Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MINISTRY OF
DEFENCE & DEFENCE
ESTATES
MONDAY 14 MAY
2007
Q60 Mr Mitchell: I just wonder whether
a serving officer—even Princess Anne's husband—is
not subject to generals and admirals coming up and saying, "If
you do this for us, we'll see you right; promotion will be coming
your way if you agree to knock these houses down or plough up
that shooting range." Are you not subjected to military pressure
like that?
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: What
I am subjected to is plenty of military advice as to what the
situation is on the ground, which is very helpful. It is perhaps
easier for them to talk to a military officer than to a civilian
doing the job. As regards pressure, I am pretty thick skinned
and I know what the priorities are so I do not find that difficult
to fend off.
Bill Jeffrey: The job has of course,
as these two gentlemen illustrate, historically been done both
by civilians and by military officers. The last incumbent was
a naval officer as well and it is very much seen within the Department
as a case of picking the best man for the job—or, indeed,
woman, one day, I hope.
Q61 Mr Mitchell: I am not criticising
that, but let me ask you whether in the abstract it would not
be better to have some kind of thrusting commercial property man
doing the job, rather than someone in-house, as it were.
Bill Jeffrey: I do not rule that
out. I think on this occasion the competition that Admiral Laurence
succeeded in was internal, but it was open to both civilians and
military people.
Sir Ian Andrews: As indeed it
was for Admiral Laurence's predecessor, Admiral Dunt. I was involved
in the appointment process for Admiral Laurence, and we had a
very strong team of people from across the civil service and the
services. He was clearly the best person for the job.
The Chairman: Thank you. Your last questioner
is Mr Alan Williams.
Q62 Mr Alan Williams: At one time,
I was the lowest level operative in the services' housing system
when, as a junior officer, one of my supernumerary duties was
responsibility for an inventory that included the sergeants' accommodation
at the unit I was in. They used to march them out, check all the
faults, damage and losses against the inventory, and then march
in the new incumbent and get them to sign that the condition was
as said. Do they still do that?
Bill Jeffrey: I think we are still
quite deliberate about the processes, which, in the end, are designed
to safeguard public funds and ensure that they are properly spent.
Q63 Mr Williams: I think that is
rather overstating the degree of responsibility involved.
Bill Jeffrey: I have no idea whether
they still do what you have just described, Mr Williams.
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: The
term is still used—march in, march out.
Q64 Mr Williams: Really. It is. You
are much younger than me, so you obviously did not have to do
national service.
Let us try something else on the memory stage.
Does the name Rachman mean anything to you?
Bill Jeffrey: Yes, it does.
Q65 Mr Williams: What do you associate
him with?
Bill Jeffrey: I associate Rachman
with exploitative, commercial management of property.
Q66 Mr Williams: Do you know what
his technique was, other than his violent side? It was systematically
to allow houses to become run down in order to drive tenants out,
and it worked quite well. Does not that sound rather similar to
what you are doing, and you are expecting to keep the tenants
in?
Bill Jeffrey: I do not think we
are allowing the quality of the estate to run down at the moment,
as I hope the whole of this session has illustrated. We know that
the worst of it is dreadful, but things are moving in the right
direction. It is certainly not the case that there is any attempt
to run the estate down to make things uncomfortable for people.
On the contrary—
Q67 Mr Williams: But we have a situation
in which it is acknowledged that less than half of bed spaces
are to the highest standards and, as Austin mentioned, 35,000
bed places will be substandard by 2013, and on the housing front
19,000 houses are below the appropriate standard. You will upgrade
only 900 in a year, so it will take 25 years to upgrade. If, as
you have indicated, you regard housing as being part of the inducement
to come into the services, why do not you give it higher priority?
Bill Jeffrey: I believe that in
recent years it has been given higher priority than in the past.
If we take the two specific categories of accommodation, as we
did earlier, I do not underestimate the fact that some of the
second standard of service family accommodation is old and in
less good condition than it might be, but the real target must
be the standard three and four accommodation, which constitutes
5% of the estate.
Q68 Mr Williams: If you do not accept
my suggestion, who in the Department is responsible for housing?
Bill Jeffrey: Principally the
Chief Executive of Defence Estates, as the person centrally positioned
in the Department to deliver the programme we have been discussing.
Q69 Mr Williams: But we understand
that you do not give much priority to the housing function. Take
the National Health Service, for example, which, like yourselves,
has an enormous range of complicated areas to control. Many, many
years ago, the health service was divided—you may not believe
this, but it helped—into accountable units within the NHS.
At the moment, there are about 560 or 570, if I remember correctly,
accountable officers responsible for different parts of the service.
Do you have anything equivalent to that—identifiable, accountable
officers?
Bill Jeffrey: What we have is
a centrally-positioned organisation, as we have described. There
are significant responsibilities on the part of the Department's
main budget holders, including those in the armed forces. Within
the individual services, there are people responsible for the
quality of the estate with whom Admiral Laurence's organisation
has a continuous dialogue. You might want to say a little more
about the structure of that.
Q70 Mr Williams: But we are told
that the: "Department judges that separating out the cost
of the estate from other parts of expenditure on the Armed Forces
is not necessary" and that: "the estate is only one
of the necessary components of the delivery of military capability".
