Memorandum from David Gee
1. I am the author of Informed Choice:
Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the United Kingdom, which
was produced with financial assistance from the Joseph Rowntree
Charitable Trust and released on 7 January 2008. The report assesses
whether recruiters and recruitment materials enable potential
enlistees to make an informed choice about whether a forces career
will suit them well. This is in view of the significant risks,
difficulties and legal obligations entailed in a forces career,
as well as the many potential benefits that it can bring.
2. The terms of reference for the Defence
Committee's inquiry focus on the significant practical difficulties
of achieving recruitment and retention targets. I hope the committee
will also consider the ethical questions involved, which are not
only important in their own right but also have implications for
the forces' recruitment and retention goals.
3. The Informed Choice report shows
that new forces recruits assume legal obligations, accept risks
and face ethical challenges that are unfamiliar in civilian careers.
The report asserts that the state has a duty of care to potential
recruits that is not fulfilled as it should be: many recruits
and their parents are not made aware of the risks, difficulties
and legal obligations before enlistment, for example.
4. Most forces personnel report being satisfied
with their careers (although satisfaction rates are not as high
as in civilian life—see Informed Choice, pp.85-87).
Dissatisfied personnel comprise approximately 17% of soldiers,
21% of airmen/women and 22% of navy ratings, according to the
most recently published MoD Continuous Attitude Surveys (late
2006). The debilitating effects of job dissatisfaction are compounded
by the legal obligations that debar personnel from leaving for
four years or more from the date they enlisted. Informed Choice
concludes that this long minimum term of service is the most serious
ethical deficiency in armed forces recruitment and retention policy;
it amounts to the forcible retention of personnel and would be
unlawful in any other career.
5. Besides its ethical shortcomings, the
minimum term of service may also be counter-productive. This is
for two reasons. First, the minimum term may put off many good,
potential recruits from enlisting. At the least, they may wonder
why restrictive terms of service are necessary for a career that
recruitment literature describes as uniquely rewarding. Second,
forcibly retained, dissatisfied recruits may adversely affect
morale and operational effectiveness while they wait to leave
(the most recent MoD continuous attitude surveys found that 21%
of soldiers and 24% of navy ratings wanted to leave; no equivalent
data are available for the air force). Your predecessor committee's
Duty of Care report of 2005 agreed, criticising recruits'
legal obligations as "unnecessarily restrictive" and
"counter productive". (Duty of Care, pp.53, 54).
6. Besides the restrictive terms of service,
Informed Choice identified four further ethical deficiencies
in armed forces recruitment practice in the UK, any one of which
amounts to negligence in the state's duty of care to potential
recruits. Recruitment literature and the application process:
a. largely fail to inform potential recruits
of the serious personal risks that are peculiar to a forces career;
b. often fail to explain clearly to potential
recruits the complex terms of service, and fail to inform recruits
of certain further rights, privileges and restrictions, including
the right of conscientious objection to military service, the
privilege of discretionary discharge for under-18s, and the restrictions
of civil liberties entailed in military law.
c. depend on large numbers of the socially
and economically vulnerable joining as a last resort; and
d. capitalise on the impressionability of
adolescents in order to attract large numbers of minors to a forces
career, especially in the army.
7. In its 2005 Duty of Care report
(p.40), your predecessor committee called on the MoD to improve
information for potential recruits to ensure that they are aware
of the commitment required of them. The MoD accepted this in its
formal response (p.4) but no significant changes appear to have
been made. For example, the Infantry Soldier brochure does
not mention the terms of service at all and nowhere in any army
recruitment literature (as of 2007) are the terms of service properly
spelt out. The literature's occasional, partial explanations of
the terms of service often include inaccuracies (detailed in Informed
Choice pp.36-37, 52-55). The Notice Paper for the army sets
out the terms of service in more detail but this is not given
to recruits until late in the recruitment process and is extremely
complicated and difficult to understand.
