Examination of Witnesses (Questions 41-59)
MS LIZ
SHELDON, MRS
DAWN MCCAFFERTY
AND MS
JULIE MCCARTHY
25 MARCH 2008
Q41 Chairman: Thank you very much for
coming. Now, we have the Families' Federations and SSAFA and I
know that the naval representative is unable to be here, but has
spoken to you, so you will be able to represent that aspect as
well. Could I ask you please to introduce yourselves and to say
what your responsibilities are.
Mrs McCafferty: I am Dawn McCafferty.
I am Chairman of the RAF Families' Federation which was established
in about November last year. Prior to that, I served in the Royal
Air Force for 23 years, my husband is currently serving in the
Service, and my last job in the RAF was Head of Recruiting, so
quite a topical subject for us to come and contribute evidence
to. Obviously, my aim today is to represent RAF families and their
concerns about issues that impact on retention of the Serviceperson.
Ms McCarthy: My name is Julie
McCarthy and I am Chief Executive of the Army Families' Federation
and I have been an Army wife for 14 years, so can speak again
from the heart about how families affect retention.
Ms Sheldon: I am Liz Sheldon,
Director of Service Support for SSAFA Forces Help. My remit is
to look after, and support, our community volunteers who worldwide
support the serving community. My background is that I was married
to an infantryman for 25 years and I ran the Army Families' Federation
about eight years ago, so I have a lot of experience of what the
practicalities are in the serving community.
Q42 Chairman: Can I begin with welfare
support. There was a recent report, 2006 I think, that 28% of
those leaving the Services said that the quality of welfare support
was one of the factors in their decision to leave. Does that reflect
your experience as well?
Ms Sheldon: Yes, it is our experience
that many people find it difficult sometimes to access welfare
support, particularly if it is of a uniformed source. We have
a confidential support line which we provide under contracts to
the MoD and many of our contacts voice their concerns about actually
contacting the system direct; they find it not so easy and they
just feel they have more confidence going into an external agency
which is independent of the chain of command.
Ms McCarthy: I think there have
been improvements recently. The Operational Welfare Package, which
came in recently that the three Services all use while a unit
is away on deployment, has made a huge impact, especially for
the work of the Unit Welfare Officer, and, I think, from a uniformed
point of view, that has improved the service that they are able
to provide. If we could see that when units are not on deployment
and are still under a lot of pressure with training and on courses
and doing the stuff in between, I think that would make an enormous
amount of difference to families certainly.
Mrs McCafferty: I think the difficulty
for families is that there is an awful lot of stuff out there
for them to call upon, but it is actually finding access to it,
understanding where to go, particularly if you have just joined
the military family, say, you have just married and your partner
has now been deployed and you are left behind perhaps with a young
baby, and knowing where to go to for that welfare support can
be quite challenging. Actually, we try through the Federations
and through SSAFA to provide routes to signpost people to the
best welfare facilities that are available for them. There is
a lot there, but it is just making sure that people know how to
access it correctly.
Q43 Mr Holloway: Can you give us
some examples of the sort of things that happen to these people
that are behind this statistic?
Ms McCarthy: Behind them not being
able to get the welfare support?
Q44 Mr Holloway: Behind people expressing
this as a factor for the reason that people would leave. Could
you give some examples of the sort of things that happen?
Ms McCarthy: I think frequently
it is where there are marriage difficulties, where there are relationship
difficulties, and I think it comes back again to Liz's point;
it is getting help, especially if you are overseas, so your access
to things like Relate. Actually, having the family support network
is a huge thing, I think, which is often underestimated, that
the majority of families that are within the Forces and are following
the Forces, they are away from the traditional support network
of their family, so they will look on the Service that they are
with to provide that, and I think in times of difficulty in marriage
or when you are having a child, that is all swept up in that and
it can be very, very difficult then, I think, to not have it to
fall back on. Of course, then it is somebody in uniform, so it
is knowing, as we said, and being able to get hold of, somebody
and overseas it is very, very difficult. I think there are long
waiting lists for things like Relate and there are not the possibilities
of going outside of the Service because you are in that community
and, unless you speak German or unless you speak Greek, you are
in trouble if you are in Germany or Cyprus. I think that would
be one of the major points. Also, if you are abroad and a close
member of your family is ill, at that time getting the support
you feel you may need to get back to see your close family member
who is ill or dying can be very, very difficult. I think that
is a huge amount and it is often the influence of the external
family, the family at home, that is when that welfare support
will have let them down.
