Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MS LIZ
SHELDON, MRS
DAWN MCCAFFERTY
AND MS
JULIE MCCARTHY
25 MARCH 2008
Q60 Mr Holloway: Can you give some
specific examples?
Ms McCarthy: Some of the quotes
that we have had from the research that we did when we knew we
were coming to do this is one where they said it was better to
start with, but, when faced with a late posting and all the uncertainty
that goes with moving to somewhere where there is no Army housing
and all the nonsense that that brings with it or, much worse,
also being posted to a TA unit, there is no support, so it is
the out-of-normal ones. My son is eight years old and he is on
his fourth school and that is a major issue that most families
find.
Mrs McCafferty: My daughter attended
three schools in three terms when she was four and five and all
she wanted to know was, "What colour's the uniform, mum?"
She just could not understand that it was a new school and a completely
new location. It is just timing, but the disruption to children's
schooling is massive. Most people do try and take their primary
schoolchildren with them and it is only really when it gets to
the 11-year-olds that the big decisions are made about whether
or not to buy a house and stabilise or take the boarding school
option potentially, if you can afford that. You have got lots
of primary school-kids who are literally being picked up mid-term
and moved for a couple of years and then on. My little boy is
in a primary school at RAF Cranwell at the moment which is about
80% RAF children based there and he is consistently coming home
and telling me that his best friend is "posted", "But
he'll be back next year, mum", and their parents are going
off, doing a training course for a year and then they are coming
back, and the disruption is massive to children.
Q61 Mr Holloway: So what sort of
things could we be doing in order to aid retention in these extraordinary
circumstances?
Mrs McCafferty: Extend tours,
I think. Tour lengths could be longer certainly for the officer
cadre (since these are the ones who currently move most frequently).
Q62 Mr Holloway: What else?
Ms McCarthy: I think looking at
the Work of Service Personnel Command Paper, in terms of education,
some of the changes that are made sort of applying for children
to school. For most people, you need to apply in the March for
your child to enter school in September. It is not a realistic
expectation. Most Army families do not know where they are going
until about six weeks before, by which point the school that you
may want your child to go to—we moved recently and my nearest
school was five miles away and I was very, very lucky that a child
dropped out at the last minute, another Army family dropped out
because of a late posting and I got my child into the nearest
school, but potentially I was driving five miles.
Q63 Chairman: We covered a lot of
this extremely important issue in our Educating Service Children
Report last year and we had some wonderful evidence from some
of the children themselves. What are some of the non-education
issues that you would highlight?
Mrs McCafferty: Continuity of
or access to careers or jobs for partners and spouses. Again,
if they want to stay co-located with their partner, they are faced
with giving up that job. In the old days, say, ten or 15 years
ago, if you were perhaps a nurse, a midwife or a teacher, you
were perhaps expected to be able to transfer jobs reasonably easily,
or with a big bank you might be able to transfer, but these transfers
do not happen so easily nowadays and there are a lot of partners
coming to us, saying, "For his career, I have sacrificed
mine". That is one of the quotes that came out of our AFPRB
work—"I cannot have my own career". We are also
finding evidence now of senior officers and senior NCOs who are
effectively leaving the RAF to say, "It is now my partner's
turn to have her career because she's followed me for 20 years
and it's now her turn", and the wives, many of them, are
earning more than their partners anyway and it is time for them
to stabilise and let them have a career.
Q64 Mr Holloway: Going forward from
here then, do you think that these sorts of minor horror stories,
although very big for the families in question, will have an effect
on recruiting?
Mrs McCafferty: I think, as I
said in my evidence, anything that is bad news in the media in
terms of families, whether it is accommodation or it is Deepcut
or it is alleged bullying, anything like that is going to have
an impact, not necessarily on the youngsters who are thinking
about joining up, but on the gatekeepers. When I was in the Service,
heading recruiting, it was about three years ago, 40-odd per cent
of parents would not encourage their children to join the Armed
Forces. That is a massive percentage. That cuts out an awful lot
of potential children who might come to join the Armed Forces.
