: By name, it was General Christopher Elliot. Q322 Mr Hancock: He must have been in charge when at least one or two of the previous reports would have ended up on his desk? Mr Haes: I cannot answer that, I am afraid. Q323 Mr Hancock: The dates would say that he should have known? Mr Haes: I do not know who those reports were submitted to, nor who was responsible for sorting them out. Q324 Chairman: We are trying to find this paper trail. Maybe we will find out. Mr Haes: I think also relevant to that is that when I was initially brought in, that was not my remit. My remit was to look at this new, emerging legislation, which indeed was a fairly full‑time job, and so I took on, if you like, the duty of care and supervision study side as a matter of natural staff work. It developed, it evolved, as it went along and presumably because I was finding things out as I went, perhaps naively, I did not make that quantum leap to say, "Has anything like this been done before?" Q325 Chairman: As a very last question, you expressed concerns about the heavy administrative burden caused by the 20 per cent of regular offenders in terms of additional duties imposed by fulfilling the Summary Dealings Regulations. What can the Armed Forces do to ensure that the 80 per cent of people who are not noticed, the grey faces, receive the full care and attention they deserve? Is it focusing wrongly too much on the 20 per cent? Mr Haes: I think the very straight answer to that is that you have got to put the military chain of command in place that will provide the leadership and therefore the care, the inherent responsibility for care, for that group of soldiers under that man's leadership. I believe that if you do that, the system will work. I spotted that and I think the ratio or the figure which I came fairly close to was 1:38 is satisfactory. I think that is adequate for a person to manage the welfare responsibilities. If you achieve that ratio, then I think you will find the vast majority of the problems we have experienced will be taken out of the system; they will be dealt with. As for the 20 per cent, how you deal with the constant re-offenders, I think that is a whole new ball park and we do not have time today. Chairman: Thank you very much for your documents and for the work you did. The Committee suspended from 4.45 pm to 5.00 pm
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Denise Murphy, Head of Services Welfare & Customer Services Director, and Ms Morag Antrobus, Senior Operations Manager, Services Welfare, examined. Q326 Chairman: Ladies, thank you very much for coming. We really look forward to what you are going to say. Could you give us some brief biographical details? Ms Murphy: I am Head of Services Welfare within WRVS. I have worked for the organisation for nearly four years. Prior to that, I had a career in human resources. Ms Antrobus: I am Senior Operations Manager with WRVS Services Welfare. I have been with them since December 1998. Prior to that I was a lecturer in further education. Chairman: Ms Antrobus, we do admire the work that the WRVS has been doing over the years. Q327 Mr Blunt: Is there such a person as a typical services welfare officer? Ms Murphy: Certainly since I have been with the organisation, when we select an individual - and that is myself, Morag Antrobus and some of the other managers - we look for someone who has a background perhaps as a matron at a school or in the nursing profession, the more caring professions. I would say that typically they would be caring people, capable of listening rather than doing all the talking and with a big heart, really. Q328 Mr Blunt: Are they all drawn from the Women's Royal Voluntary Service? Ms Murphy: No, they are not volunteers. The AT services welfare officers that work for Services Welfare are in fact paid employees. We recruit via publications like The Lady magazine. Q329 Mr Blunt: Are there any men? Ms Murphy: There is one. Q330 Mr Blunt: Is there an age requirement? Ms Murphy: No. In the adverts we ask for a mature attitude to life but I do not suppose we would employ someone at 64 and a half, for example, because of the retirement age. Q331 Mr Blunt: Do you know how young the youngest is? Ms Murphy: The average age of the 80 people we employ is 51 and the ages range from about 27 to someone who is due to retire in a couple of months at 64 plus. Q332 Mr Blunt: Do they come from any particular social background? You said they have mainly worked in a caring capacity. Is there any social background or career background that would be typical? Ms Murphy: That is nursing and education, and clearly on the CVs I look for individuals who have worked with young people and who have tried to understand some of the issues that young people have. Ms Antrobus: May I add that quite a few of them in fact actually have some sort of knowledge of the military - they might have been a spouse of someone in the military - for various reasons, and so they come to us, not all of them but a percentage, with that knowledge. Q333 Mr Cran: Still on the subject of your service welfare officers, are they trained? You advertise for them. You get the right individual. You have explained what sort of individual it is you are after. What do you do with them then? Do you train them in the job that you expect them to do or not? Ms Murphy: It starts off with induction training. That induction training is over about three days. We go through the entire terms and conditions, through what they are expected to do and case studies. In fact when we select them we actually put a scenario together regarding a particular issue that they may be confronted with when they go into the units. That is obviously to assess how they would deal with it. After their initial induction, we are very well supported by Colonel ATRA who actually attends and goes through issues that he wants to put forward. Q334 Mr Cran: Is he a serving officer? Ms Murphy: Yes. Colonel Villalard at HQ Land takes part in that induction as well. After that, the services welfare officer is then placed in a unit with a mentor, with another services welfare officer who is more