Mrs McCafferty: I think the welfare
umbrella as well covers an awful lot in that people maybe are
citing that on their exit surveys, but it actually covers things
like the education of their children, support when they are moving
house, trying to find a new home, financial problems. There is
an awful lot there underneath that term "welfare" and
how they have characterised their reason for leaving as "lack
of welfare provision".
Ms Sheldon: Picking up on Julie's
point about the Operational Welfare Package, yes, I am sure that
has made massive improvements, but I have heard professionals
and I have had professionals say to me that, once the operations
have come to an end and the package also comes to an end, the
problems still continue. In fact, very often mental health issues
which have started off during an operation deployment may still
be simmering way below the surface, so in fact problems are sort
of swept up and they do not come to an end when the deployment
ends and actually those are still sort of bubbling away and need
to be identified and supported. Let me give you an example actually
of a situation I came across in Germany last week. I picked up
that IV Brigade, which is closing in Osnabruck as the base is
closing down at Osnabruck, is moving back to Catterick. The brigade
will have been on operational tour in Iraq for six months and
they will have three weeks when they get back literally to pack
up and move over to Catterick, so they will lose their post-tour
leave and, during that time, the families have gone through all
sorts of strains and stresses, as will the servicemen, and they
have got this on top of all the strains and stresses associated
with a really big move to Catterick. That, to me, symptomises
where welfare support really is failing, it is failing the families.
Q45 Chairman: So those are some of
the problems.
Ms Sheldon: Some of the problems.
Q46 Chairman: What are some of the
solutions? How do we improve welfare support and obviously try
to avoid a decision like that?
Mrs McCafferty: For example, we
have talked about Relate and the Royal Air Force is working at
the moment on a trial with the RAF Benevolent Fund to provide
Relate at unit level, but it is only a trial and I am sure it
is quite restricted. I do not know exactly how much money is being
spent on doing this, but it is that sort of resourcing, if that
could be delivered to all military units as a given, that it will
be on your unit, it will be funded. You could take all sorts of
examples of community support projects that actually many of the
wives and partners initiate because they recognise the need and
they will create self-help groups, but actually providing support
to that sort of activity would, I think, help an awful lot.
Ms McCarthy: I think that there
is a lot within the Army unit about stability that perhaps things
like super-garrisons in the next 20 or 30 years will give, and
I think with some of that, if we do see that stability, for those
elements of the Armed Forces that are stable, there will be a
number of the welfare issues which will resolve themselves, if
you like, because people will integrate within the community and
it will be a little bit easier and you have not got the moving
every two years. For those still moving, I think there needs to
be still a very comprehensive welfare package. There are a number
of small units who do not have unit welfare officers, who do not
have people who are single-hatted in that role and who are not
given the resources that they need and the proper training, more
importantly. It is training not just for the unit welfare officers,
but for their whole office to know how to deal with the myriad
things that they get coming through their door.
Ms Sheldon: I would like to comment
on this and actually I would like to pick up on the comment by
Hew Strachan which is that actually the MoD do not have the capacity
really to handle many of the welfare issues that come to their
door, and really what they need is to have a welfare support infrastructure
which provides seamless support to families wherever they go and
servicemen and which also embraces the wider family. We are getting
many, many parents now contacting us because they just feel completely
out of the loop and they are parents of many of the younger recruits
that people are concerned about. The issue is that at the moment
we have got three Services which operate their personal welfare
support differently. At the moment, this is accepted by MoD under
the Armed Forces' personnel overarching strategy, for good reasons,
I am sure, but it means that there is not a continuity, there
is not a sort of streamlined approach to handling welfare issues
and, when you have got people moving in and out of joint operations,
back-filling between different units, it actually can bring an
incredible hardship and an inconsistency sometimes in the way
in which rules are applied.
Mrs McCafferty: We had an example
of that recently where we had an RAF family where the individual
was deployed overseas, but on a joint unit, and, therefore, actually
the lead for welfare was Army which is a very different system
from the way the Royal Air Force do things when people are deployed,
and the family were expecting the same provision as an RAF unit
and it was not delivered. They felt very isolated, very left out
and in fact contacted us for help and advice and we had to then
go and investigate and find out. Actually, it was not that the
Army were not providing, it is just that they did it in a different
way which was not necessarily conducive to what the RAF family
felt they needed and were used to because, as Liz said, the three
Services have a different welfare support system.
Chairman: We will come on to that later
on because it may well be a real issue.