Ms Sheldon: I think parents are
playing an increasingly major part and the wider extended family
are playing a major part in whether or not they encourage their
children to stay or even join the Services. If you think about
some of the parents of people who are being seriously injured
on operations and their reactions to how well they have been supported
or not which have hit the headlines, I think those will have a
knock-on effect on other members of the community. I would also
just like to pick up again on the previous discussion about the
profile of the military in terms of recruiting, our presence in
the schools and universities. I think the issue that all the Service
community has is actually increasingly now seen as very sort of
completely separate and almost divorced from the rest of society,
so access to education and to healthcare for them is not really
recognised because actually most people think, "Well, yes,
we've got this access", and the very mobile, highly transient
population, many of whom are under a lot of pressure, is very
small and almost sort of hidden in a way, and I think that is
a real danger if the community is seen to be separate and not
actually fully accepted within the wider society.
Mrs McCafferty: Certainly we have
had evidence from families who say that, if they live out in the
community, and about 45% of the RAF live in quarters and the remainder
live out in their own homes, they do not necessarily feel able
to speak out openly about what their partners do because of that
sense of pride. They have a huge sense of pride in what their
partners are up to, but they do not necessarily feel that that
community around them may share that, so you find that a lot of
them do not actually talk a great deal about the fact that their
partner is deployed in Iraq or is currently a pilot in the Royal
Air Force or an engineer or whatever. I think that is very sad,
that they do not feel able to be proud of what their partners
are doing, but there is a certainly a sense that it is not something
that they would go and shout about to their neighbours and, therefore,
they are very isolated. If things do go wrong and the partner
is injured, they do not feel that in that network, that community,
there is going to be a lot of understanding and sympathy for them
because people just do not understand what they are going through.
Q65 Mr Holloway: That takes me on
slightly. To what extent do you think the attitudes of people's
partners have on people staying? I remember coming back on a Tri-Star
and one of the crew telling me at the reception of the families
of the Tri-Star fleet that "these knackered, old aircraft
are dangerous". The fact that someone's husband or wife,
whatever, might get killed or they felt a particular military
involvement was somehow unjust or illegal, to what extent does
that have an effect on people staying in?
Ms McCarthy: I think it has an
enormous effect, not perhaps so much for our younger soldiers,
but I think definitely for the middle management that we talked
about before, for sergeants, captains and majors. I know that
with most of my peers, the spouse has said, "Do you know,
I've had enough. This is not going forward". There are very
few that would last a separated tour. Most will then try settling
the family and commuting to wherever their posting is and very
few that I know that have done that have actually lasted more
than a couple of tours. Either the family has disintegrated and
they have ended up being divorced or the husband or wife has said,
"This isn't working. I'm leaving the Service", and I
think there is a massive influence on the families.
Mrs McCafferty: I think especially
where the harmony guidelines are being breached routinely, it
is the partners and spouses who are the ones who are saying, "Enough's
enough". The individual very often, the Serviceman, is quite
happy to deploy. He is enjoying it, he is putting his training
to good use and he is getting a great deal of job satisfaction
out of area, but the family are then faced with him coming home,
unpacking his bags and, guess what, he is off again in another
six months or so. Whilst I was serving, I certainly had senior
NCOs come to me and say, "If you give me that deployment
order, ma'am, I'm going to have to go home and face divorce"
because it gets to the stage where the families say, "Enough
is enough". The families are very supportive when they go,
they are very proud of what the guys are doing, but, if you push
it too far, then I think that either, the families break down
and then you are left with all of the baggage that that creates
and all of the welfare support that SSAFA have to pull in to support
that family, or they leave, as a result of an ultimatum from the
partners.
Ms Sheldon: Certainly our statistics
show that there has been a massive increase in marital breakdown,
relationship problems and emotional issues that people are bringing
to us, possibly exacerbated by operational tours, but that is
not to get away from the fact that the constant sorts of stresses
and pressures of Service life on families put those relationships
under enormous stress.
