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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 620-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
Wednesday 14 July 2004 MR D SHERLOCK, MS L DAVIES and MS B HUGHES COMMODORE P BRANSCOMBE and MRS K BURGESS Evidence heard in Public Questions 536-655
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Wednesday 14 July 2004 Members present Mr Bruce George, in the Chair Mr James Cran Mr David Crausby Mike Gapes Mr Mike Hancock Mr Kevan Jones Rachel Squire ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr David Sherlock, Chief Inspector, Ms Lesley Davies, Assistant Director of Inspection and Ms Barbara Hughes, Inspector, Adult Learning Inspectorate, examined. Q536 Chairman: Thank you for coming. I shall just read a short opening statement and I understand you have a short statement to make. This is the fifth evidence session in our duty of care inquiry. The aim of this inquiry is to examine how the armed forces look after the people at the very beginning of their service, recruits in Phase 1 training establishments and trainees in Phase 2 training establishments. At today's evidence session we shall be hearing first from the Adult Learning Inspectorate. We shall be asking them how they intend to conduct their programme of inspections of care and welfare at armed forces initial training establishments and what skills and resources they have to do this effectively. Then we shall move on to hear from SSAFA Forces Help about how they provide welfare support to the armed forces and how such support may be improved. Thank you again very much for coming and for the written submission. I understand you have an opening statement. Before you make it, perhaps you would introduce your colleagues. Mr Sherlock: I am David Sherlock, Chief Inspector of the Adult Learning Inspectorate. On my immediate right is Lesley Davies, Assistant Director of Inspection at the Adult Learning Inspectorate. Lesley has, for the last 18 months, been in charge of the overall programme, setting criteria and so forth for our work with the Ministry of Defence and the armed services. On my extreme right is Barbara Hughes, who is the lead inspector of the series of inspections on duty of care which we shall be carrying out between now and next March. If I may say just a few things, the first and perhaps most important is that we are clear that our job is not to investigate further the tragic deaths of young people at Deepcut or indeed those which have taken place subsequently at Catterick, but to form an independent assessment of whether or not the arrangements for training and welfare now in place are such as to fulfil the duty of care which the armed services have for their recruits. I am plainly sensitive to the fact that the parents in the Deepcut and beyond group do not regard the ALI's work as meeting their need to know what happened to their children. I hope and believe, however, that what we will do over time is to give them the comfort that lessons have been learned from their tragedies. I should also stress at the outset that we have yet to begin our inspections. We do not do so before October. We shall be publishing next March. We shall continue to inspect provision for learning in the armed services and the Ministry of Defence thereafter, under the memorandum of understanding, returning, I am sure, to these same issues of initial recruitment, training, care and welfare again and again in the years to come. What we have done so far is background reading, including the proceedings of the House and this Committee, to determine what we need to do to be able to make a reliable judgment on the revised care and protection arrangements as they operate in the various establishments and to determine the inspection team, the budget and the access arrangements which we will require. There are details on all those matters in the portfolio which we submitted to you. My hope is that you will be confident, on the basis of our submission and our discussions today, that the ALI's work will be sufficiently carefully focused, sufficiently rigorous and sufficiently independent to complement your own and that of the legal authorities in respect of the particular events of Deepcut. Our distinctive contribution will be detailed observation of training, transition and welfare over a sufficient period to make secure judgments about them with recommendations informed by our experience of recruitment, induction, learning and learner support in the wider world outside the armed services. If I may address, just to finish, the question you have already put about the competency of the ALI for this work, there have been questions about whether the ALI is the best organisation to do this work. I am certainly confident that it is. My confidence is based on over 800 inspections a year of adult learning in further education colleges, of work-based learning, including apprenticeships, of adult and community learning, of Job Centre Plus programmes, including the New Deals, of UFI Learndirect, of learning in prisons and on probation, in the Police Service and on previous inspections of the armed services. Independent reports show that more than 80 per cent of training providers believe that we raise standards markedly and we can demonstrate substantial improvements in performance in, for example, work-based learning. Our approach is rigorous, but we seek to work with providers rather than doing things to them. In our belief, the key to continuous improvement is culture change not coercion. We publish our findings in plain language. We have won two awards for public accountability in recent months: one for the best government information publication of 2003 for my annual report; the second, the CIPFA PriceWaterhouseCooper's award for reporting and public accountability in 2004. We have 140 full-time inspectors and 650 associate inspectors with specialist professional skills. In the case of our survey of care provision in the armed services, we shall also be adding to our team inspectors from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. May I leave it there and answer your questions? Q537 Chairman: Indeed. You have answered some of our questions, but we shall ask you them anyway to give you a chance to elaborate. You have certainly taken away most of my first question about your background, competence, credentials for embarking on this type of inspection programme. It was a very fair response. You have actually been to Harrogate on a preliminary inquiry, have you not? Ms Hughes: Yes, to the Army Foundation College. Q538 Chairman: Did that give you any markers as to what you should be looking for? Ms Hughes: We have inspected a range of service establishments which have Learning and Skills Council contracts; that is part of our standard work. A range of issues has come out of those inspections. Certainly we did three trial inspections last year in relation to Ministry of Defence work and that is where we picked up some key points for our current work. Q539 Chairman: The military is a pretty unique institution and what might apply in those which you have mentioned might not necessarily apply. None of those guys you have talked about would expect to go off and get shot or blown to smithereens, which does give one a different perspective of the workplace from the one with which you would normally be associated. How are you training up and identifying people who would be able to find their way around the military culture? The Army culture is not the same as that in the Air Force and the Navy or the MoD. Mr Sherlock: Indeed. Ms Hughes: We have a core team of nine full-time inspectors with the Adult Learning Inspectorate and they cover a range of occupational areas. They are all lead inspectors, so they have been into a range of establishments, including services. Some have worked with the police as well on survey reports. In addition to that, we are training up about 20 of our part-time associate inspectors. They will be working with us on the inspections at different stages. They have both physical training background as well as a health and care background and are particularly experienced in residential care and mental health. We feel we actually have quite a good range, alongside the colleague who is working with us from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Social Care Inspectorate. Q540 Chairman: It might be helpful to you and us if before you started you came along and had a good chat with us so that we can disclose that information which is disclosable. Almost everything we are doing in our inquiry is either on the web or will be made available but it might be useful if we exchanged information. Ms Davies: Certainly. Mr Sherlock: That would be very helpful; thank you very much. Q541 Chairman: Please write to us in due course when you think it would be useful to hold such a meeting. Many recruits to the armed forces are very young people under the age of 18; some are as young as 16. How much experience do you have of inspecting institutions catering for people under the age of 18? Mr Sherlock: Residential institutions. There is a set of grades in your pack. We deal with residential colleges, particularly for young people with disabilities and learning difficulties who are extremely vulnerable and indeed young people over the age of 18 in those categories too. We deal with all work-based learning for young people over the age of 16, some of them have problems which are substantially the same as those of some recruits. For example, the work on those going into New Deals, Workstep and other programmes of that kind operated by the Department for Work and Pensions share many of the difficulties which have been identified to your Committee already. We fully understand the range of challenges which young people, of the kind who are entering the Army, particularly face and we are familiar with many of the problems with residential contexts. Q542 Chairman: There is some public concern about armed forces training but it is not so much about learning as about quality of care. This is something we come across when we make our visits. What experience do you have of inspecting the provision of care and welfare, which is not exclusively our concern, but is largely our concern? Ms Hughes: Care and welfare, pastoral support, curriculum support, are all aspects which we inspect against because we use the common inspection framework which is the framework for all post-16 education training inspection. That includes specific aspects around support and guidance to learners, Job Centre Plus clients, inmates, whatever the situation, whatever the context. The common inspection framework actually has a great deal of care support aspect within it which we will reference against. We are also going to be referencing the care standards which you also have a letter about in your pack and seeing how we can dovetail those into the work we are doing. Q543 Mr Jones: I accept that as an organisation you have a lot of experience of dealing with inspecting difficult organisations. This is not me speaking, I am playing devil's advocate here. We have now been on quite a few visits and I accept it varies between the establishments you go to: whether it is the Army, Navy or Royal Air Force. How would you react to some of the undertones we have picked up, certainly in the Army, "We know how to do it. We have made some changes. Why do we have to have some do-gooders coming to tell us how to train people when with the best will in the world they do not understand quite how we operate or how we are going to operate?". How are your inspectors going to get over that? In some places I can see there being some quite challenging situations with regard to obtaining information and co-operation. Mr Sherlock: We do recognise that picture. I should perhaps say that at the moment we are doing inspections of ten Army education centres; in fact we have a team in Germany at the moment. We carried out some very interesting trials last year and Barbara led some of them and in some cases we encountered some resistance. I would have to say that Admiral Goodall and his colleagues have been extremely helpful and supportive so far, as have Adam Ingram and Ivor Caplin. At the moment there is a real determination to improve. That is what we would hope to build on. You are right in saying that we have a slightly delicate line to tread in that this exercise plainly is about public accountability, about ensuring that the sort of things that you are being told and that we are being told about improvements are in fact being carried through on a consistent basis on the ground, not just between nine and five but at weekends and evenings and nights indeed, so that there is an emphasis on accountability in the present exercise. What we are also trying to do is to build a basis on which real culture change can take place. The memorandum of understanding, which we have signed with the MoD, is for a minimum four-year period and we anticipate it being a long-term arrangement. What we would hope to do would be to put in place regular self-assessment against the common inspection framework, a style of inspection which is very much about debate among peers, with a shared aim, if we could build that, towards continuous improvement. We would hope to disseminate good practice as much as we are dealing with poor practice. We would hope to work alongside DOC, which has also produced some impressive reports identifying difficulties, building on the kind of partnership which, for example, the Surrey police built with the armed services themselves, to secure a real understanding of the problems. That is probably a fairly long way of answering your question, but there is no quick answer. One has to build confidence and understanding of what we are seeking to do together. Q544 Mr Jones: I do not for one minute question the senior management's commitment to this, but how do you deal, for example, with the instructors, the inspectors, who change on a regular basis? I had one yesterday who said to me "Compared with when I went through training ...". How do you get that change of ethos, to which you just referred, all the way through the chain of command? Mr Sherlock: Those are major structural questions and in fact so many of the answers you have already received, from Colonel Haes and others, refer to possible structural problems, things which perhaps need fixing in the medium term. Q545 Mr Jones: You have