Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-299)

MR CHRIS BAKER OBE, REAR ADMIRAL CHARLES MONTGOMERY CBE, MAJOR GENERAL ANDREW GREGORY, AIR VICE MARSHAL SIMON BRYANT CBE, MAJOR GENERAL SIMON LALOR TD AND VICE ADMIRAL PETER WILKINSON CVO

22 APRIL 2008

  Q280  Mr Jenkin: So, it would be a greater sin to be over rather than under-recruited?

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: I did not say that.

  Q281  Mr Jenkin: You did not say that but your Royal Navy colleague did.

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: I said "overmanned as opposed to undermanned". The simple reason for that is that if we are overmanned we are denuding resources from elsewhere in the defence programme. If you are overmanned that leads to notions of redundancy programmes which we very much avoid.

  Chairman: If you are overmanned the Treasury's eyes glint.

  Q282  Mr Jenkins: Vice Admiral Wilkinson, I sit here listening to the manning issue and totally agree that you have a problem. With a decreasing number of personnel and draw down of the Services and privatisation of function I know that it becomes harder and harder with a smaller number. Do we not now have a position when we shall soon be conducting a review on the merger of the three forces so we can have interoperability and you can meet pinch points by the transfer of operatives from other parts of the forces? Are they not their own worst enemies in keeping ever-diminishing forces independent in this way?

  Vice Admiral Wilkinson: The three Services work very closely together on a whole range of operational and administrative matters. We work, live and fight together. We are using the resources allocated to us as effectively as we can.

  Major General Gregory: Mr Jenkins' question is very astute. We do have mechanisms where appropriate to look at loaning ability between Services to support pinch point trades, so we are not in one Service discharging people where we have a critical shortage in another. We do exactly that, which is your point. We now have the mechanisms to address that.

  Q283  Chairman: I have one question to which I would like a one-word answer from each Service. It may be a bit unfair to insist on that and you may prefer not to answer in that way. What do you say is the weakest link in the whole of this chain of recruitment and retention in each of the Services? Is it at the level of money, entry into schools or the recruiting office stage?

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: I think I would go for balance, if you want a word, that is, trying to get the resources appropriately spread so you get the best overall effect, because this is a complex equation. If you want to go into recruiting that has an effect. If you charge at that, whether it is people to go and do the outreach or the resources to fund it, that takes away resources from elsewhere. At the same time, we have operational pressure points that are sitting there which will be further challenged. To go back to Mr Crausby's point, the question is whether the net effect is a downward spiral. Therefore, to try to find balance is the most difficult part of the equation for me.

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: I agree with that. There is not a single point that I register. It is a matter of getting the right balance between the three Rs: retention, recruitment and requirement. I make one point that we have not yet touched on which is germane to my service. One of the key pinch points in achieving the right kind of trained people in the front line of the Navy is the training capacity at sea. That is one of the key factors to bear in mind when we come to the issue of over-recruiting. If we over-recruit and do not have the capacity to train at sea we will end up with unhappy sailors on jetties trying to get themselves to sea which is bad for retention.

  Major General Gregory: The greatest challenge is retention in training and in the field army. My greatest concern is our ability to see things before they happen. It is an art and not a science with a whole host of factors that play into it. To make sure you can spot things and have the mechanisms rapidly to react is a challenge.

  Q284  Chairman: Major General Lalor, does any of this come onto your desk?

  Major General Lalor: Yes, it does. I have responsibility for facilitating and co-ordinating the three Services' manning levels and their reserves. If we are at a point where it is considered a concern then it is certainly my job to make sure the necessary focus is put upon it. Manning balance in the reserves is less critical and you can take greater risk against the reserves component. Obviously, the key area in the reserves is: do you have the necessary capabilities that the operations require to deliver them? If you do not have manning balance it is not the end of the world in the short term as long as you can deliver those individuals and skill sets as a reserve that you are requested to deliver. The only other point is that you must ensure you retain a critical mass in the reserves. Whether it is at unit or formation level, if the manning balance gets so low that there is not critical mass to provide sufficient activity manning balance would be a very significant issue for us, but the management of manning in the reserves area is exactly the same as it is on the regular side. The three single services need to ensure that they apply the effort and resources to get an acceptable balance, but they can take greater risk against the reserves manning area.

  Chairman: I have been shoving everybody off the issue of tri-Service matters but now we can go back to it.

  Q285  Mr Jones: I would be interested to have your observations on my earlier question about cadets. What importance do you attach to the three individual Services recruiting separately? What would be the advantage or disadvantage in having a single point of entry into the Armed Forces in terms of recruitment?

