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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