a situation where the trainers are changing on a two-yearly basis which is unusual in other training establishment in the civilian world. You constantly have a new set of people there. Mr Sherlock: Retreading prejudices in some cases I am sure. You have received assurances about the level of training improvements in training of trainers. That is the key to it. The DOC report last year made it fairly clear that certainly at that stage some of those improvements had not come through. There were people going into a training role who had not yet at that point been trained. It seems to me that some of the points Colonel Haes made to you about the training role being a high prestige role, being seen as a step towards promotion, improvement of career development generally for people who are selected for it, is an important issue. We have to rebuild that. I have to say that I was concerned by some of the things he said about it being done on a word of mouth basis. It seems to me that there are much better practices available where people apply for roles of that kind if you want to give it prestige. We have to break that cycle by ensuring that the training of trainers is better, that it takes place before they take up their positions, that they apply for it, they are properly assessed for it in terms of their suitability and that they receive some career development as a result of high performance in that area. Chairman: I hope the grading system you use is not the same as the one Colonel Haes advised us of in that establishment. Q546 Mr Hancock: You have mentioned Colonel Haes a couple of times. Have any of you actually interviewed him yet about his experiences? Mr Sherlock: Not yet, no. Q547 Mr Hancock: I hope you are going to. One of the worrying facets about what he was asked to do was that he was not actually given access to what had gone before and he had not read the documents which the Surrey policy in particular were so critical of, which had not been implemented. Are you satisfied that the MoD are going to make sure that you have all of that information made available to you? Are you sure they are giving you all there is? Mr Sherlock: We shall certainly seek all that information. That is one of the things the Surrey police report contributes very importantly to this work in that it is a full catalogue of the work which has gone on before. We shall certainly be seeking to look at that and probably to speak to Colonel Haes as well. The second part of your question is perhaps more difficult. One of the reports, that on the profile of trainees in Cardiff, we have not yet been able to run down with the help of colleagues from MoD. I would hope that we can in fact run to earth all of them over time, but we certainly do not have all the information we need at this stage. Q548 Mr Hancock: I would not rely too heavily on that, because we did find out that it was a very, very selective profile. Mr Sherlock: Indeed; absolutely. Q549 Mr Hancock: It was very narrowly based and some fairly outrageous things were said in that report based on all recruits, which was a bit misleading to say the least. Mr Sherlock: I really answer that in the hope that we shall have a completely comprehensive set of all the documents referred to in the Surrey police report and other documents. Q550 Chairman: They probably want to distinguish those which are relevant to your work. Some of the things would not pass over, and perfectly correctly, but I am sure there will be some things in the various reports identified to which you should have access. My last question is almost about dealing with the military. Unless you are prejudiced when you go in, you will find they are a great bunch of people and it is quite difficult to stand back. The temptation in many cases is to empathise with them and what they are doing. Then you get charged with being one of the gang. How are you going to assure people that you are very professional, you are going in, you are watching, you are listening but you have a distance? You must have thought about that. Mr Sherlock: We have that challenge all the time in other very close cultures like the Prison Service, for example, where empathising with the culture without becoming cosy is a challenge. It is true of further education, indeed of all the areas in which we work. We need to lay down what the ground rules are. We need to make it absolutely clear that we will be grading the work in the end, not in this particular survey report, but after this. We need to make it clear how we arrive at our judgments, based on evidence. We are open with people about how we are arriving at our judgments and the evidence we are finding. We train people to work with us; a nominee from each of the organisations we are inspecting. We work very carefully to ensure that the process is transparent. Once people understand precisely what we are doing, then in fact the necessary gap tends to be maintained, even though civilised relationships are easier to maintain. Chairman: On the point Kevan made about people saying you were busybodies coming from outside, I have heard that in virtually every school I have visited which was about to be "Ofsteded". The relationship you might have or the criticism of you will not be unique. Q551 Mr Cran: I dare say if I read through the very extensive brief and package you have given us I could find the answer to this question, but I want it on the record. It really arises out of something Mr Jones said to you. In one of our visits one of the senior people we met simply said this - it does not matter who this individual was - "We will wait to see what they bring to the party in terms of skills and expertise". I guess you really have to assure the client what it is you bring to the table and so on. Tell us about it. Mr Sherlock: Which skills, or how we are going to go about that process? Q552 Mr Cran: Both. What you bring to the party. That is what you have to assure them about. Mr Sherlock: Yes. What we bring to the party is independence, the authority built of looking at a huge range of contexts, some of them blue chip companies, some of them charitable organisations, some of them other parts of the public service like the police and the Prison Service and so on. People understand now, within the MoD certainly, that the ALI is the specialist inspectorate for this country for preparation for work and workforce development. How we convince people, what we do on every inspection, is to submit the CVs of the visiting team, not as a matter of negotiation, but so people have a clear understanding of the background that our inspectors are bringing. As I mentioned in my earlier answer to the Chairman, we also train a person from that organisation to join the inspection team, joining in every piece of work we do except for the grading. That nominee process gives people a very clear idea about the ALI's operational culture and the standards we achieve. Q553 Mr Cran: The ministerial statement was on 24 May, so quite a lot of work has been going on between 24 May and now. Mr Sherlock: Indeed; yes. Q554 Mr Cran: Are all the early indications that you are going to get the co-operation of all that you need? Mr Sherlock: I think so; certainly Admiral Goodall and his staff have been exemplary. Q555 Mr Cran: I did not mean the admiral. I would expect him to be very supportive and all his staff. It is when it gets out into the sticks; that is a different issue. Ms Hughes: We have had quite a bit of experience from going into establishments like that and certainly with the three pilots we did last year, even though they volunteered for it so they were working in co-operation with us, naturally some people were uneasy about us going in, suspicious about us going in, but we were very well received. We showed them how professional and independent and objective we can be. They took advantage of the situation and in one establishment which we inspected they actually responded there and then to the inspection and put in some of the changes in response to the judgments we made. We have a track record of showing that we can persuade people, because of our independence and objectivity and because we are able to get on with such a wide range of people in different organisations, that hopefully - hopefully; I cannot guarantee it - we will be able to overcome some of those anxieties. Q556 Mr Cran: Just to hypothecate for a minute, let us assume just for a second, that it is not all going to be quite like that and there are some people somewhere in certain training establishments who are just not going to co-operate. What are the means by which ... I know you will produce an independent report. Who does that go to? Mr Sherlock: It goes to the minister and I have assurances from both Mr Ingram and Mr Caplin that if we ever find resistance that we cannot deal with at the establishment commander level, or indeed at Admiral Goodall's level, then we have open access to ministers at all time and that anything we are concerned about that we take to ministers will be made public and will come to you. Q557 Mr Cran: You might get a deal of co-operation under those circumstances, might you not? In addition to this - everybody else might know, but I do not - how much extra expertise are you going to have, full time or part time and all that? Mr Sherlock: The total programme is around 900 days of inspection. We have seconded to us for the whole period a full-time inspector from Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary, who is already a trained ALI inspector. That is one of the useful legacies of our work with the Police Service at the moment with SeaSky that two inspectors will join us throughout that period. We shall be operating three teams for many of the weeks, so we will always have a range of the necessary experience to do the job properly. Q558 Mr Cran: In answer to an earlier question you outlined the list of expertise and the ranges of people you would be looking for. Would any of those be ex Army trainers? Ms Davies: Yes. Ms Hughes: Yes. Q559 Mr Cran: If so, how are you going to ensure that they have left all the baggage behind them and they are fully keyed up to the new thinking? Maybe they were keyed up to the new thinking beforehand, but maybe they were not. Ms Hughes: That is something we are really conscious of and we have had experience of that in our pilot work and in our normal Learning and Skills Council inspections. We are very mindful, we have experienced that and we have overcome it by reinforcing our independence and objectivity and that we are outside the military establishment. So anyone who is from the military, working with us as an inspector, has to abide by our code of conduct and our understanding of the common inspection framework. Q560 Mr Cran: It is a big additional role for you and it is a very important role. The question is: who is paying for it and how much extra resource is required and are you getting it all? Mr Sherlock: Yes. The Ministry of Defence is paying for it. The total bill is around £900,000 and there has been no difficulty in negotiating that with them. Certainly we had all the proper discussions you would expect about the level of reliability you could expect from various levels of cost. We have been through those and the MoD opted for the highest level of reliability that we were able to give. We were certainly determined that this would be a definitive report and that is what we are resourced and determined to do. Q561 Chairman: How did this relationship come about? Was it your initiative or the MoD's? Ms Davies: I have been working with the MoD for about 18 months. We were invited to join the performance, monitoring and evaluation unit, because they were looking at internal audit. We were asked along to give a view of how inspection differs from internal audit. From attending those meetings of all three services, taking part in those meetings, we went into the pilot phase which Barbara has talked about, looking at how the ALI could bring something to the table, what external inspection could offer the Ministry of Defence. Our work has been trundling along for about 18 months anyway, long before the duty of care and welfare survey was mentioned. We were just about to sign off the memorandum of understanding to work together next year anyway, looking at initial training, but just in about four or five establishments. We have 18 months' of work together. During the trials we looked at the impact on recruits and trainees of initial training, looking through our area of learning. You have reports in the pack. We also picked up some duty of care issues and that is also in the report. We also looked at the impact of inspecting against a common inspection framework on the organisation and that proved to be quite positive for the MoD as well. We are aware of the context and the issues around an individual being part of a unit as well. Mr Sherlock: May I make a supplementary point to Mr Cran's question? The point about independence is plainly a critical one. You will not be surprised that as soon as the minister made his announcement in the House on 24 May, all sorts of people offered us help, including some very recently retired military officers. We have accepted none of that help, basically because we wanted to be absolutely certain that people had already signed up to the ALI before this came on the horizon. That is important. The second point is that one of the wishes of ministers which came through was that at some point we should take a member of the press with us on our inspection. I have already said that we would be very happy to do that. We have done it before indeed in some of our other contexts for inspection and it has worked extremely well. I would anticipate that at least at one of the inspections, and probably more, there will be members or a member of the press with us; not enough to disrupt the process but to observe how we conduct the work and to provide an additional element of public accountability. Mr Cran: Forgive me, I may be the only one on the Committee, but I do not trust journalists any further than I can fling them. How are you going to ensure that these people are going to play the game, because they never play the game with me? Q562 Chairman: There are 800 MoD journalists, perhaps one of those would do. Mr Sherlock: It is always difficult but it can be done. We have before had journalists from The Times Educational Supplement with us. I do not think that would be appropriate on this