experienced, and so there is a lot on-the-job training. Q335 Mr Cran: How long does that mentor stay with the person? Ms Murphy: At least six months, but we like them to stay at their first training unit for 12 months. Ideally, that is what we would like them to do, but again because of pressures of people leaving - and thankfully the turnover of service welfare officers is not high - and because of the age profile I inherited when I joined the organisation, and there is quite an older work force, we have brought in young people to look at succession planning. Q336 Mr Cran: How often do you retrain these officers? You give them the induction training; they have six months with a mentor. Would you retrain them after that? Ms Murphy: We are currently looking at the training ourselves. There are many courses within the Army that they can actually dovetail into and that is always available to them. We look at the listening skills training and that is something that we are currently doing. Ms Antrobus: They start off initially in one of the training regiments, which is clearly quite different to working in the Field Army. What we like to try and do, we cannot always achieve it for logistical purposes, is to put the services welfare officer through Phase 1, then into Phase 2 and then out into the Field Army, so that the training, just by virtue of the job changing, because it changes from unit to unit and Phase 1 to Phase 2 and on to the Field Army, is ongoing. The more specialist training is something that we do try and dovetail with the Army because theirs is very good. At the moment there are a lot of courses on combating stress and because we are with the Field Army, we do have to get involved in that as well. They are very supportive about putting us through that training with their own staff. Q337 Mr Cran: How do you measure the performance? You get them in position, but your organisation is not like perhaps many others where, if you have a Marks & Sparks type organisation, you have a manager and supervisors who can assess your performance. This job is a bit different, is it not? How do you measure performance? Ms Murphy: What I have tried to do since I have joined is add a bit more structure to what we have got within Services Welfare and we have introduced appraisals and we have introduced probationary period assessments as well. The way the structure is worked out is that we have myself, Morag and then we have four managers who look after a particular location - there is a copy of our structure in the report. Those managers are tasked with visiting a club x number of times throughout the period we discuss, so they have constant dialogues with their managers. We also annually write to the commanding officers and ask them to complete a questionnaire basically about the service we provide, how could we do it differently, and then about the particular services welfare officer and how they are performing and what could we change there, and any training they think is lacking in that area, because those commanding officers and the unit welfare officers are working closely with those people every day. Q338 Mr Cran: What sort of on-going support do your welfare officers get from the centre of your organisation on an on-going basis? Do they get any, or are they working fairly solitary existences from everyone else in the camp? Ms Murphy: It can be solitary, and that is one of the qualities, if that is the right word, when we choose someone. They have to be fairly robust people to live in an isolated part of the country. The support we give them is in the form of their manager who is on basically 24 hour call for them if necessary. Although the services welfare officers do not work 24 hours, there are times when they are called upon and they may need someone else to contact to give them some support there. We get feed-back currently from a series of information days whereby we go out to all the locations and tell them about the bigger part of the organisation and tell them how we are performing within Services Welfare. We have one more to do in Lichfield and then we have completed that. Through that exercise we will have had face-to-face contact with the 80 welfare officers. Q339 Mr Cran: Do you have a sense, because of the work which your welfare officers are doing, as to whether the welfare support provided in, let's say, a Phase 1 Training Establishment, Phase 2 Training Establishment, is adequate or not, not just in relation to your welfare officers, I mean the package which exists in these camps to support training? Do you have a sense of that? Ms Murphy: The recruits you mean? Q340 Mr Cran: Yes. Ms Murphy: I can only say how I feel it is from speaking to commanding officers and the other staff, and I feel there is a huge effort being made at the moment especially, because it is very high profile at the moment; that they want to give us as much support as they can. It is not perfect 100 per cent of the time, and when we feel a services welfare officer is not being supported, or he or she raises a problem with us, then we make sure we do not sit on it, we take it forward to the relevant individual to highlight the issue. Q341 Mr Cran: So you very definitely do see a change in attitude in the Armed Forces in relation to this whole duty of care area? Ms Murphy: Yes, I do. Q342 Mr Cran: It is significant, is it? Ms Antrobus: Absolutely. Ms Murphy: Yes. Q343 Mr Roy: What attitude do recruits have to raising issues of concern with services welfare officers? What kind of attitude do they have to that? Is it encouraged or discouraged by their peer groups? Ms Antrobus: I think it is two-fold. We actually get involved as the recruit comes in. Within certainly the first two weeks of their initial training we have an induction with them where they are literally just brought to our facility and introduced to us. Just to rewind, we are often now involved in reception days with parents, it is not always after they are in. We tell them why we are there, what we can do for them, that it is their right to be able to come to us, that they do not have to ask permission, and because we work