Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60 - 79)

WEDNESDAY 26 MAY 2004

LIEUTENANT GENERAL ANTHONY PALMER, REAR ADMIRAL SIMON GOODALL, COLONEL DAVID ECCLES AND MR JULIAN MILLER

  Q60  Mr Jones: The Minister has it on his desk.

  General Palmer: I am sure it will come to me then.

  Q61  Mr Cran: I have sat and listened to what you all have to say and it is perfectly clear that a fairly enormous amount of work is going on between the four of you at your level. I am still left unclear in my mind about the structure at your level of the care regime. Colonel, I take it that you have the delivery responsibility for individual education and training for the Army and you would have equivalents in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. General, I take it you have the policy level responsibility. I take  it, Admiral, that you have this tri-service responsibility of bringing everything together and I am not quite sure at all, Mr Miller, what you do. Could you all confirm what it is that you bring to the party, but, more importantly, how you all come together?

  Colonel Eccles: I am Chief of Staff of the Army's training organisation and we are responsible for the care organisation for the Army trainees. We do this in conjunction with a number of agencies, not least Land Command, the Army's Field Army, because they have a number of the assets. We work very closely with them in order to provide the necessary support.

  Q62  Mr Cran: In terms of duty of care, what do you bring to the party?

  Colonel Eccles: What we do is translate the policy which is set above into action on the ground.

  Q63  Mr Cran: May I be clear? This goes back to what Mr Gapes was asking you earlier on. If you feel that something is going wrong somewhere, I take it that we have a bottom-up system as well as a top-down system.

  Colonel Eccles: Yes; indeed.

  Q64  Mr Cran: In your judgment does that work?

  Colonel Eccles: It does work; not every time, no system is perfect.

  Q65  Mr Cran: Absolutely. General, did I get your responsibilities right?

  General Palmer: Yes, you did. These two gentlemen work for me, because I am responsible for training as well as personnel policy more generally. Admiral Goodall is the Director General of Training and Education and works for me. Mr Miller is the Director General of Service Personnel Policy, so terms and conditions of service including welfare come directly under him and they both report to me.

  Q66  Mr Cran: These are undoubtedly grand titles, so I should really like to know, Admiral, reporting to the General, what you bring to the party. What do you bring to duty of care?

  Rear Admiral Goodall: As the focal point in the MoD for training and education my job is to apply strategic policy, develop policy on the delivery of training and education across the board, which maps onto the national skills agenda and finds good practice across the services and develops that into tri-service policy. I was trying to think of an analogy and it is probably, to go back to the point that I am a Stoke City supporter, that I am in a way the Football Association, whereas the Football League are the deliverers of training. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force deliver the training but work to the overarching policy of Director General of Training and Education. Where I fit in with the duty of care is that duty of care is very much a responsibility of the training deliverers and therefore the training and education policy needs to ensure that it is reflecting duty of care issues where it applies and indeed specifically here my role is as the focal point of implementing many of the DOC recommendations and co-ordinating those. The training and education recommendations fall firmly to me: the duty of care recommendations and associated policy are largely dealt with by my colleague.

  Q67  Mr Cran: This tri-service responsibility that you have. The noise of axes grinding is everywhere and it is very, very difficult to get various entities, who have quite a long history of doing things their way, to do it in one way, the best way. Do I have that right?

  Rear Admiral Goodall: That is correct and that is a major task of mine. Indeed I would argue that in the last 18 months we have had significant progress in bringing the three services together. I do believe in the delivery of training the three services have recognised that as the services get smaller and indeed as operations are increasingly joint, so there has been a key recognition of the need to train as we fight, that is in a joint environment. We are also looking at harmonising many of our personnel support procedures so that we are driving out differences in the way the services actually report on personnel issues. We are operating and training much more together today than we were 10 or 15 years ago. To have different ways of approaching basic administrative processes, different training processes, when there is no justification for a difference, makes no sense. In some areas there is a justification for a difference because we all operate in different environments, the maritime, air and land environments demand certain different skills, but there is a huge amount of our training delivery and our personnel support which is common and should be joint. There has been a significant amount of goodwill amongst the services to come together, identify where those areas are and learn from each other. Within the past year we have developed a significant number of policies on accreditation, education, higher education, lifelong learning and all those things which are actually joint, agreed policies across the three services.