occasion, but there are journalists who are not concerned to make mischief and who might be invited to joint us on one or more of these inspections. I add that simply because it is important that the whole process should be seen to be transparent and independent. Chairman: If you find one, pass him on to us, would you? Mr Cran: I should like his name as well, because I do not think this individual exists. Q563 Mr Hancock: This is not like an Ofsted inspection, you are not just checking the capability of all three of the armed forces to train people. It is what they are doing with them 24 hours a day. I am interested to know what expertise you are bringing with you, because presumably you do not have that expertise. Where are you getting that from and who are your partners there? Mr Sherlock: We do have some of it. Ms Hughes: We do have some of that experience. We certainly have specialists in residential care as part of the inspectorate, but also in the range of inspections we do, from the Careers Service to work-based learning, to looking at apprentices working on a night shift, we have actually seen a full race throughout a learning cycle, a training cycle, of a young person's experience. That includes out of hours. On this particular inspection, on this particular project, we are planning to be there out of hours, during the silent hours, at weekends, we are planning one-day visits, and we are also planning unannounced visits. So in addition to those establishments where we let them know a month to six weeks in advance, we are also going to do inspections where we turn up on the door. Q564 Mr Hancock: Has that been agreed? Mr Sherlock: Yes. Q565 Mr Hancock: That is interesting. Could I go on to the recruits themselves and what access you are going to have to them specifically and, more importantly probably for the accuracy of your report, what access are they going to have to you and what form that would take. One of the criticisms we have encountered, certainly in the evidence, is that recruits were reluctant to bring things out because of the implications of what would happen to them. Likewise some trainers were reluctant to report incidents because they felt that their future positions, whether in the Army or the other services, would be in some way jeopardised by whistle blowing in one form or another. Where do you see your place in trying to give the recruits and indeed some of the trainers the opportunity to come to you? Ms Davies: May I say a bit about the programme first of all, because it is important for the sampling? We plan to visit about 20 establishments, all of Phase 1 and about 50 per cent of Phase 2. Our selection criterion was to look across all three services and then we looked at throughput. So we are going to the small, the medium and the large establishments; geographical location was also taken into account. We were also keen to look at those establishments which offer Phase 1 and 2 on the same site and those which only offer Phase 1 or Phase 2 and we shall probably dip a toe in the water of Phase 3, if it is around, as well. We shall be visiting the defence colleges. We are talking to the agencies and we are going to visit the recruit and select centres. We are also going to have a look at the officer training. The look at the officer training is about how officers are prepared to support recruits and trainees. We are certainly not inspecting all officer training, but we are interested to see how they are prepared to support trainees. We shall also be looking at training trainers. We have mentioned a programme of announced inspections and we shall be carrying out unannounced. The unannounced ones may be where we have not visited yet and we turn up on the door, or we may re-visit and that could be any time Monday through Sunday evening. We are going to send out questionnaires to the parents of trainees and recruits who are under 18 at each establishment and we are going to try to send out questionnaires for all early leavers on record as not completing either their Phase 1 or Phase 2 training. We are also going to put up posters with direct telephone numbers, a mobile number and an office number which they contact and the mobile will be 24 hours. We will arrange to meet staff or trainees off site if appropriate. What we are trying to do is to make sure that we get full coverage. In that sampling we shall see such a number of recruits, trainees and staff. We agree confidentiality with them whether we see them on site or off. We will select the staff and recruits and trainees we want to see. We will not just be in receipt of those who are delivered in front of the team. They can be assured that the number we are going to see will give them anonymity. Q566 Mr Hancock: That is quite an impressive statement of what you are going to try to do. The Chairman just suggested I ask whether the MoD are on board for that and whether they have agreed to that. Ms Davies: Yes, they are. Q567 Mr Hancock: It is important that the MoD at all levels have agreed to that, not just a minister and the head of training. It needs to go right down the chain of command to make sure that everyone is on board for this and that people will not be singled out when you have left the establishment because it will be known that they have spoken to you. Can you outline to me the sort of things you have? One of the problems has been the hanging around, certainly between Phase 1 and Phase 2, recruits who have done their initial training, have got to a certain peak of physical fitness and awareness of why they have joined and then they are left in limbo land before they move on. Many of the incidents highlighted to us occurred during that time. It is important that you devote some time to looking at that. Once again, I am not altogether sure where your expertise comes from for looking at that issue. It is not just about finding things for young recruits to do. It is about what they are doing when they are not doing what you have told them to do. That is when, for some of them, the psychological battles they are fighting as young people growing up are at their worst. Ms Davies: We are used to looking at aspects, what we would probably call in other contexts --- Q568 Mr Hancock: But where? I cannot quite see, from what you have said, where? Ms Davies: Certainly when we look at prison education and training it is about purposeful activity and in that case what the day of a prisoner looks like. The plan for this inspection, certainly with our ex military colleagues, is to look at the life of a recruit, the life of a trainee and to see what purposeful activity they undertake in those holding weeks or months. Certainly what we will be doing is tracking through recruits and trainees to see exactly how long it has taken us to progress. We will request those files on the trainees and recruits before we interview them. We will have a full picture before meeting those we are going to interview about how long the journey has taken them and what barriers they may have met along the way. Q569 Mr Jones: Going back to your earlier answer about trying to get information from recruits, how easy do you think it is going to be to break into the chain of command? One thing which struck me, whether in the Navy, Air Force or Army, was that it was dinned into the recruit from day one that the first point of call for any problems or concerns is the chain of command. To step outside that can be seen as a sign of weakness by the military structure. That is very different from other establishments you inspect, where there is a plethora of different things where you can complain or raise issues. How easy do you think it is going to be to get people to speak outside that chain of command when it is dinned into them from day one that is where the complaints should be? Mr Sherlock: It is one of the major challenges; there is no doubt about that. I can only say that it is similar in some of the other uniformed services we deal with, the Fire Service and the Police Service and indeed parts of the Health Service as well. This is a very difficult issue. Colonel Haes and others expressed a very substantial faith to you in the chain of command as a means of delivering care and looking after the welfare of soldiers at all levels, people in the armed services at all levels, and advocated to you that restoring the chain of command was exactly the right way to go in terms of ensuring that tragedies like Deepcut do not recur. I think that is one of the key issues we would want to look at. There are some serious structural issues here. Mr Hancock spoke of the period between phases. Colonel Haes asked why we had phases, why this was an independent agency. Those questions need to be asked and we would certainly hope to have a very substantial part of our evidence collected by Christmastime - not all of it but a substantial part - in order to allow the team to address issues of that kind, to see whether we can find a way through what, in some respects, is a set of self-inflicted difficulties which arise out of the structure which has been chosen. One understands why that structure was chosen, but it obviously has some inherent challenges. Q570 Chairman: The MoD has agreed to you writing letters to parents. Ms Davies: Yes. Q571 Chairman: At what level was the agreement made? Ms Davies: With Rear Admiral Goodall. Chairman: Perhaps we shall write to him as well; that would be quite helpful. Thank you for telling us. Q572 Mr Crausby: We have talked a little bit about outside expertise but the Commission for Social Care Inspection is the statutory inspectorate for safeguarding the care and welfare of young people in residential establishments. It does have considerable experience with consulting and monitoring people under 18 and their welfare in residential education settings. How will the Adult Learning Inspectorate be involving the Commission for Social Care Inspection in this programme of inspections? Mr Sherlock: The intention is that two of their inspectors should be seconded to the team. Early discussions have been had. It is not a done deal yet, but I do not imagine there is going to be a major problem. Ms Davies: We have agreement in principle, but we are meeting to discuss the actual resourcing. Q573 Mr Crausby: Do you have an ongoing relationship with the Commission? Ms Davies: We have been working with many inspectorates because every child matters. We have been working in the inspectorate and looking at that issue anyway. Q574 Mike Gapes: You referred to the three pilots you have done. I also understand that you have made 21 MoD inspections since 2001, but only one of those, on HMS Raleigh, relates directly to initial training. Mr Sherlock: Correct. Q575 Mike Gapes: In your report on the Army Foundation College you looked at the learning experience of young recruits studying for NVQs. Neither that report, nor the HMS Raleigh report, talked in any way about the welfare provision for recruits at these establishments. How are you going to take account of care and welfare issues specifically? It may follow on from your previous answer, but how will you do that? How will that be conducted? Ms Hughes: It is because those establishments were inspected against the Learning and Skills Council contract, where there are apprenticeships on NVQs and it used all of the common inspection framework. What we are doing for this particular piece of work is to bring out certain aspects of the common inspection framework, particularly support and guidance, initial assessment, the progress that individuals are making, the pastoral support, the curriculum support they are getting. We are going to be talking to the support agencies, some of which have already presented to this Committee, to pick out those particular aspects. We are confident that in fact welfare and duty of care are part of the common inspection framework and that we are actually pulling that out in much more depth. The terms of reference you have in your packs give you the details of how we are going to do that and also gives you some examples of the areas we are going to focus on: for example, where recruits and trainees fail their training and withdraw or they are standing down for some reason; the management of equality of opportunity and diversity; the scope and accuracy of record keeping to help the young people progress. Quite a range of issues is highlighted in those terms of reference. Q576 Mike Gapes: Will you have a list of criteria, of standards for care and welfare almost like a check list to assess every institution you go to against those criteria? Ms Hughes: No, it does not work like that because the basis of all our work is focusing on the trainee's experience and how that is supported in an organisation and how their achievement and progress is managed. That is our basis: the trainee's experience. It is not a matter of a checklist, it is triangulating evidence based on interview, observation of training, observation of welfare support, documentation and records certainly and bringing all that together to get a view on what you are hearing from people about how they are finding the experience and how well they are being supported. Q577 Mike Gapes: I may be a bit slow, but I do not understand how you will actually judge whether the standards of care are adequate and consistent. If it is based upon individual interviews, it could be very impressionistic. How do you make the comparison between one place and another unless you have some set criteria and you can say this meets that, this meets that. I know we are all obsessed with traffic light codes and boxes, but I should be interested if you could explain how you would make those comparisons. Mr Sherlock: I think Barbara was probably jibbing only at the use of your word "checklist". The common inspection framework lays down a set of clear statements about good education and training and the care and support that goes with that in order to ensure that learners achieve success. It is a very clear statement which has now lasted for three or four years and operates successfully in a very wide range of environments, including those where we have done the pilots. We can certainly read those out for you out of the common inspection framework. Q578 Mike Gapes: You do not need to read them out. Mr Sherlock: The important thing is that there are statements of what good practice looks like. Q579 Mike Gapes: I know league tables are controversial, but would there be some kind of a sense in