Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1260
- 1271)
WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2004 (AFTERNOON)
MR DES
JAMES, MRS
DOREEN JAMES,
MR JAMES
COLLINSON, MRS
YVONNE COLLINSON,
MR GEOFF
GRAY AND
MRS DIANE
GRAY
Q1260 Mr Havard: Apart from individual
meetings with the Minister, you have not been approached about
your experience by any of the other organisations.
Mr Collinson: Nobody, no.
Mr Gray: No.
Q1261 Mr Havard: There has been no
attempt to capture your experience in any consistent rigorous
way.
Mr Gray: No. Various reports have
come up in DOC. We have not been consulted on those.
Q1262 Chairman: I am glad we have
had the opportunity of listening to you. Des, I must say if you
send us the letter of your suggestions—without being flippant,
I must say that if you have got it down to five weeks for a reply,
then I will be sending my correspondence on to you in future,
because I do not think any department routinely responds to a
Member of Parliament in less than five weeks.
Mr James: When you consider that
the five-week delay is the fourth letter asking the same questions,
we are probably talking more like five months.
Q1263 Chairman: You will send us
the questions, please?
Mr James: Yes, absolutely.[2]
Q1264 Chairman: The Army has told
us that the inadequate supervisory ratio lies at the heart of
the past failures. Do you believe that a larger number of supervisory
staff at Deepcut might have prevented these tragedies?
Mr Gray: If you have young people
there, you have to have somebody to supervise them, et cetera.
They are between 16- and 18-year-olds and you cannot let those
age groups wander around in the middle of the night with a loaded
weapon; they must be supervised. If there was more supervision,
who knows what might have happened.
Q1265 Chairman: You will have heard
from attending our sessions that so many have told us it was that
period in 1999/2000/2001 when the ratios got absolutely hopeless,
far, far too high; but a number of the problems that you talk
about did not take place necessarily within that narrow band of
time. What impression, if any, did your children give you about
the nature and quality of the relationship between recruits and
supervisors? Did they talk to you about the supervisors and what
they were like?
Mr Collinson: The first time I
saw James's supervisor was at his funeral.
Mrs Gray: The first time we saw
him was on a video tape of training; that's all.
Q1266 Chairman: I know it has been
exhausting for you, but the last question is that the MoD have
told us that they have now established an armament officer outside
of the chain of command, and we know who the empowerment officer
is in Deepcut. A person who is outside the chain of command, who
is responsible to listen to problems and complaints from young
recruits undergoing Phase 1 and Phase 2 training—is this
an improvement; is it the answer; or is it not the answer? You
have come across the concept of the empowerment officer, have
you?
Mr Gray: I think there should
be a totally independent body that should be used, maybe like
an ombudsman of the Armed Forces, or an inspectorate of the Armed
Forces.
Mr Collinson: I agree totally;
there has to be somebody there 24/7 that they can turn to, and
who are looking after them.
Mr James: My view, for what it
is worth, is that we are going again from the issue to the solution
and we miss out the important part. Frankly, I am not prepared
to take part in that. I am really very tired of the initiatives
that have been made public by the MoD in the last couple of years,
purely to pacify public opinion, without any thorough and proper
look at what has gone on. If we carry on like that, we will just
finish where we came from.
Mr Collinson: I think it just
proves that Mr Ingram is not interested in what happened in the
past. His motive at the moment is the future. As we have all said
many times, if you do not sort out the problems that have happened
in the past, you will never get the future right. One day—maybe
tomorrow or three months down the line—if we pick up the
paper and read there is another death at another Army camp, we
have failed, and that is not what we want.
Q1267 Chairman: I honestly think
you are making a mistake there. The fact that we have spent today
talking about the past and the fact that this PhD student is spending
three or four months looking at the previous reports means that
we recognise—and we have spoken a number of times to Surrey
Police—that you cannot look to the future unless you look
to the past. I can assure you that we are.
Mr James: Chairman, you mentioned
earlier that somebody had done an assessment or a study of all
the different reviews and reports. Can you clarify for me who
that person is—not by name but their position?
Q1268 Chairman: He is a PhD student
at King's College.
Mr James: A student?
Q1269 Chairman: No, a PhD; he is
a graduate. A PhD student is mature.
Mr James: I know exactly what
a PhD student is.
Q1270 Chairman: And exceedingly competent;
and he is under the very close supervision of staff here. A document
will be published. A PhD was written that we have and are looking
at. Please, be open minded, Mr James, honestly; I know it is difficult.
Mr James: It is difficult.
Q1271 Chairman: We are really trying
to get to the heart of the matter and make recommendations. If
you think that we are so gullible that we are just taking part
in a public relations exercise by the Ministry of Defence in order
to placate Parliament or the public—
Mr Collinson: You have picked
me up wrong there. I never said that this Committee was gullible.
All I am saying is that when we—
Mrs Collinson: It is Mr Ingram—
Chairman: I spent eight days in the summer
recess, attending a course run for the RAF and the Royal Navy,
as to how they are training the trainers to look out for problems
of alcoholism and bullying, and how to respond and then to pass
that information off to qualified people. I spent a week in Lichfield
looking at how the Army was doing it, to see where they were trying
to train the trainers into changing their culture into seeing
what was happening and therefore passing on what they see to the
professionals. We have not finished our report, but I think there
was a genuine effort, imposed upon them by events that they lost
control of, to ensure that this kind of event that you have had
this agonising experience of, will—not never recur, but
the likelihood will be greatly diminished. We have not drawn together
all of our material yet, and when we do we will spend a considerable
amount of time in analysing the mass of data, the interviews and
the meetings we have had. It is imperative as far as we are concerned,
and this will probably be the last report of this Defence Committee,
that the legacy of Deepcut and Catterick and elsewhere, although
the memory will never be expunged as far as you are concerned—at
least future recruits are not going to have to go through what
recruits in some establishments went through, and we know the
consequences. I hope that you will eventually, if not immediately,
recognise that we are striving very hard to achieve the objectives
that you would see, even though at this stage you remain to be
convinced as to, if not our motives but our methods. Once again,
thank you very much for coming. It has been a harrowing day not
just for you, because you sat through this morning as well. [To
the morning witnesses] Ladies, thank you very much for your evidence
and for sitting through this session of evidence. I now close
the proceedings.
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