8. Forces recruitment literature describes
itself as briefing potential recruits about what life in the forces
is really like. The Infantry Soldier brochure, for example,
"[tries] to give you as much information as possible on a
career in the Infantry...". However, army recruitment literature:
does not describe military operations realistically; avoids the
words "risk" and "kill"; does not warn of
the step-change from civilian life to the military training regime;
and does not explain the difficulties of forces life such as long
periods of separation from family and friends. This finding is
supported by the Adult Learning Inspectorate's reviews of all
forces training establishments in 2005 and 2007, which found that
recruitment materials "sometimes mislead" and do not
portray forces life accurately (see Adult Learning Inspectorate,
Safer Training (2005) and Better Training (2007)
reports). Recruiters are understandably concerned that information
about the "down-sides" of a forces career could put
young people off enlisting. However, if this information were
included in the briefing materials, the forces would recruit better-prepared
personnel, while those unsuitable for a forces career would not
join (only to leave during training or find themselves forcibly
retained by their obligations). This change could benefit recruitment
and retention targets, better protect the moral rights of potential
recruits, and build public trust in the recruitment process.
9. Data obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act show that the army discharged 2,775 soldiers (non-officers)
for "Service No Longer Required" (SNLR) in 2006; this
means that more soldiers are being discharged for SNLR than are
being recruited at age 16 (2,005 16-year-old soldier recruits
in the same year). In 2006, the navy and air force each discharged
only 75 non-officer personnel for SNLR. Officers in Army Recruiting
Group explained to me that the army discharges personnel who do
not progress up the ranks because personnel in their thirties
are deemed unfit for front-line service (eg as an infantry rifleman).
Senior officers in the MoD contradicted this, claiming that the
large SNLR figure is due to the many types of discharge that SNLR
includes (eg discharge for drug abuse, discretionary discharge
etc.). The MoD's reasoning does not explain why similar numbers
are not discharged from the navy and air force, however. It seems
possible that fit and motivated soldiers are being forcibly and
needlessly discharged from the army. This would evidently be detrimental
to retention targets, add pressure to recruiters, and put personnel
at unnecessary risk of job insecurity.
10. The UK's ratification of the Optional
Protocol (OP) to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on
the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict has significantly
improved protection for minors entering a forces career; however,
recruitment of under-18s continues to put minors at risk. The
policy is at odds with the national age of majority, and notably
at odds with minimum recruitment ages for the police, ambulance
and fire services (all set at 18 years). Minors recruited into
the armed forces accept far-reaching legal obligations and face
significant ethical choices while deemed by the state to be insufficiently
mature as persons to vote, consume alcohol or nicotine, sign a
contract or watch adult films. The armed forces' dependence on
under-18 recruitment cuts against the grain of a growing international
consensus that minors should not be recruited into the armed forces.
This emerging consensus is reflected in the general EU trend of
increasing the minimum age of recruitment to 17 and 18 and phasing
out conscription; the UK is the only EU state to recruit 16 year-olds.
Army recruiters have told me that they usually do not meet or
phone the parents of applicants to the armed forces, often because
applicants do not want their parents involved; it is difficult
to see how parents who sign their child's consent form but do
not meet with recruiters can be granting consent that is properly
informed of the nature of military service and its legal obligations.
The Informed Choice report notes your predecessor committee's
recommendation to the MoD, made in the Duty of Care report,
to "examine the potential impact of raising the recruitment
age for all three Services to 18" (Duty of Care, p.7).
In its formal response (p.1), the MoD claimed that this was not
a practical option but it had not apparently conducted a study
to support this position. The Informed Choice report indicates
that the sustainable, phasing-out of under-18 recruitment may
be possible and suggests how it might be achieved (see pp.25-26),
beginning with measures to phase out 16-year old recruitment.
The report recommends that the MoD or a body such as the National
Audit Office conduct a full feasibility study into this in accordance
with Duty of Care's recommendation.
11. Finally, Informed Choice proposes
a new Armed Forces Recruitment Charter, which would set out recruiters'
responsibilities to potential recruits (eg to give honest and
balanced information about forces careers; to attempt to involve
parents directly in the recruitment process where possible etc.).
This would codify best practice; it would improve public trust
in the recruitment process, thereby benefiting recruitment; it
would better protect the position of potential recruits; it would
help to ensure that new recruits were as aware as possible of
the nature of a forces career and so reduce early drop-outs; and
it would help to enhance the accountability of recruiters and
the forces' recruitment organisations. Minister for the Armed
Forces Bob Ainsworth MP, as well as senior officers in the MoD,
have indicated an interest in this proposal.
6 May 2008
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