  Vice Admiral Wilkinson: All our evidence shows that people wish to join a single service, not defence. That must be the starting point. Our careers offices on the high street are Armed Forces careers offices and again the advisers in there work very closely, intelligently and perceptively with the people who come through the doors to try to direct them to the best career and Service. We consider that we are using our resources as effectively as possible, but I defer to my single Service colleagues for their views.

  Major General Gregory: I totally agree. I believe that this is linked to Mr Jenkin's question and whether we are managing liability and whether we are doing it from the start as sensibly as possible. The ethos of the Service remains very important and within the Army one then has the ethos of the various cap badges. We are making sure that, first, as people come into the Armed Forces careers office they are targeted as effectively as possible; and, second, we have much better mechanisms to allow transfers within the Army but between cap badges if people find they have made the wrong choice.

  Q286  Mr Jones: This point arose in our duty of care inquiry. I know that in the Army a good deal of emphasis is placed on regimental recruiting, but there is not a lot of evidence that people say they want to join a specific regiment, is there? They want to join the Army, do they not?

  Major General Gregory: Generally, unless they have family affiliations they probably want to join the Army. Part of the responsibility of careers offices is to make sure that the range of opportunities open to them and the skills they will get in the various areas are properly presented so they can make an informed choice.

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: I have nothing substantial to add.

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: I absolutely agree with the Army's perspective. We have exactly the same feedback as that to which Vice Admiral Wilkinson referred. There is a desire on the part of people to join a single service rather than join defence. This is really important at the entry point into the Services. We have done some work on identity in our Service. Right at the top of what people in our Service identify with, particularly the younger community which we were surveying at the time, is the Royal Navy. That is fundamental to their sense of belonging to our service. Later they will develop their identities with a ship or team mates, but when they join the Navy the identity is with the Royal Navy.

  Q287  Mr Jones: Or the Royal Marines?

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: Yes.

  Q288  Mr Jones: The Royal Marines is almost a hybrid service?

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: It is. People are recruited by the Armed Forces recruiting office but the identity there is with the Royal Marines, not defence.

  Q289  Mr Jones: If someone came into a recruitment office and wanted to join the Navy but having talked to the adviser felt that perhaps that was not what he or she wanted would that individual be referred to the Army or Air Force?

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: Yes, absolutely. I believe that Vice Admiral Wilkinson picked up the point that this is very much the modus operandi of the Armed Forces Career Offices.

  Q290  Mr Jenkin: Do the recruitment strategies among the Services fundamentally differ and, if so, how?

  Rear Admiral Montgomery: It is important to understand that we have different issues in terms of our image among the target audience. When we conducted a survey into the levels of awareness of the Royal Navy before our latest campaign 12 months ago it showed a very worrying lack of awareness. People were distinctly less aware of the Royal Navy then than they were of the other two Services. Therefore, our campaign plan which started 12 months ago began by raising awareness in the wider community. There is an example of where a particular Service issue was reflected in a particular Service's recruiting strategy. We tackled the fundamental issue of general awareness at the start and then channelled effort in parallel towards the submarine and marine streams, for example. That approach would be unique to this single Service.

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: I think that our footprint and structures will ultimately result in a significant differential. There is the issue of national awareness to which the Admiral referred but that is very much reinforced by local effect. Clearly, with different footprints and resources to support that, for example in regimental terms the way the station commander would liaise and support an Armed Forces presence in his area will be different.

  Q291  Mr Jenkin: But that is an historical anomaly rather than a different objective?

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: Yes, it is, but that is conditioned by resource. You are absolutely right that we are where we are and we would like to do better, but that is the most cost-effective way of achieving it.

  Major General Gregory: I do not think our strategies are that different. I think they are very well co-ordinated between the directors in the three Services responsible for recruiting right down to the Armed Forces career office level. As a generalisation what must be recognised is the different roles within the Services particularly the Army which is a very people-heavy organisation where one equips the man, whereas the other Services are rather more technically-based in terms of manning equipment and things like that. There will be a difference, but in terms of recruiting strategies they are well co-ordinated and sensibly brought together where appropriate.

  Q292  Linda Gilroy: Presumably, interoperability has driven much earlier joint or shared training. Given what we continually hear from our colleague John Smith about the virtues of training coming together on the St Athan site, is there not an inevitability about the Services coming even closer together—not just one Army but one Service?

  Vice Admiral Wilkinson: There is certainly an inevitability about coming even closer. I do not think it will result in our being one Service. We are very cognisant of the Canadians in this respect and their attempts at a defence force which effectively they have had to reverse over the past few years. Even a nation with very small armed forces—I think of New Zealand—has still found it effective in terms of ethos and people's association with their own service to keep individual services. Like Mr Smith, I am certainly a great fan of the exciting prospects of the defence training rationalisation programme and work at St Athan.