  Q68  Mr Cran: Specifically considering duty of care and the considerations we are concerned with here in the terms of our remit, it would be your view that the three services are going in the same direction and the same doctrine underpins what they are doing.

  Rear Admiral Goodall: Absolutely. There are great similarities across the service and the services are learning good practice from each other and indeed as part of our work to implement the defence training review we have created six defence training organisations which are truly joint training establishments. These are establishments where RAF, Navy and Army personnel will train and operate together and we have to have a system which is common so that the three people sitting alongside each other do not have different conditions of service, different ways of looking at their support and so forth. It is vital to the way we are going, the services all recognise that and yes, there are sometimes difficulties and I had hair when I started this job, but we are making significant progress on that front.

  Q69  Mr Cran: Mr Miller, what do you bring to duty of care?

  Mr Miller: Duty of care is one of the areas which I look at as part of my personnel policy remit. It sits alongside responsibility for pay, pensions, veterans, resettlement, issues of that sort. We aim to provide the high level strategic guidance to the services on personnel policy issues, including on matters affecting duty of care. Risking my luck a little, I would draw your attention to this document with which you are probably familiar, the Armed Forces overarching personnel strategy, which provides the backdrop to the activities which the single services conduct. For example, in the area on which you are  concentrating, it sets out the department's commitment to diversity and to tackling bullying and harassment wherever they come up. This provides the backdrop. The single services are then the mechanism through which that is effectively executed. It is perhaps just worth saying a word about the internal structures which relate to this, if it is not too boring. In particular I draw attention to the body, which the general chairs, which brings together the three principal personnel officers of the services under his chairmanship, the Service Personnel Committee, which provides the key forum within the department for approving and developing an agreed approach to these issues. It has an executive group beneath it which I chair, which tries to ensure that we follow through their decisions and carry them out in a way which has the support of the services, but helps us ensure consistency on their part with the central policy.

  Q70  Mr Cran: I want now to come to the initial training establishments. The question I had in my mind was: who is responsible for welfare? But I guess that is far too simplistic a question because there is no one individual responsible for welfare. Maybe, Colonel, you are the one to tell us because you would speak for the other two as well.

  Colonel Eccles: I would say that there is a simple answer and it is the chain of command. The commanding officer of each establishment is responsible up to the training agency in this case and then, for policy, up to the MoD. That is the way in which we construct our regime.

  Q71  Mr Cran: I think I was really meaning within the initial training establishments. How does that work?

  Colonel Eccles: For example, in the Army we have the initial training group which consists of a brigadier who is responsible for all the Army training regiments and he oversees the policies therein and makes sure they are being applied correctly.

  Q72  Mr Cran: Would that be the same for the other services?

  Colonel Eccles: Yes; on a smaller scale.

  Q73  Mr Cran: Within the initial training establishments and how they operate, is there a formal structure which brings together the chain of command and all the other bodies which would be interested in duty of care and how the trainees are being looked after and so on, or is it informal?

  Colonel Eccles: No, there are formal structures. If I start from the bottom upwards, at a training establishment the commanding officer will probably run a welfare forum in which he has his doctor, his chaplain, his WRVS lady, company commanders and all the people involved in this process and they will review policies and progress. They may also deal with individual cases and have a case conference to deal with people they are concerned about. That is how it is co-ordinated within a formal structure at the unit level. Moving to the next level up, across ATRA for example we have forums in which this is done. There may be the main board of the Director General of the Army Training and Recruitment Agency at which these issues are brought forward and policy and direction is given. There is a structure all the way up and this ties into the side with the Army welfare committee which is responsible for providing a number of the resources and agencies which help us.

  Mr Cran: Many other questions, no time.

  Q74  Chairman: Is that chart published? May we have some copies or is it on a sheet of paper?

  Colonel Eccles: I am sure we can provide that for you.

  General Palmer: May I make one tiny addition? The welfare actually starts right at the bottom with the corporal, the sergeant and the platoon commander. They are directly responsible for the individual welfare of their individual recruits. I remember when I was a platoon commander in training that every Friday we had a conference. I know this happens today and I am sure you will meet this as you go around. There you discuss every single one of your platoon, how they are getting on, what their problems are, etcetera, and that gets reported up the chain. Everybody is graded. Whether it is a training issue or a welfare issue there are plenty of mechanisms for doing that.

