Conclusions and recommendations
1. There are shortfalls of personnel in all
three Services. In April 2007 the shortfall was 5,850 and the
Armed Forces as a whole were 3.2% under-strength.
The numbers leaving early are at a 10-year peak for Army and Royal
Air Force Officers and for Royal Air Force Other Ranks. Overall,
the numbers leaving early have increased slightly in the last
two years. The Department should use a staffing model to analyse
how it will achieve manning balance by 2008, calculating how the
various measures it proposes to take will affect the model and
reduce the shortfalls.
2. The increasing frequency of deployments
on overseas operations and time away from home are factors causing
people to leave the Armed Forces. More
than 15% of Army personnel are away from home more often than
is planned for under the Department's 'harmony' guidelines which
are being consistently broken. The Department has little scope
to reduce the operational tempo which is impacting on personnel
but in case of enduring operations, such as those in Iraq and
Afghanistan, it needs to provide people with greater stability
of work patterns. The Department should give longer notice of
deployments and let serving personnel know their work patterns
over a longer time horizon.
3. There are indicators of overstretch in
specific areas, such as the severe shortfalls in personnel in
some specialist trades, such as nurses, linguists and leading
hands, and the routine breaking of harmony guidelines.
The longer this situation continues the more it will begin to
affect operational capability. The Department maintains that the
Armed Forces are stretched, but not overstretched, and would only
be overstretched if there was a failure to meet military commitments.
But the Department also needs to ascertain the 'tipping points'
where the degree of stretch itself precipitates the loss of scarce
skills, putting operational capability at risk.
4. Financial incentives have met with some
success in retaining people in the short term, but several key
factors for people leaving, such as workload, inability to plan
ahead outside work and the impact on family life, have not been
addressed sufficiently. In addition to
financial incentives the Department should extend non-financial
retention measures to provide personnel with greater certainty,
for example, revising manning requirements upwards for the most
stretched trades and relieving specialists from general duties
such as driving vehicles. Workloads for those deployed on operations
and back in the United Kingdom should be evened out as far as
possible.
5. The Department lacks information on the
costs of its recruitment and retention measures and has performed
limited investment appraisal on its range of financial incentives.
All business cases for future initiatives should be supported
by a full investment appraisal including an assessment of the
costs and the benefits expected. The Department should have robust
cost information to support appraisals.
6. The Department does not have a long term
strategy to ensure a steady supply of highly qualified specialist
personnel especially where there are shortages.
The Department has broken the link between pay and rank for doctors
and pilots and is considering doing so for nurses, to facilitate
their recruitment and retention. The Department should extend
this approach by introducing more flexible pay structures for
other specialist trades where there are personnel shortages, such
as information technology engineers and linguists.
7. Short term cuts in recruitment have had
long term impacts on manning levels which are almost impossible
to recover from and appear to have cost more money to mitigate
in the long run. The Royal Navy is currently
affected by cutbacks to recruitment activity made in the 1990s
because manning shortages which started in the lower ranks are
working their way up to Petty Officer Rank. The Department should
use a staffing model to assess the likely longer-term impacts
of cut backs in recruitment, including the costs of addressing
future shortfalls in recruits, and restoring manning levels.
8. The Department sets annual targets for
recruitment but they do not take account of the need to fill in
some of the gaps resulting from previous recruiting shortfalls.
The Department should look at the scope to over-recruit in specific
areas where there have been serious shortfalls in personnel. Although
flexibility may be limited to some extent by the physical capacity
of the training system, the Department should assess how such
constraints can be overcome, for example by re-scheduling training
and using temporary facilities. It should build in the necessary
flexibility under the new arrangements implemented through the
Defence Training Review programme.
9. Nine out of ten of the Army's top ten
officers were educated at independent schools, whilst three-quarters
of Army scholarships in 2006-07 went to students from independent
schools. The Department monitors
and collects information on areas of diversity such as race and
gender, but not on the socio-economic or educational background
of new recruits and personnel who are promoted. Without such information,
the Department cannot be sure it has a workforce that "is
drawn from the breadth of the society which it defends".
The Department should collect and monitor information on the socio-economic
and educational background of recruits; of those who are promoted;
and on relative success rates for those from different educational
backgrounds who are awarded bursaries. The Department should use
this information help it draw on the best available talent from
across the population.
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