split shifts if they do not want to come during the working day, in other words if they do not want to say either to somebody in the chain of command or admit to their pals, because it is not always about --- Q344 Mr Roy: Can I just stop you there. You say they do not want to admit to their pals, but is it not the case it could very well be a strength if these recruits feel able to come to you rather than perceived to be a weakness? I think it is a much-needed strength. Ms Antrobus: Absolutely, but I think we have to accept that the environment they are working in and living in is quite macho, and there is always going to be, particularly with the younger ones, that whole thing which you will get in any large organisation where you have a lot of young people, that they do not want to admit, for example, that maybe they are home sick. Crying for Mum, which a lot of them do, is not something they are happy to admit to their friends. Q345 Mr Roy: What about particular groups? You are saying some are crying for Mum, is it a geographic problem, for example, at Catterick, if you are a Scot coming down to England? Do recruits from geographically further away cause a problem? Ms Antrobus: Not at all, and I think it takes them as much by surprise as anybody else. They are just not prepared for the fact they are going to be that home sick. Q346 Mr Roy: So you could not categorise any particular group? Ms Antrobus: No. Often the tougher you perceive that young person to be, the more home sick they will actually be. I do not think it is a social thing, from their background or geographically. Q347 Mr Roy: You think it is important you do meet them as early as possible? I remember when I was at Catterick last year, your people were so highly regarded - I cannot emphasise how highly regarded - so highly regarded they thought they could pull an MP aside and tell me how highly regarded you were. Does that all come back to the initial relationship you try and build up at the very start? Ms Antrobus: I think you are building up two relationships. You have to build a relationship with the recruit and you have to build a relationship with the training staff and the chain of command, and it can be a bit like walking a tightrope because you do not want to lose credibility with the recruit. Q348 Mr Roy: You want to be the honest broker? Ms Antrobus: Yes, absolutely, and it can for all our services welfare officers be one of the trickiest parts of their job, supporting the chain of command but at the same time building an honest relationship with the recruit. Q349 Mr Jones: You mentioned you thought it was important to meet them early on and you also mentioned you had some contact with families, is there any situation whereby services welfare officers will contact parents or have any contact with parents whilst the recruit is in the training centre? Ms Antrobus: Yes, yes. It will sometimes be the fact that they want you to ring Mum or Dad for a particular reason. It might not be related to their training, it can just be, "My Gran has not been well, could you give Mum a ring and say that I am going out on exercise but I'm thinking about them", or Mum being concerned and ringing the services welfare officer and saying, "I know there's something wrong, can you do something about it?" Again, it might not be anything related to their military training, it could be a relationship problem but they are on the phone to Mum or Dad and they picked up on the fact there is something wrong, and are just asking us to look into it. Q350 Mr Jones: At Lichfield yesterday we met two of your officers who talked about some of their experiences, but one of the things which came across to me yesterday as key was the listening skills, and you mentioned in the early days that home sickness is the one they really deal with, but what do you think is the most common problem in Phase 1 or even Phase 2 Training? You gave an example there of parents who might contact you, how would one of your officers react to that in terms of the chain of command in the Army or establishment they are at? Ms Antrobus: We are a confidential service, so one of the things we do at induction - and we do inductions for permanent staff as well - is to make sure everybody understands where we are coming from with confidentiality. If the recruit really does not want us to tell anybody at all then there is very little we can actually do but accept that confidentiality, while at the same time explaining to them that nothing really is going to get any better because we are not able to change things if it is a military matter. If it is something like a relationship, unless it is going to impact on their training, then we would either deal with it ourselves or, if it was of a more serious nature, because we are a referral agency we would refer it on but at the same time say to the recruit, "Do we have your permission because I cannot take it any further than this as your services welfare officer and clearly there is an issue here and we have to move it forward." In the four years I was out there working I never had one recruit tell me that I could not take it to the chain of command. Often it is just they want you to act as their advocate. Q351 Mr Jones: Can you talk us through how you do that, or how you did it when you did the job? Ms Antrobus: It is not that difficult. I am trying to think of a scenario I could give you where they come in with something which could be serious to them, because you have to take into account that this is an age group you are dealing with where everything has to be instant and everything is a drama, and I do mean that in the nicest possible way. The girlfriend who is at home has broken up with them, so they say, "I am very unhappy and what I am going to do is go home." "Well, actually no, you can't go home", so you sit and explain to them that it is not the end of the world and you can spend a lot of time just sitting talking to them and explaining what will happen "if". "So let's try and find out if we can give you some coping strategies while we try and sort it out for you." In the main, you will sort it out. If