That suggests that, far from there being anyone focusing on this,
you are happy to keep it diffused. If is almost as if you do not
want anyone focusing on it.
Bill Jeffrey: I think that I would
dispute that. As I said earlier, accommodation is only one of
a number of aspects to the assessment of resources for particular
military capabilities, as you would expect. I accept—and
did so earlier in the hearing—that we would benefit from
bringing together as many aspects of expenditure on accommodation
across defence as we can. I see value in that—separately,
in terms of making the kind of judgments that the Chief Executive,
in particular, has to make.
Q71 Mr Williams: But, for example,
the other year, you cut back existing contracts, which caused
problems, at the same time as you increased expenditure on emerging
contracts. There seemed to be no identifiable, guiding pattern
of policy.
Bill Jeffrey: I explained earlier
the circumstances in which that happened. As the Admiral said,
we are introducing better systems to enable us to prioritise between
works programmes initially budgeted for in the services and then
injected into the Defence Estates budget and the other stuff.
However, as the Admiral himself described, in the particular case,
to which you referred, Mr Williams, there was a process. You might
argue that they decided to go ahead with the wrong things and
to defer the wrong things, but there was a process in which a
judgment was made on what should be held back until later years,
and what should not.
Q72 Mr Williams: That all sounds
fine—there are plans and proposals. But there is no delivery,
is there? You were supposed to introduce a system by April this
year under which every site had its own plan. That was to be delivered
by April 2007. However, the people who were to deliver it will
not receive the guidance from the Department on how the plans
are to be drawn until July 2007. You did not have much chance
of delivery, did you?
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: I am
not quite sure how that happened.
Q73 Mr Williams: Will you go away,
find out and let us know?
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: The
process of creating these individual estates plans is very important
and hugely complex. We must make sure that we get it right. We
are not quite there yet, because people are taking a little bit
longer than we expected.
Q74 Mr Williams: We expected them
to get it right by 2007, but you cannot even give them guidelines
on how to get it right until July 2007. Where is the urgency and
the focus?
Bill Jeffrey: I do not recognise
the point about July 2007. I know that the Integrated Estate Management
Plans, which are the detailed plans established at site level,
are being produced. The date that I have for their completion
is September of this year, which, obviously, is a bit later than
April. But they are coming along.
Q75 Mr Williams: I shall return to
a point raised earlier about shortages of back-up staff, which
you seem to have made no attempt to remedy. We have quoted figures
on shortages of safety and specialist staff—only half are
available. Only half of the quantity surveyors are available.
We are told in the Report, which you have signed up to, in figure
8 on page 23 that the safety systems and specialist engineering
staff responsible for "conducting audits to ensure that safety
rules and procedures are being properly implemented" are
at 50% of establishment and have been for a long time. Does that
not give you concern? If it does, why haven't you done something
about it?
Bill Jeffrey: It does, and as
I said earlier we are tackling it. It is a difficult employment
market.
Q76 Mr Williams: How are you tackling
it, if you are not improving the situation?
Bill Jeffrey: Again, as I said
earlier, since the Report was published we have added six quantity
surveyors to those numbers. That is not a huge number, but there
are other interviews coming. It is something that we are trying
to address, and we have already had a limited amount of success
in addressing it.
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: May
I add that as you can imagine, as I am relatively new in the job,
I am paying a great deal of attention to such figures? The recruitment
campaign looks as though it is being remarkably successful. I
shall hold my judgment on that until I see the people walking
through the door, but we are putting a lot of effort into it.
Q77 Mr Williams: But you—the
Department, not you personally—have signed up to the Report,
which states, "Any accident or lapse in safety that might
occur on a site could be partially caused by the shortage of these
staff and this could have legal implications." If it has
legal implications, that also means that it has damaging physical
implications for the people there, doesn't it? But still it has
not led to any prioritisation.
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence: We
are putting a very high priority on it. Like the quantity surveyors,
it is an area in which the market is buoyant. It is difficult
to get these people—they are very much in demand—but
I stress that we are putting a great deal of priority on it.
Q78 Mr Williams: I must admit that
I do not see much evidence of that. One hates to say it, but perhaps
some of the no-fee litigation people who are trying to milk money
out of the National Health Service should actually do us a social
service by turning their attention to any incidents in the accommodation
for which you are responsible, and that might help to focus your
attention.
Sir Ian Andrews: May I address
that, Mr Williams? One of my other responsibilities is to Mr Jeffrey,
and it is to oversee health and safety issues and so on across
the whole Department. I place a high priority on it, and the Secretary
of State has made it clear in his Safety, Health and Environmental
Policy Statement that he expects great priority to be given to
it.
There are a number of possible ways in which
we can address this. For example, I am absolutely convinced that
the arrangements that we have put in place with our water and
waste water PFI providers and our regional prime contractors enable
us to give much higher attention to health and safety issues than
we ever did before.
Q79 Mr Williams: Which PFI contracts
are you referring to?
Sir Ian Andrews: In particular
the so-called Aquatrine water and waste water areas, but also
our regional prime contractors, which we select based on, among
other things, the extent to which they can assure us of their
safe working practices. We drive them very hard to do that.
| 