Q66 Linda Gilroy: I think you were
listening to Professor Dandeker and he contrasted the situation
in the UK with the US where he said he felt that more probably
for communities the country was at war in the US than it is here.
How does it feel to you? Are we at war?
Ms McCarthy: That is probably
very difficult for us to answer as we are within the communities
most of the time. I think our reply would probably be yes, but
whether the general public feel that, no, I do not think they
do see that. I think it is something that happens on another continent.
Mrs McCafferty: "It is nothing
to do with us" almost, "just to do with them, those
Armed Forces people".
Chairman: Can we move on to remuneration.
Q67 Mr Crausby: In the face of all
of those issues about welfare and families, it makes me wonder
why anyone stays in at all really, so I suppose the question I
am going to ask is: is it just for the money? It cannot be just
for the money because that is not the feeling that I get when
I talk to members of the Armed Forces and that, whilst the money
is important, it is not just for the money. What impact does the
remuneration package have on someone's decision to stay, or leave,
the Forces?
Ms McCarthy: We have surveyed
468 spouses and not one of them cited money as the reason for
their spouse leaving the Army. It may be a small factor, but I
do not think it would ever be the factor. Similarly, we had a
quote that, "Bad housing may not be the one factor that drives
us out of the Army, but good housing would go a long way to keeping
us in", and I think the same could probably be said for money,
that people do not join the Forces for the fantastic remuneration,
but I think they deserve, and should have, a good remuneration
package and it is not just the basic salary, it is the whole thing
as well, it is the allowances and the housing that goes in with
it.
Mrs McCafferty: We find as well
that the remuneration package has a pull-through factor. If you
are on a pension-earning engagement, that will actually be a retention-positive
factor until you reach the point where you have earned the pension
and then you can walk, so there is an issue about the structure
of the remuneration package as well. I have heard talk as well
amongst many of my colleagues of the "golden handcuffs"
of the boarding school allowance because, if you actually commit
to that, then you are in it for the long haul really because you
cannot afford to do it on your own if you decide to leave, so
I have many friends who have actually stayed in the Services,
not just because that is helping them to afford it, but it is
certainly a factor. As Julie said, finances do not really feature
on our issues database very much at all. There is the odd comment
here or there about the odd allowance, so the boarding school
allowance or the Continuity Education Allowance (Board) which
it is now called, is an issue because there is a view that for
those who are claiming it, the cost has gone beyond what the allowance
is now compensating for, but the actual pay and allowances do
not really feature very highly at all. If you look at the retention-positive
factors in the RAF's report, there is lots of job satisfaction,
responsibility training, opportunities for adventurous training,
lots of reasons to stay. I stayed for 23 years and there were
no reasons why I would have gone any earlier.
Q68 Mr Crausby: Whilst money might
not be important, housing must be an enormously important issue,
especially with the price of housing these days and the way it
is escalating, so the worries that must accompany that as far
as the future is concerned. I see that the Government, in recent
weeks, introduced a sort of shared equity scheme. Now, my experience
of shared equity schemes is that they are usually very complicated,
not very attractive and, quite frankly, not much use, but what
do you feel about them?
Mrs McCafferty: I think the recent
announcement is a very small trial and, as you say, it has a limited
effect. The fact is that the families need to have choice. They
need to have the opportunity to buy into these shared equity and
key worker living programmes where they can, and the more that
the Government can deliver, the better, of those sorts of options.
I think housing is a big issue for serving personnel in terms
of, "When can we afford to buy? Can we afford to buy and
when?" because, when you are trying to determine when you
buy a house, when you stabilise the family, are you going to try
and sell a house every two or three years and keep moving or are
you going to try and stabilise the family and can you afford to
do it.