which I, as a member of the Committee or a member of the general public, would be able to look at the list of institutions and say this one is good and this one is not so good and this one is pretty poor and this one is appalling? Mr Sherlock: What we are proposing to do is to grade, not on this particular assessment, but for the future. We use a one to five grade: one is outstanding and five is pretty dreadful, three is at the satisfactory level. We publish those for all the provision we inspect. Q580 Mike Gapes: This could be a kind of Ofsted for duty of care. Mr Sherlock: It could indeed. The important point, and this goes back to the point some other members of the Committee have made, is how to get sign-up from the people involved in the armed forces. What we have to demonstrate is that good duty of care is going to improve the quality of training, particularly improve the dropout rate, which is appalling at the moment. There are some absolutely objective criteria about what "better" might look like and more people staying all the way through, more people succeeding in their service careers over a longer period, all of those things, would look like good news so far as the MoD is concerned. Q581 Mike Gapes: Would you take account of the fact - and this came up in evidence sessions we had before - that many of the recruits who come in are people who actually have very low educational levels of attainment, may have issues or problems of their own, so in a sense you are almost doing a value added assessment as opposed to a crude --- Mr Sherlock: Absolutely right. We are used to dealing with young people with some of those problems, I have to say. Some of the profiles which have come through as evidence to you look very much like the young offender population in many respects, in terms of numeracy and literacy levels, for example, in terms of joblessness, in terms of broken homes. We are used to dealing with young people of that kind and the success of any programme is not saying that we do not want them; it is a question of how those problems are managed. There are ways, which may not yet have been explored adequately by the MoD and the armed services, of dealing with those issues. They plainly do have to be dealt with if you are going to cut that dropout rate, which I would have thought was appallingly uneconomic. Q582 Chairman: The task the MoD has is almost impossible. If you recruit for the infantry from lower educational levels and then within less than half a year you are not training them progressively to acquire the skills gradually to achieve the standards required, because the moment they leave their training they could be off to Iraq. How to change the youth culture into military culture in a short space of time is a formidable task. Mr Sherlock: Indeed it is. Q583 Chairman: We can commend them on the success they have had so far with people the schools reject. They are failures in school and yet they can go on and win medals nine months later. One has to have a degree of understanding of the successes, although we hear so much about the failures. I am not quite sure whether I misheard, but did you say you were not grading duty of care? Mr Sherlock: The intention is not to grade this because it will be a survey report bringing out the general issues. What the report will have, however, is a short report on each of the bases visited as an annex to that. There will be a general set of statements about fulfilment of duty of care as a whole and then a short report on each of the establishments visited. Q584 Chairman: By the words you use people make a judgment and their own score. Mr Sherlock: Indeed. Q585 Chairman: I just wonder why you will not do it yourselves or find a new scale, a narrower scale, a broader scale. People say you are jibbing, you are ducking, a problem. Ms Hughes: It is simply because of the nature of this particular survey. Once we get into the annual cycle of inspection of establishments for initial training and the other phases of training, then we will grade. We found that in fact grades can get in the way; they certainly provide the league tables you were mentioning and a strong sense of competition, particularly where organisations have particularly good grades, but we felt on this piece of work that it would be a negative factor and we would much rather have our judgments without the hindrance the grades might bring. Ms Davies: There will be clear judgments, it will not be description; there will be judgments with the evidence underpinning the judgements. It will be very clear where there are strengths in the establishment and where they need to improve. Q586 Chairman: So you are going to have to give your inspectors the language to use to indicate whether they are A-plus or B-minus. Ms Hughes: They already have that language. We are trained in that language already. Q587 Chairman: Perhaps you could drop us a note and tell us what that language is. Ms Hughes: Certainly. Mike Gapes: So we can read your reports and understand them. Q588 Chairman: I do a lot of observation of elections and we do not have a scale of one to ten. We just use weasel words. It requires the skill of a Kremlinologist to work out that what looks positive is terribly negative. It is incumbent on you to make it pretty clear to the reader how well you believe that particular unit is performing. Mr Sherlock: The sort of comments which occur are bullet points which say "So and so is poor". It does not beat around the bush. We tend to arrive at overall judgements for organisations which say "Bloggs and Co are inadequate to meet the reasonable needs of learners". Q589 Chairman: In monitoring we say something like "Some improvements have been discerned from the last time we monitored your election", which means "Oh God, this is really lousy and we are being polite to you even saying that". One has to be far clearer here. Mr Sherlock: I am sure that is right. Q590 Rachel Squire: The armed forces have many layers of internal audit designed to make it fully understandable for all of us who are not members. Will the Adult Learning Inspectorate only be inspecting establishments, or will it also be inspecting these audit systems and the ways in which their recommendations are implemented? Ms Davies: We are aware of the audit system and there are several of them. What we ask for on any inspection is to see any auditing which has taken place, any evidence where there has been some evaluation of any of the education and training taking place in that establishment. That is one part of our evidence. Audit is designed to identify to inspection different areas which need to be improved. Just to give a flavour, it checks compliance by checking whether records are kept and completed. It would not necessarily check the content of the records but that they are useful to someone picking up the records. There are some key differences between our inspection and an audit. Certainly we would be looking at the audit as part of our evidence. What we will do is identify whether any arrangements to monitor duty of care and education and training is appropriate, rather than make specific comments on how that audit was carried out. We will make a comment about the usefulness of how they evaluate their own education and training and monitor progress and how duty of care is monitored. How do they know what is actually happening? They give a command, it goes down the chain of command. How do they know that is taking place? That is what we will be looking at. Q591 Rachel Squire: That certainly picks up on some concerns which have been expressed over the years. What do you consider the armed forces and the people involved in the armed forces can hope to gain from the forthcoming programme of inspections? Mr Sherlock: What I hope is going to come out of this is a more self-critical environment, an environment where people are confident enough to identify shortcomings and to address them without the kind of fears which members of the Committee have raised about reprisals of various kinds and problems with their careers. I hope that the armed services will see some very substantial improvements in standards. Certainly in the last three years we have been working with work-based learning and modern apprenticeships, in 2001-02 very nearly 60 per cent of work-based providers were inadequate; last year 46 per cent were and this year 36 per cent are; in the last quarter 18 per cent. That level of improvement, which is the result of facing up to problems squarely and dealing with them is something which gives people enormous pleasure and pride. We have also a good practice database which appears on the internet called Excalibur, which takes examples of good practice, often with snips of video or photographs and descriptions about how other people might learn from them and puts those out to the learning and skills community as a whole. Again, the level of pride that commercial providers, which are supposedly in competition with each other red in tooth and claw, have in appearing on that good practice database is quite extraordinary. We feel that we are contributing to the building of a national learning and skills community which the armed services should be part of and in fact in many cases are already part of or are qualified to be part of in terms of the standards they are achieving, which will recognise the strengths of that provision as well as the problems which have to be faced. What we hope to do is to help the armed services to be a community where there is a genuine passion for continuous improvement in training as there is in all sorts of other activities. Q592 Rachel Squire: You have just mentioned Excalibur, the good practice database and sharing information, can you say whether the conclusions from your inspections will be made widely public. Mr Sherlock: They will be on the internet. The only reason for not putting a report on the internet will be if there is a threat to national security identified by the minister. Q593 Chairman: Having made a report, would you then go back to evaluate how many of the recommendations have been implemented? Mr Sherlock: Yes. Q594 Chairman: This is where the MoD is not so strong in this field. They have had a lot of reports and they are not so hot on implementation. How are you going to overcome that? Mr Sherlock: The intention certainly is to re-inspect where there are shortcomings in fairly short order. Outside the MoD environment we do it within 12 months, with a series of small-scale visits. We have yet to determine exactly how we are going to do it in this particular arena, but the minister spoke on 24 May about monitoring and we would envisage something similar. I do not think there is any point in identifying strengths and weaknesses if you do not follow up. There has to be a cycle of improvement set up from which people derive the comfort of success. Chairman: I think you will find great enthusiasm to comply. It is far too early for us to come to any conclusions, but I think the MoD are listening and doing more, which I hope will last. Thank you very much. It has been very helpful. I hope we will not sever connections. We shall keep each other informed of what is going on. We are doing a bit of your job and I hope we do not make things more difficult for you, but we shall be asking some of the questions that you will be asking. I wish you all the best of good fortune.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Commodore Paul Branscombe, Deputy Controller, Service Support and Mrs Kate Burgess, Director of Social Work, Soldiers', Sailors' and Airmen's Families Association (SSAFA) Forces Help, examined. Q595 Chairman: Thank you very much for being patient. Perhaps you would like to introduce your colleague. Commodore Branscombe: I am Paul Branscombe. I have been the Deputy Controller of SSAFA for nine years, but responsible for the support of the service community, both the serving people and their families, in terms of personal welfare, support at home and overseas. That is significant only in that of course that time covered most of the period of the Deepcut report. Perhaps also significant was that for 33 years before that I was in the Royal Navy, I commanded many ships and training establishments and I was also an instructor in an initial training establishment with the Royal Navy. I think I can perhaps bring both sides of the coin. Kate Burgess can introduce herself. Mrs Burgess: Good afternoon, I am Kate Burgess. I am the Director of Social Work for SSAFA. I have been a social worker for 34 years and I have been with SSAFA for 25 of those, mainly in Germany. I have been in this post since 2002 and I am also the senior manager responsible for the confidential support line which we run on behalf of the Army and the Navy. Q596 Chairman: Any initial remarks? Commodore Branscombe: You have had our written submission, but I should just like to emphasise our expertise is not in training per se, but very much in the personal support of people overall. We have a lot of experience in that, but our main concern is with the personal support welfare of young, vulnerable people. You will notice that we also particularly pointed to a special category, which we can perhaps come to, of care leavers, but I should like to emphasise that our criticism is not of the Army per se and I think I would like largely to concentrate upon the Army, because we perceive that is where the largest problem is. It does not mean to say that there should not be common treatment of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, but in our experience the problems have been far less, if at all, with those two services. I should just like to qualify it in that particular way. Most of our concerns are to do not with training methods, which we are not necessarily qualified to talk about, but mainly the problems which have been brought about by culture, attitude and management and by that I mean the management of the welfare support of these young people. Those are the points which we would prefer to major on. Q597 Chairman: Can you give us some idea of the role of SSAFA Forces Help in providing welfare support at initial training establishments in the three armed services? Commodore Branscombe: The answer is that now we provide almost none to the MoD. We do provide a complete welfare service to the Royal Air Force, which includes their training establishments. We have relatively little involvement with the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines and we now have none with the British Army training establishments in the UK. Up until about four years ago we were in partnership with them, with an organisation called the Army Welfare Service. I have to say that the Army Welfare Service had almost no involvement within those training establishments and indeed the welfare of young recruits in training establishments was seen to be very much the responsibility of the individual chains of command locally, assisted by the WRVS, from whom you have already taken evidence. Q598 Chairman: Why did this rupture take place then, if you are left now with just the Air Force? Commodore Branscombe: Part of the difficulty was that we had a very major difference of opinion as to how personal welfare support should be delivered to individuals. Our core beliefs are that we would wish to deliver these services as an independent organisation, as a professionally qualified and experienced organisation - and by that I mean in terms of having qualified and experienced social workers to deliver it - and that we should provide continuity over a long period of time, where that continuity is tracking a particular person throughout their movement and not just in one establishment. We had been providing welfare services - and by that I mean a qualified social work service - to the Army in the UK and I emphasise the UK, because we still do it in Northern Ireland and abroad, but the Army decided it was going to set up its own organisation, which is one which we helped them set up, but they then decided they were going to have it managed and supervised by retired military officers and serving NCOs. We believed that was not the way in which we would be able to provide support, either to serving people or to their families, because it needed to be an organisation which was outside the military chain of command and we had a major disagreement, also about the professional qualification of the people who needed to do it. In the event the Army decided that they would dispense with our fully qualified social workers, whom we had had in place for more than 40 years - not the same ones obviously - so losing that experience overnight. We still disagree with the method by which they choose to provide personal support to their personnel and families in the UK. Q599 Chairman: Was this an acrimonious split? Commodore Branscombe: It was not particularly friendly. We accepted their decision, but I have to say that it was not conducted in a particularly friendly or logical way. It was also our concern, which we recorded at the time, that not only would they be losing the independence and the professionalism which was needed to provide some of these complex businesses and particularly of course within "the professionalism" I mean the mechanisms which we had for professional supervision of those social workers and people who are very experienced. Also at the time it was claimed of course that there was going to be a cost saving by disposing of our qualified social workers, which in itself was illogical and not actually correct. In fact it cost them more to employ retired officers as civil servants and indeed serving NCOs than it would have cost for us to continue to employ social workers, who do not get paid a lot of money as you know. Q600 Chairman: Would you give consideration to giving us financial details of the contract? If you cannot, we fully understand. Commodore Branscombe: We are delighted to be able to provide you separately with any information related to the decisions surrounding this and indeed the financial information. What is significant is that at the time leading up to the Deepcut difficulties and so on, a number of welfare reviews were conducted internally by the Army, all of which were inconclusive and the ones which were not acceptable to them were actually rejected, including I have to say those which involved the actual resource cost. Q601 Chairman: I do not know whether you have sent it to us, but if you could send details of how you functioned before you were given the elbow, it might be quite helpful to see your methodology, how successful you think it was. Have you had any opportunity to see how the new system is operating? It might be operating much better, I have no idea. Commodore Branscombe: It is very difficult to judge. Perhaps I shall pass to Kate now to give you a view on that. Mrs Burgess: In terms of general support to Army personnel and families in this country, we do continue to receive a number of calls in our central office from those individuals saying they do not wish to approach the Army Welfare Service because they are in the chain of command. Certainly with our confidential support line, the first two questions which any callers ask are: "Who are you?" and "Are you independent of the chain of command?". We have no direct evidence of how things may not be functioning, but we do know that we do get a lot of calls with those questions, which leads us to confirm our view about the concerns of individuals who do not wish their employer to be involved in decisions about their future. That would not happen in any other walk of life. Q602 Mike Gapes: The document you sent to us actually talked in the same way as Commodore Branscombe did about the professional practitioners of clear standing but without rank and not within the military chain of command. You clearly believe that is absolutely essential. Commodore Branscombe: We are convinced of it, not only from the point of view of my own naval experience, but also from long experience of how it worked prior to this change within the Army. We can also evidence it, because it works in many other places, including the Army abroad, including the Army in Northern Ireland, together with the Navy and the Air Force, but it also works absolutely with the Royal Air Force where we have what I would call a semi-detached relationship. We are highly responsive to the Royal Air Force chain of command but clearly outside it. For that reason, what is so important is the perception of the users, whether they be families or serving people, that they have the confidence to come to us. The Chairman asked how easy it was to measure how effective the present Army Welfare Service is in the UK. The answer is that you cannot measure because the main metric would be those people who do not go to them. You can obviously measure the fact that some people go. I notice from earlier evidence that the Director-General SP Pol mentioned the document AFOPS, Armed Forces Overarching Personnel Strategy, signed up to by the Secretary of State, that is the MoD's own welfare policy. If I may quote, "In providing personal welfare support it is there to provide appropriate, timely and confidential specialist welfare support, including proactive and preventative services, directed by professionally qualified full-time staff for service personnel and their dependent families". That is very clear to us and that is very clearly put. If that is followed by other parts of the armed services, then we are in something of a dilemma as to why that should have been departed from in the case of those establishments within Land Command's remit in the UK, which of course includes these important training establishments. Q603 Mike Gapes: Do you have any data? You referred to people who contact you today. Do you get similar phone calls from people in the RAF or the Navy, as opposed to those from the Army, or do you keep a log and would you be able to say the overwhelming majority of the calls are disproportionately, given the size of the services, from the Army, therefore the system is clearly not working there, whereas you get a smaller number from the Navy and RAF proportionately? Mrs Burgess: Not in those terms. We do keep some information in our central office of the calls we receive there. We do have a number of Royal Air Force calls to the confidential support line, which is run in theory only for the Army and the Royal Navy, but we do provide a social work and personal support service to the Royal Air Force and their families in this country and all three services overseas. It might be quite difficult to answer your question. We do have some statistics in our confidential support line report, which can identify the service of course. Q604 Mike Gapes: If there is anything you feel you are able to give us, that would be helpful. The Army and Royal Marines have stressed to members of our Committee on visits that it is important for the chain of command to be the primary focus of welfare support. What is your attitude to that? Do you believe that view is sustainable? Are the current systems adequate within the chain of command relationship? Commodore Branscombe: As a mantra it is a very fair and reasonable statement and I would agree that myself from my own previous background. It is the practicality of how it can be done which is important. It is extremely difficult for a commanding officer - and I am talking now about the commanding officer and all those beneath him, to be able to discharge some of the highly specialised functions which you need for dealing with people who may be, by definition, in distress, particularly if they are not going to approach you or other people because it may affect their career. So the answer is of course the chain of command at high level is responsible for the welfare of their personnel, in the same way as line management would be anywhere. It is how it is done. Unfortunately it is the very narrow interpretation of what is meant by military chain of command which does not allow them to understand and appreciate that you discharge your responsibilities for complex things through a variety of different media, including of course other experts who will do it. It does not mean to say you have to do it yourself, but by trying to do it yourself, you may not actually be able to achieve that object. Mrs Burgess: When the Army Welfare Service moved to British forces in Germany and initially we worked in partnership, it was interesting that one of the overriding reasons we were given was that they needed to have serving personnel to understand the difficulties that Army personnel would experience. For instance, the example was given to me that a social worker being pink and fluffy, if a soldier came to them saying they really did not want to go on a course because they were worried about their wife, the social worker would immediately say they would fix it and they need not go on the course. We would not do that. We would go to speak to someone in the guy's unit and ask whether the course was important for his promotion, whether he really needed to go now or could go next year. If the answer were to be that he must go now, we would put in all the support systems to enable that to happen. I do feel quite strongly that we do not need to be serving in order to be able to do that and in order to understand what the chain of command wants, because we know whom to ask. Q605 Mr Crausby: You provide a service of social workers for the RAF initial training establishment already, so could you tell us what you see as the benefits to the Army, Navy and the Royal Marines? In a sense the Army, Navy and Royal Marines are completely separate from the RAF and probably have a very different set of problems, particularly the Army. Commodore Branscombe: The difference with the Royal Air Force service is that the Royal Air Force command specify very carefully what it is they wish us to do in terms of requirement. It is up to us how we do it. The RAF's service is seamless; no distinction is drawn between operational flying station or a training establishment or whatever. Therefore we have identical support wherever it happens to be, whether it is a training station, a flying station or whatever. Because we have the same service everywhere, I have to tell you that we see almost no problems. We do not see problems of the same kind of magnitude because we have planned services in place, including working together with community support, which does that very preventative and proactive work in a planned and professional manner. I am afraid that part of the difference of the attitude of the Army is that they see everything as being reactive and reacting to things when they go wrong if they know they actually go wrong. Ours is a proper social work philosophy for preventative services. The answer to your question is that with the Royal Air Force we see almost no problems, or if we see problems, they are headed off as a matter of routine business. It is not something which is different or separate. Q606 Mr Crausby: Could you tell us a little more about the Army's decision to remove social workers from initial training establishments? That is our primary concern. What impact did that have on the initial training establishments? Commodore Branscombe: To be fair, they never had them. Interestingly enough we were always kept out of those training establishments because at the time before the split came, running up to that, the Army Welfare Service was seen as very much a family welfare service, so it principally was concerned with married servicemen and their families. Not that we did not deal with single servicemen as and when needed and indeed it was partly our push to get the Army to change its view, to move towards looking after single servicemen wherever they might be. The Army did its own trial - I think it was in 1996 - which we were not involved with, but we were pleased that they did it, to look at what needed to happen to extend their work to single personnel, including those in training establishments. I think the training establishment they looked at was Catterick as it happened. As with so many of these reports which are done, no action then flowed from it. By the time we had separated from them, there was really not a lot of involvement by specialist welfare staff, even though they did not have them by that stage, because all they would have had would have been uniformed senior NCOs who were not qualified. Our point is that if somebody was having difficulty with a training instructor who was a senior NCO, how would a young soldier differentiate between Staff Sergeant Bloggins, the instructor and Staff Sergeant Smith who was a welfare person? Q607 Mr Crausby: On visits we have seen the involvement of the padre and the church at initial training establishments amongst single people. Is that an adequate alternative or do you think the issue of trained civilian social workers would