Q47 Robert Key: I specifically wanted
to explore this a little bit further. What is your relationship
with the Army Welfare Service and the other welfare services because,
in my experience, whenever budgets have been tight, the first
to go is the Army Welfare Service which puts more of a burden
on to you and very often, if you are not in the right place at
the right time, there is not an adequate Welfare Service Officer
or team to back up problems, crises, families and issues?
Ms McCarthy: I think one of the
major issues that particularly the Army Welfare Service have at
the moment is recruitment and recruiting the right people at the
right time. I think they have seen, especially with the operational
commitments of the Army, an increase in their budget to allow
them to expand what they are doing. We do have a very good relationship
with the Welfare Service and we do signpost them frequently and
I think probably a role that the Families' Federations have particularly
is that, although people come to us because they are not sure
they want somebody outside of the uniformed circle, I think SSAFA
are probably the people who then pick up if there are shortfalls.
Ms Sheldon: Yes, we provide secondary
personal support and welfare support in the UK to the Army Welfare
Service and we provide professional social workers who provide
that sort of back-up where the Army Welfare Service does not have
that sort of expertise. Our experience is that actually some of
the Army welfare support is very good, some of it is quite patchy,
and I think it really depends on who they have been able to recruit
and also how speedily they are able to put people in place. We
saw this actually at Birmingham about a year ago when the welfare
support there was very, very tight and I know that the Army Welfare
Service was very pushed to get people into the hospital quickly.
Q48 Robert Key: Directly following
on from this, Wiltshire County Council Social Services spend about
£½ million a year supporting Army families in the community.
That is the third pillar, is it not? It is yourselves, the welfare
services and the county council or local authority social services.
How do you interact with the local authority social services?
Mrs McCafferty: In the RAF, we
would do it through SSAFA because we have a contract with SSAFA,
I say "we", the RAF has a contract with SSAFA to provide
that professional expertise and they would be our gateway because,
in the Federation, there are only six of us and none of us is
qualified in social work and we do not necessarily understand
those structures, so we would signpost towards SSAFA and they
would then open the doors to find provision. The other route I
can take is that, because we are part of the Royal Air Force Association,
I can also tap into the RAFA network for support if I need that.
Q49 Robert Key: But your professional
social workers whom you employ, how do they interact with the
county?
Ms Sheldon: Well, they would link
in with, and defer to, the social local authority, as appropriate,
and yes, they have links and they work very closely with them.
Mrs McCafferty: The RAF also has
Community Development Workers and they are professionally qualified
and their remit is to go out and liaise with local authorities
to talk about provision of service to the local community.
Q50 Mr Jenkin: It may be easier perhaps
if one of you, or jointly, could prepare us a note that explains
this because there is quite a large number of Service charities
that support Armed Services personnel. How do you all fit together
and how do you dovetail with the Government and how does it actually
work? I think it would be useful to have your perspective on that.
Ms Sheldon: Well, the Federation
of British Service Charities, COBSEO, is supposed to be the co-ordinating
mechanism for all 120, I think at last count, Service charities.
Within MoD, at the centre, in SPPoL, there is a staff officer
whose role it is to co-ordinate charitable activity to link in
with MoD priorities, but that is an area which needs a lot of
work, and they also tie in with COBSEO. Therefore, we try as best
as possible to share it or to share information within that sort
of mechanism, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
Q51 Mr Jenkin: Do you work better
with each other than you do with the Government, bluntly?
Mrs McCafferty: Yes.
Ms McCarthy: Yes.
Ms Sheldon: Yes, we do.
Q52 Mr Jenkin: Are there areas which
you are undertaking as charities which you feel the Government
should be doing, and can you briefly describe what those areas
would be?
Ms McCarthy: From my point of
view as a Families' Federation, I think we see ourselves sort
of independent and this is not something that the Government could
do. We are there to lobby the Government or the MoD and say, "What
the MoD are doing is disadvantaging families", and I think
we come from that very sort of special point, and I think Kim
would say the same for the Naval Families' Federation as well.
Mrs McCafferty: I think we all
value the independence. Although I am funded through an RAF budget,
we are independent of the chain of command, hence I can send my
evidence to you at the push of a button and nobody checks it before
it comes. When I was in the RAF, it would have gone through about
six layers of staffing before it got anywhere close to you, so
it is the independence, and that is what the families feel, that
they can come to us about issues of concern to them and they know
that we can talk direct on their behalf, so it is not necessarily
providing a charitable service. I think perhaps SSAFA would be
different, but the three Families' Federations have a unique role.