  Q293  Mr Hamilton: I fully understand the argument and importance of the Services being able to retain their personnel, but when we come to recruitment I am reminded of the fact that as an ex-miner when I started in the collieries there were 400,000 people in the industry. By the time I left there were only 230,000 people. They had a personnel department that dealt wholly with recruitment. I have listened to and looked at all the evidence very carefully and I do not understand how Mr Baker and your department should not be involved directly in all the recruitment that takes place because once they get in you offer three different Services, which is understandable, but when you went into the pits you would become an electrician, engineer or collier. You applied for different services and when you went into the industry there was a department that dealt with that. Are you not under-selling yourselves by trying independently, although there is close co-operation, to do recruitment when a single entry point would be the logical way forward?

  Mr Baker: Viewed from the perspective of the Ministry of Defence where we are now makes good sense. We fully recognise the importance of the single Services marketing themselves on their own terms. Each has an individual offer to make and all the evidence shows that people want to continue to join single Services and it is important that they can make their own pitch in that context. What we do in the Ministry of Defence is facilitate the co-ordination of that. I run a defence manning committee where colleagues from the three Services come together and discuss how to co-ordinate and resource campaigns and how to spread best practice where single Service practice appears more broadly applicable. I think that is the right level of integration as things stand. We do not want to homogenise the recruitment process.

  Q294  Mr Hamilton: I understand that much of what you said will happen after they come into the various Services. What I am saying is that when an individual comes along and says he wants to go into the Navy, Royal Air Force or the Army that does not require the Services to carry out recruitment; they can be better utilised to do other work and that should be a civil service issue. Once they are recruited then it is up to each Service to deal with it. That makes sense to me. It just seems that you are duplicating the work.

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: I can see there is much sense in where you are coming from, but the other observation is that at that juncture people probably have made up their mind where they want to go and they will need some education, possibly some persuasion, which again depends on someone with some authority who can relay what that individual is about to embark upon, not someone who does not wear a tri-Service hat.

  Mr Hancock: But to do that requires quite a lot of skill, does it not? Are you equipped with those skills to give that help to somebody? It is easy to say someone should join the Army or Navy and see the world, or whatever. If my father having spent 30-odd years in the Navy was sitting here now he would say that it was the best thing you could ever do, but that would not necessarily be the case.

  Q295  Chairman: Do you have those skills?

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: Personally, undoubtedly not, but we spend a lot of time ensuring that we select the right people for the front of the shop for the Royal Air Force. Again, within the personnel department I deal with my fellow Air Marshall on the training front and the key is to make sure that the right image is there in the first place and it has the right cross-section so that if somebody comes along a particular avenue we do not provide advice on just one particular strand of the Royal Air Force.

  Q296  Mr Jenkin: I turn to reservists and put the same question. To recruit reservists basically do you use the same technique across the three Services or do you require different things?

  Major General Lalor: Reserves are very regionally based. Whether it be an air base, a TA centre in the Hebrides or a naval base, you must have a very local campaign. The marketing to facilitate that local recruiting is very much co-ordinated as no doubt we will discuss, for example on Project OAR (One Army Recruiting). But for the reserves it is fundamentally different because you recruit more on a local basis which is supported by national marketing.

  Q297  Mr Jenkin: Are the three services basically trying to recruit the same kind of people?

  Air Vice Marshal Bryant: No. Obviously, there is a lot of overlap. Again, the Royal Air Force is very technically oriented. It is not that the other Services are not, but the percentage of our people who are technically based is significantly larger, so to a degree that drives one to different conclusions.

  Q298  Mr Jenkin: But even in the case of the Army is there not technological convergence?

  Major General Gregory: But the fact is that 80% of the people who come into the Armed Forces careers offices are interested in joining the Army rather than a specific part and the guidance which we have discussed then points them in the right direction depending on their skills and aspirations. One must also remember, picking up Mr Hamilton's point, that to be an electrician in the depths of Afghanistan is very different from being an electrician on a fighter base. It suits some people to be in one environment and others to be in another, so it is all part of getting a collective balance and informing them sensibly. That is why the importance of having people with the right skills in the careers offices is fundamental.

  Q299  Mr Hamilton: I am aware of that. A special type of skill is also required 3,000 ft underground. The person who gave career advice fully understood that because he came from that background. That was the point I tried to make. The people who would be giving the advice would be those like yourself who had left.

  Major General Gregory: That is very fair.



 
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