they say, "I need to go home", I would say, "We need to talk to your company commander to see if we can get you home, if it is that serious, but I cannot do anything until tomorrow, go away and think about this and come back and see me in an hour, if you have that time, or tomorrow and just let me know where we are up to." You just do it little steps at a time. Usually, you can save an awful lot of anguish for them, because for them it is the most important thing in the world at that point in time. If something is not done, eventually it does impact on their training. Q352 Mr Jones: That is an example of something they have brought with them from outside their Army recruitment life, but what about a situation where it is something which relates directly to their training, whether they are being bullied or unhappy with something that is happening as part of their training? We heard yesterday, and we heard again today, that the military see the main stovepipe being the chain of command as a way of addressing these problems. From your experience, are there examples of where that comes to you and it is directly relevant to the recruit's training, and how do you get back into the chain of command? Ms Antrobus: With absolutely no problem at all. We are very, very fortunate, we enjoy a very, very good relationship with the chain of command from a corporal right the way up. Clearly it depends on the level of the problem. As far as bullying goes, it is our opinion that in the majority of cases we have ever had to deal with, which are very few, it is often between the peer groups and not from the chain of command to a recruit. But we would look at what the problem was and depending on what we were being told, because again it is a very fine line - you can destroy somebody's career if you move too quickly with something like that -we would decide at which levels to go into in the chain of command. Obviously, if it was very, very serious you would just skip the whole lot and go straight to the colonel, but normally we can resolve it before then. He will always know, do not misunderstand me, because it is his right to know, but in getting that information you can deal with it at different levels. Ms Murphy: Can I add an important point here? Morag has mentioned going straight to the CO, and that is something which is written everywhere, you have not got to start at the bottom, you can go straight in at the top. If it is any issue at all which in our opinion we feel is something not right within that chain of command, we can bounce the system all the way to the top. I am glad to say we do not have to do that really. Ms Antrobus: We should say that none of our services welfare officers would be concerned about rattling cages if we felt it was necessary because we saw something which was not right. Q353 Mr Jones: In terms of the decision about where you take it in that stovepipe, is it down to the welfare officer on the ground, or do they have to take advice from someone outside? Ms Antrobus: We work very, very closely with the chaplaincy and also with the medical centre, the doctors and nursing staff. It is rarely done in isolation. It is more likely that you would go and find a padre because the chances are - and this is where we have to find ways of discussing things with other welfare agencies without breaking confidentiality - if there is a serious problem you tend to find other people know about it anyway. Ms Murphy: Just one final thing to add to that, if there is any thought at all there is a self-harm situation then we try and look after that individual 24/7 because we appreciate the magnitude of the potential problem there. Q354 Mr Cran: At Lichfield yesterday I was quite surprised, although on thinking about it again I do not see why I should have been, that your officer up there indicated the training staff themselves sometimes come along to your officers for assistance, help, whatever it is. At the time I thought that was strange but it is not now because of course problems are not ring-fenced. Is that a perceptible problem in your perception? Are the training staff themselves under a lot of pressure? Are they over-worked and therefore that leads to them coming to your officers? Or is this an exaggeration? Ms Antrobus: No. We see more training staff now than we have ever done, particularly the younger training staff. Whether they work too hard or not, I do not know, but I do know they are certainly under a great deal of pressure, particularly if they are married, and in that initial period of training they will see very little of their wives and family at that point, which can put a strain on the marriage. It is very full-on in the training regiments, for obvious reasons, so you rarely seem to escape from it. Our own services welfare officers, by the time they are ready to come out of the training regiment, are pretty wiped out. So, yes, they have started to come in and talk to us more, but it is a bit of a tightrope for us because all the while you are trying to support everybody. It is this credibility that you have to keep hold of between being seen with the training staff and at the same time you are telling these young people, "Everything is fine and you can come to us and it is not going to go any further", which it is not, but then they see you on the other side as well. Q355 Mr Cran: Is it your view that they are under stress and perhaps over worked because there are fewer of them? Have you got that feel for why this might be happening? Ms Antrobus: I think in the past there have been huge inroads, even in the last two years. Five years ago the staff ratios I feel were very poor but all of that has now been recognised. I think they could still do with smaller numbers to look after. I think it was Mr Crausby who said he was a lecturer? Did you say that? Q356 Mr Crausby: No. Ms Antrobus: Did I hear somebody say they had been in education? It is almost the same sort of thing. If you put a teacher in front of 40 people, you are not going to pick up on the very vulnerable ones because you have so many, and it is exactly the same thing for the training staff. If they