Ms McCarthy: If you look at the
numbers who have already taken up the share equity scheme, your
answer is in there. I think it is not even 100 in the last few
years. I do not believe that the shared equity solutions answer
the mobility that the Forces still have and I do not think it
is the encouragement that the Forces need to buy their own houses.
We need to be looking more at younger soldiers buying, ready for
when they come out in ten or 20 years' time, which some of our
more sensible element do, whereas others, if you look at the Service's
Cotswold Centre, the number of soldiers, sergeants as well, some
very responsible posts coming out, being there and having nowhere
to go, it is quite scary really.
Mrs McCafferty: Gone are the days
when the gratuity that you got at the end of your service would
actually pay for a house. It will not even cover a deposit now,
so there is a massive difference there and in the last 25 years
it has changed dramatically.
Q69 Mr Crausby: I remember some announcement
being made about extending the right-to-buy to Armed Forces personnel.
It obviously seemed to be a very unfair situation where people
lived in council houses and had the right-to-buy, whereas people
in Army accommodation did not have the right-to-buy. To what extent
has that been developed and how useful would that be?
Mrs McCafferty: We do not own
them, so I do not think that is an option.
Ms McCarthy: Our husbands own
all of the houses, so really I do not think that was an option
for us at all.
Mrs McCafferty: We lease them
from Annington Homes and we cannot buy them. When we do not need
them, we hand them back to Annington.
Ms McCarthy: With the first issues
that Addington did, that a percentage should be offered to Service
personnel, I believe that has now faded. Because Addington have
their percentage back that they were promised by the MoD, there
is no obligation on them to offer any discounts or any priority
to Service families.
Q70 Mr Crausby: So it is effectively
dead in the water then?
Ms McCarthy: Yes.
Q71 Mr Crausby: All of these arguments
about welfare and pay do not matter, but financial incentives
must have some importance. What do you think should be the right
financial incentives to keep people in? I get the impression that
sometimes the Government just stumbles along and puts in money,
but does not really know what will attract people.
Ms Sheldon: I would suggest that
it would be better for the Government to invest in obviously robust
and much better housing, much better accommodation, but also in
their welfare infrastructure, in their personal support, because
the Service is struggling. As both Dawn and Julie have said, particularly
for the Army Welfare Service, they struggle. Once budgets are
tight, they struggle and then they have to turn to charities for
support. We need to have much more cohesive support for all the
families and Service people than we already have and I think that
is where the MoD should be putting its money.
Q72 Linda Gilroy: There are probably
lots of ways in which money could go into Army welfare services,
but, if there was a pot of money, which part of the Service would
you put it into? What would you want to see it spent on?
Ms McCarthy: We have a particular
set-up for unit welfare officers and I know there was a recent
survey done by a serving officer into the training and recruitment
of unit welfare officers and it was not pursued because there
was not the money for the investment into what he was recommending,
and I would like to see, where they have identified things such
as that, that that is developed and that the unit welfare officers
are given the correct amount of funding and resourcing that they
need.
Mrs McCafferty: Similarly, the
RAF have reintroduced what used to be called the "Families
Officer", which delivered a low-level welfare support for
those who lived on the patch and liaised with Defence Estates,
et cetera. They have now introduced Service Community Support
Officers, but only for a limited period, funded by the centre,
and there is going to be a need for more money for those sorts
of posts. If they are successful, we would like to see that sort
of money, delivering people on the ground who can actually talk
to the families and talk to the serving personnel about the issues
that matter to them, and, as Liz said, broader investment right
across the piece would be far better than trying perhaps to look
at individual remuneration packages or financial retention incentives.
I think they (FRIs) work where they are targeted at particular
needs. For example, for shortages in a certain branch or trade,
they work for that particular purpose, but they should not be
seen as a long-term fix. I think the long-term fix is broader
investment into the whole support for the community.
