Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640
- 657)
WEDNESDAY 14 JULY 2004
COMMODORE PAUL
BRANSCOMBE CBE AND
MRS KATE
BURGESS OBE
Q640 Mike Gapes: How many?
Commodore Branscombe: One hundred
and fifteen.
Mrs Burgess: One hundred and fifteen
from January to June this year.
Q641 Mike Gapes: It is not many;
just a few a week.
Commodore Branscombe: Yes, but
it is there and they are longer.
Q642 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 all dialogues.
Q643 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.
Q644 Mr Cran: Would that lead you
and anybody who read the annual report to the conclusion that
X% concerned this subject and so on, as you outlined?
Commodore Branscombe: Yes.
Q645 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.
Q646 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.
Q647 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.
Q648 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 not 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.
Q649 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.
Q650 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.
Q651 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.
Q652 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 Help 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 reply, 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.
Q653 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, somebody else could 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.
Q654 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 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.
Q655 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, now the Commission for Social Care
Inspection, which has replaced it, 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.
Q656 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.
Q657 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.
| 