add something else? Commodore Branscombe: It would hugely, I have to say. We work very carefully with the padres, also with the doctors within primary care and where necessary mental health teams. Very often the first indications that a problem is presenting come from a number of places, including, I have to say, from a qualified social worker. It could come from many places. We believe that the padres and the doctors do very good work. On the other hand, they also have many other considerations which they have to take into account. Q608 Mr Crausby: We met the WRVS in one establishment and one of their staff was a trained social worker. Is that widespread in the WRVS, or was that just an accident? Mrs Burgess: I do not know. From my own experience of working with the WRVS, I do not think that is the case, but I do not know. Commodore Branscombe: It is not for us to be critical of the WRVS because they were introduced in 1988 to counter what was perceived then as a problem of bullying within Army training establishments. Even on their own admission, though they are inducted, they are neither trained nor qualified, but they are very good people who do a good job. That is very different from having trained social workers. As far as I am aware, it is also not just our concern, not in a critical sense, but was one of the findings of this report which was done in 1996, that the WRVS needed to be looked at in terms of its overall capability to deliver the kind of detailed welfare support which was needed. Q609 Chairman: What report was that? Commodore Branscombe: It was called The Single Soldier Trial, which was carried out by headquarters land command between September and November of 1996. Q610 Chairman: Thank you, that is quite helpful. We will pursue that. When we were working out our rules of engagement we looked at Surrey, who said they wanted a broad inquiry and therefore we included the Air Force and the Royal Navy, although personally I have never had any complaints about wrongdoings from the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines. All the complaints I have come across came from the Army. I am not making a scientific survey of the complaints mechanism, but we are looking at all three plus the Royal Marines. Is there anything in the culture of the different organisations which makes one less likely to have youngsters in training self-harming themselves, committing suicide, being subject to harassment, bullying? I recognise that the Army is much larger and they have to play a different role to play, but can you give us any advice on your view? Commodore Branscombe: I am sure you are right that the Army, being numerically the largest, has the largest throughput through training establishments and particularly with the infantry. I have to say that the infantry will also tend to come from the lower educational attainment; not that there should be a correlation there, but maybe in assessing risk then that is a risk factor you would look at and maybe they might have a greater proportion of people from more difficult backgrounds. That sounds judgmental, but that could be a sociological factor. There is no doubt that the Army's very rigid interpretation of the responsibilities of the chain of command, which I described earlier, and particularly what I would call the closing of ranks when, if there is any trouble it is kept within the regimental family, can be a good thing, but sometimes of course that can be quite misguided because it can have the opposite effect to the one which is needed to provide the right kind of qualified and timely support which might be required. Q611 Chairman: Would a ship be like a regiment in some respects? Commodore Branscombe: In some respects. The other thing which I would perceive as an ex sailor is that rank is something which goes with armed service and discipline and so on, but there is a far greater mesmerisation with rank for its own sake rather than necessarily how good you are at the job. The Air Force and the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines are more managerial in their approach and far less hidebound by mores and procedures which are to do with an exclusively military Army culture. Q612 Chairman: If you have any more thoughts on this, I should be really grateful if you would drop us a note, because it is a key issue, or if you are aware of any other literature on the subject, that would be quite helpful. Commodore Branscombe: Of course, but I would emphasise that we are not criticising the Army, we think the Army are marvellous at what they do. Bearing in mind that these young men and women are being trained to go into danger right now, next month, there are tough things which need to be done in that kind of military training. Compare and contrast. The Royal Marines are also soldiers, albeit sea soldiers and they train just as toughly at Lympstone for the commando role, but maybe they have a different approach to their training and their discipline, although it is tough. Q613 Mr Cran: I want to try to get the balance of your view here, which I have to say I am finding difficult to get - my fault not yours. It is simply that in my perception of duty of care considerations in the armed forces, I do not know what the historical situation was but going around now, I am fairly clear in my mind that these considerations are now right at the top of the agenda, without any doubt at all. The message has come down from the high command and more or less everybody is talking about it. They are all very concerned about it, things are being done, my colleagues have outlined what they are. Is that a proposition with which you would agree or not? Commodore Branscombe: I would agree only in that it is today's topic. I have to say, with my cynical hat on, and I talked about the question of continuity, we have heard that many of the problems which have been experienced within every part of Army, Navy and Air Force establishments, is the shortage of resources. The same shortage of resources which means that you have fewer instructors within new entry training establishments, of course transmits right the way across. It also means that those people who are dealing with it at staff level - and I talked about management and am talking now about admirals' staffs or generals' staff or indeed within the MoD -have a much lesser level of experience in dealing with these non-military matters. Duty of care is after all a generic, is it not? The welfare aspects within duty of care and particularly as they relate to occupational health or social work are pretty specialised stuff for your average professional soldier, sailor and airman. There is less continuity, so therefore the staff officers, including those at relatively senior level and even the generals and the admirals, move on so quickly that they are fighting the alligator which is closest to the canoe this month and this is the reason why so many reports are done and so many studies are done, but they never flow through. In some ways - and I have had experience of this myself - people do studies in order to put the problem off for 18 months until after it is reported, by which time the officer, who may be very competent, or the team which has written it, has moved on and certainly the people who have to implement it have moved on as well. As long as you can solve the problem of your watch, that is fine. These enduring problems, as we have seen from the minutes of this Committee, never really finally get solved. I also have to say that if the priority from resources for the tree-hugging part of it, let us call it, the rather softer things as opposed to buying weapons or ships or systems, is not there, then they just do not get dealt with. Q614 Mr Cran: The summary of what you said is that you do agree that it is now top of the agenda, that quite a lot of action has been taken, that the problem, as you perceive it, is going to be keeping it at the top of the agenda. Is that a fair summary? Commodore Branscombe: Yes and there is also a great difference between commanders becoming very exercised by it and being able to manage the problem so you solve it. Our issue, as professional welfare people, people people, is that there is very little understanding of the practicalities and of the issues involved in personal support and welfare of individuals. Q615 Mr Cran: Would you agree with my summary, that that is a reasonable summary of your views? Commodore Branscombe: Yes. Q616 Mr Cran: If it is, the next question is: do you see a mechanism, a role, it might be this Committee or whatever, to keep that issue at the top of the agenda? Is there any means, with all of your experience, or is it just a generic problem in the armed forces because of the very rapid turnaround of personnel? Commodore Branscombe: It is partly systemic, for the reason which you have described. On the other hand there are measures which could be taken to improve that. Q617 Mr Cran: I should just like you to canter over again for me the answer you gave to my colleague Mr Crausby. Again, as I have gone around - my colleagues may disagree - I have been immensely impressed by the Salvation Army where they are present and I grant you they are not always present, the padre and so on. My impression is that the armed services really are making an effort to say that we recognise that you, Mr or Miss Recruit, do not want to come within the chain of command, but here is a card which tells you how to get away from the chain of command. So they are doing quite a lot there, are they not? Commodore Branscombe: I have to say that yes, there is lip service. You must remember though that it is extremely easy for the military chain of command, who have the absolute power, to neutralise people whom they see as a threat to the way in which they do their business. There is a culture, particularly I have to say in the Army - I am sorry to have to keep coming back to this - of a general mistrust of civilians, in whichever guise they come. They will be extremely polite and extremely welcoming and extremely cordial, but there are all sorts of ways of being able to exclude those people who are not on the inside track from access. Q618 Mr Cran: Again just so that I know what is happening, you have the confidential support line for the Army, extended to the Royal Navy and Marines and so on. May I know whether the incidence of the use of this support line is going up, going down or is static? What is happening? Mrs Burgess: It is increasing. Last year we had 3,391 calls and already this year we have over 1,700 in the first six months. Specifically talking about bullying, harassment, those calls are remaining much the same, although there is a small increase every year. Q619 Mr Cran: Just so I know what happens, you get the call, it is a serious case of bullying. What then happens? Do you just limit what you do to giving advice? Mrs Burgess: We do, but in extreme cases and with the consent of the caller, we are able to refer on to support services if that is what they wish and that does happen, but infrequently. Certainly after the annual report of the first year of running we did in fact write separately to PS4, because there had been a series of calls from recruits in Phase 1 and 2 of training and from parents who were then alleging serious bullying. It was reported that one alleged perpetrator of the bullying in one of the establishments had been moved to another establishment and his behaviour was allegedly continuing. We did feel that was a very serious matter and we needed to represent that separately. Action was taken in each of those cases in order to try to ameliorate the situation. The last call was from a soldier with an ethnic background who had been treated quite badly and we did get some feedback from that. Q620 Mr Cran: I am just not sure who is involved. You have this very serious complaint or complaints, there is a confidentiality between you and whoever is making the call, obviously, and if you are released from that bond of confidentiality that means you can really go where you wish with the permission of the individual. Is that what happens? Commodore Branscombe: That is correct. In general I have to say that credibility depends on he absolute confidentiality and anonymity, if that is what the caller wishes, either by telephone or by e-mail. We have a very sophisticated technical means of receiving e-mails without actually knowing whom they come from and that is being used increasingly. Our credibility depends upon us not revealing the source or breaking confidentiality. That has to be absolute. If, however, there were particular circumstances which were so serious, which might indeed involve life and limb or serious crime, or where we believed that it was really serious and needed to be taken further, we have an agreement whereby we would report it, not to the establishment where it is at, but to the Adjutant General's headquarters direct, with permission to break confidentiality, and we would do that. We have only done it on three occasions since 1996, but significantly part of those did involve Phase 1 and 2 training establishments. Mainly we are listening and we are supporting people to make the complaint themselves or solve it themselves and actually through the chain of command, because that is the only way it can be solved by the employer. On the other hand many things can be solved without even having to come to the attention of the chain of command. Q621 Chairman: What if someone telephoned you who was not within your contractual responsibility? I am sure in a similar situation a lot of MPs, when people come to them from other constituencies, say "Please do not tell Mr X but this is what I would do". We could say "Sorry" of course. Commodore Branscombe: We never turn anybody away; we do not. Q622 Chairman: You still give advice. Commodore Branscombe: We sometimes have hoax calls, not that I would suggest they would come from anybody else, but we are very experienced in being able to deal with all of these particular things. Most importantly, we do take calls from parents and grandparents, because we think that is very important, and from the extended family, partners and whoever, and veterans. In some cases we have taken calls from veterans because people may be confused. We have people who will listen and attempt to put them on the right path to solving their problems. Q623 Chairman: An historical question, because the Navy was not always known for its caring, sharing, kid-gloved