You talked earlier about an Armed Forces' Federation and we believe
we take that role from a families' perspective; we represent the
families independently.
Ms McCarthy: There are areas,
I believe, that the Government should be stepping up, such as
mental health, if you look at what combat stress is doing particularly,
and things like that, but perhaps more in our veteran community
I think there is much more that they could be doing there. In
terms of the Service community, picking up on Robert's point about
what Wiltshire County Council do, I think there are a lot of local
authorities who very much think, "Well, that's Army families
and that's all RAF families, the Forces, so that would be dealt
with by the Forces", and they sort of perhaps back away from
their responsibilities and what they should be doing.
Ms Sheldon: SSAFA comes from a
very different angle because our remit is to relieve need, suffering
and distress where the public funding is not able to do so and
to move quickly. As an example, we have set up Norton House in
Ashtead so that families can stay when wounded patients are having
treatment at Headley Court.
Q53 Mr Jenkin: Is that not an example
of something that, in an ideal world, the Government would be
paying for?
Ms Sheldon: I think we would all
agree that ideally that would be the case, but you then hope that
by what you do in showing where there is a need and where perhaps
people should think about changing policy, then hopefully that
will bring about change, but it is not our job in SSAFA to bring
about the change in policy. We can only hope that the Families'
Federations can raise those issues and, in the meantime, until
policy can be changed, which can take ages, then we will help
the Service community.
Q54 Mr Jenkin: But the very fact
of your being there, does that not actually discourage the Government
from taking on these additional responsibilities because, "Oh,
we can put that on to the charities; they'll do that"?
Mrs McCafferty: I think the charities
are becoming quite robust in terms of drawing a line and actually
saying, "No, that isn't our business". They have to
be because they have got limited resources as well and the charities
themselves have got to raise funds.
Ms Sheldon: This is a very, very
low-key example. One of our volunteer networks was approached
in the south of England for funding to help repaint accommodation,
servicemen's accommodation. Now, that is where we definitely drew
the line and said, "No, this is a public funding issue. Sure,
it is not very nice when you come back from deployment and your
barrack block looks pretty ropy, but I'm afraid that is not what
our charitable funding is all about", so we were pretty clear.
Q55 Mr Crausby: You make quite an
important point about lobbying. Do you see yourselves as lobbying
organisations in the absence of your partners not being able to
lobby? Do you see that as a substitute or do you see yourselves
as organisations that should provide support to Service personnel?
Mrs McCafferty: I think both.
Yes, we have been established to represent the families' perspective,
and that includes the Service person who is a part of the family,
which is quite a cultural change for the RAF. It used to just
be the dependants and the partners, but, since the set-up of our
new Federation, we represent the serving family member too, as
long as what we are representing is a family-related issue, and
that is quite broad. If you think about it, most things have a
tenuous link to family whether they are to do with parents or
siblings or children and dependants, so yes, we are there to represent
their concerns, and that is one of the reasons that we are here
today, but also to support them. When the families come to us
and they have a problem, they have an issue, not only do we capture
the evidence and put that into a report, but actually we then
try and find a way to help them resolve that issue, and that might
be turning to the Royal Air Force, in my case, talking to the
RAF Community Support staff, to the policy staff, or it might
be going externally to SSAFA or to the Royal Air Force Association,
and it is for us to determine how best to support that individual
and that family, so we do both. We are not just a lobby group
and I would not want to characterise us as that because we are
doing an awful lot of fairly low-level, but very important, welfare
support.
Q56 Mr Holloway: Just to go back
to Liz's comment about the accommodation at Headley Court, surely
it is not a big deal that the charities are doing these things
because they probably do it better than anybody else could, but
surely it is a question of, when they do it, whether or not they
get cash from the Government for things that the Government ought
to be funding. In the Headley Court case, has there been a struggle
to get cash?
Ms Sheldon: Well, we would hope
very much that MoD might, in time, assist us with some funding
towards running costs, but, in the meantime, we are raising funds
to cover these through fund-raising and other charitable expenditure.
Q57 Mr Holloway: But most people
would probably think that that was a pretty reasonable thing for
taxpayers' money to be spent on.
Ms Sheldon: Yes, I would agree
with that.
Chairman: We are now moving on to Reserves
because you heard either Professor Strachan or Professor Dandeker
say that Reserves were very important to the Armed Forces.
Q58 Richard Younger-Ross: The National
Audit Office found that many Reservists cite personal, family
and employment pressures as well as inadequate support as reasons
for leaving the Armed Forces, and I think SSAFA's own submission
notes that the families of the Territorial Army and Reservists
have similar welfare concerns. What more can be done and what
more needs to be done to support Reservists?