are having to look after huge numbers then logistically one or two are going to fall through the net. Q357 Mr Cran: You obviously have to deal on a confidential basis with those who come as clients to you or to your officers, and that does preclude you or your officers from going to the chain of command, let us say to the colonel, the commanding officer, and telling him that he has a problem. You would not do that, would you? Ms Antrobus: If the problem is serious enough, yes. Q358 Mr Cran: You do? Ms Antrobus: Very much so. Q359 Mr Cran: Have you done it? Ms Antrobus: Personally, no. Q360 Mr Cran: Do your officers? Ms Murphy: If that recruit or young soldier was likely to harm him or herself ---- Q361 Mr Cran: No, I do not mean that, I mean in relation to the training side. Ms Murphy: You mean if the problem was raised by one of the recruits regarding the training staff? Q362 Mr Cran: No. If a member of the training staff has a problem, comes to you, wants to explain it, we have just been told by you that this is on the increase, and all I was simply asking was, would it come within your competence to go to the commanding officer, or your representative, and say, "Oi, you have a problem here"? Ms Antrobus: Absolutely. Q363 Mr Cran: And you do that? Ms Antrobus: Absolutely. Ms Murphy: Yes, because it would affect what we are there to do, what we are there to provide. Q364 Chairman: In terms of record-keeping, we would not want names obviously, but could you write to us and give us some idea of your workload and the kind of problems you are facing? That would be really helpful for us. Ms Murphy: We have some stats we can send to you, because what we record on a monthly basis is not just the number of recruits who go through the clubs, it is the number of issues that the soldiers raise, and that could be anything from missing their Mum and Dad, to the dog has died, to my girlfriend has decided to leave me. We have the whole of last year which you can see. From January to May we had 137,000 recruits through the clubs and about 2,600 of those were welfare issues. So there is lots of throughput, if you like. That is a good thing we think because it highlights two things really. One, they may not be dealing with the issues, but, two, at least they are coming to us to try and help them resolve their problems. Q365 Chairman: Do you produce an annual report? Ms Murphy: No, not really. We are in the process, because of the assessments we have just carried out when we wrote to each of the commanding officers, of writing a report as feed-back from that actual survey. I can give you a copy of that as well. Q366 Chairman: Please, that would be very helpful. Another thing which would be quite helpful is if you would not mind sending us a copy of your training manuals. Ms Murphy: The induction programme? Q367 Chairman: Yes. That would be really helpful because then we would know the kind of things you are telling your people. That would give us an idea of what they are saying to their clients. Ms Murphy: Fine. Q368 Mr Roy: How happy are you with the current structure of welfare teams at initial training establishments and how consistently do these teams meet? Do you meet for the sake of meeting? Ms Murphy: No. Q369 Mr Roy: What is the feeling when you do get together? Is it on an ad hoc basis? Ms Murphy: I defer to Morag because she has been involved in those meetings. Ms Antrobus: Again, in the last two years, we have seen more formal meetings being introduced but they have always been there. Certainly in the locations I have been in and certainly in the training regiments, there are regular welfare meetings for the full team. That will be everybody from the NAAFI staff who play an important welfare role, up to the commanding officer and the unit welfare officer, the quartermaster. Then there will be a smaller body, a bit like your committee, when it is the people who will be dealing with the more sensitive welfare cases, who have a look in depth at what is actually going on. At the same time, there are always ad hoc meetings, because things are happening almost on a daily basis. So you might decide to have a very impromptu meeting by going to see the padre and the doctor. Q370 Mr Roy: Is there a requirement that these teams meet? Ms Antrobus: The commanding officer will say, "My welfare team is meeting every Thursday afternoon" and some have that many meetings. They will meet on a weekly basis. Some meet fortnightly. Q371 Mr Roy: That worries me a bit insofar as you say it is the decision of the commanding officer. Does that mean it can change from one commanding officer to another, depending on his or her attitude? Ms Antrobus: Yes. Ms Murphy: Yes, it could. Mr Roy: That is interesting. Q372 Mr Crausby: The two-tier reappraisal of initial training in July last year noted that, "In some establishments, instructors were openly hostile to WRVS staff and what they referred to as other 'busy bodies' ...". To what extent are instructors receptive or hostile to you? Ms Antrobus: This is quite a difficult one really to answer. I think the culture of the Armed Forces has changed in the last five years, and I think the people who perhaps are openly hostile to us are becoming fewer and fewer and fewer. I think because we enjoy an open door policy to the commanding officer, it can leave people in the chain of command a bit nervous about what we may be taking to him. I do not think it is any more sinister than that. They know we can actually just by-pass everybody in the chain of command, which is more than his most senior officers under him can do, go and knock on his door and he will never say no to us; he will say, "Come in and sit down." Q373 Mr Crausby: So to what extent does that make them more hostile? As you say, it is a macho environment, and I can imagine some hard-bitten sergeant does not like the idea of young recruits going to see you and then you going to see the commanding officer. Ms Antrobus: I think it is no more than historical and the culture of the way the Armed Forces have been, particularly in some regiments within the British Army, but as I say that is becoming less