Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR BILL
JEFFREY CB AND
MR TREVOR
WOOLLEY CB
28 NOVEMBER 2007
Q80 Mr Hancock: Have you had to put
back anything you have taken out because it was proved that it
did not give you the efficiencies and actually brought down the
level of capability within the department over that three year
period?
Mr Jeffrey: I cannot think of
an example where consequence immediately followed cause, but it
is certainly the case that where there are shortcomings in capability—we
may come to this later in the hearing—we do our very best
to fill them.
Q81 Mr Jenkin: From 2004 to 2008
you were given certain targets of reducing civilian staff by at
least 10,000 and reductions in military posts by 5,000. You actually
succeeded by reducing the civilian posts by 11,000—so over
your target—and the military posts by 10,000, that is double
what was anticipated two years ago. This flags up to me two concerns,
first of all that means we have 5,000 military people now back
in the military rather than in the MOD,
it reduces the pool of reserve by 5,000 people as well, but more
importantly I want a guarantee that it does not reduce the number
of military personnel in the MOD
and thereby change the ethos on which the MOD
has been run for a substantial amount of time. There is a vital
link between our front line troops and the administration back
here in the block. How are you coping with that?
Mr Jeffrey: Can I say I agree
very much with your last point, Mr Jenkins. I came into this department
two years ago and one of the things that most impressed me about
it was at our best military and civilian worked well together;
they reinforce each other. Civilians like working with military
people and, as you say, something of a military ethos rubs off
and I think that is a very considerable strength. I go back to
the discussion we were having earlier about the head office review
and I would guess that at the end of that the proportion of the
military and civilian will be much as they are now. On the military
contribution to the efficiency savings I do not recognise the
10,000 figure that you gave; the target, as you said, is 5,000
by the end of 2007-08 and the figure I have in front of me is
that we have reached almost 3,900 by September of this year so
we are pretty well on course. These are essentially military posts
in support and administrative functions which, if we can redeploy
them, will be used for more military purposes.
Chairman: Let us get onto the targets
now.
Q82 Mr Crausby: The 2005-06 Annual
Report stated that you were on course to achieve all six PSA targets
by March 2008, yet the latest PSA performance report shows that
you are on course for only one of those targets. What has gone
wrong?
Mr Jeffrey: In relation to the
targets we are in a worse position than we were earlier this year.
If you take them in turn I think we are on course and from your
other inquiries into Iraq and Afghanistan you will know there
is some risk involved.
Q83 Chairman: You have just told
us you are not on course.
Mr Jeffrey: On operations, which
is target one. Target two, which is contribution to conflict prevention,
we are broadly on course with a little slippage. On target four,
which is the EU and NATOone, we are also on course. The two areas
that are problematic are the question of readiness, which is target
three, and it is very much a consequence of existing high levels
of deployment. The measures that we apply to assess the readiness
of our forces for future conflict have been declining and we now
think it is unlikely that we can hit the target by next April.
Also for manning where, for different reasons, two of the three
services are now thought unlikely to come in within manning balance.
It is a less good position than it was earlier in the year, but
if you look at all six targets there are some that are on course
as well. If the chief of defence staff were here he would say
that the operational target tops all the others. There, in ways
the Committee will be familiar with from its other work, it is
difficult but we do feel we are making progress.
Q84 Mr Crausby: How many do you expect
to hit by next March? How many targets will you achieve?
Mr Jeffrey: The assumption is
that the position by next March will not change greatly from the
position as reported in our PSA related material that we sent
the Committee for this hearing.
Q85 Mr Crausby: Which target is most
at risk?
Mr Jeffrey: We are already saying
that we are unlikely to meet target three. As I said earlier we
will be unlikely to meet the manning target in terms of so-called
manning balance which is between minus two per cent and plus one
per cent of the requirement. For the RAF we expect to meet it
but we are, at the moment, looking unlikely to meet it for either
the Navy or the Army for different reasons.
Q86 Mr Crausby: Do you intend to
take any action to change this or is it accepted?
Mr Jeffrey: In a sense we are
taking action all the time but one has to make a realistic assessment
of what is achievable in this sort of business over these sorts
of timescales. The thing I would say about the most significant
of these which is readiness is that it is very much a consequence
of the scale of operations at the moment.