approach to the men in their charge. When did things change and what changed it? Commodore Branscombe: It changed in about 1972, following on from a report by the Seebohm committee, appointed by this House. At the time there were concerns about recruiting and it ended up with the appointment of a social-work-led professional welfare service for the Royal Navy as opposed to it being run by retired officers and so on. The only issue we would take with that is that they have to an extent customised it in that they do have serving naval personnel and it is run by a serving officer, a very good chap. We also do believe that it suffers from perceptions of belonging to the naval chain of command. In answer to your earlier question, we do get telephone calls from both Royal Marines and Royal Navy saying we would wish to talk to you because we will not talk to the Naval Personal Family Service, as it is called. However, we believe it to be a good service. On the other hand it is quite small. Our general principle also applies in that we do believe these kinds of sensitive services are best provided externally to the military chain of command by professionally qualified, experienced people in continuity. Q624 Chairman: When people telephone you, is it just a telephone conversation, or do you refer them to one of your own qualified personnel nearest to where they might be telephoning from? Commodore Branscombe: We do both or either. Normally the person who is on the line will continue with the call for as long as they take and sometimes they are very lengthy with distressed people, as you might appreciate. We also refer them on and it may be that they are referred on to other people within our organisation. Whether it is a volunteer case worker or a social work adviser, or somebody in relationship counselling or whatever, we will signpost them to the most appropriate place they need to go. Finally, on the confidential support line, you may have been given the wrong impression by Colonel Eccles' evidence who said that the confidential support line was set up in order to be a safeguard against suicide. That was not the case. It was set up long before that and it was set up specifically to cope with the problems of equal opportunities. Obviously we have a contingency in there for dealing with people with suicidal thoughts and, most importantly, we have a contingency for people who are reconsidered suicides, which is most important. Q625 Rachel Squire: I think the points you are making on the confidential helpline are very good points to make and record. I have certainly had families contacting me and looking to me to try to get them some more information for them to then discuss with me or you or others how best they feel they can deal with a particular concern about their son or their daughter. It is that initial contact and feeling that they are not putting their son or daughter at any extra risk of any kind which is very important to the family. How critical is it that potential users of the confidential helpline are aware of its existence and nature and that they have an ability to access it discreetly? I should appreciate your comments on that. Just thinking of the time I have spent on board ship I wonder where you would go to make discreet phone calls. I am also particularly interested in how your confidential support line service is actually funded. Commodore Branscombe: Awareness is of course absolutely critical to its use and confidence that it is completely independent of the chain of command. This was in a risk assessment which we did for the Adjutant General. Unfortunately, in order to save money, they decided that they would do the publicity themselves. I have to say that this was not a success. Not only was it not timely and universal, but the graphics and the means which were used to do it were amateurish in the extreme in terms of the kind of design which you would need in order to make it attractive to people. They have improved somewhat since then, but I have to say that we are putting quite a lot of effort now into doing that public awareness process ourselves. Part of our worry is that people are not as aware of it as they should be. It is like painting the Forth Road Bridge: you have to keep on repeating the message to every recruit who comes in. It is funded wholly by the Ministry of Defence, it is paid for. We are paid for under contract, a very modest contract, with the Ministry of Defence to run it for them. It is paid for partly by the Adjutant General for the Army and partly by the Second Sea Lord for the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines. We employ the people, good folk, wonderful people and we manage it in totality, including all of the IT. It is a rather clever e-mail system which we designed ourselves with consultants to make sure that it is completely discreet. It is very unusual, but it works very well. We are getting far more e-mails. The reason we did that was because soldiers and sailors on deployment now overseas can get easier access to e-mail than they can to telephones. Q626 Mr Crausby: The figures we have on the confidential line indicate that quite a small proportion of recruits actually use it as opposed to people who have a bit more experience. Could that be because recruits are not as aware, or it is something they are not thinking of? Do you have any insight into why such a small number of recruits do use the line? Commodore Branscombe: I think that is correct. It certainly is awareness. Their awareness of all things to do with the service is pretty low when they arrive and they have a huge amount of information to take in. We are also aware that at some stages the information was not being given out in those training establishments, for whatever reason or construction you may put on that. I have to say that is not now the case, because there has been a big push in the last few months to do it. Significantly, I was written to by a welfare officer in an Army training establishment - and I can tell you that it was Deepcut - asking us directly for information because he wanted to give it out to his recruits. He said that the posters which had been provided by the MoD were so bad that they did not give the right message and asked whether we could do something about it. I have to be direct about that and that reinforces our evidence for our concern. Last time I gave evidence to this Committee I said that no matter what the top of the chain of command thinks, the actual message which gets to the other end of the chain, to the junior people, is not the one they think they are sending and certainly is not the one which is necessarily conducive to them accessing the kind of things with confidence that they need to be able to do. I suspect that is still the case because you need to be persistent, you need to reinforce it with briefing by credible people and you do not want too many messages as well. Part of our difficulty with the e-mail service or relatively low take-up, is because on the cards they give them, the printing is titchy, down in the right-hand bottom corner and you can hardly read it. It is presentation. This is mechanical stuff. This is not rocket science. It needs to be improved. There are lots of practical things which could be improved. Q627 Mr Crausby: The impression I get, certainly at the moment, is that plastic cards are going out, probably for many of the reasons James Cran highlighted, and it is at the top of the agenda; they are very keen to be able to say that this is outside the chain of command, this is independent and this proves it. They cannot wait to give these cards to us as Members of Parliament to indicate that there is an absolutely secure system which is outside of that. To some extent they use that to prove they are doing the job. How sustainable is that in the longer term? Will all these plastic cards just disappear and get lost? Mrs Burgess: May I make a comment about that publicity? One of my concerns, chairing the management board for the confidential support line, is that until the recent round of publicity it was very clear that this line was provided by SSAFA Forces Help. I am encouraged that most service people do know about SSAFA Forces Help because of the work we do. That was very much celebrated by the Army, saying they really wanted everyone to know that this was outside the chain of command. They then took on the responsibility to produce their own publicity. Our name features in this titchy little bit about the website. Clearly on the card are the big logos of the Royal Navy and the Army. It does not say "Provided by SSAFA Forces Help". That to me totally detracts from what they were previously celebrating, that this was independent and it was okay to go to. They are also orange and even young people in dingy bars might not be able to read it very well; I certainly cannot. That is a concern. It is not clear that it is an independent organisation. Commodore Branscombe: We try to do checks ourselves to ensure that information is coming out, including going and trying to phone it ourselves from remote places. I get out of my car at a barracks telephone box and try to ring it to see whether I get through, to make sure it is actually working, so we are convinced. We were finding that we never seemed to see literature in barracks or those sorts of places and we discovered at one stage that several hundred thousand leaflets had been printed but they were still sitting in a quarry in South Wales and had never been distributed. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. This has to be managed properly and I have to say this is another reason why it needs to be managed by people who have a vested interest and indeed a commitment to making sure these things are done properly. Q628 Mr Crausby: Can you tell us something about the issues which are raised by recruits on the line? The 2001 report talks about recruits being disappointed, unhappy and wanting to leave the Army. Does that dominate or are there other issues? Mrs Burgess: Bullying certainly features throughout all the annual reports I have here. It does appear that psychological bullying is increasing, though they are relatively small numbers. Q629 Mr Crausby: Is that bullying by trainers or by other recruits? Mrs Burgess: That I cannot tell you; we do not have that information. It has been interesting in preparing to come here today to look at the sort of statistics we are collecting and the sort of information we might be developing and collecting in the future. Although we have been running it for some years, it is a developing process. Commodore Branscombe: To be fair, some of it is peer bullying, yes, there is no doubt. You should not run away with the idea that it is purely bullying by instructors. Some of the bullying is not necessarily by instructors, but by older people who happen to be in the establishment and some of the bullying is indeed pretty unpleasant stuff. Q630 Mr Crausby: How much is it from recruits who want to leave the Army? Is there any of that? Mrs Burgess: We do not keep that specific number as a statistic. Commodore Branscombe: We do have a breakdown for the first six months of this year, because we do not publish the report until the end of the year. There were 47 in the last six months. It is very difficult to tell. The biggest one of them all is terms and conditions, about half of that, which is usually surrounding disenchantment with the Army. Q631 Mr Crausby: Is that all calls, not just specifically from recruits? Commodore Branscombe: No, this is from recruits. This is purely recruits. So we have broken it down because of the interest in recruits. We try to anonymise it though; we do not like to do that. I can tell you that slightly more than half is about disenchantment with the Army and them saying it was not what they expected and that they wanted to leave. The other breakdown is that six were health, partly injury and sometimes mental health; social welfare is mainly family stuff, to do with their family, then there are general enquiries. As it happens, we had no calls concerning suicidal thoughts in the first six months of this year. Q632 Chairman: Perhaps you would let us have those statistics and any others you think might be of interest. Commodore Branscombe: Yes, indeed. You will have received the annual report in the Library of the House as it comes out; that is passed to you by the Army whom we pass it to. This is just a summary of where we have got to half way through the year. Q633 Mike Gapes: Has the profile of the calls you have received since 1997 changed? Are there any trends, anything which is clearly different today to what it was? Are there any trends which are alarming and could cause concern? Commodore Branscombe: I am sorry I cannot answer that directly without going very carefully through the data as it relates to our specific subject here, to recruits. Q634 Mike Gapes: Perhaps you could drop us a note on it then. Commodore Branscombe: My instinct is, otherwise we would have noticed it, that there has been very little change, but what is encouraging is that more people are calling us. So the answer is that we are getting a greater volume but the division of categories within that, although we are being able to refine slightly more down to categories of interest, including recruits, is about the same. Q635 Mike Gapes: Your helpline operates from 10.30 in the morning to 10.30 at night. Commodore Branscombe: Yes. Q636 Mike Gapes: Is that sufficient? Should it operate 24 hours a day? Mrs Burgess: We have put a lot of thought into this and we do have a system whereby we can record those calls which are made out of hours. Certainly I learned from a recent discussion with the manager that maybe in a month we have a maximum of three in those hours when we are not open. So we do believe that we are operating the service at the time it is required. We did extend it specifically during Operation Telic, but we have reverted to those hours and they do seem to be appropriate. Commodore Branscombe: I have to say that was mainly because of the different time zone. As people were calling from the East, we needed to be open earlier. We review this all the time as we do want to do it by the most economical means and there is not a lot of point us having people sitting there if we are not getting calls. We know when the clusters of calls are. The answer to your question is that having it open 24 hours a day would not improve the service