and less and less. Q374 Mr Crausby: How do you deal with that? How do you go about improving relationships? Ms Antrobus: We do have this induction both at ITGIS at Lichfield and in all the training establishments on a rolling programme. We are invited to stand up and do the presentation to permanent staff and point out to them that we are part of the welfare team and that we are there to offer them support and the value that we can bring to their job. So, for example, we can give unlimited amounts of time to a young recruit who is going through a bad patch, irrespective of what the problem is, and if he or she wants to sit for three hours and tell us, we can do that and not feel pressurised because there is something else waiting to be done. So it is us really having to sell ourselves to the training staff and say, "We are all part of the same team." Mr Crausby: Thank you. Q375 Mr Cran: You have made it abundantly clear that if a problem arises with a particular corporal or whoever, you can go straight to the commanding officer, and that I understand, but what happens if the chain of command in any particular establishment is unresponsive? Where else do you go? Do you go to ATRA? Ms Antrobus: We could. Could I say, it is not always about going directly to the commanding officer. If it is a member of the training staff, the same as if it was a recruit, you would try and see where to put it, so it may be that if it was a corporal you would just go and find his sergeant and say, "We have a problem here, are you going to deal with it?" If he deals with it, fine, if he does not deal with it, then you go ---- Q376 Mr Cran: To the next level? Ms Antrobus: Exactly. Q377 Mr Cran: I am trying to find out how heavy your boots are, that is all. In the extreme case, if the chain of command in a particular establishment was unresponsive and your SWO was worried about it and takes it up with you or the area director or manager, where else would you go? If it was serious enough, would you take it to ATRA? Ms Murphy: Without any hesitation whatsoever, because if we ignored that, we would not be carrying out the role for which we are employed. Q378 Mr Roy: Can I just ask on the back of James's question - if the problem is a corporal and you go to the sergeant, and the sergeant deals with it, do you check at the end of that circle there is no retribution coming down the route? Ms Antrobus: Most definitely. It is a question of following it through to make sure, and if the recruit has taken the time and effort to come to you in the first place, if it is not resolved they will keep chipping away at you. If it is resolved, they usually come bounding in through your door to say, "Thank you very much indeed and everything is great." Q379 Mr Cran: It is also the case, because of the job the SWO is doing, that sensitive information, confidential information, is gleaned from whoever it is who has the problem. How is that information documented, processed, passed on? Just talk us through that, because I have not got a sense of that yet. Ms Murphy: It is personal notes. We used to operate a system whereby a book was held within the office and fairly detailed information was written into that book, but because of data protection and the confidentiality of the issue, we asked the services welfare offices to stop doing that but they clearly understood they needed some aid to record certain issues. Therefore we asked them to keep personal notes of anything that is serious enough to have to go into notes. Q380 Mr Cran: I am talking about confidential information, sensitive information, relating to a young lad who has got a problem. Would that go into these notes or not? I mean the routine staff that your officers are doing. Where is that going? Ms Antrobus: The chances are, if it was that sensitive, we would not even hang on to the problem in the first place, we would refer it to the appropriate agency. Obviously what we would be doing is saying to this young person, "This is so important, in order for us to get this right for you, then we need to put it with ..." and identify the agency. It is usually either somebody in the chaplaincy, the Army Welfare Services, or one of the other welfare agencies which can actually act upon that information they are being given. So one of the things that we try to do is not hold sensitive information at all. Q381 Mr Cran: You are talking about important problems where you would sign over those people to an agency which can solve the problem. What about routine stuff? That does not go down on paper either? No record is kept? Ms Murphy: It only goes down so we can put the stats together, so it will be, "Saw five people tonight regarding debt problems" or something like that. Q382 Mr Cran: And no name attached? Ms Murphy: No. Chairman: A couple of weeks ago we had some interesting evidence about a certain part of the country which my Celtic background prevents me from saying --- Mr Cran: It was in fact Wales! Q383 Chairman: Cardiff! --- where there were a lot of problems, potential problems, amongst the 500 recruits in the Cardiff area which were analysed by the Ministry of Defence. They talked about the high number of people coming from broken homes, classified as coming from deprived backgrounds and we were told in the evidence that 40 per cent joined the Army as a last resort. My own view was that perhaps it was wrong to draw conclusions from one specific area but I wondered, because the Welsh are a pretty tribal bunch and I assume most of those who come from the Cardiff area probably end up in one of the units where the Welsh predominate, as do the Scots or the Irish, have you - and if there is any problem with confidentiality please write to us because we would not want to abuse our position here - found there are certain areas where the range of problems which you encounter are of a different order of magnitude from any others? If that is the case, do you send your best people there? Do you have to put in additional resources? How would you cope if you found a camp where, for all sorts of reasons, the problems are much more complicated and more difficult to deal