Ms Sheldon: If we are going to
do that, it is actually to look at the needs of the individual
rather than the current emphasis at the moment on what the command
structure requires. This is not to get away from the fact that
this is a duty of care and commanders want to know about the welfare
of their families and their Service people, but I have not actually
ever seen a questionnaire asking people what they feel about the
response they have had from the Unit Welfare Officer or from their
SSAFA social worker, whether their response has been timely, confidential,
whether they felt properly supported. I have not actually seen
it yet, and I might be wrong, but I feel that at the moment, with
the way in which people tend to talk about support welfare, it
is very much command-led rather than thinking about what the individuals
themselves need, and we need to be very much more focused on the
person.
Q73 Chairman: Is that something that
you could be doing yourselves?
Ms Sheldon: As an organisation,
this is something we think about all the time, but, thinking in
terms of the MoD, if they are looking at the way in which they
are going to provide personal support for their community, they
need to be looking at it very much in that way, much more holistically,
rather than sort of top-down.
Q74 Mr Crausby: The RAF Families'
Federation, in their submission, noted that the introduction of
the JPA had removed staff who knew the rules and regulations,
and that was supported by a report commissioned by the MoD, saying
that the JPA had removed many clerks from the front-line who could
help them understand rules and regulations pertaining to RAF service.
The JPA was designed to provide personnel with a simpler system.
Has it and, if not, why not?
Mrs McCafferty: It was designed
to allow a greater self-service so that individuals could actually
access computers and actually update their own leave entitlement
or submit their travel claims without having to go through layers
of bureaucracy. The assumption was that that would then remove
the need for clerks at the front-line who used to do that work.
It has removed a lot of the routine, and very dull, administrative
work that needed to be done by clerks, but what it has removed
as well is the experienced levels of the people who understood
the more specialist requirements for things like allowances, so
you now no longer have a specialist in allowances working in a
general office that you could go to, either as a partner or as
a serving person, and ask them to explain what their entitlements
were and how to apply for things. When I was serving, I had a
general office of 30/40 people working for me with a chief clerk
and we were constantly being visited by serving people and their
partners looking for advice on things about postings, things about
promotion, and you go in there now and the general offices are
denuded of staff and there is hardly anyone there. It is quite
frightening, only 20 years on, to see how few people are there
and, instead, you supposedly have these terminals where people
go and do a lot of the research themselves, but not all of them
have access to JPA terminals. I have certainly heard evidence
of serving personnel not now claiming the allowances that they
are entitled to because either they do not know how to do it because
the training package was delivered on the system with very limited
actual proper training for people to use it, or they are frightened
about being audited on it and making genuine mistakes and getting
caught out for being dishonest because the system is so complicated
apparently. I have not used JPA, I left just before it launched,
thank goodness, but we are certainly hearing tales of JPA being
a very complicated system. I think there are lots of fixes being
done. I think there is lots and lots of work going on to try and
make JPA the slick system it was intended to be, but, because
the RAF bought it off the shelf, well, the Army, Air Force and
Navy all bought into the same system, we had to adapt our personnel
processes to fit this off-the-shelf system instead of having something
designed to reflect our existing processes. My comment in the
actual evidence was as well about removing people, for example,
from the postings process where in the past you would have had
several people working in an office, looking at postings for people,
or assignments, as they are now called, and basically having that
human interface with somebody and, before you actually pressed
the button to say you are posted from A to B, there would be somebody
perhaps talking to the warrant officer or the sergeant to find
out what the impact might be on that individual, asking questions
such as "Has anything changed recently?" They do not
have the manpower to do that now, so, more and more, people feel
they are being posted and promoted by computer. They are not.
There are still people there doing the work, but there are fewer
of them hence it is very difficult for people to feel there is
a human being actually managing their careers anymore.
Q75 Mr Holloway: Is it fair to say
that this is putting a huge burden on particularly young officers
in actually doing the work of the clerks?