Q87 Willie Rennie: Is it not the
case that the only targets that you are actually anywhere nearing
meeting are the ones that are subjective, the ones where you have
made your own mind up, that you agreed that you are meeting, and
the ones where you have actually got hard figures that you can
check and other people can assess as well are the ones where you
are trailing? I would argue, for instance, on number four, as
to whether you were actually meeting that, especially when you
have not agreed to a three budget of the European Defence Agency
and you have failed to persuade other NATO members to commit more
troops to Afghanistan. I would say that that one is disputable,
but you have regarded that as on course.
Mr Jeffrey: These are, as you
say, matters of opinion. I think we would feel on target four
that the objective is for us to make our own full contribution
in these areas and we are doing so.
Chairman: I do not think Mr Rennie was
asking about whether these were matters of opinion; he was drawing
a distinction between the ones which could be subjectively judged
and the ones which could not.
Q88 Willie Rennie: Is it not slightly
suspicious that the only ones that you are passing are the ones
that you have made your own mind up on?
Mr Jeffrey: I take the point,
on the other hand all we can do—and we do it honestly—is
to assess where we are on each of these targets. The first of
them, the operational one, is, as the Committee knows, underpinned
by some quite detailed factual material as well so it is not as
if military commanders were simply putting a finger in the air
and saying that they feel we are on course. The big engagements
in Iraq and Afghanistan are immensely complicated and the judgment
at the moment is that there are very difficult circumstances where
we are achieving our operational objectives.
Q89 Chairman: Is this the underpinning
factual material that we asked for last year and were refused?
Mr Jeffrey: We have given some
of the information of that sort to the Committee but not as much,
I suspect, as the Committee was seeking.
Q90 Robert Key: Your latest armed
forces manning figures were issued on 22 November. I wonder if
you are as concerned as I am that the number of people leaving
the trained strength of the Armed Forces has increased by one
per cent in the year to 30 September. It seems to be accelerating,
this departure of trained service personnel.
Mr Jeffrey: The position on voluntary
departure, which is early departure, is that it has been pretty
steady for all three services at around four and a half to five
per cent with some variation between the services and between
officers and other ranks for some years. The rest of the ten per
cent or so of the armed forces who leave every year and always
have done leave as planned at the end of an engagement. The suggestion
that we are losing people in very much larger numbers than before
is certainly not true. There have, however, been some signs of
an increase in voluntary departure in the Army; the voluntary
departure of other ranks in the Army has been running in the recent
months at around 5.8% which is a bit more than the five per cent
we would normally assume. These are small but significant factors;
we certainly keep a very close watch on them.
Q91 Robert Key: Looking at those
joining and those leaving, can you confirm that although there
is an increase in the number of those raw recruits joining there
is also an increase in the number of corporals and sergeants leaving?
Mr Jeffrey: Only to the extent
that I have indicated to you in my response to your earlier question,
Mr Key. If you look across the other services and at the officer
ranks the early departure—that is people leaving before
their engagement comes to an end in the normal way—is remarkably
steady. However, in the Army there are signs that early departure
for other ranks is creeping up a little. The other thing I would
say, particularly in the Air Force, is that there are some signs
that people are not extending for a further engagement to quite
the degree that they were in the past. I do not want to exaggerate
this and I think some of the media coverage implies that this
is a much bigger phenomenon than it actually is, but there are
certainly respects in which we are feeling some concern.
Q92 Robert Key: With the increasing
pressure on all three of our armed services, the harmony guidelines
are increasingly important. Only the Royal Navy is meeting the
harmony guidelines; the Army and RAF are not. How long can you
expect our service personnel to go on working with this tempo
if the harmony guidelines are not kept?
Mr Jeffrey: The harmony guidelines
are important. It is certainly something I know ministers, the
service chiefs and I are concerned with. We are not meeting them
at the moment. On the other hand, as we said in answers to earlier
questions, some of this is an inevitable consequence of operational
deployments at the current level. What I would say is that in
the Army, where the problem is most significant, the percentage
of individuals exceeding the harmony guidelines has reduced from
just over 18% in the fourth quarter of 2003-04 to just over ten
per cent in the final quarter of last year. That is not satisfactory
and it bears unduly hard on some particular units which are more
deployed than others. It is something we need to watch but it
simply reflects the fact that we are deployed to the extent that
we are at the moment.
Q93 Mr Jenkin: There is one answer
to a question that concerns me, Mr Jeffrey, insofar as this is
there because it is there. We want to know how you are going to
get rid of it. How are you going to get us back into harmony?