  Chairman: If there is such a chart, we should like to have a copy.[8]


  Q75  Mr Hancock: May I ask a question about when a recruit leaves and goes for the first time to an active service unit? What goes with them in the way of a profile about what they have been like in training, so that there is a warning if necessary there? What actually goes with that recruit as he or she develops?

  General Palmer: Can we send you five or six specimen reports? They are very, very detailed. We could go through them all now, but it would take a long time. We can send you examples of a number of training organisations.[9]


  Q76  Mr Hancock: Are you saying that there is a detailed profile which goes to units?

  General Palmer: It is immensely detailed. For instance, when foot and mouth was around and we could not do training, we had a decision to take on whether to keep people in training and delay their move or to send them and tell the field unit. Reports were annotated, as I recall, in red giving the objectives which had not been achieved. The risk is never exported unknowingly to the Field Army, acknowledging that these people are going to be going straight on operations.

  Chairman: A variation of Mike's question is: how do you ensure that recruits are aware of the support systems which exist, how do they access them and are not discouraged from using them? It is almost the other edge of the scissors. If you could send that to us, gentlemen, we should be really grateful.[10]


  Q77  Mr Blunt: How are the care aspects of initial training funded? How do you ring-fence that funding?

  Colonel Eccles: Welfare and the duty of care are woven into everything we do. Yes, it is possible to break out the costings of that. It is actually quite difficult. There are some things which are provided, funding for infrastructure improvements for example, which one can identify readily. However, because welfare and duty of care for our people are part of our lives and part of our responsibility the whole time, it is difficult to break down and put in a discrete section on its own.

  Q78  Mr Blunt: The problem here and the problem identified by Colonel Haes is the budget issue and that is seen in a number of ways. As recently as last year we had personnel from all three services' initial training organisations taking their place in frontline units. It is pretty obvious that would be referring to recruits, but I assume you would not put that remark in if it were just about recruits. That must be referring to trainers who are then being taken out with the Field Army facing an operation, being stripped out and put in the Field Army. That is in Colonel Haes's note to us and that would strike me as a failure to ring-fence the care provision in the initial training regime, is it not?

  General Palmer: We have only just put these people back into training. I should be appalled to hear that they had been removed from it.

  Colonel Eccles: Quite. There are gaps within our organisation, because no organisation is manned 100% and occasionally people are deployed from ATRA on operations. Then the system is adjusted so that their responsibilities are covered correctly. For example, one would not take a corporal who was in the middle of training a section of recruits away immediately on operations. We would adjust to fill any gaps which came up.

  Q79  Mr Blunt: There is a hint of a qualification in that answer. Ideally one would not, but I just wonder what the balance is here. Is there a change of policy now in the exact extent to which ATRA is protected from the demands of the operational Army?

  General Palmer: The answer is probably that each training organisation has a different issue and a different problem. For instance, people who are being trained to be bomb disposal officers on a training course lasting a year do not have the same supervisory needs as the Royal Logistic Corps people at Deepcut. You cannot actually lay down or even cost exactly what constitutes welfare as a discrete area. It is typically indivisible from the regime; it is part of the accommodation, it is all that. In some areas it may well be that you can afford it or you can afford to take a balanced judgment as to whether or not taking a sergeant from the bomb disposal structure and moving him to Iraq is creating less risk in the operational theatre than taking him from the training. Again it comes back to balance of risk. In those areas where we know we have been deficient in the past, like at Deepcut in the Royal Logistic Corps, I would be amazed if we had taken people out and gone back to the supervisory ratios which we have only just, literally in the last six months, put in place. I cannot categorically say that has not happened, but I would be amazed if it had. On the other hand, in other parts of the ATRA, maybe some of the aeronautical engineers who do not require quite so much supervision, if somebody said they had to go to repair a helicopter in Iraq because that happened to be the operational priority for the moment, a risk assessment would be done.


8   Not published. Back

9   Not published. Back

10   Ev 282-3 Back


 
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