with? Ms Murphy: It has not really occurred but what I can say is that with the training regiments we select people - and I use this term quite a lot - square pegs and square holes, and we really look at the environment those individuals will be working in and make sure they have got the right strengths to go in there. But I do not think we have had particularly higher cases in some areas. Ms Antrobus: I think it is probably more to do with the type of trade they are going to go into. For example, you will find you probably have more young people in the infantry regiments who have for a variety of reasons been socially excluded, excluded from school, come from broken homes, all the things you have said. The minute you move it up to somebody at 18 and Winchester, you are going to find a very high calibre as opposed to people who are going definitely into the infantry regiments. Q384 Chairman: If you chat with your colleagues afterwards and do find you can answer the question more fully, we would be really grateful if you would drop us a letter. Ms Antrobus: Of course. Q385 Chairman: We are very concerned about bullying, and you have referred to this a little earlier, what advice do you give to your operatives on how to detect bullying? Do people come forward and say, "The corporal is giving me a bad time", "The guy in the next bunk is giving me a really hard time"? How do you react to this? Are you anxious about the question of bullying or do you think it is rather exaggerated? Ms Antrobus: Not really. I go back to what I said earlier, in most cases it tends to be in the peer group and not within the system itself. You can usually tell. Because we enjoy having a facility which is social, it is not just about young people coming to us with problems, they come in just to chill and meet their friends, watch a DVD, play pool, do whatever, because you are spending such a lot of time with them in their social environment where they are relaxed, you can usually identify if somebody has a problem. Sometimes they will just come straight out with it and say what is happening. Maybe their friends will come and say, "I think you should have a word with ...". The chain of command might have picked up on it and will ring us and say, "We know there is a problem but this person is not speaking to us." Q386 Chairman: If you look through your records, would you be able to tell us how many cases there were in the last one year, two years, three years, which might indicate a problem of bullying, even by fellow soldiers or sailors? Ms Antrobus: Not sensibly. Q387 Chairman: Because you would not have enough cases or you have not recorded them? Ms Murphy: I must say in my three and a half years I have not come across any cases of bullying, but that is not to say it does not happen because I am sure it does, it happens in most workplaces. Our stats will show whether there is a problem because of Army life or home life or relationships or medical, but not necessarily be that specific to specify bullying. Speaking for Morag for a moment, I have spoken to services welfare officers and the other side of the coin is that sometimes recruits say, "I am being bullied" but there is another reason and they want to escape from the Army, whatever it is, and we have to be very careful not to just say, "Okay we will take this forward" because there is a lot more discussion which needs to take place if someone puts that flag up. Q388 Chairman: If you look at the media in the last 12 or 18 months, you would have the impression that a soldier's prospect of not being bullied by somebody was almost zero, that this is the source of many people leaving the Armed Forces, that it is an intimidating environment. If that was the case, half right or a tenth right, surely you should be picking up these vibrations. Is it that there are not any vibrations or the way in which you are configured means people do not want to tell you about these things, they will talk about their mother dying but not about the guy in the next bunk who is making their life very difficult? Ms Antrobus: I think there is a generation thing that is at work here in the use of the word "bullying". What you and I might perceive in that word is one thing, but what a 16 year-old will perceive as bullying, particularly in that environment, is not bullying, it may be harsh discipline but it is certainly not bullying, and the harsh discipline is there for a very, very good reason because they could end up 12 months down the line fighting a war. So you cannot afford to make that training regime too soft. I think sometimes there is confusion in their minds about what bullying actually is. Q389 Chairman: We asked a question a couple of weeks ago to some people, not in your profession, about what signs they would look for in seeking to ascertain if somebody was troubled, potentially suicidal. What sort of advice would you give your colleagues about the signs? I was not entirely convinced of the explanation. I mockingly said, and it was not meant to be in any way harsh, that this could apply to any group of people, not people who were about to commit self-harm. What advice would you give them to look out for? Ms Antrobus: It is very, very difficult, I will be honest about it. I think one of the first things you start to notice is that normally 16, 17, 18, 19 year-olds are very noisy and boisterous by nature, and that you could perhaps be looking for somebody who was normally very outgoing and suddenly going very quiet. That might not mean they are going to self-harm but it is usually a good indicator that there is a problem lurking somewhere in the background. So I think it is watching for differences in personalities. With the numbers who go through in a busy facility, we could have 500 or 600 recruits and trainees in at one time, and you will not know them all that well all of the time. So it is very hard to write a set of rules. Q390 Chairman: I am sure. If it is possible, when you have time to reflect on this question, if you do find anything, it would be very helpful, because this is a matter of some concern and we need to be satisfied if there are