It is not acceptable. It may be acceptable for a short time but
to say that this is acceptable for year upon year upon year—if
we had this tempo for year upon year upon year—it is just
not acceptable. What plans do you have for bringing it back within
the harmony guidelines?
Mr Jeffrey: Principally I think
the best prospect, given that these things inevitably have time
lags built into them, is some reduction in the pressure that we
face. Certainly as one looks forward there are signs of the scale
of the current operational commitment reducing. The prime minister
has made it clear that he expects us to go down to about 2500
in Iraq by the spring. Also—although I would not want to
place too much weight on this because it has been making quite
significant demands for quite a while—the ending of the
major operation in Northern Ireland has helped the army in particular.
We are scaling down and have scaled down in the Balkans. There
are some signs that the operational pressure will ease over the
next year or so. We certainly hope so.
Chairman: As you know every year we raise
the issue of diversity and the recruitment of black and minority
ethnic representation in the Armed Forces. In the interests of
time we will write to you about these issues because the annual
report shows a disappointing performance. We will write to you
and we will need quite early replies, please.[5]
I want to move on now to equipment issues now.
Q94 Willie Rennie: Is it not the
case that there is no real desire within the MOD
to get up to the full establishment in all the three Armed Forces
because if you were you would go over your budget; there is no
way that you could afford it, especially when you are trying to
make these efficiency savings.
Mr Jeffrey: I must just say that
that is not the case; it does not feel like that. I do meet the
recruitment people from all three services occasionally and we
are doing our best to translate what are actually quite good recruitment
figures at the moment into trained strength. The figures that
were published last week suggest that we are in fact achieving
significant improvements in the additions to trained strength.
Q95 Willie Rennie: If you did get
up to establishment all of a sudden and there was this mass influx
of people wanting to be soldiers, how would you cope with it?
Mr Jeffrey: First of all I am
not sure it would be massive; we are talking about few percentage
points short of what the requirement is and we would just have
to cope.
Q96 Mr Jones: Your memorandum to
us on defence equipment showed that the forecast costs for the
Astute and the Type 45 programmes have increased by some £500
million, this is the Major Projects Report of 2006. You also state
in the MOD PSA performance report
that there is likely to be growth on the Nimrod programme. Why
is it that once again we have large increases in major projects
and where will these increased costs be met in the CSR settlement?
Mr Jeffrey: The particular increases
that are referred to in the memorandum that we sent you a few
weeks ago are increases on the original main gate decision. Both
the Astute programme and the Type 45 programme are part of what
Sir Peter Spencer, the previous Chief of Defence Procurement used
to refer to as the toxic legacy. Much of the cost growth in the
papers we sent you relates to these earlier years. That is not
to say that there has been no cost growth recently, there has.
It was principally incurred during the course of last year as
a result of some further efforts by the teams concerned with BAE
Systems in particular to understand the cost base of Astute and
to identify with them ways of resourcing the Type 45 programme
more efficiently. What we have now done is to re-negotiate the
contracts on both of these on a more fixed price basis and there
is good reason I believe to say that the costs of both programmes
are now more under control. They have been problematic programmes
all the way through. All I would say is that the big figures that
come out of that memorandum we sent you are principally the result
of the cost growth in the early part of the programme.
Q97 Mr Jones: What about the Nimrod?
Mr Jeffrey: Nimrod is certainly
giving rise to in-year pressures this year. It is the one significant
area that we are having to attend to now.
Q98 Mr Jones: In the case of Nimrod,
for example, is it not about time we took the decision to either
scrap it or actually stop throwing money at it and look at an
alternative solution to this? Is it not time that some of these
projects, Nimrod being one, need a good, hard look at?
Mr Jeffrey: The current programme
is seen as a more forward looking one than that question would
imply.
Q99 Mr Jones: You talk about Sir
Peter Spencer and the toxic legacies, but what about the slippage
in the Type 45 and also the A400M? Will we ever see this thing
fly? There is clearly slippage in these programmes.
Mr Jeffrey: There has been some
slippage in the A400M programme which is the subject of discussion
with the contractors. I think if the Committee would like more
detail on where that stands it might be safer for me to offer
a note than to rely on my own memory on this programme. [6]
Chairman: It would be helpful to have
more detail on it.
5 See Ev 31 Back
6
See Ev 31 Back
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