Ms Sheldon: I think it is very
difficult to reach people within the communities where they are
based. I gave the reasons before that, from SSAFA's perspective,
we have a network of volunteers across the UK who could be deployed
to provide low-level befriending support for families because
very often people are coming to terms with an experience which
is supportive within the serving community and they do not have
a network of people going through a similar experience of anxiety
and loneliness which they will be doing on their own, so sometimes
all it needs is actually a friendly face to call upon and say,
"Hey, I'm feeling really lonely. Can you pop round? I am
really anxious and I haven't heard from my son for a few weeks
and I just hope he's okay". It is sometimes just helpful
to have that reassuring contact and it is really, I think, having
a mechanism to put these people in touch, not just with us, but
also with other organisations that provide support as well which
can just help to sustain people through a very difficult period.
Ms McCarthy: The biggest problem
is the footprint of the units at this sort of level because you
may have for a TA unit families all over England and Scotland
and that is their biggest issue, that the ROSO, the Regional Operational
Support Officer, does not have the resources probably—we
are back again to resources—to be able to contact. Certainly
we have found when we speak to some of the TA families, we have
a specialist who works with TA Reserve Forces, and one of the
biggest things actually is communication from the soldiers themselves
as well. The Regular Forces have a lot more influence on their
soldiers, shall we say, to be able to get them to take information
home which I do not think the TA have. Something that we are working
on is the Family Support Groups which we are presenting on Saturday
to the Future Reservists Conference which is actually trying to
empower the units themselves to start collecting this information
and, as Liz said, just to put people in touch. I do not think
it is something particularly that the chain of command can do;
it is a wife wanting to talk to a wife or a sister to talk to
somebody who knows what they are going through. It is very much
having somebody that you can just pick up the phone to, and the
hope that they will have somebody close is not necessarily a realistic
one for TA families, but at least, if we can put somebody at the
end of a phone, at the end of an email, I think that is one of
the key things. I think what we need from the MoD side is the
facilitation of that and help with that to make things like Army.net
much more accessible to our TA families. It is quite difficult
for the Regular families to access, so the TA families probably
find it very, very difficult.
Mrs McCafferty: I would echo what
has been said. I think there is a smaller percentage of reservists
serving with the RAF, but they are a uniquely difficult group
to reach and you have to assume that the partners and the families
do not actually understand anything about the military lifestyle
because they have not chosen to volunteer at the weekends and
become a Royal Auxiliary Air Force Officer and disappear off and
do exciting things, but they are just carrying on with their normal
lives. It is only when their partner is deployed or there is an
issue where they need support, suddenly they do not know who to
turn to and, as I say, it is facilitating information to them,
a welfare package that they can tap into when they need it, but
also respecting the fact that they do not necessarily want it
forced down their throats. There has to be a respect for the fact
that they are in their own community and we need to be there when
they need us, but not necessarily be constantly inviting them
or sending them lots of information. If you are in the Regular
cadre and you are on the patch, you can have families' briefings,
you can have pre-deployment briefings, the families are brought
together, you can tell them what is going on and it is far more
effective than relying on the soldier or the airman to take that
information home because they just do not, they just do not tell
them what is going on. The Reservists are another level removed
from us and, as Julie said, they could be at the other end of
the country from the parent unit to which that Service person
has been deployed.
Chairman: Talking about the patch, let
us move on to the role of families in general.
Q59 Mr Holloway: It seems that a
lot of the dissatisfaction is as a result of disruption. Could
you give us a flavour of the sort of disruption that families
suffer, maybe some specific examples?
Mrs McCafferty: For a large number
of RAF personnel, every 18 months to two years you are going to
be posted on, not necessarily to an area of choice. When you move,
you have to make a decision whether to leave your family behind
and then live unaccompanied, living in a mess or a barrack block,
or you take the family with you. Depending on that family dynamic,
you have possibly got a wife or partner who wants to follow her
own career and now cannot find work, you have got access to dentists,
access to doctors, access to accommodation, you may find that
the quarters are not in very good condition where you are going,
you may want to buy your own home and find that that is very difficult,
you may have special needs for your children and getting access
to that can be very problematic if, every two years or so, you
are changing location. It goes right the way across a whole raft
of things that we touched on in the written evidence that we sent,
that mobility and the lack of stability that Julie mentioned earlier,
it pervades everything in your family lifestyle.
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