signals screaming out then people in the system are able to pick them up, so knowing what the signs are is obviously very important. Ms Antrobus: Except our newest members as SWOs, our SWOs in the training regiments go, with the Army, on suicide awareness courses which are run through the medical centres, which I am told - I have never been on one myself - are very, very good. I am sure we could get you the information on those courses. Q391 Chairman: That would be very helpful. Ms Murphy: I think the biggest indicator would be in our clubs, and one thing we say to the services welfare officers in their training is not to be particularly interested - although it is not that we are not interested - in a group of guys playing snooker or pool, look around and see if there is someone on their own, and that is usually an indicator and we ask them to specifically look for isolation. Q392 Mr Roy: In the sphere of room for improvement in the future, I am a great believer that welfare needs to be taken far more seriously both individually and collectively, and I do not believe welfare means someone is too soft; I believe that someone has to recognise welfare is a strength. The WVRS has identified some areas which could be improved and they have said, for example, a higher ratio of training staff to recruits. We have already heard earlier today there is a ratio of 1:38. Do you think that is enough? Ms Antrobus: I think it is high. I think it should be lower. Ms Murphy: I do, yes. Q393 Mr Roy: I have to say when I heard the ratio was 1:38 that it did seem rather high. The number of WRVS staff has recently increased, and we have heard from the Chief of Staff of ATRA. Do you feel you now have an adequate presence at Army initial training establishments? Ms Murphy: We discussed this earlier. We would ideally like more because again it is ratios, is it not? The more services welfare officers we have, the more we can spot those 100 people in a club who come in. At the moment, they usually work on their own because they work back-to-back shifts, but ideally if we had more then I think we would be in a position to identify more perhaps. I know you feel strongly about that one, Morag. Ms Antrobus: It is like everything, is it not, the more people you have got on the ground dealing with those numbers, then the more you are going to be in a position to identify where the problem areas are, who is having difficulties. Like the training staff in the very busy ATRs, especially the last weekend before pay day and certainly at a weekend, when often we are the only facility which is open for these young people, you could have a thousand going through just on a Saturday and Sunday. Q394 Mr Roy: My argument for needing more, for example, would be: are the WRVS there as a cost or an investment? And I actually think they are an investment because I think in the long-term they do save costs. Ms Antrobus: Yes. Q395 Mr Roy: Because they save an awful lot of problems. Could you explain, where does the money come from in the first place? Who puts up the argument for it and to whom? Ms Antrobus: It comes from the MoD, the full grant, but the colonel of a training establishment has to put forward his arguments and he has to find that money from his budget. Q396 Mr Roy: That is determined on the CO's attitude, I take it? Ms Murphy: Yes. Ms Antrobus: I can see where you are coming from but most commanding officers would have five of us in there if he could afford it. Ms Murphy: It does depend a lot on the CO but it also depends on Colonel ATRA as well because they have an input --- Q397 Mr Roy: I am sorry? Who? Ms Murphy: The colonel responsible for ATRA. He would take a very active role in looking, and has looked, at the numbers we employ, hence the reason we have taken on another nine, so it is a bit of a dual role really. Morag is right, we get services welfare officers saying, "The commanding officer wants another two", and I have to say, "It is not as simple as that, we have to go through the channels and then it has to be funded", because these people are paid employees, as I said earlier. Q398 Mr Roy: If someone made the argument for a larger grant from the MoD, because that is where the money comes from, if it was laid down there was a realisation this was an investment, because it does stop my constituents being bullied or, unfortunately maybe even committing suicide at the very end, therefore it is an investment, what difference would that larger grant make either to you, given your extra staff, or yourselves? How do you quantify what more money would mean to yourselves? Ms Murphy: We do not decide what facilities are available in the clubs, that is really to do with the commanding officer. The argument I have put forward in the past is, give us better facilities which will encourage the soldiers to come in, which will allow us to identify any problems. The additional funding would allow us to pay for additional services welfare officers. Q399 Chairman: You are dealing with young people with a whole bunch of problems, would you be giving advice to your operatives on the lines of, "You are out of your depth on this"? Do you say, "These are the following subjects not to get involved in because these are for people who are way, way above your pay grade" - that is the wrong word to use? What sort of things would there be on this list? Ms Antrobus: We are not counsellors and we make that very, very clear both at the interviewing process and then at induction. Ms Murphy: Even if we have employed counsellors to do the job, that is not their role. Ms Antrobus: So for bereavement we would immediately say, "There are people, usually the chaplain, who are qualified in bereavement counselling", because if you try and tackle something like that, you can open up a can of worms and one thing leads to another. So depending on what the problem is, we would refer it to the appropriate agency. Q400 Chairman: So you have not got a problem with that then? Ms Antrobus: Not at all. Q401 Chairman: Ladies, thank you very much for coming. We were quite nice, were we not?! Thank you very much. Ms Murphy: Thank you all. |