Mrs McCafferty: Not only that
because you are not only line-managing the Service personnel,
but you are line-managing the civil servants because, at the same
time, the Civil Service moved to, I think it is called, HRMS which
is their equivalent to JPA and you are having to do an awful lot
more management at a junior officer level and senior officer level
of your civil servant staff, whereas in the past you had on your
base a civil servant specialist and, if there were any Civil Service
employment policy issues, you went to the Civilian Admin Officer
(CivAdO) and the CivAdO was your expert, supported by regional
support staff. They have all been removed from the units now,
they do not exist, so the line managers are having to carry that
burden. When you talk about capacity, in the strategic context,
capacity to run operations concurrently, but actually at the tactical
level, at unit level, the capacity for people to do all this "stuff"
means that welfare and community support for families gets squeezed
out. We do not blame the line managers for that because we recognise
that they are busy, but we do feel that the resources need to
go in to put back what they have already taken out.
Q76 Linda Gilroy: Could that be done
through a helpline, or is there a helpline?
Mrs McCafferty: There is a helpline.
Q77 Linda Gilroy: Is it effective?
Mrs McCafferty: I would not like
to comment; I have never used it.
Ms McCarthy: Phoning up and asking
for a bit of advice is different from somebody knowing someone's
personal circumstances within the unit and being able to say,
"Actually have you thought about, or did you know about ...
?" and I think that is the difference. It is that personal
touch which I think is where families come in as well. It is where
families really need the attention personally and I think that
is what soldiers are now finding with JPA.
Ms Sheldon: We have experienced
a large number of calls actually all related to JPA coming through
to the confidential support line because, at first, people just
did not know where to turn to.
Q78 Linda Gilroy: Is that ongoing?
Is that still a feature?
Ms Sheldon: I think that has started
to drop off, but yes, last year we had a lot of calls initially.
Chairman: Now, terms and conditions of
service.
Q79 Linda Gilroy: In your submission,
Dawn, on Service terms and conditions, you say that, although
the evidence is patchy, there is certainly an emerging theme that
the differences in entitlements between the three Services, exacerbated
in the joint arena, can cause feelings of resentment. I wonder
if you could tell us a bit more about what that is based on.
Mrs McCafferty: For example, when
I was serving before, I was working in the MoD on a project to
harmonise, and simplify, the allowances policy, and we basically
brought together the Army, Air Force and Navy policies and banged
them together to simplify them ready for JPA. I spent a year and
a bit doing that and there were obviously an awful lot of allowances
that have evolved in the individual three Services, and evolved
differently, and they had different entitlements. We bashed them
together and tried to get rid of as many of the differences as
possible, but there was some "tolerable variation" allowed
between the Services. Each Service had to fight its own corner,
but it ended up with some allowances being different between the
Services. Now, that is fine if you are all serving on individual
uniformed stations, but, when you serve together or you are deployed
out of area, those differences can come to the fore and then it
does cause resentment if you happen to be in the cadre that has
got the least entitlements. As I say, it is only very patchy evidence
because we have only been running since November, but we have
had a couple of comments now about where entitlements are different,
where perhaps the Army has, for example, a greater entitlement
to leave between relocation, (which they do not get anyway by
the sound of it!) but there is an entitlement there where, on
paper, the RAF has less. Now, whether it is down to local management
to deliver a better provision, I do not know, but it is those
sorts of things that niggle away. The issue about rank between
the Armed Forces as well comes to the fore in joint arenas where,
for example, you would serve longer to reach warrant officer in
the Royal Air Force than you would in the Army, so you can end
up having a very young Army warrant officer in charge of perhaps
a more senior, and more experienced, sergeant or chief technician
in the Air Force, and that can cause a lot of friction as well
in the joint arena. That is purely because the three Services
have long agreed to have different terms and conditions of service.
They have harmonised, where possible, but they have not yet brought
them into line, so there are differences and, as I say, it just
grates when you are the one, and it is not always the RAF, I am
sure there are examples of where the RAF have a better entitlement
than the Army or the Navy and we have put our feet up and said,
"That's fine by us", but I am sure things could be done
to try and soften the edges of that to take away an irritant,
as perhaps the RAF would call it.
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