hugely. Q637 Mike Gapes: You talked already about the e-mail service you have. How much take-up has there been for this secure e-mail service? Commodore Branscombe: We only started it mid-way through last year, so the take-up was relatively slow, not least because the awareness of it was not so great. It is taking off and we are now getting far more. Q638 Mike Gapes: How many? Commodore Branscombe: One hundred and fifteen. Mrs Burgess: One hundred and fifteen from January to June this year. Q639 Mike Gapes: It is not many; just a few a week. Commodore Branscombe: Yes, but it is there and they are longer. Q640 Mike Gapes: Do you have regular correspondents, people who send you e-mails, you reply and then they send another one? Commodore Branscombe: We can do that, but generally not, no. We have had dialogues, but the 115 would not be dialogues. Q641 Mr Cran: I understand the statistics which you outline are from the annual report. Commodore Branscombe: These are provisional statistics. These will be better presented when we come to the year end. Q642 Mr Cran: Would that lead you and anybody who read the annual report to the conclusion that X per cent concerned this subject and so on, as you outlined? Commodore Branscombe: Yes. Q643 Mr Cran: The question which might interest the Committee and which would certainly interest me is whether you would be able, by use of the statistics you have from the helpline, to indicate when problems were occurring at a particular establishment. Obviously we just have to take the Deepcut example as an example. Might that have been possible, in general? Commodore Branscombe: That is a difficult one, only because we do not, unless somebody chooses to reveal where they are, necessarily record or indeed officiously try to find out where they are. That is part of the modus operandi. Nor indeed would we necessarily know, nor indeed would we necessarily pass that information across to the chain of command, unless, as we have described, it was a very severe problem and we had information that we could pass over. We think that otherwise would inhibit people from using it if that were generally known. That is quite sensible. Q644 Mr Cran: I suppose it would be true to say that in order to achieve what I was trying to get at one would need a very much larger service with much more participation across the armed forces so that one could see these trends. That would be fair, would it not? Commodore Branscombe: Yes, I think that is true. Also, statistically and numerically it is quite a small thing to get any significance from. Q645 Mr Cran: Is anybody or any outfit in a position to achieve that end or not? Commodore Branscombe: No. I think we are the only people who would have that. The only other way you could do it would be by having a competent professional personal support welfare service in being in those training establishments who were providing statistics of cases which had been seen by a worker on the ground. That would be the only way of doing it and we would advocate that. We do believe that there is a need for professionally based independent social workers to be working with these establishments. Q646 Mr Cran: Those who receive the calls on your helpline are clearly very special people indeed. I would not be any good at it, that is for sure. I guess that they have special backgrounds and are chosen very carefully. Commodore Branscombe: They are indeed. We choose them from a variety of professions, many, because they work shifts and part-time, are of an age where they are very experienced. They are trained in listening skills and indeed we use both the Samaritans and others; we are a member of the Helpline Association. Many of them will have professional backgrounds. We have quite a lot of nurses, we have consultant psychologists, we have people who do it because, although they are paid a huge amount, they see it as a contribution which they are making and they are working for SSAFA doing that. We are also insistent that they are people who cannot in any way be recognised as being anything to do with the military chain of command. As it happens, we may well have somebody who may have been military or maybe a military wife, but we are very, very careful about anybody who could possibly be compromised in terms of independence or indeed compromised personally by being recognised by accident on the telephone. Q647 Mr Cran: The people we are talking about are trained on a regular basis. I do not mean a constant basis but you re-visit their skills. Commodore Branscombe: Yes and we have to do that in order to keep them current; in fact we insist they must do a minimum number of shifts, so they cannot just dabble in it. We have to have people ready for emergencies as well and they have proper supervision and appraisal. They are supervised. The manager of our line is a very, very experienced senior social work practitioner and manager, who was also a nurse. She also has been in the business for years and years and years. They have proper social work supervision. Q648 Chairman: How many do you have on your list? Commodore Branscombe: About 20. They do not all work at the same time; they come and go. Q649 Chairman: How often do you have your training programmes? Commodore Branscombe: It is a rolling training programme. Because most of them also have other jobs, and it is quite important that these are people who live in the real world, they tend to be at weekends, on Saturdays and Sundays. The line is also open 365 days a year, which is really important, because people tend to ring at holiday times and weekends. Q650 Rachel Squire: Could you clarify how you do respond to e-mails? You mentioned that you would not normally get engaged in constantly exchanging e-mails. Commodore Branscombe: Yes, I can describe that. I am afraid that it is a bit "anorakish". They come in through the SSAFA forces website, which has a link. They are not actually addressing an e-mail box, they are coming in through a website which is unique and then it is linked across. We then have a unique secure line from our central office down to the site where this is actually done. There is some very clever software which actually strips off the address. All the operator sees, as soon as she or he gets it, is that there is a message to the confidential support line. They get an immediate response; as soon as it comes in they will get a response to say "Roger. We've got you. We promise to feed back to you within 24 hours" because we cannot necessarily respond immediately. A reply is then drafted, checked by two people, a team leader and this very qualified supervisor social worker, to make sure that it is the right quality of advice, that it has addressed the problem, that there are no underlying difficulties and that is fired back. It has a unique identifying number, in order that we can track it, but neither the operator nor the supervisor nor the checker knows whom they are talking to. Only the machine, which is very secure, knows where to fire it back to because then the address is put back onto it. Q651 Rachel Squire: There are hopefully safeguards that when it goes back it is seen only by the person who sent it. Commodore Branscombe: The problem is that part of when we ask people to log onto the site is that they must accept that we will keep their identity secure whilst it is within our system, but, as you and I know, once it is on the internet, or once it is on their computer at home or in the office, anybody can access it. We could not do that, legally we could not say that, but on the other hand we do give them that warning beforehand that they must be responsible for the security of what they have sent and what comes back. We give absolute assurance that whilst it is within our domain, not only will it be anonymous, but it will be completely confidential. Q652 Chairman: When you wrote to us in April you said that the MoD had "unusually" not yet consulted you following the publication of Surrey police's final report. Why should they have contacted you? Have they contacted you? Commodore Branscombe: The answer to that is no. We were slightly surprised. We have enjoyed for a very long time a good relationship with both the Army Adjutant General's area, not least because we run their confidential support line, but also with the MoD centrally. Almost coincident with the Deepcut situation beginning to go difficult, we had almost no communication from either the Army or the MoD at all. In the past, for example, my colleague, as a director of social work, had been consulted in all sorts of matters relating to advice on the Children Act or whatever. Both of us were members of a MoD committee which disappeared without trace and they did not even have the courtesy to write to us and say we were no longer required. We can only advise, but I have to say that we have been providing that advice to the MoD for very many years. I do not say it was linked to Deepcut, but it was also coincident with certain things which happened around Telic, for example, where we gave advice on casualty notification which was not necessarily followed. I just sense that there was something of a cessation of communication because we were perhaps saying things which they did not want to hear. Q653 Rachel Squire: A question about independent oversight. The government has announced that the Adult Learning Inspectorate's role in inspecting armed forces training will begin with a first programme of inspections in the autumn, to focus on care and welfare in initial training establishments. Does that meet the need you have said you see for "independent oversight and management of personal welfare support of individuals in training"? Commodore Branscombe: I have to say that as they say they are going to employ somebody from what used to be called the SSI, the social care inspectorate, which has been replaced, if that were inspecting proper social work practice, that would be fine. But that would only be fine if the system were in place to provide that support. It is not for me to say what they can do about inspecting training standards and all that sort of thing, but I believe that they may have under-estimated the difficulty of assessing the complex and very germane matter of the pastoral and personal welfare of those individuals as opposed to the training function. Yes, but that is only going to be okay if that support is managed in a way which we suggest it is not at the moment. Q654 Mr Crausby: Could you tell us something about the particular needs of recruits joining the armed forces after leaving local authority care? Would you like to comment on how the MoD and the armed forces should be addressing these needs? Mrs Burgess: Last year we approached all three services to say that we really wanted to research how care leavers found going into the services. We felt there might be some specific areas where we could assist local authorities in discharging their duties under the Children (Leaving Care) Act. All three services were quite content for us to pursue this piece of work, so we did have some meetings with the Children and Young Persons Unit at the DoH and also with The Who Cares? Trust. I put a few lines on our website inviting people to contact me, if they wished to, if they had joined the services from care and we had about a dozen replies from people. Some said that it was the best thing they had ever done, others had had a pretty dismal time. It took some months to arrange a meeting with some of these individuals, which we did manage to achieve at the end of last year. My colleague who manages our service with the Royal Air Force is progressing this piece of work. We have started to do some work about preparing the sort of information that we were hearing from these individuals which might have helped them when they joined, things which perhaps many people would not think about. If you are without a parental home to return to, when there is block leave in the services for instance, as I know there is with universities, where do you go? They were not clear that there was a financial resource available from local authorities to assist these care leavers in those particular areas. I believe it is £100 a week. We felt that we could really do quite a lot of information sharing between the Ministry of Defence and the local authorities. At a recent meeting of the Service Support Advisory Committee, which we run from our headquarters, we were advised from the centre, MoD PS4, that they were now progressing this work. We have had no further communication from them, which is quite disappointing in view of the work we had set off with their blessing. I think that we, as a social work service, do have a very important role to help those who might need it to make that transition. We have all worked in social services, we know how they operate. Not to make them different, not to stigmatise them, but to carry out the local authority duties on their behalf. Commodore Branscombe: With respect, I think that the individual services are finding this problem too difficult, which is disappointing, because at the time when the legislation was enacted in 2000, we did formally alert them to the problem and that it was something we needed to address and that was minuted. That was when we were providing advice to the Tri-service Welfare Management Committee, but it was noted and no further action was taken as far as we are aware. Again, we can only advise. Q655 Mr Crausby: Are they covered by the Act? Local authorities certainly have a responsibility to look after young people in care until the age of 21. Is there a responsibility on the armed services to assist in that and to ensure that happens? Commodore Branscombe: I am not clear on the legal point of that. What seemed clear to us as a matter of principle was that if the duty of care was there, just because they had joined the Army, Navy or Air Force did not mean to say that responsibility had lapsed. It was of course exceedingly difficult for the local authority from which they had come to discharge that if they did not know. If the MoD was not going to tell them or to pick it up, then here was another gap through which things were potentially falling. Nobody wanted to address this. I think it was in the "too hard" box. Although relatively small in numbers, it is potentially a very real problem. Chairman: Thank you both very much. We have had two very interesting sessions, which I am sure will contribute to the writing of our final report. |